In Watermelon Sugar

Steve Weddle’s Country Hardball is a tremendous collection of stories that intersect and overlap to form a major modern work. He really has put together something rather special here and I’d urge you to read it.

There’s so much to love about the book that it’s difficult to know where to start.

I’ll begin with the cover. That’s not the obvious place, but it does hint at what’s to come. It has the silhouette of a man walking down a lane that passes a small house and then disappears as if to nowhere. Above his head is a circle of sunlight that’s surrounded by oppressive and powerful looking dark clouds. It’s a strange balance of the static and the moving. A blend of hope within hopelessness and hopelessness within hope. And the house, solitary and small, could hold anything from a warm welcome to a sinister ending.

In these ways, it gives a suggestion of what’s inside.

The stories themselves are beautifully balanced. They tend to play out major moments in people’s lives as seen through what might be everyday happenings or simple interactions. It’s that ability to focus upon the small and suggest enormity that really highlights the talent of the author.

Weddle has a wonderful sense of touch. The weight of the words is practically perfect and, like I imagine the battle of wits between a baseball pitcher and a hitter to be, the changes of pace and direction are gripping.

Should you read this, you’ll get the chance to walk a mile or two in another’s shoes. The shoes aren’t likely to be new or well-healed, but by the time you get to take them off, you’ll know you’ve been on a journey.

Weddle must have a wonderful ability to empathise with people because, more often than not, I felt I’d really inhabited someone’s life for a spell. Understood their woes, their fears, their dilemmas and their need to cope. Each tale did something to my breathing; as I reached the end, I’d find I was either deeply inhaling, exhaling or simply holding on to my breath like I didn’t want to let it go for a little while longer so that I could savour the last nuances of the page.

A review, any review, will struggle to do the book justice. I did try and pick out a few quotes here and there for a while in the hope that I’d be able to give a sense of what I’m trying to say. In the end, I was sticking so many markers in between pages that I couldn’t hold the thing up any more without losing them.

Here are a couple of moments from The Thing With Feathers. A boy shoots a bird, injures it, and suddenly wants to take back the damage:

‘The bird fluttered at his touch, shifted along the ground, then settled under the boy’s hand,’

which sets him thinking about his mother:

‘He thought of lying in bed with his mother when she got the sadness,’

and then takes us to the time the bad news arrives:

‘One of the women looked and saw him and said she was sorry and everything was going to be all right and it would be fine and it would be okay. It’s bad now, but will be okay. It will be okay. But it wasn’t.’

There’s such a melancholy beauty to the sentences and phrases that I couldn’t help but be moved. That’s the way I felt throughout – moved and shaken and wanting more.

And then there was this:

‘On a good day I could get a Texas Rangers game [on the radio]. I didn’t much care for any of them, but if they were playing the New York Yankees, at least I’d have someone to root against. Sometimes it just works out better to root against something.’

Brilliant.

Each of the stories was my favourite while I was reading it – I think they’re all that good.

With a small amount of distance from it now, I loved the opener about a boy who’s had a family heirloom taken from him by bullies and think it really sets the tone perfectly. A story about parents whose child is trying out for the All Stars and who can’t afford for him to make the grade (maybe they could buy just one more lottery ticket a week – they’ll think of something) is really special.  The story of the store manager who remembers burying an elephant when the circus came to town while he tries to decide which of his employees to lay off is stunning. Not to mention the ex-military man who finds the girl who’s been missing for a while.

Important to me is the political flavour of the work; there’s no capital P to the word in this collection, but it is often an indictment of the poverty many have to suffer in these times.

Best thing I can do now is shuffle on and let you buy the book and read it for yourself.

No doubt you’ll be as impressed by these tales as I have been.

If there’s justice, Country Hardball will be studied one day and still be talked about fifty years hence. Here’s hoping.

Free for the next few days, my romantic comedy HOW TO CHOOSE A SWEETHEART.

Enjoy.

:)

Charlie Fox becomes involved in an investigation centring upon a motorcycle gang in the Lakes after her close friend is laid up in hospital following a bad motorbike accident.

Her suspicions about the crash arise when she finds she was on the back of another bloke’s bike rather than her husband’s and when her friend mentions a white van that seemed to come for them.

Right from the beginning she’s faced with conflict.  She’s at odds with her father who sees her military and close protection career as a complete failure when compared to the family’s middle-class ambitions; there’s her relationship with Sean, her boss and ex-lover for whom she longs and yet fears getting close to; there’s an Irish thug who has his fingers in unpleasant pies; there’s the bike gang whom she wants to get to join so that she can find out what the hell’s been going on; there’s her friend’s son who needs her to keep him safe yet wants her as far away as possible from him and his mates; and there’s the policeman who has her taped but also has a soft spot for her.

The zest for the pursuit of the facts as a reader is sharpened by the fact that Charlie and Sean, working together with their smouldering chemistry, don’t have a lot to go on.  The evidence they find is often ambiguous and their confusion keeps the suspense at a high level.

In the end, it’s a trip to Ireland that opens things up in more ways than one.

Throw in the adrenalin created by the bike rides, the violence and the sense of threat and you have a very full and satisfying story.  Lots of fun if you like your kindle journeys to be turbulent and gripping.

Here's a kindle book that's free for today only.

It's written by young Scottish writers and suggests that the future of Scotland's writing tradition is in good hands.

It's free in the US and the UK.

Brazzaville Beach is a tremendous novel.
Right from the beginning it has the
feel of something rather unusual and for me there was a definite double-take
moment when I realised I'd found my place.
It's centred around 2 main aspects
of Hope Clearwater's life, her time with her husband in the UK and her time
without in Africa.
The drive of the plot centres around Hope's work observing
chimpanzees in the world's leading scientific project on the subject of the
animals. She's cottoned on to the fact that strange things are happening within
her community of chimps that have taken themselves away from the main group. The
chimps from the north are sending patrols into the southern territories and this
is the cause for a lot of interest. Unfortunately for her, the more she finds
out, the more she realises that her discoveries are contrary to the theories of
her eminent bosses and it seems that they'll go to any length to suppress her
findings.
Weaving in and out of this African scene is her background and her
relationship with her very driven husband who is a gifted mathematician. He's
obsessed by seeing things in different ways and interprets things with numbers
and visual patterns. It's a background that helps to explain Hope's current
situation and thinking, while providing a hugely interesting story in
itself.
There's plenty of what I've come to expect from William Boyd in
here:
It's quite addictive, which is quite often the case for me when reading
his books.
There's the wonderful detail in the characters and settings and
he's a bit like Hope's husband in the way he can present what is commonplace in
new ways that make it a pleasure to get to know people and place.
There are
the asides that show a tremendous knowledge in a vast range of areas (or at
least they seem to) that are interesting in themselves, but are also very
relevant and helpful as part of a gentle analysis.
There's the African
setting, clearly understood and alive with the exotic.
I loved it. I feel
like I've had a good workout and a huge amount of entertainment.
The sad
thing is, I was reading a signed, hard-back, 1990 first edition and it's
borrowed from a friend. I'd so like to keep it on my shelves and have considered
a few ways of explaining its loss (the cat ate it and the like), but it never
worked on my teachers and I don't suppose my conscience could take it these
days.
A super story that you should check out.

I've just put up a review of Mulliner Tales by PG Wodehouse. This is a book I'd recommend to anyone who wants to enjoy the beauty of words and laugh a lot.

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