Review

from Issue 107 Autumn 2021

by Melbourn Magazine

Travelogue

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

by V E Schwab Do you ever feel invisible? Have you ever been forgotten by someone who you’ve definitely met before? Well this is life for Addie LaRue, granted immortality but in exchange must go through life never making a mark on the world: people forget her as soon as she’s out of sight, her writing disappears and any influence or memory she wants to leave behind is quickly erased.

This is a sturdy, well-crafted contemporary novel standing firmly in the fantasy genre. The author, Victoria (V E) Schwab is an American fantasy author who grew up in Tennessee and graduated with a degree in Fine Arts from Washington University, St Louis in 2009. A prolific and frequent best-selling author she is, perhaps, best known for her 2013 novel “Vicious” and the “Shades of Magic” series. She now lives and works in Edinburgh and, in May 2018, delivered the Sixth Annual Tolkien Lecture at Pembroke College, Oxford. She came out as gay when aged 28.

This novel was a decade in gestation and as of July 2021 has spent 37 consecutive weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list. It covers 300 years from medieval France to modern day New York city. The character of the book’s title, Addie LaRue, makes a Faustian exchange with a powerful god in eighteenth-century France to escape a looming marriage, and spends the next 300 years moving through life forgotten. Her only companion is Luc, the god that cursed her and who offers to end the curse in exchange for her soul. She travels the world witnessing major historical events, then one day she finally hears the words “I remember you” spoken by Henry Strauss, a present day New Yorker.

Henry, a bookshop worker in Manhattan, seems content with his life. Everyone is drawn to him and noticeably mesmerised. Henry’s story is one of inner turmoil, self-worth and the need for validation and love from those around you. The three central characters of the novel – Addie, Luc and Henry – become entangled in each other’s stories, each of them at odds with the world around them and at the same time desperately looking to be embraced by it.

V E Schwab

Author V.E. Schwab has created an inclusive and magical tale of love and loss, where you’re rooting for Addie the entire way through. Her refusal to sell her soul and to keep trying to leave her mark on the world despite years of being forgotten is heroic. At least two of the characters are LGBTQIA+ and Schwab introduces this in a nuanced and unpremeditated way, making this a fantasy novel where LGBTQIA+ people are celebrated and embraced, but in a way which lets the characters be themselves and doesn’t overtly rely on their queerness to form the narrative.

The non-linear narrative regularly transports us back in time to Addie’s past, but it never gets confusing. The story is also told from both Addie’s and Henry’s points of view which offers a story full of substantial characters and a real character-reader connection. The surreal and fantastical elements of the book fit seamlessly within the world of the narrative and entwine wonderfully within the intricate life of Schwab’s protagonist.

Readers will come away with a message of hope and the importance of persevering even when we feel like we aren’t making a difference. Schwab has created an optimistic and powerful story of the importance of ideas, creativity and internal self-worth and discovery. April McIntyre

The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life

by John Le Carre If there is indeed a Heaven then we can be certain that David Cornwell (more famously known around the world as the writer John le Carre, who died in 2020 in his 89th year) is already ensconced in some quiet corner seated at a writing

desk, looking out on a sea view and lost in the task of writing. He is surely following his famous practice of writing pains-takingly in long hand – and using a traditional fountain pen!

John le Carre was a writer of great elegance and poise. He was that rarity in our now terribly tarnished English public life: a thoughtful, deeply principled figure. His self-penned biographical details on a single page at the start of this volume and headed “About the Author” are modest:

“John le Carre was born in 1931 and attended the universities of Bern and Oxford. He taught at Eton and served briefly in British Intelligence during the Cold War. For more than fifty years he has lived by his pen. He divides his time between London and Cornwall.”

Although recognised with mainly overseas awards and British university honorary degrees in acknowledgement of his writing, he eschewed with good reason celebrity interviews and the medals and titles of the British political honours system. He chose instead to reveal himself in: his body of work; the themes he chose to write about and the writing itself; the characters he created from his fertile imagination with which to explore those themes; and the lives, beliefs and personalities of those major and minor characters which he first imagined and then brought vividly to life for his readers – characters that were fully formed yet each with an aspect rich for potential development. The rounded figure (in more senses than one) of, perhaps, his most famous character George Smiley – only one of the many such memorable characters he created – was sketched almost fully formed in his slim and very slight first novel “Call From The Dead”, published in 1961 and today still impressive. It is a huge and sad loss, and not just for readers everywhere, that John le Carre’s life and that great talent is no more.

