Mackay, Shena

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charming but plotless
A Glorious, Heady Plunge Into Childhood
remembrance of things past
Less is more
Childhood revisited

Orchard On Fire: A Novel
Shena MacKay
Manufacturer: Harvest/HBJ Book
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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The Story of Lucy Gault

ASIN: 0156005328

Amazon.com

This intimate, intensely seen novel was shortlisted for the 1996 Booker Prize. Shena Mackay's six previous novels have won her critical admiration and a popular audience in England, but her work has not received due recognition in the United States yet. The Orchard on Fire is a concise, domestic novel set in the village of Stonebridge, where the parents of April Harlency have come in 1953 to run the local tea shop. April's private reveries and her entanglement with the grim family life of her best friend, Ruby Richards, fill up a vivid and dramatic year in the wonderfully distinctive life of Stonebridge.

Book Description

When April Harlency and her parents move from Streatham to The Copper Kettle Tearoom in Kent April's whole life changes. Through her eyes we witness her rite of passage from childhood to adolescence. With her best friend, the wonderfully exciting but dangerous Ruby, they discover an idyllic secret world in the orchard. However, their lives are permeated with a sense of menace which is mainly centred on Mr Greenidge who befriends April and involves her in a sinister and uncomfortable relationship that will eventually lead to trouble for all her family.

Customer Reviews:

charming but plotless.......2001-03-04

Memories of a year of childhood, told in the first person but presented as a novel. The incidents forming the bulk of the book are framed by a narrative in which the adult author goes back to the village where she was raised. These incidents are often dramatic or amusing but they are separate stories and do not cohere to form a conventional plot. The book would have been better as a straight non-fiction memoir. The writing is often graceful but sometimes tends to the seed catalog school of fancy prose e.g. " a sky as pale blue as the scabious that grows with fragile poppies and the scarlet pimpernel sprawling over the marled furrows." I enjoyed it, but I had recently read Trezza Azzopardi's "The Hiding Place" and after the impact of that masterpiece of remembered childhood this suffered by comparison.

A Glorious, Heady Plunge Into Childhood.......2000-11-17

In my opinion, this is Shena MacKay's best novel. In Coronation Year, Betty and Percy Harlency, with their small daughter, April, move from London to a small village in Kent called Stonebridge, to take over The Copper Kettle Tearoom. The Copper Kettle is a charming, but not financially prosperous, establishment.

When April meets the tomboyish, fiery, ginger-haired Ruby, their friendship is instantly sealed. The girls are staunch allies who conspire together in every way possible. Their secret signal is the "lone cry of the peewit;" their hideaway is a railway carriage where they are continually up to mischief. When the two girls finally manage to pry open the door of the carriage they stand and gaze "in the smell of trapped time."

It is this smell of trapped time, this nostalgia for the emotions of the past, that The Orchard on Fire conjures so expertly. MacKay is reminiscent of Proust in this extraordinarily evocative novel and we feel intimately connected to April and to her emotional life. MacKay, usually a brilliant writer, excels in The Orchard on Fire and we can hear the buzz of the insects and the bluebottles, smell the overgrown weeds and the lush summer grass and picture the family's new home at The Copper Kettle.

The small English village where April lives is a bit unconventional as are April's parents; the duo are unlikely political radicals and MacKay manages to introduce a Bohemian element into the story in the gentle, pretentious artist characters of Bobs Rix and Dittany Codrington, who is "like the Willow Fairy in Fairies of the Trees by Cicely Mary Barker."

One of the best sections of this wonderfully-written book comes when The Copper Kettle is chosen to host a weekend party for Bobs and Dittany and their artist friends. For a time, Stonebridge is awash in fairy lights and the pink glow of nostalgia.

Although some may dismiss The Orchard on Fire as overly-sentimental, it is nothing but. Child abuse plays a part is this masterfully-written story as does sexual perversion, bringing to mind scenes of Pip in Great Expectations. We become deeply immersed in April's world, and in her fears and expectations, most particularly her horror at losing a cherished Christmas present.

