Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett

The first few pages of the critically acclaimed Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett open with the principle character revealing their favourite breakfast foods. “Sometimes a banana with coffee is nice”. Although I am partial to a banana, I don’t drink coffee. I find when I drink coffee it gives me a hyperactive interior monologue in my head for the rest of the day; a sort-of Virginia Woolf stream of consciousness, where I jitter about wondering, if like Mrs Dalloway, I should buy the flowers myself (I have entered a florist once in my lifetime).

So about fifty pages into Pond I decided that it would be better if Bennett’s character stuck to tea.

Tea wouldn’t result in a manic desire to place certain vegetables in certain bowls on certain windowsills. It wouldn’t produce a bizarre identification with the neighbour’s Portaloo and it wouldn’t create a wired isolated way of life which is unfathomable and completely unnecessary.

What I could glean from the book is that it is comprised of short stories voicing the musings of an unnamed woman who lives in a cottage on her own. The critics of the Literary Review claim Claire-Louise Bennett “privileges the modes of human experiences that are so often undervalued” – a real-world translation of this is that the author discusses the small things in life that often make up our experience, like tomato puree or broken cooking appliances.

I was ready to put this book down as literary guff until I came to page 65 to the story entitled “To A God Unknown”. The reclusive woman was reading in the bath. Reading in the bath is one of my all-time favourite things and as it happens I was reading in the bath at the time. The character had her window open to a storm outside and I thought the idea was so beautiful I wished it would rain so I could do the same.

I was following her train of thought for a few pages and then I got lost again.

I felt when I was reading this book that I was living inside someone else’s daydream. The daydream of someone I didn’t like very much. Just as I got settled I was jolted by the words like “kairotic” and “abnegation” that were dropped in the reverie’s rambling prose like status symbols. It was then I was aware that Bennett was talking and not the character and she was talking for a critical audience that wasn’t me.

The Land Where the Lemons Grow by Helena Atlee

Lemons and all things citrusy have been a career long obsession of Helena Attlee. The Land Where the Lemons Grow is a sort-of memoir of the garden historian’s quest to collect knowledge about the fruit cultivated in Italy’s landscapes.

You might think 247 pages of lemons might get a bit repetitive and on occasion Atlee’s mission is greeted with bemusement.  ‘Ah, the signora who wants to talk about lemons” says a guard to her outside the Boboli Gardens, in Florence. However, the little yellow fruit has a curious and bizarre set of family members which Atlee also gets to meet. Blood oranges, sour oranges, citrons, bergamot, esrog and budda’s hands are all part of the lemon family tree and all have a distinct heritage and unique properties.

The purple flesh of blood oranges, for example, is rich in Vitamin C and can help weight-loss - despite a person’s diet! Beragmot oranges are known as “green gold” and the oil they produce is highly valued by the perfume industry. While esrog, a yellow citron, is lovingly harvested every year for the Jewish community who accept only the purest and unblemished crop.

I wish I had this book when I was last in Italy. It is an excellent piece of travel writing. Atlee discovers botanical museums, gardens and festivals which celebrate citrus and she helpfully provides a list of in the back pages. Up until now I had not heard of The Battle of Oranges, a “food fight” which takes place every year in Irvea and has its roots in the town’s medieval past.

The fascinating history behind citrus is also related in a light and tantalising way. Franciscan monks grew potted trees in their monasteries, British naval sailors had lemons added to their daily rations while the next time I add lemons to my shopping basket I will be thinking about how the Sicilian mafia formed in order to control the thriving island’s lemon trade.

Finally the culinary uses of citrus are obviously an important part of the story. Recipes for pasta, cocktails, salads, cakes and candied peel make up segments of the book’s chapters and Atlee skilfully describes intense bittersweet flavours that fizz on the tongue.

I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a piece of lemon drizzle cake, drinks hot water with a slice or is partial to a bit of limoncello. The book has deepened my understanding of the fruits which speckle the landscapes of Lake Garda, Sicily and Calarbria and Helena Attlee is the perfect tour guide.

A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James

Two weeks after Marlon James won the Man Booker Prize, I was on holiday in Oxford. I walked into Blackwell's bookshop and he was there, giving a last minute talk. The room was treated to a reading from his prize-winning ode to Bob Marley and I managed to bag myself a signed copy.

During the Q&A James cursed. It was a mild selection from the variety of four letter words available in the swear vocabulary, nevertheless it raised eyebrows around the room. Halfway through A Brief History I wondered if any person in the room had actually read the book. Pumped full of language that would make characters from a Quentin Tarantino film blush, gratuitous sex scenes and weighty descriptions of gang violence this masterful epic deserves all of the praise it has received.

Marlon James is a brilliant writer. Not only is he gifted with story-telling, he is a funny and articulate speaker. One moment during the Q&A at Blackwell’s illustrates this perfectly. A man shot up his hand, and when it was his turn to ask a question he went on a five minute rant about the book “ignoring significant moments in history including Henry Kissinger’s visit to Jamaica”. He concluded with “I’m angry with your book”.

“Have you read my book?” Marlon James asked.

“No” the man replied.

The laughter that followed certainly broke the tension in the room.

