Making the transition

On the Welsh coastal path © C A Lovegrove 2013

The Broken Bridge by Philip Pullman.
Young Picador, revised edition 2004 (1990).

‘You’re interested in painting?’
‘It’s the only thing—’ 
‘It’s not the only thing. It’s not even the most important thing.’ 
‘What . . .’ Ginny still couldn’t speak properly. ‘What is the most important thing?’ 
There was a long, long silence.

Chapter 14

Ginny Howard’s mother was from Haiti, and it’s from her that Ginny apparently inherits her artistic talents. She now lives with her widowed father in a Welsh village near the sea, and for a sixteen-year-old of mixed descent that isn’t easy.

Come the summer holidays after her exams and some of the mysteries concerning her mother and family start to emerge, upsetting the sensitive but determined teenager at that crucial period when she is making the difficult transition from childhood to adulthood.

A publishing scoundrel

Lord Byron (1813) by Thomas Phillips

Henry James: The Aspern Papers
Penguin Popular Classics 1994 (1888)

Miss Juliana Bordereau lives with her niece Miss Tina in a run-down Venetian palazzo; it is here that a literary researcher — nameless throughout this novella — manages to track the pair down and inveigle them into letting him stay as a lodger. His ulterior motive is to gain access to any papers rumoured to exist pertaining to the late American poet Jeffrey Aspern, all for eventual publication.

Nine chapters detail the narrator’s underhand machinations, first to pull to wool over the eyes of the elder Miss Bordereau and secondly to gain the confidence of Miss Tina. James conjures up a kind of apologue or moral fable from what initially appears to be a factual first-person account but which increasingly makes us suspect the researcher is an unreliable narrator.

A long hot summer

Maggie O’Farrell
Instructions for a Heatwave
Tinder Press 2013

July 2014. It seemed appropriate to be reading a novel set in 1976 in drought-ridden Britain at roughly the same time of year and in temperatures of around 30 degrees Celsius. Seeing that it took almost four days to relive the four days that an Irish Catholic family finds itself plunged into crisis, and that the reading virtually coincided with a rather more amenable visit by children and grandchildren, it was tempting to compare and contrast the two periods separated by nearly four decades; however, this is a terrific novel to enjoy at any time of year, spread over any length of time and in any circumstances, and I found it easy to resist the temptation.

July 1976. Meet the Riordans: Robert and Gretta, Irish-born, living in Highbury, London; Michael Francis, married to Claire, living in Stoke Newington; Monica, once married to Joe but now to Peter, living in Gloucestershire; and Aoife — pronounced Eefuh — living in New York. While Robert and Gretta are part of the Irish diaspora, they still own a cottage on Omey Island off Connemara, Galway, where family holidays have been taken over the years.

On the morning of Thursday July 15th Robert Riordan disappears,