The final book club of 2015 read random (2008), a short, moving poetic play by young black British playwright, debbie tucker green. As well as wanting to coincide with the forthcoming debbie tucker green symposium – http://www.lincoln.ac.uk/home/campuslife/whatson/eventsconferences/debbietuckergreen.html –  I was also keen to introduce an exciting new playwright who I suspected the readers wouldn’t have come across before.

In random, a single actress (originally played at the Royal Court Theatre by Nadine Marshall) performs multiple roles: sister, brother, mother and father, and for much of the time speaks directly to the audience. It starts off as an ordinary day in the life of an ordinary black family in London, but half way through it becomes clear that the brother, a teenage schoolboy, has been fatally stabbed in a random attack. The rest of the performance conveys the thoughts, feelings and emotions of the remaining family members, as they are informed of brother’s death by the police, visit the site where he was stabbed, and go to the morgue to identify his body.

Initially there was a mixed response to the play: many readers were moved by it, felt connected to the characters and thought that the experience of grief was related in a way that had universal applicability. But a few readers disliked reading a play with such upsetting subject matter, and one reader found it difficult to understand the language, which in places uses street patois.

All readers seemed to enjoy watching youtube clips of scenes of various performances of random and discovered a new appreciation of the peculiarly beautiful poetry and rhythm of debbie tucker green’s language. They also commented on the manner in which actresses mediated the language in ways they didn’t expect. This led to an interesting discussion about the multiple interpretative possibilities of play texts.

Readers also enjoyed having PhD student, Jessica Day, present for the discussion and an interesting cross-generational conversation about language use seemed to arise as a result of Jess’s presence.

In the end, while all readers admitted that they wouldn’t have chosen this play to read themselves, most were happy to have read it and would be interested in seeing a play by debbie tucker green if one was staged in Lincoln.

Dr Siân Adiseshiah

The book club session on 22 August was my first with the group and, due to a personal interest in the work of J.G. Ballard, which I’m hoping to pursue as a research project, I suggested Super-Cannes as our group read (as much as anything because it’s the first novel by Ballard to have been published in the current century). In the end that proved to be an… interesting choice. Ballard has produced several works that can, at the very least, be described as challenging – most notably Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition – but Super-Cannes is often seen as one of Ballard’s more approachable later novels.

That word, “approachable”, requires a few definitions, such as “approachable enough to throw brick bats at it.” The group almost entirely disliked the book upon their initial reading, yet as I’ve often found when teaching Ballard this leads into extremely fruitful territory. For those unfamiliar with Super-Cannes, it follows the arrival of Paul and his young wife Jane at a luxurious, gated society – Eden-Olympia – in the south of France, which is recovering from a mass murder committed by a member of its elite. Paul quickly discovers that the serpent has wounds his coils throughout the divine setting of this community, gradually moving from detective to sociopath as he increasingly participates in the drug taking, prostitution and violence that the inhabitants of Eden-Olympia are prescribed by a rogue psychologist, Wilder Penrose, to cope with the boredom and stresses of their existence.

The group had no sympathy at all with Paul nor (and this was a slight surprise to me) his wife, though in the case of the protagonist I indicated that this was a general tactic on Ballard’s part. In almost none of his novels does he ever present a sympathetic main character, but is more generally concerned with the barely repressed psychopathology of everyday life. Indeed, this refusal to provide routes that could allow us to empathise with the events of the novel is structured into its very end – with everyone believing that it was unsatisfactory and only I suggesting that such dissatisfaction was the very point of the novel. Rather than allowing an act of supposedly cathartic violence, the novel concludes with Paul’s fantasies of destruction that are unlikely to change such a corrupt society.

It was while engaging with such deliberate literary strategies on Ballard’s part that the discussion became particularly interesting. Although I indicated my own dislike of interpretations that rely upon an author’s biography, we did discuss the context of Ballard’s most famous novel, Empire of the Sun, and how his experiences of a concentration camp during the Second World War partially influenced his interest in the social and psychological causes of violence. It was also during this discussion that readers began to suggest where real sites of empathy could exist, with some of the minor, secondary characters – the cleaners, security guards and immigrants – who are subject to the perverse desires and actions of the gods of Eden-Olympia.

Throughout the session, many members of the group remarked that while they found themselves repulsed by or, at best, cold towards Paul and his situation, they were affected by Ballard’s elegant and exquisite descriptions of the world of Super-Cannes and its hyper-modern evocation of a twenty-first century paradise, complete with the devil as psychopath. This was also provided me with some of my most pleasurable experiences with the group, that while actively disliking the novel the group very quickly realised why I had selected it and that it was the type of book they would not normally have encountered, an avant-garde dissection of human psychology masquerading as a crime novel.

Jason Whittaker

At the book club meeting, held on 24^th June, we discussed Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road (2006). In his most recent book, McCarthy trains his trademark modernist craft on contemplating the end of humanity, providing a dark and largely bleak vision of a father and son struggling to survive in a world where humanity is all but lost.

In the first half of the discussion we shared our initial responses to the novel, which were overwhelmingly positive. Readers obviously enjoyed McCarthy elegant prose and were genuinely held by the narrative, despite some of the more graphic scenes! An insightful contribution by one member prompted an intriguing discussion on whether The Road could be considered an allegory on the current state of global capitalism.

Focusing on selected passages, we discussed the figure of the prophet in the text and drew out a number of intertextual strategies that McCarthy used, such as his allusions to the bible and religious imagery. The description of the boy as ‘carrying the fire’ helped us to focus discussion on the human subject, and whether, when pushed to the brink, a sense of purpose and duty can still exist.

