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The Weight of a Human
Heart
Playful with content, O'Neill is also joyfully original with format. Figures of a Marriage is related entirely in graphs, pie charts, tables, Venn diagrams, flow charts and lists. Seventeen Rules tells sequential paragraphs of a story by adhering to the writing tips of famous authors. There are harrowing tales of the Rwandan genocide. Freshness is maintained by allowing characters’ personalities to show rather than merely recounting carnage. In English as a Foreign Language, a Rwandan student defends himself from reliving the trauma by only talking of it in clich`E9s. The undue emphasis on religious teaching in some African schools is highlighted in The Saved, where a bishop equates attractiveness with wanton sexuality, and plots against an able but non-Christian Ugandan science teacher. The pain of Africa is captured in throwaway phrases: "a baby cried as if for future sorrow". But "a riot of colour" to describe African markets seems hackneyed. There are several Scots male protagonists here, and they provide humour as well as brutality and tragedy. Four Letter Words is a boy’s story of his parents, constructed around the profanities his father taught him.Typography is a prize-winning story about a teenager coping with loss. There is a magnetic insouciance and irreverence to many characters, such as the complaints handler who had taken to "silently lipping obscenities as he listened to grievances". And the lack of objectivity of some critics is mercilessly lampooned in The Eunuch in the Harem. Ambrose Bierce's quote, "the covers of this book are too far apart", appears here – but it can't be said about this brilliant collection.
The Last Slave Market
Three years after Kirk returned to Britain from his expedition accompanying Livingstone along the Zambesi, he became medical officer in Zanzibar, the main port for the slave trade, taking his new wife, Nelly, with him (she couldn't leave the ship, so appalled was she by the horrors facing her on their arrival), and somehow raising a family in the disease-ridden town (in 1869, cholera killed 7,000 people in one month). Slave trading in East Africa was different, Kirk observed, with slaves often sent to be servants in the well-off homes of Arabian or Turkish families. The practice mirrored the exchanges of individuals between African tribes in the area. Which doesn't lessen the horror of it, but after Henry Morton Stanley "rescued" the stranded David Livingstone and blamed Kirk for much of the explorer’s trouble, Kirk had difficulty being listened to about the problem. It says much for him that he persevered, listing numbers of those trafficked for his superiors in London, and pushing local powerhouses such as Sultan Barghash into giving up the trade. Hazell tells his dreadful story with just the right mix of pace and detail, to keep you hooked.
Chris Womersley’s novel begins like a classic crime yarn, with the rape and murder of a young girl in a New South Wales town, apparently by her older brother. He flees the scene and vanishes and is later believed to have lost his life in World War I. But this unusual and rewarding tale quickly develops into something else, when the wrongly accused brother, Quinn Walker, reveals himself to be very much alive, and returns to his hometown to clear his name. Quinn hides in the hills outside the town and is "adopted" by a young orphan girl who is dodging the local sheriff, Quinn's uncle. It is this unlikely relationship – between this traumatised soldier and this needy and yet resilient girl – which is both moving and revealing and which dominates.
On December 28, 1817, the painter Robert Haydon held a dinner party at which the guests included Keats, Wordsworth, Charles Lamb and the explorer Joseph Ritchie. Hughes-Hallett's enjoyable history of this one evening, with its poetry readings, discussion of the merits of Homer, Shakespeare and Milton, debate about art and science, tipsiness, mockery and nonsense, also gives a wider picture of Regency society, with digressions into the acquisition of the Elgin Marbles, the career of Humphrey Davy, the politics of the Royal Academy, and the genesis of Frankenstein. A memorable evening, memorably evoked. I wonder if the drama critic John Reynolds, who was invited but didn't turn up, kicked himself afterwards.
Once I'd fought my way past the horror of multiple similes in the first few pages, some of them utterly distracting and pointless ("hands so plump they quivered like dreaming dogs". Really? Labradors or poodles?), to the character of Darcy – North’s 18-year-old heroine who is searching for her missing mother in a North American landscape ravaged by a new Ice Age – this novel picked up its pace and became appropriately strange and refreshingly unpredictable. North is excellent at creating a sense of dystopian danger while keeping Darcy a recognisably human and real teenager, with classic adolescent concerns – essentially a girl longing for maternal comfort – and resists making her an Ellen Ridley-like Amazon or a crushed victim, shuffling towards her doom. — The Independent
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O'Neill
This grim but
spellbinding account of an unassuming Scotsman, Sir John Kirk,
unfairly maligned by his one-time boss and Victorian hero, the
explorer David Livingstone, is another eye-opening chapter in
Britain's long relationship with Africa. Instead of concentrating, as
most histories of slavery do, on the west coast of Africa, Hazell
looks to the east coast, which continued trading long after
anti-slavery legislation was passed.
