Jean McNeilBesprekingen

fantastic sense of place and urban and liminal spaces, as well as a study of grief, desire, ageing, the magic of film. it moved me greatly

In Day for Night, Jean McNeil’s sixth novel, it is 2018. Writer and filmmaker Richard Cottar is approaching two significant milestones: he’s turning fifty, and he is soon to begin directing a movie about Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), the exiled Jewish German scholar and philosopher who killed himself in Spain rather than face deportation to France and what was sure to be a disagreeable fate at the hands of the invading Nazis. Richard’s wife, Joanna, a successful producer, has found investors to bankroll the film. The Cottars live a comfortable if hectic life in London with their two children, Nathan and Lucy, a life that becomes more hectic whenever Richard is working on a film and is grappling with endless details and the daily roller-coaster of triumph and crisis such a project entails. But Richard and Joanna have other concerns: both feel unsettled and anxious about the Brexit vote and suffer apprehension over how England’s impending departure from the EU will impact their lives and careers. Will they be forced to pull up stakes and establish themselves elsewhere? How will this affect their children, both born in England? Suddenly the future is uncertain, and they are resentful when the politics of Brexit throw obstacles in the way of their creative endeavours. In the novel’s first half Richard immerses himself in prep work for the film. But he’s oddly restless, not feeling quite himself, and even he can tell his behaviour is uncharacteristic: the upcoming birthday has thrown him into a state of turmoil, causing him to suffer disturbing premonitions of mortality. And he becomes irrationally fixated on Elliott, the attractively androgynous young actor who’s been cast as Walter Benjamin, an attachment that he struggles to keep from his wife, who’s balancing a variety of responsibilities while trying to keep the film’s financing in place. In the novel’s second half the focus shifts to Joanna, her own ambiguous relationship with Elliott, and the many challenges she faces as she guides the film toward a satisfying resolution.

Themes of exile and displacement permeate McNeil’s probing and geographically peripatetic narrative. Richard, from Kenya, and Joanna, an American, live in an England that, having taken a sharp turn to the political right, feels like it’s closing the door on the rest of the world. England is home, but they can’t avoid suspecting that, like Trump’s America, it’s growing mean-spirited and inward-looking and is no longer a welcome destination for immigrants. And so where does that leave them: Joanna, who prefers stability over uncertainty, and Richard, who, like Walter Benjamin, feels within himself the nostalgic push-pull of the voluntary exile and sees his own life as open-ended, liable to lead anywhere?

McNeil tells us that the phrase “day for night” refers to a filmmaking technique whereby a nighttime scene is filmed during daylight hours. But the term takes on political overtones when it is applied to the choice that the British people have made with their vote: choosing darkness over light. In the end, this is a book about the struggle to maintain some measure of self-determination amidst the barrage of forces that shape our lives in a chaotic world. It is about artistic versus personal integrity, the many faces of love, and the challenge of remaining true to oneself while enduring unwelcome, unexpected disruptions. The notion that to some extent we are all exiles—that every one of us has been compelled to move on from where we were—is not new. But in this engrossing novel the author puts an intriguing twist on it. In Day for Night, Jean McNeil has written another in a series of powerful novels, one that draws the reader into a world that is at once familiar but rapidly becoming unrecognizable.

Working as a surgeon in east Africa has left Rebecca at low ebb. You would think a nice quiet vacation with her mother’s sister and her family would be just what Rebecca needs to rejuvenate and relax. Memories of her trauma work and the political environment leaves her on edge. A romantic interest in her cousin seems out of place and detracts from dealing with the ugliness terrorism brings. The descriptions of the flora, fauna, and wildlife provided a richness that was lacking in the characters. The book needs editing to deal with an overabundance of dashes.

I received this book through a random giveaway. Although encouraged as a courtesy to provide feedback, I was under no obligation to write a review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

I found the exotic location and the coverage of contemporary issues in this novel compelling, but always seemed to be struggling to stay afloat, plot-wise. Having reached the end I'm still not clear exactly what happened and who (if anyone) was double-crossing who. The writing is cerebral and finely chiselled, but perhaps one for bigger brains than mine.½

Rebecca Laurelton is a relief doctor working at the epicenter of an intense civil war in East Africa who clearly endured a violent, traumatic incident and needed some respite. She takes the opportunity to become acquainted with her aunt Julia and her family when Julia invites her to stay at her fabulous estate called The Dhow House, which gave its name to the title of Jean McNeil’s book. It turns out, though, that Rebecca is more than she seems, but then so is her family.