Although this novel tells us more of April then just her childhood, it is childhood that is most strongly evoked in all of its trouble and all of its glory. The adult April is but a shadow of the child April and we, who grew up with her, know why.

The Orchard on Fire is Shena MacKay at her finest and one of the most wonderful and atmospheric books I have ever read. It is a glorious, heady plunge into the world of childhood that will never be forgotten.

remembrance of things past.......2000-06-21

If you are a female child born in the late 50's in South London, as I was, and if you also spent your young life in Kent, as I did, you will understand the mastery of this novel. I have never read anything which recalls this time and place in such a way that can only be described as 'Proustian'. The novel, 'The Orchard On Fire'has a particular 'smell' and 'truth' I have only experienced before in the novel, 'Wise Children' by Angela Carter. Fantastic and wonderful. Bless you Shena Mackay and thank you.

Less is more.......1998-10-07

The power of this story is all in the telling; behind the ingenuous narrator, twelve-year-old April, the implied author stands in the beautifully realized shadows, and so orders the narrative that the reader is offered the ultimate compliment of creating his/her own perception of ultimate meaning. The characterizations, like the threads of experience, are rendered all the more powerfully convincing through economy; selective detail allows the reader's imagination full rein. I found myself deeply moved by the plight of all children under threat, whatever form the abuse may take, and comforted by the compassion of the creator. She writes like other well-loved novelists of mine, such as Penelope Lively and Anita Brookner;like them she engages me in enlightening reflection.

Childhood revisited.......1998-07-13

The characters in this story are what makes it so successful, especially April and Ruby two eight year old girls who are a perfect match for each other. The innocence of April and Ruby's daring wildness remind me of what a childhood experience is all about. I had wished that April revealed Mr. Greenidge's advances but was relieved that he wasn't cruel, unlike Ruby's parents however, who should have been reported long before they were. The reminiscences in the last chapter were a powerful reminder of how tied we are to our pasts. It is true that we "...purchase pieces of our lives..." at rummage sales but how else do we hang on to the past and share the dreams of others?

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A Bowl of Cherries
Shena MacKay
Manufacturer: Moyer Bell
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1559211148

Average customer rating:

Good writer. Too weird a story and weird characters.

Dunedin
Shena MacKay
Manufacturer: Vintage
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0099284197

Customer Reviews:

Good writer. Too weird a story and weird characters........1999-05-09

I could not even finish this book. After 100 pages I found the whole story line dis-jointed, strange and distasteful. There are too many great books out there to bog your mind down with this one

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An Advent Calendar
Shena Mackay
Manufacturer: Minerva
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0099270781

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Purple Sentimental Ink

The Artist's Widow: A Novel
Shena MacKay
Manufacturer: Moyer Bell Ltd.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 1559212292

Amazon.com

Many adjectives have been applied to the work of Shena Mackay, but sentimental is not one of them. The Artist's Widow is a fine example of Mackay's brand of acerbic storytelling--who else, one wonders, would have the chutzpah to end a novel with the death of Diana, neatly skewering popular sentiment about "the People's Princess" with her title character's dry remark that "we're in danger of genuine grief being whipped up into something ugly." Indeed, the line between genuine feeling and its ugly counterfeit is the underlying theme of Mackay's fifth novel, and she sets the tone right from the start as she plunges us into a retrospective of the work of recently deceased artist John Crane, attended by his friends and family. Chief among these are Lyris, his widow, also a painter, and Nathan, his great-nephew, an artist-poseur long on posturing and woefully short on talent. Lyris, who nurses no illusions about her relation, remembers him "as a little boy at a family party loading his paper plate with cocktail sausages, chocolate fingers, gherkins, cake and crisps until it collapsed, and with white powder on his nose at her husband's funeral." Nevertheless, she harbors a fondness for him. Nathan, on the other hand, regards her as an "old bat," but is willing all the same to suck up to her, his eye always cocked on the main chance. Eventually he manages to convince Lyris that there's a real bond of affection between them--an illusion that nearly costs her everything.