Interestingly, many in the group did not regard McCarthy’s text as a conservative, anti-feminist text, and rather sympathized with the women’s position that under such circumstances the only humane action is suicide.

The book club closed with a contemplation of possible frameworks in which to read McCarthy (whether his book is a work of eco-criticism, for instance) and if the book had a morale. This prompted interesting discussion with debate ranging from reading the text as unheeded warning on humanity’s current state of existence to others which saw a redemptive potential even in the bleakest of human circumstances. Finally, we mentioned, for those interested, suggestions for further reading, including The Border Trilogy (1992-1998) and Blood Meridian (1985).

At our session on 20 May, we discussed Jackie Kay’s memoir Red Dust Road (2010). In this recent work, Kay narrates the emotional and physical journeys she experienced as an adopted child, and incorporates the stories of her biological and adoptive parents into a history of her own life.

We began by discussing readers’ initial impressions of Kay’s story, its themes of family, memory, inheritance, race and racism, politics, and sexuality. Readers were intrigued by the structure of the memoir and its movement between past and present, which we explored by reading aloud incidents from Kay’s early life, retold in the language and from the perspective of childhood. The group noted Kay’s ability to create a ‘voice’ for others and many of us were moved by the lack of judgement and the kindness, empathy, and forgiveness exhibited in the memoir as well as the warmth of Kay’s depiction of her adoptive parents. We spent some time reading aloud passages depicting the ‘red dust road’ of the title, encountered on Kay’s journey to Nigeria as well as in her imagination and dreams, and we reveled in the pleasures of the poetic depictions of landscape, trees, birds, and flowers. The metaphors Kay uses to describe the frailties of memory were particularly striking to readers.

To inform our discussion we listened to an interview with Kay in which she suggests that memoir-writing enabled her to become a character in her own life story and led her to the conclusion that truth is stranger than fiction. We ended by reading some poems from Kay’s earlier collection, The Adoption Papers (1991). This enabled us to consider the difference literary form makes to the way this story is told and to reflect further on the portrayal of the relationship between child, birth mother, and adoptive mother. Reading these poems prompted discussion of motherhood and the social expectations on women in the 20^th century. It also returned us to questions of inheritance and belonging that have been recurrent themes in our readings.

We met on 6th May 2015 to discuss some poems from the Irish poet Seamus Heaney’s final two collections, District and Circle (2006) and Human Chain (2010). These poems, in their varying ways, deal with memory, loss and the relationship between past and present.

We began with ‘The Tollund Man in Springtime’ from District and Circle, a text that can be connected in subtle ways to the Northern Irish peace process, and to Irish history more broadly. Although a number of readers in the group were familiar with Heaney’s work, I felt it would be useful to set this poem in context. I first showed a series of images of bodies recovered from Danish bogs that had been buried in the Iron Age. These bodies became internationally famous when their pictures featured in P. V. Glob’s The Bog People (1969). Glob argued that these individuals, their skin, hair, clothing were perfectly preserved in the peat bogs of , may have been victims of ritual execution, or may alternatively have been killed as sacrifices to a Mother Goddess of the earth. The reading group found these startling images thought-provoking, and perhaps shocking, in their intimacy and strangeness. The bog bodies exerted a major influence on Heaney’s poetry in the mid-1970s, as he imaginatively connected them with images of contemporary victims of sectarian violence in the Troubles.
We looked at the poem ‘The Tollund Man’ alongside the image of this body, and considered two questions: how meaningful is it to use this ancient past to ‘explain’ the late twentieth-century present, and is it ethical to treat this murder victim as an aesthetic object? The Tollund Man in this poem is voiceless, but in ‘The Tollund Man in Springtime’, he not only acquires speech and individuality, but reawakens through the long seasons to take the modern world – planes, scanners and cash-points – in his stride. He carries a bunch of Tollund rushes on his travels, and the poem ends with him mixing the pollen from the rushes in with his spit, and spiriting himself into the street. The group enjoyed the palpable and sensory nature of Heaney’s language, and the striking images that pass before the Tollund Man’s eyes as he lay in the soil. We felt that the poem was about coming to terms with a painful past, of not forgetting what went before but equally not being imprisoned by it.

In the second part of the session, we moved away from this ‘public’ focus in Heaney’s work to more ‘personal’ poems, ‘The Blackbird of Glanmore’ from District and Circle, and ‘The Door was Open’ from Human Chain. Both poems are elegies, but as our discussions revealed, they deal with the past, and with loss, in differing ways. ‘The Blackbird of Glanmore’ alludes to the death of Heaney’s four-year-old brother in a road accident, when Heaney was 12 and at boarding school, an event dealt with an earlier poem ‘Mid-Term Break’ (from his first collection, Death of a Naturalist, in 1966). ‘The Door was Open’ is dedicated to David Hammond, a musician, film-maker and broadcaster born in Northern Ireland like Heaney. The blackbird is recalled as a harbinger of doom, but in the poem its jaunty presence was seen by the group as something enduring and positive, a reminder of how life will continue long after a human presence leaves the scene. The open door of the second poem initially makes the speaker feel an intruder, but gradually the dark interior becomes rather welcoming, a kind of invitation to explore the space beyond. The group felt that darkness and uncertainty was accepted and embraced in the text, and that this perhaps reflects a less burdened attitude towards the past in Heaney’s late poetry.

We had decided at the outset that, if they felt comfortable, members of the group would take turns reading a stanza. This was a really interesting exercise, as the range of accents brought the energy and the nuances of the poetry powerfully to life, and encouraged everyone to examine the language closely and appreciate its effects. At the end of the session, several members of the group said that they had enjoyed looking at modern poetry much more than they thought they would, and I hope our discussion will make it seem less daunting in the future!

Dr Scott Brewster