Rebecca’s mother was estranged from her sister Julia, so Rebecca barely knows her. She had never met, Julia’s husband Bill, or her adult children Lucy and Storm. Bill is a farmer cum financier, Lucy is a college student, Storm seems to be drifting between high school and college uncertain what to do, and Julia is a somewhat shallow socialite. They are very wealthy, sheltered behind their gates even though they have lost their farms. But then, as Rebecca’s American friend notes, “There are fortunes to be made off poor people.” They seem very much of the Kenyan Happy Valley type, though transplanted to a coastal resort settlement on the coast of the Indian Ocean in an anonymous African country that is likely Kenya. Rebecca’s work in the north would then be in Somalia, and the paramilitary group Al-Nur would be Al-Shabaab.

The conflict is inching closer to the Dhow House by the day. There is rising tensions in the community, increasing incidents of violence and murder that are reported. Rebecca is attuned to this, because we learn she is more than a doctor, she is also an intelligence asset, reporting what she see to British intelligence. So The Dhow House is rich with all sorts of action adventure espionage elements, but that’s not what it is about.

Rebecca falls in love with her cousin Storm who is fifteen years younger than her. He’s eighteen, physically beautiful, athletic, someone who is enjoying life surfing, going to parties, and trying to figure out what he is going to do. All of them know that they should leave Africa, but in England they would be ordinary people. In Africa they are epic. Yes, this is Happy Valley.

The Dhow House is a strange and unsettling book. McNeil is a beautiful writer. I cannot tell you how many times I stopped to admire an expertly crafted sentence rich with imagery and original, singular metaphors that took my breath away. It’s not just that her metaphors were so very fresh, but they were perfectly apt.

McNeil is writing about the quandary of the white Africans, who have lost their power in an Africa for Africans. This family recognizes that they are mediocre people who are special only because they are in Africa, clinging like the ghosts who won’t leave their home after their time has gone. I wonder why McNeil wrote about these uninteresting people when from her book, it’s clear she is more interested in people like Aisha and Ali than in people like Julia and Bill.

So why didn’t I love it? This is not the kind of book McNeil should be writing. Here is a book full of violence and war and yet I felt not one moment of jeopardy, of tension or fear. There is this all-consuming passion between Rebecca and Storm, and yet I could never figure out why. I really did not care about the plot or the people at all. They were ghosts messing about and ruining what should have been a beautiful book about the birds and landscapes of this coast. The most compelling and interesting character in the book was Aisha, a woman who came to the medical camp.

I confess I did not like Rebecca. She is a ruiner, reckless with other people’s lives. As a doctor with a relief agency, she had no business acting as a spy. That brought jeopardy to her fellow relief workers. As an adult, a thirty-something woman, she had no business having an affair with her eighteen year-old cousin, no matter how reciprocal the attraction. Likewise, she had no business not warning her family that she had seen a leader of Al-Nur who warned her there would be an attack. She repeatedly put others in jeopardy without thought, yet never once did I feel as though she were in real jeopardy, not even when the trauma that happened to her is fully revealed. Perhaps because she withholds herself so completely from life, I can’t care enough to feel her at risk.

The narrative jumped quite a bit and not always with clarity. I would be reading into the third, fourth, or fifth page of a chapter before realizing that there was a jump back in time. This is in part because McNeil is a very oblique writer, avoiding any sort of straightforward narrative. She has internalized the “show, don’t tell” doctrine to the point of obscurantism. I was a quarter into this book and lamenting to my best friend, “I have no idea what this book is about.”

The thing is, I love her prose. When she is writing about birds, about the sky, the water, the trees, I swoon. She should write books like Diane Ackerman, naturalist essays about the world because she sees the world in magical ways.

