Fiction Reviews | January 2004
by Helen Simmons
E-mail Your Comments

A Gathering Light by Jennifer Donnelly
Bloomsbury | 0747563047

Mattie is the only person working at the Glenmore Hotel who knows what really happened to Grace Jones, a young female guest, whose drowned body is pulled from the lake. But Mattie also has other things on her mind. Should she stay and help her father work the family farm and marry Royal Loomis, the handsomest boy around? Or should she break free, head for New York and learn to be a writer?

So far, so full of fairly predictable, feminist awakening; but A Gathering Light is more than just another coming-of-age novel.

It’s a long, absorbing read and Mattie has a distinctive and engaging voice. She picks a ‘word-of-the-day’ from Webster’s Dictionary and slowly comes to realise the darker and more complex meanings that lie beneath the language of everyday.

Donnelly creates an almost luminous sense of place and writes beautifully about the way in which the farming year governs the rhythms of peoples’ lives.

The pace is perfect as the complex plot builds very delicately to it’s climax. Mattie can help Grace by telling her story; but Grace also helps Mattie in ways she possibly never suspected.

Stratford Boys by Jan Mark
Hodder Signature | 0340 860979

“If I make a play about Gaffer Hodge of Swine Street and his two sons who fall out, people will say, “Why go to a play? We can see all this at home.” But if it’s about old Romans and it happens in Syracuse, they’ll go away thinking, “Those old Romans were just like us.”

So reasons the young Will Shakespeare as he struggles to compose his first play. He and Adrian Croft have seven and nine-pence to conjure up Stratford’s next Whitsun Pastime and what with bagpipe-playing grave-diggers, boys who don’t want to play girls and chicken-skin gloves, they have their work cut out!

Jan Mark’s cast of characters is worthy of any Shakespearean drama as Will transmutes the moth-eaten pages of an old mystery play into its final incarnation as Fortune My Foe; a tragedy.

I love the picture Jan Mark creates of Will constructing his characters, exploring their complex feelings and motivations as he feels his way towards the Big Question of how best to hold to hold the mirror up to nature and create magic out of the everyday.

Witty, playful and challenging, Stratford Boys is Jan Mark on top form. It’s a wonderfully intelligent, readable and serious look at the processes behind creativity, which she miraculously manages simultaneously to explore and recreate as she writes about this fledgling writer.

Helen

E-mail Your Comments