“Well if you read my book” Marlon James followed with, “you would know Henry’s Kissinger’s visit is in there… I did my research”.

In fact the amount of research that went into this novel is staggering. The book is the result of a four year project and spans decades of history surrounding the attempted assassination of Bob Marley. It is actually impressive he has managed to relate a history with such depth in under 600 pages.

At the front of the book there is a character list which evokes Shakespearean themes. The opening chapter is a monologue from an ethereal spirit of a murdered man, Sir Arthur George Jennings, who asks his audience to “Listen”. He wanders in and out of scenes of death narrating key points in the timeline and closes “Acts” reflecting on death and changes in the wind.

Also among the cast is a cynical young woman from uptown Kingston (my personal favourite), several fearful gang leaders, a child criminal and a journalist from Rolling Stone magazine looking to get an interview with the Singer.

Marlon James mentioned that an HBO series is in the works and I can see how this book would translate brilliantly to the small-screen. There are parts which filled me with a sickening dread and I turned the pages realising I would not find out a character’s fate until I reached the next chapter.

That said I would highly recommend you read this book. It ticks all the boxes for every content warning you can think of, yet it is intelligent, hilariously funny in parts and written with a sterling soundtrack in mind.

In Defence of Dogs by John Bradshaw

I’ve always wondered whenever a new scientific study crops up in the news about dogs whether the scientists involved just spend their working days just playing with dogs. Then I rethink my life choices.

The conclusion after reading In Defence of Dogs by John Bradshaw, is yes the scientists who conduct such studies entitled “Can dogs read human emotions?” do spend their waking hours with man’s (or woman’s) best friend. In Chapter Seven alone Bradshaw describes at least twenty separate case studies, a couple including litters of puppies.

While the scientists have to remain objective watching collies, springers and spaniels work out contraptions with levers and pullies and quantifying how tug-of-war games occur, my brain would explode with the urge to cuddle them all. Then I conclude that my life is better spent watching funny dog videos and walking my Labrador.

In Defence of Dogs succeeds in what it aims to do: dispel the myths surrounding the origins of our favourite companions and dismiss harmful training methods which are grounded in those myths.

The domestic dog is not…not, Bradshaw repeats, the ancestor of the modern day wolf. This assumption has led to the prevalent theory of the “top dog” and that your pet dog seeks to take control of your household. The training principles that follow this premise can cause anxiety and hinder Bradshaw’s own hypothesis, that your dog sees you, its owner, as its family.

There were parts of the book which had me nodding in heavy agreement. In particular, the sentence that dogs are “expected to be simultaneously better behaved than the average human child and as self-reliant as an adult”. The idea of punishment as a method of training is done away with as well as my own personal favourite, “shock-collars”.

The letter I have included at the beginning of this review mentions “devices on the market that can be used to silence a dog.”  I acquired this letter from a previous job at a newspaper. It is a Letter to the Editor from one reader who did not want to have their name published in the paper. As a consequence his vent about his neighbour’s “pampered brutes” could not be published. Instead it has served as a suitable bookmark for this book.

On page 118 Bradshaw refers to one such device arguing that it will result in aggressive behaviour which could lead to euthanasia. The noisy neighbour’s dog is suffering from ‘separation anxiety’, a condition which is explained in the case of Bruno, an emotionally dependent Labrador on page 164.

As a dog lover I was promised I would love this book and I do, mainly because it allows me to have an informed opinion when defending the honour of my pampered brute and it is written by a scientist who I can tell was fighting the urge to play with his furry workmates.

The Dressmaker by Rosalie Ham

A quarter of the way through The Dressmarker by Rosalie Ham, I was reminded of a scene in Sex in the City. Carrie is dating Aleksandr Petrovsky, the pompous artist who whisks her away to Paris in the final series. He reads her some Russian poetry (Joseph Brodsky) and in true “city-girl” fashion Carrie responds by reading an article in Vogue…

“Oscar de La Renta sleeveless silk full skirted dress with black patent leather bow belt.”

“Now that”, she finishes “is pure poetry…”

In The Dressmaker Rosalie Ham supplies poetry for the fashion-magazine reader who also likes some scandalous gossip on the side. The pages swish through “frosty-ice green tulle skirt[s]”, “magenta silk organza” Dior copies and my particular favourite “a white silk satin jumpsuit with frock printed roses”. The chapters are labelled with matching fabrics: “Felt”, “Shantung”, “Brocade” and even the landscapes “curve” and lean “provocatively”.

The story, as opposed Sex and the City’s glamorised Big Apple setting, takes place in set in rural Australia, in the small town Dungatar. 

Myrtle Dunnage, a young woman, returns to the town after being forced to leave when she was ten. Tilly, as Myrtle is now known by, has come back to look over her frail mother, the town outcast. While fending off busybodies and gossips Tilly wows the locals with her dressmaking skills.

The book is the perfect glossy mag. Rumour and dirty laundry laid up next to a description of a designer copy – available at an affordable price.

Although it sometimes feels like the plot hemlines are unfinished and the details are not up to scratch, the story is what it should be, just a bit of harmless fun and escapism.