But Lyris is not the only character suffering from delusions; there is Nathan's ex-girlfriend, Jacki, and Lyris's middle-aged and frustrated friend Clovis. There is Clovis's ex-wife, Isobel, and his current girlfriend, Candy. There is Nathan's crowd of unsuccessful artist-wannabe friends and his grasping parents, Buster and Sonia--all suffering in various degrees a disconnect between what is real and what they'd desperately like to believe. Mackay masterfully mixes and mismatches her creations and leaves them with at least as many loose strings dangling as ones that have been tied up. Readers looking for an uncomplicated happy ending, beware: the worldview expressed in this gleefully black domestic comedy has far more in common with Evelyn Waugh's than Jan Karon's. --Alix Wilber

Book Description

"Every artist leaves behind a shadowy retrospective exhibition of the pictures that were never painted," begins this tale of the good, the bad, and the untalented. But what do the artists present at the private viewing of the late John Crane's last paintings sense of this "shadowy retrospective"? Among those attending are Lyris, Crane's widow and a painter herself; her grandnephew Nathan, a boorish conceptual artist; Clovis, a middle-aged bookseller; and Zoe, a beautiful young filmmaker. None of them realize it, but the evening will forever alter their lives. The Artist's Widow is a novel about the nature of friendship, betrayal, courage, and cowardice.

Customer Reviews:

Purple Sentimental Ink.......2000-11-12

The Artist's Widow is a disappointing book. Written by an excellent author, I really expected more. In fact, quite a bit more.

In The Artist's Widow, images of Bereavement abound. After a long and devoted marriage, a painter's widow is attending a retrospective showing of her late husband's work. As she looks at his paintings, she can't help but reflect, as though her husband were also present in the room: "It was the sort of party John and Lyris Crane hated."

Later, amid the snobbery and insincerity of an inexpensive dinner give by the gallery owner, ostensibly in Lyris' honor, but filled with people she doesn't even know, she comes to have other, more intensely personal feelings for John: "Lyris felt a pang of envy for John, among the flowers and berries of the crematorium gardens. But the trees would be gathering darkness now, the reeds and bullrushes whispering, a chilly dew rising to meet the rain. Time to come indoors."

At home, Lyris takes off her tight blue dress shoes and dons a pair of John's worn slippers. "Kind boats," she thinks. These two words tell us more about the marriage of John and Lyris Crane and evoke an empathy that many writers cannot evoke with an entire book filled with words.

The Artist's Widow is a finely-drawn portrait of Lyris, herself a painter, and the emotions she faces as she rallies against sorrow, solitude, frailty, confusion and fear that surrounds an eighty-year-old woman and the seemingly uncaring, forbidding world of outsiders.

Shena MacKay, a Scottish novelist, is a wonderful writer, a true master of words, and, although the portrait of Lyris is a wonderfully-drawn one, the book, itself, is still fatally-flawed.

In her best books, primarily, The Orchard on Fire and An Advent Calendar, MacKay characterizes villains as Britains who are politically, economically or culturally privileged. They are atrocious characters and people we love to hate. Her heroes, on the other hand, tend to be misused, sparky, angelic; the downtrodden who manage, somehow, to take wing and fly. Although this may seem contrived in an author of lesser talent, MacKay gets away with it because she really knows how to be elusive, how to use sudden shifts and reversals in time and how to write magical passages filled with intensity, energy and sometimes, comedy.

In The Artist's Widow, MacKay misses the mark. Surprisingly so for someone so talented. Although Lyris is a wonderful character, her sadness is reduced to a mere grimace and the other characters are, sadly, no more than mere cliches. The "bad" ones are exaggerated out of proportion while the "good" ones are just too pat and pallid, as are the comeuppances for the former and the rewards for the latter.

