Books

Anyone growing up in the ’80s will be familiar with Masquerade, Kit Williams’ picture book that contained, within its beautifully illustrated pages, clues to the real-world location of a jewelled golden hare. It led to a worldwide treasure hunt that was eventually solved, though not without controversy, and not before searchers had caused damage to both public and private property in their desperate quest to find the prize.

In the author’s note that precedes The Skeleton Key – her eighth psychological thriller and the third following her breakout success He Said/She Said – former journalist Erin Kelly explains the impact Masquerade had on her as child and her desire to explore how such a book might be received in today’s world of online forums, GPS co-ordinates and Twitter infighting.

And so we meet Eleanor Churcher, 50 years after her artist father Frank published The Golden Bones, a book containing clues to the locations of seven jewels, each shaped to form a different part of the skeleton of the mysterious, fictional murder victim, Eleanor’s namesake, “Elinore”. With all but one of the jewels located, and a community of obsessive searchers who call themselves Bonehunters desperately searching for the missing pelvis, Eleanor has been forced into a reclusive, nomadic, life. For while most Bonehunters believe the puzzle has a “bloodless solve”, a dangerously obsessed few believe the elusive jewel has been placed inside Frank’s living daughter and will stop at nothing to retrieve it.

Kelly builds a mesmerising and richly layered novel of murder, mystery, intrigue and obsession. Weaving effortlessly between past and present she examines family dynamics and the psychological effects of monstrous narcissism in minute and forensic detail. It’s a testament to the author’s skill that in her cast of fascinatingly flawed characters there are few I’d like to know in real life; I was gripped for every single one of this astonishingly good novel’s 500 pages. It’s a dark book, but more than rescued by the joy that Kelly clearly found in her material: her delight in revisiting one of her own childhood obsessions fizzes off the page. Brilliant.

S J Watson is the award winning author of the bestselling psychological thrillers Before I Go To Sleep, Second Life and Final Cut. Follow him on Twitter at @sj_watson

Close to 500 big, weighty pages, this has the heft of a holy book – the gospel of Greta. And The Climate Book is a remarkable achievement, particularly as it’s the work of a teenager who famously missed quite a bit of school.
Ms Thunberg is sharp (in her writing style) and blunt (in what she says). She is happy to call out the “bullshit” of politicians, the greenwashing by deceitful businesses, and the myth that there is a “sustainable” way to carry on as we are. This is a book everyone should read, especially the children likely to inherit a global nightmare.

I came to it with what I thought was awareness of the looming catastrophe, happily doing my bit in terms of plant-based diet, careful consumption and zealous recycling. But I’m now shocked at how teeteringly close we are to the brink of extinction – and how, in effect, nothing done so far is likely to stop it.

The format is more than 80 essays by scientists, climate experts and the concerned (including Margaret Atwood, Naomi Klein and George Monbiot), divided into topics and punctuated by the curator’s pull-no-punches prose.

Thunberg preaches revolution: a complete change in the unsustainable, capitalist, growth-pursuing life of the rich nations, plus the need to make reparations for the damage it has inflicted on the world’s poor.

“The Industrial Revolution, fuelled by slavery and colonisation, brought unimaginable wealth to the Global North, and in particular to a small group of people there,” she writes. “That extreme injustice is the foundation our modern societies are built on… The sufferings of the many have paid for the benefits of the few. Their fortune came at a price – oppression, genocide, ecological destruction and climatological instability. There is a bill for this destruction that has not yet been paid.”

But our governments’ actions concentrate on loopholes and “clever accounting”, she says, and if that approach continues, we shall see droughts, floods, locusts, pandemics, crop failures and mass migrations – in short, a biblical apocalypse. Until now Sweden’s young prophet has largely been a voice crying in the wilderness. This book is the amplifier of her terrible warnings.

Friendship between two people thrives on shared memories, but what happens when the other person can no longer remember them? Where do your stories and secrets reside without that intimate subtext of mutual understanding? And what is the impact on your own memory when your friend’s is being erased by Alzheimer’s?

Dislocations is an elegant, elegiac exposition of the terrible sense of loss that’s felt when the narratives that bind old friends are gradually eroded, as though invisible moths have nibbled away at a beautiful, densely-woven cloth.
The unnamed narrator says she isn’t trying to “patch up” those holes by writing about visits to “M.L.”, in a residential home. Instead, she wants to bear witness to her beloved friend’s “unintelligibilities and breaches and silences”.

If that sounds depressing, it isn’t. In what feels like a fictionalised memoir (it’s a novel dedicated to the real-life M.L.) Molloy doesn’t wallow in emotion, but deftly unpicks the threads of deterioration like a fine seamstress. The narrator notes that her friend retains linguistic structure to the point where she can assist in correcting an academic text, yet lacks any of the understanding and insight that once distinguished her. And it’s a searing moment when M.L.’s “faint, dull voice” of despair suggests a momentary awareness of her decline.

There’s a glimmer of comfort when her friend briefly flares into a semblance of her much-missed former self: “Some impertinent remark that takes me back to how she used to be: witty, ironic, snobby, critical, at times even malicious.” But later the narrator questions her memory: “Can she have been all those things, or am I remembering wrong?”
This self-doubt grows as the narrator’s own sense of self starts to fragment. Her one-page chapters, which read like diary entries with titles like “Projection” and “Bottled Up”, progressively dismantle the strong edifice of their friendship, brick by brick. In the end, all that’s left is words – that only one of them can understand. And a deep question about whether our words and memories yield truth, or fiction.

Dislocations is a poetic insight into one of the dread illnesses of our time, lucidly translated by Jennifer Croft and published on fine paper in a slim volume by Charco, the Edinburgh-based specialists in Latin American literature.

Following the success of Celine’s Salon, Volume I, which Perspective reviewed earlier this year, this second anthology of poetry, song writing and short stories is also drawn from the band of modern-day troubadours – both first-timers and established artists – who have performed at the live salon events.

Started in Soho in 2016, Celine’s Salon went online during Covid but in 2022 burst free of the pandemic’s shackles and took to the road, visiting Derry in Northern Ireland, Glasgow in Scotland and Tenby in Wales. The result is this slim collection: a cross-genre chorus of Celtic voices laid out, as in the first book, like a live performance, complete with a “curtain raiser” poem by the eponymous Celine Hispiche, herself a writer and performer.

By their very nature, these are voices rooted in the distinct cultures of the three Celtic kingdoms. Local dialect features from the outset, with Lesley O’Brien, a Scottish singer, storyteller and poet, welcoming us to the green hillside of Carbeth where the “cauld kiss o winter” reminds her that she “must come wance pur week” to worship in nature’s “kirk”.

Later, there’s a sonnet-length ode to Tenby that stretches language even further: Dinbych Y Psygod in Welsh rhyming (or so it appears!) couplets is by Welsh performance poet and singer, Ros Moore, who grew up in the Eisteddfod tradition; it’s offset with a helpful English equivalent.

Regionality is felt not just in the language but in the subject matter too: in Ronan Carr’s song Paul Muldoon, in Valerie Bryce’s Swan Lake, and – I confess a personal favourite – Frank Rafferty’s My Granny Made Me an Anarchist: you’d have to be an eejit to not grasp its Glaswegian sensibility.

Together these and the many other voices of this unique anthology rise in unison to speak not just of the things that make us different, but of what binds us and what we share; to remind us that – in Rafferty’s words – “The world can be whatever all of us create.”