This week: a book to help us clean up our act so we might live longer, stronger and better
This week there are three very different works of fiction and there’s also a memoir from the eldest daughter of a god-help-us Influencer, along with a book to help us clean up our act so we might live longer, stronger and better.
The Players, Minette Walters, Allen and Unwin, €17.99
The year is 1685 and the Duke of Monmouth heads a rebellion against the Crown, James II. The rebels are easily overpowered by Crown forces and The Bloody Assizes are the result, a series of court cases where the guilty were either hung, drawn and quartered or sent as slaves to the West Indies. The judge who presided over the assizes was the notorious Judge Jeffries, known as ‘The Hanging Judge’ and he appears in Walters’ novel, not as a cardboard cut-out baddy but as a nuanced and complex character, whose many outbursts seem to have been fuelled more by drink than anything else.
Her principal characters, Lady Jayne Harrier and her son, seek to help those in trouble in Dorset after the rebellion, with varying degrees of success, but she opens a hospital for the wounded, treating everyone she can, regardless of which side they’ve fought for. Walters is a master craftswoman and a tireless historical researcher and for the many fans of her previous novel, The Swift and the Harrier, this loose sequel is an absolute feast of historical fiction.
The Teacher of Auschwitz, Wendy Holden, Zaffre, €16.99
This novel is based on the true story of Fredy Hirsch, a teacher and athlete and also a Holocaust prisoner, who was given charge of the children in the family camp at Auschwitz II-Birkenau. He was charismatic and charming and the children loved him. But of course, he was also Jewish and he happened to be gay, something intolerable in Nazi ‘philosophy’. There is plenty of material out there relating what happened to him and so I’m not telling, but this story isn’t about the inevitable end for most Jews in concentration camps. Rather this is about how, under extreme circumstances, Hirsch inspired and educated the Auschwitz children in his care, about how he pleaded for more rations for them and succeeded in his pleas, how he insisted they maintain rigorous hygiene inasmuch as they could in the squalor of a death camp. He helped prolong lives, temporarily at least, and he instilled in the children a strength and resilience of spirit that no amount of Nazism could divest them of.
It’s a special story, solidly endorsed by Holocaust survivors and historians, a reminder that even in the bleakest of circumstances, there is room and rhyme and reason to celebrate life in all its precarious fragility, while it lasts.
The House of My Mother, Shari Franke, Gallery, €17.99
In this truth-is-stranger-than-fiction memoir, and a rather upsetting one at that, the eldest daughter of Ruby Franke (Ruby’s now in prison) tells what life was like living under her mother’s creepy, violent, abusive and criminal control. Her mother was one of those god-help-us Influencers who posted every day about the wonderfulness of being a Mormon mother of a huge family in Utah, and who also hosted her own YouTube vlog called 8 Passengers, all centred around those poor kids and how fabulous she was at rearing them.
Helped along by the equally creepy Jodi Hildebrandt (also now in prison) and seemingly ignored by husband Kevin, who didn’t separate from Ruby until almost the last minute when the cops dropped by, this is really evil stuff involving shocking physical, mental and emotional abuse. Ruby Franke and Jodi Hildebrandt’s social media channels have since been taken down, but they had millions of enthusiastic followers. Admittedly, those followers were Americans, and Americans, it seems, are batshit crazy. Just look at the White House. An unsettling but compelling read.
Things Your Future Self with Thank you For, Dr Mark Rowe, Gill, €18.99
Because we’re all living longer, it’s important that we live better, because who wants to spend their last years incapacitated or in a home, or worse? Mark Rowe is a family doctor and has had personal experience of burnout, which he outlines in this book. It would not have happened, he says, if he had been looking after himself. But rather than making dramatic changes, he insists we can make huge strides in improving our physical and mental health by making just small adjustments in our lifestyle.
So here’s the book. The author has tried and tested everything he advises, and it has worked for him. He disses the misconception that self-care is selfish, and he’s long been a critic of our current medical landscape of ‘Pharmageddon’ as he calls it, where there’s a pill not only for every ill, but for every non-medical crisis and setback that forms the fabric of a normal life. It’s a sound, practical book, worth reading.
The Cleaner, Mary Watson, Bantam Press, €15.99
A young South American woman fakes a bicycle accident near the gated residential community of The Woodlands in a ‘pretty college town’ somewhere in Ireland. Two residents come to her assistance, insisting on taking her inside to dress her wounds. She needs work, they need a cleaner and in jig time she’s cleaning three homes, all interconnected by family and marriage, all well-to-do households. Someone in one of these households is responsible for Esmie’s brother, now in a coma, returning from Ireland in disgrace after his scholarship fees for his PhD were withdrawn. Nico, the brother, has been dying slowly ever since and Esmie, his youngest sister, has travelled to Ireland not to clean but to wreak revenge. First she must find out who in this tight-knit family group is responsible for her brother’s destruction. A well-paced thriller, not altogether convincing, but Watson keeps you turning the pages.
Footnotes
Classics Now, a festival celebrating the Greek and Roman classics and bringing them up to date, runs this weekend January 31 Jan to February 2 at various venues across Dublin. See classicsnow.ie for details.
If musical classics are more your thing, the Festival of Youth Orchestras takes place in the National Concert Hall on February 8 with daytime and evening performances. See nch.ie for details.