Six Degrees of Separation: From ‘Phosphorence’ to….

I haven’t read the starting book for Six Degrees of Separation in March. It’s Julia Baird’s Phosphorescence and it’s sitting beside the bed unread. In fact, I had to look up what phosphorescence actually IS and I find that it is a sort of light. So, for the March Six Degrees, I’ll go with the theme of ‘light’. You can read the ‘rules’ for Six Degrees of Separation on Kate’s Books are my Favourite and Best website but essentially it’s a form of trigger association based on the books that you have read. So, thinking of light….

I really like John Banville’s intelligence and the way that he makes you work hard as a reader. In Ancient Light, he effortlessly handles two narrative lines, while expanding your vocabulary. I must confess that I didn’t realize that it was part of a trilogy – and a trilogy that I had read, no less!- and I felt rather foolish when I realized that the books were all related.

I was rather less impressed by Ellen Van Neerven’s Heat and Light, a collection of short stories arranged around three themes: Heat, Water and Light. It was a bit of a ‘curate’s egg’ of a collection- very good in parts, but some stories made less of an impression.

I read Danielle Wood’s The Alphabet of Light and Dark before I started writing this blog. Set on a lighthouse on Bruny Island, it is a story within a story where an aspiring author returns to the lighthouse once tended by her great-great-grandfather and decides to write about her great-great aunt. There are lots of descriptions of landscape and reflections on history.

M.L. Stedman’s The Light Between Oceans is set on a lighthouse, too, but this time in the 1920s on the Western Australian coast. A husband returns from the war a changed man, and his wife Isabel cannot understand the existential changes that have been wrought on her husband. Their marriage is wracked by tragedy and loss. There’s a Jodi-Picoult-esque ethical dilemma, which was concluded a little too rapidly for my liking.

There was no rushed ending in Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light. The third of her Thomas Cromwell trilogy, it’s the brilliant culmination of a marvellous work of historical fiction. You know how the story is going to end (not well), but Mantel keeps you engrossed right to the last page.

And finally, someone who could barely remember seeing light: Helen Keller. Light in My Darkness is her compilation of autobiographical writing. Originally called My Religion, it’s pretty turgid in places and I found it easier to skip the chapters on Swedenborgianism. Frankly, I wouldn’t bother reading this and instead read Dorothy Herrman’s Helen Keller: A Life.

So, mainly fiction this month and a rather crabby collection of reviews. Rather ironic really, given that the theme I had chosen for myself was ‘light’!