Like many readers across past decades I grasped each new le Carre novel as it appeared and was gripped by his writing and his values. This volume, a detailed memoir of his life, is as absorbing and as well written as any of his 25 or more novels. It reveals the extent to which the fictional characters le Carre created resided not just in his imagination but were part of the rich, colourful, personally challenging and simply astonishing life he led. In this memoir, finished four years before his death, le Carre has looked hard at life and looked hard also at his own life as he lived it in pursuit of his career as a writer. From these two well springs, across a creative lifetime spanning fifty plus years, he wrote a body of work which is broad deep, universal and richly satisfying for the reader.

If you are minded and feel yourself deserving of a treat, start with “Call From The Dead” – a fine first novel from a young aspiring author – and proceed in sequence through the novels following the footsteps of the lifelong development of a great writer. You will not regret it.

The memoir makes clear that while from a privileged, well-connected wider family background, he was the son of a hopeless bankrupt fraudster who was eventually imprisoned, and so his early life and youth was chaotic. It is not necessary to have read any le Carre novels to enjoy and appreciate the worth of this book. The national and international elected public figures and those from the upper echelons of many spheres of public influence who travelled alongside him for part of his road, or whose own journey intersected the career path of le Carre the writer, are here to be seen and heard. The personalities, the anecdotes, the descriptions, the small and large occasions; the intimate dinners that were formal or informal or large or small affairs; the meetings and conferences with leaders and others of civil, military, diplomatic or intelligence background are all perfectly and tantalisingly drawn. He creates for the reader that sense of presence: of truly ‘being there in the room’. If you have read even a few of his novels then the connections between the writer’s lived life and his creative work stand revealed as he traces the linkages and reveals the strands, some subconscious, that bind the life he led to his views and his creative output.

John le Carre is above all else a reader’s writer – he takes great care of the reader. At the same time, and tilting in the opposite direction, he does not spare himself as he serves his art and calling as a writer. He has done this across all 25 or more novels whose settings evolved from his third novel – the murky world of a specific State Intelligence operation involving British spy Alec Leamas at the height of the Cold War – to the complex concerns of our more modern, supposedly

David Cornwell, more famously known as John le Carre

John le Carre more open and free, but in reality much more unsafe and conflicted world. And who among us has not read that third and, once read never to be forgotten, novel which brought him to international stardom “The Spy Who Came In From The Cold”- first published in 1963? All who have read the novel are forever challenged by the decisions and actions of British spy Alec Leamas and those at the pinnacle of the London government who ordered and manipulated him?

Having read this memoir I reread the novel again a few evenings ago and it is still a stunning achievement, even though the Berlin Wall has long fallen. If you have the opportunity to experience also the glorious film performance of Richard Burton in the noirish black and white 1965 film adaptation, it will add enrichment to the reading. Le Carre’s account of this film-making experience (pp 239–52) alone is worth the price of the book, including his reflections on the world of film, the personal price of film-acting and celebrity, and his view of talent. He tends to the view of the film’s Hollywood director Marty Ritt: “I don’t have a lot of respect for talent. Talent is genetic. It’s what you do with it that counts.”

This volume of memoirs is set out in 38 easily read chapters across 350 pages of elegant polished sentences of beautiful prose and is a joy to read. But be warned – it is very very dangerous. It will cause you to think and, indeed, may cause you to change perhaps long-held views of the people we are, the country we live in and the values and beliefs we suppose ourselves to hold dear. For John le Carre, who always acknowledged the sword – but urged laser-like focus on the true reasons for the sword’s being wielded – the pen truly was mightier than the sword. Hugh Pollock Personal care for your feet in the comfort of your own home • Nail Trimming • Hard Skin & Cracked Heels • Corns & Verrucae • Fungal Nails • Diabetic Foot Care Telephone on 01763 261250or 0791 3913955