Micro Review 10 (2024) Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize

 

Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon (Penguin Books)

As I started reading the books for the Debut Fiction Prize so late I was aware that this was the overall winner as I started it, and as I've enjoyed all the books so far (and one is one of my top reads of the year) this one had an awful lot to live up to.

Again on paper the book was right up my street:

An exhilarating, fiercely original story of brotherhood, war and art, and of daring to dream of something bigger than ourselves.

It's 412 BC, and Athens' invasion of Sicily has failed catastrophically. Thousands of Athenian soldiers are held captive in the quarries of Syracuse, starving, dejected, and hanging on by the slimmest of threads.

Lampo and Gelon are local potters, young men with no work and barely two obols to rub together. When they take to visiting the nearby quarry, they discover prisoners who will, in desperation, recite lines from the plays of Euripides for scraps of bread and a scattering of olives.

And so an idea is born: the men will put on Medea in the quarry. A proper performance to be sung of down the ages. Because after all, you can hate the Athenians for invading your territory, but still love their poetry.

But as the audacity of their enterprise dawns on them, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between enemies and friends. As the performance draws near, the men will find their courage tested in ways they could never have imagined...

The author is also based in Norwich so another tick in its favour...

Sadly the book wasn't quite my cup of tea, I had hoped that it was just the abridged Book at Bedtime version that wasn't for me and that the full book would connect.

I can't quite put my finger on why the book didn't work for me. The story was interesting, I knew both Euripides plays being performed and the characters/setting were strong. I also quite liked the way the characters spoke in a vernacular way, it just left me cold and I didn't find it either a comedy or a tragedy.

I'd love to have been a fly on the wall at the discussions where the winner was chosen to find out why this one won - it was good but just not a winner in my mind.

A winning read

The Cut Out Girl by Bart Van Es

As soon as I saw this book on the Costa Longlist I knew that I'd want to read it and finally it has been my turn to borrow it from the library.

It was worth the wait and despite beating one of my favourite reads from last year (The Skylark's War) in the Costa prize now I have read it I can't be too sad at this turn of events.

I've written before about my interest in books about the Holocaust, in fact my dissertation for my first MA was about how such an event is portrayed in children's literature. This new addition to the canon - all about how one Jewish girl was saved by various Dutch families was right up my street.

The mix of family history (it was the author's family who played a part in saving Lien), modern history and thought, detailed scholarly research and Lien's own autobiography made this book a compelling read. It was also shocking and not just because of the horror of the extermination camps.

I had the idea, mostly gained through literature admittedly, that Holland had a good reputation when it came to their actions during WW2. So many Jews fled there from Germany during the 1930s that to me it seemed like a good place for people to have fled to.
We then have the stories of the heroic people who hid Jews and worked for the Resistance. The praise heaped on those hiding the Frank family and the other similar tales lead to me to believe that while the Dutch weren't quite as helpful as the Danish in saving their Jewish population they were definitely 'good guys.'

Van Es dispels this early on:

"The Jewish wartime death rate in the Netherlands, at 80%, was more than double that of any other Western country, far higher than in France, Belgium, Italy or even Germany and Austria themselves."  p.58

Van Es, like me, was shocked to discover this, and even more so when he found out that along with various geographic and military reasons "it was the native administration that brought death to the Jews" (p. 58).

The poor behaviour of (some) Dutch people continued through the war, and is an integral part of Lien's story, as well as afterwards when survivors returned home or people emerged from hiding.

I know that history is rewritten by the victors but this new knowledge adds to the unease I felt on visiting the Anne Frank House last year. It is so easy to promote the bits of your history that you want people to concentrate on by passing over the negative aspects quickly. The suffering that all of Holland experienced in the winter of 1944/45 and then in rebuilding the country as a liberal land has airbrushed a lot of the darkness.

It is early in the year to be picking 'best books' but I have a feeling that this one will stay with me for a long time, and in many ways is a companion read to one of my top reads from a few years ago - East West Street by Philippe Sands.