ARTS & CULTURE
BRIGHT BURNING THINGS BY LISA HARDING
Once a talented ingenue taking London’s stages by storm, we meet Sonya Moriarty five years on from her brief moment in the spotlight. She’s stricken with an alcohol addiction and desperately trying to outrun the voices in her head – including the beautiful and unconditional love from her four-year-old son Tommy and dog Herbie. She has pitted the three of them against the world, weaving compelling but dangerous fantasies about the motives of others and pushing away offers of help based on her own childhood trauma. A near miss with a kitchen fire while she’s black-out drunk causes the neighbours to alert Sonya’s father, who forces his daughter into rehab. Sonya struggles with an unnamed ‘condition’; emotion crashing through her like gales, and seeing events through her eyes is both exhausting and exhilarating. The almost-modernist prose becomes freeform in places, and following Sonya’s train of thought – especially when she’s drunk – requires a combination of close focus and total surrender. Yet in the middle of these maelstroms are searing moments of insight and self-awareness. Readers may find themselves torn between judging Sonya’s bad behaviour and brought to tears with sympathy for the anguish she experiences on her journey to steadier ground. A heartbreaking book that’s painfully funny in parts.
CARELESS BY KIRSTY CAPES
We’re straight back to the beaches of Troy for Barker’s second book in this series, which revises the Homerian epic from the perspective of the lesser characters – particularly the women – who are all too often silent in these histories. The story opens at the nail-bitingly cinematic pivot point of the ten-year Trojan War, where the wooden horse containing Achaean fighters is wheeled inside the city gates. We’re given a glimpse of what really occurs at the death of Priam, the King of Troy, before the “exploits run from mouth to mouth and no doubt grew in the telling”. We also return to Agamemnon’s camp and the mind of Briseis, once a minor royal, now enslaved alongside the other women whose communities fell to these rampaging armies. She is pregnant, carrying the child of now-dead Achilles, and was swiftly married to his ally, Lord Alcimus, upon the warrior’s death. It has made her a free woman – saving her from a position stuck on the lowest possible rung of the ladder and giving her the ability to move around the camp. Despite victory, the Achaean forces are trapped on the beaches by the winds, with no hope of returning home. Resentment builds among the army with every day that passes. Yet, with King Priam’s rotting body lying unburied, dishonoured on the dunes, will the Gods ever allow them to return home? Barker expertly balances the domestic with the divine, giving us more of her addictive, alternative accounts of the Greek mythology canon. Although Troy’s siege is said to have happened over three thousand years ago, hearing Briseis’s innermost thoughts, fears and hopes make the events feel timeless – which is how you know this series deserves its inevitable status as a modern classic. THE WOMEN OF TROY BY PAT BARKER
Brilliantly visceral and energetic from the off, Careless opens with 15-year-old protagonist Bess in a grotty chip shop toilet, about to take a pregnancy test. Though Bess’ foster parents live next to Shepperton Studios, her life is no movie. She imagines her ‘Boy’, the father of her possible child, climbing through her bedroom window to save her, and likens their ‘meet-cute’ to those of cinematic greats, yet she’s got her eyes wide open to the harsh reality (he steals her bike on their first encounter), and their relationship is definitively “not a love story”. Bess is a keen film photographer, constantly capturing the world around her on celluloid as if she needs physical proof of her perspective on life. It backs up her sense of self-worth: this is how she sees the world, this view matters. She dreams of a future as a filmmaker, creating documentaries about her friend Eshal, who’s set on career as a vet but terrified at the prospect of an arranged marriage. Bess’ little sister ‘Riss’ – her foster parents’ biological and favourite daughter – is annoying, and her social worker is hopeless. But are these thoughts actually the truth, or just her stubborn-yet- heartbroken take on the situation? Author Kirsty Capes is an advocate for better representation of care-experienced people in the media – and this book deserves all the awards it will no doubt receive.
“This book deserves all the awards it will no doubt receive”
16
J U N E 2 0 21
C A M B S E D I T I O N . C O . U K
Powered by FlippingBook