I received an e-galley from the publisher after entering (and losing) a drawing through Shelf Awareness.

https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2017/04/26/9781770413498/

In Jean McNeil’s suspenseful novel, The Dhow House, Rebecca Laurelson is a doctor on temporary leave after an attack on the NGO field hospital where she’s been treating the wounded. The hospital is in an isolated region of East-Africa where Islamic extremism is spreading and surrounding towns and villages are coming under threat. After leaving her post, she travels south to Kilindoni, on the Indian Ocean, a luxurious resort town where prosperous white Africans flaunt their wealth and carry on as if the dangers that threaten their way of life don’t exist. Rebecca’s Aunt Julia and Uncle Bill, eminent members of this set, live in the Dhow House, a roomy, well-appointed, well-guarded seaside retreat, lushly landscaped and situated behind gates. Rebecca was raised in England by her mother, Julia’s sister, and recalls seeing her aunt on only a single occasion when she was very young (as the novel begins she’s in her late thirties). She also remembers that her mother’s family disapproved of Julia’s life choices. But even though Rebecca is a virtual stranger to her aunt and uncle and their two adult children, Lucy and the enigmatic Storm, they welcome her into their home and treat her as if they’ve known her all her life. Rebecca, however, traumatized by her recent brush with death and in a vulnerable state, is holding back. She can’t tell anyone what is really going on, a situation that only adds to her feelings of isolation and loneliness. Putting on a brave face, she fits in as well as she can and drifts through her weeks in Kilindoni, observing events and interactions that take place around her, attending parties and leisurely lunches, going to the beach, drinking wine, and getting acquainted with her extended family. Still, she can’t escape what she knows and can never truly relax. To make her situation even more precarious, she finds herself unable to resist an overwhelming physical attraction that shames her and that she knows is a betrayal. As the extremists move south and the violence creeps closer to the country’s urban centres, and the dangers that Rebecca knew all along were closing in on all of them finally take a lethal toll, her betrayal is discovered and she is forced to accept that there is no remedy for what she has done. Jean McNeil is a disciplined and patient writer. This is a novel that gains its considerable power from the author’s expert withholding and her subtle deployment of numerous moral ambiguities. In McNeil’s novels families are never simple and emotions are often as destructive as any roadside IED, and this is especially true of The Dhow House. Our fascination with Rebecca is driven in part by her damaged state of mind and the burden of emotional baggage she carries with her, which render her suspicious and unreliable. We often question what she does, but even her most brazenly self-destructive actions are dramatically appropriate and convincing. To be sure, The Dhow House is a novel that challenges the reader. Its structure is not linear. The story unfolds slowly. McNeil relies on flashbacks to fill in the blanks in Rebecca’s recent past. But the book is written with a sensual appreciation for the power of language to move the heart and stimulate the intellect. The frequent descriptions of the natural world dazzle with the precision of first-hand observation (the author is also an accomplished travel writer and memoirist). Jean McNeil’s is a mature talent, and The Dhow House is fully engaging at every level. It takes us into a world filled with menace and populated by people whose motives are often hazy, but it is a novel that we inhabit and from which we emerge with reluctance.

Rebecca Laurelson leaves his photographic career to become a doctor in a bush hospital near the coast of Africa. All who need medical attention are admitted, rebels and local people alike. Rebecca is need of a respite from the daily trauma and decides to visit her aunt farther down the coast. She has had little contact with her and tries to integrate with the family. White settler hegemony is disintegrating and there is conflict and danger everywhere. Rebecca tries to fit in and attempts some personal liaison but even in close encounters she sees only bone and sinew with occasional bursts of pent up sexual energy. In the end she must leave Africa. Throughout the narrative, the author zeroes in on Rebecca’s introspection but provide us with a rich description of the surroundings, bird life and local customs. One is charmed by her literary prose and steadfastness in portraying her lead character’s state of mind. A good read…

I was provided with an electronic copy in return for an honest review

I just love these meditative types of books and lately I have been attracted to books set in Alaska, the Arctic and the Antarctic. Such different places that are hard for me to imagine. Enjoyed that each chapter started with a description of a different type of ice, who knew there were so many. Also liked the clear and concise description of the differences between the Arctic and the Antarctic.
The author meets so many interesting people, experiences so many different things, things that make her ponder events and people in her own life. Took me to a place I will never visit except in books like these.
ARC from Netgalley.

Seven-year-old Morag is growing up on an isolated island off the coast of Novia Scotia. Without mother or father, the most important figure in Morag's life is her grandfather, Sandy, a drunken, volatile musician. Hunting Down Home is the compelling story of their unusual relationship and of a family's last year together, a year like many others; of a hot summer, raucous parties, fishing and hunting. Before the year is out, Morag will learn the power of choice on a night when she finally takes the future into her own hands.

An odd book. Morag is an interesting protagonist - and her view of her life unusual. But I could not warm to the characters.½