Castlebar Book Club
The Book Club meets once a month (usually the second Tuesday of the month) in Castlebar Library at 8.00pm. Check events page for next meeting. (Previous Book Club selections)
Books for April meeting, 2009
The Island By Victoria Hislop
On the brink of a life-changing decision, Alexis Fielding longs to find out about her mother’s past. But Sofia has never spoken of it. All she admits to is growing up in a small Cretan village before moving to London. When Alexis decides to visit Crete, however, Sofia gives her daughter a letter to take to an old friend, and promises that through her she will learn more.
Arriving in Plaka, Alexis is astonished to see that it lies a stone’s throw from the tiny, deserted island of Spinalonga – Greece’s former leper colony. Then she finds Fotini, and at last hears the story that Sofia has buried all her life: the tale of her great-grandmother Eleni and her daughters and a family rent by tragedy, war and passion. She discovers how intimately she is connected with the island, and how secrecy holds them all in its powerful grip
Amazon.co.uk
'Adding depth and colour to the story is the description of Cretan life... in particular, the vividly detailed account of life on Spinalonga... It is one of the achievements of this thoughtful novel that it presents the lives of the island's inhabitants with such empathy. The result is a fascinating work that combines a moving love story witha plea for more understanding about this most cruel of diseases.'
The Times
'This is a vivid, moving and absorbing tale, with its sensitive, realistic engagement with all the consequences of, and stigma attached to leprosy, elevating it beyond holiday literature.'
Observer
'Gently gripping tale'
Scotsman on Sunday
'Brings dignity and tenderness to her novel'
Telegraph
'a compelling story that has rarely left the bestseller list this year and deservedly so'
Sunday Express
In many respects, despite its meticulous research into Cretan culture, Hislop has written a beach novel predictably packed with family sagas, doomed love affairs, devastating secrets. However, she also forces us to reflect on illness, both the nasty, narrow-mindedness of the healthy and the spirit of survival in the so-called 'unclean'. Her message seems as relevant today as it would have been a century ago. Same prejudice, different disease.
Guardian.co.uk
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner By James Hogg
James Hogg was born in 1770 into Borders farming stock, and spent a good deal of his adult life running his own farm at Altrive in Yarrow. Aged six, he’d been forced to leave school after only a few months of education due to his father’s bankruptcy, after which young James didn’t read very much except the family Bible. He was in his twenties when he started writing poetry (Walter Scott was an early champion; Hogg collected ballads for him), and he had a measure of success, though he was never good at retaining any money he made. But it was Justified Sinner, written while he was in his fifties, that would become his lasting legacy to Scottish literature. Its influence can be seen in the figure of the doppelgänger, found everywhere from Muriel Spark to Alasdair Gray, and when the eponymous hero of The Testament of Gideon Mack meets the Devil, author James Robertson surely has Hogg’s novel at the back of his mind.
The doppelgänger represents the side of our nature which must be suppressed in a civilised ordering of society.When the straitlaced Presbyterian physician of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde drinks his potion, he releases the more feral and lustful part of himself. Critics have argued that Stevenson was talking about the effect of narcotics – alcohol and drugs – on the Scottish psyche. He may also have been thinking in terms of the creative impulse: all writers, after all, are divided selves, populated by multifarious characters and voices. In Hogg’s scheme of things, however, it is one particular tenet of Christianity that seems at fault.Antinomianism, according to Chambers Dictionary, is the belief that ‘Christians are emancipated by the gospel from the obligation to keep the moral law, faith alone being necessary’. In other words, if you are one of the ‘chosen’, one of God’s elect, then by implication you can do no wrong. Whatever you do must be
right and must be good.You are forever justified in your actions.
As early as the first page of the book,we have been warned by the ‘editor’ (one of two narrators, Robert being the other) that we are about to encounter ‘hideous events’, yet the story itself opens almost as comedy, with Lady Dalcastle’s weddingnight prayers interrupted by the snoring of her elderly husband. Things do not go well for the newlyweds – the boorish and earthy Lord Dalcastle is not to the taste of his godly wife, who turns for succour to Reverend Wringhim. Eventually she bears two sons, George and Robert, but Lord Dalcastle doubts the paternity of the latter, so Robert is given over to the care of Reverend Wringhim. Robert is presented by the Editor (and presents himself to the reader through his own journal) as an unlikeable, self-serving prig, and it is to Hogg’s credit that, as Robert’s misfortunes multiply, the reader begins to feel a good deal of sympathy for him.
This is one more reason why Confessions of a Justified Sinner burrows its way into the reader’s consciousness like few other books. It is a demanding read, and opaque with it – we are never entirely sure what transpired on Arthur’s Seat, but must add our own layer of interpretation to the others in the story.
Gil-Martin certainly beguiles Robert Wringhim. So much so that Robert’s first murder is of a preacher, Mr Blanchard. His second, however, is more telling still – his own brother, George. Robert has become an Exterminating Angel, and defends himself by stating to the reader: ‘I am the sword of the Lord, and Famine and Pestilence are my sisters. Woe then to the wicked of this land, for they must fall down dead together, that the church may be purified.’ The notion of purification has, down the ages, led to ethnic cleansing on a mass scale, culminating in the Nazi death-camps. Fervour for a cause can lead the zealot to commit just about any act of barbarity. To this day, there are plenty of believers out there who think the world will only be healed when it is rid of the apostate, the sinner and those who dare not practice the believers’ specific creed.
This makes Justified Sinner a book of not only continuing but urgent relevance.
Along the way, we are given insights into the religious and political turmoil of the eighteenth century. Hogg shows just how easily an Edinburgh mob could be raised and roused – as happened oftentimes throughout the city’s history. Scotland, for all its religious learning, is shown also to be a country rife with superstition, but Hogg can be playful, too.
Hogg’s enduring masterpiece is a triumph, too, and deserves to be read, enjoyed and discussed by a new generation.
Ian Rankin
Reader's Area of this site
- Reader's Review site with active discussion board
- Book Group Links: A selection of sites compiled by the Salt Lake City Library.
- Great Books Foundation: The grandfather of them all
- Reading Group Choices Online: Over 550 guides from publishers. 150 can be printed from the site
- Reading Group Guides: A very useful selection of reading group guides from Random House Publishers
- Writer's Resource site for writers of all abilities