One of the "bad" characters is Nathan, Lyris' great-nephew by marriage. Nathan is a young artist on the make; a man who sees that none of his friends gets ahead and whose friends see that he doesn't, either. Although his repulsiveness is patently obvious to us, Nathan, himself, feels it to be nothing less than cutting-edge.

MacKay, usually so very good, experiences a lapse with The Artist's Widow. In describing Nathan she says, "His eyelids, with a bristle of pale lashes, were tender and his eyes dull green and hard." Later, Nathan becomes "a pond with green scum on its surface."

Nathan, unfortunately, is not the only victim of language-overkill. One unfortunate woman is nicknamed "The Wounded Squid" because "she was so clinging and so easily hurt into squirting her purple sentimental ink over everything."

Even Lyris' dead husband is not spared. MacKay writes, "The last canvases burned with the brilliant chemical derangement of autumn when the slow fuses smoldering up the stalks of senescent leaves burst into mineral fire."

Despite his awfulness, and Nathan is awful, he really is no more than a cardboard cutout. And then there is Zoe, who seems to harbor some redemptive value. She however, is nothing more than a false start that soon peters out.

On the side of the "good" guys, there is Jackie, a victim of racism who is far too far-fetched to be believable, Candy and Clovis, the gentle but confused bookseller.

The dispensations of justice in this book come all too quickly and patently and the characters seem to be playing a role into which they are forced. Shena MacKay, to her credit, is not a tidy author, but in The Artist's Widow, she is downright confusing. Read Shena MacKay, by all means, but read An Advent Calendar or The Orchard on Fire rather than The Artist's Widow. The first two are really first-rate books, books that are worthy of this wonderfully-talented author.

Toddler on the Run
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Toddler on the Run
Shena Mackay
Manufacturer: Simon and Schuster
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000BPD4WA

THE WORLDS SMALLEST UNICORN
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THE WORLDS SMALLEST UNICORN
SHENA MACKAY
Manufacturer: QUALITY PAPERBACKS DIRECT
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000S84KNW

Old Crow
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Old Crow
Shena Mackay
Manufacturer: TRAFALGAR SQUARE +
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 1853811939

Book Description

A young woman left with only her pride stands up to the hypocrisy of a cruel town in the latest novel from this award-winning author.

Average customer rating:

Too dry and writer-ly....for book critics only !

Heligoland
Shena Mackay
Manufacturer: VINTAGE (RAND)
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0099273594

Book Description

The Nautilus, a strange building shaped like the chambered shell of the same name, was built in South London in the early 1930s. Designed on Modernist and Utopian principles, it was a haven for a floating community of cosmopolitan refugees, intellectuals and artists. Now, at the end of the century, only two of the original inhabitants still occupy their chambers -- Celeste Zylberstein, joint architect with her late husband of the Nautilus, and Francis Campion, an elderly poet. Gus Crabb, a dealer in bric-à-brac, is the only other resident until, to the Nautilus, like a hermit crab seeking a home, comes Rowena Snow. Of Indian/Scottish parentage, orphaned, without family or friends, Rowena is in search of her own Utopia -- or the Heligoland of her childhood imagination.

Heligoland is Shena Mackay at her very best. Rowena, damaged but courageous, is a brilliant creation, and her path to a sort of contentment is both funny and moving. The other characters are at once utterly strange and entirely believable, and Shena Mackay's eye for the oddities of ordinary life is as sharp as ever. Her writing -- sentence by sentence -- is sublime, surprising, inimitable.

From the Hardcover edition.

Customer Reviews:

Too dry and writer-ly....for book critics only !.......2004-02-13

Shena Mackay's latest novel "Heligoland" has been shortlisted for several prestigious UK book awards including the Orange Prize. That comes as no surprise as Mackay's pedigree is quite impeccable and "Heligoland" is just the sort of novel that's aimed at book critics to win heaps of prizes but will be challenged to sell ten copies to the great reading public inside (let alone outside) the Great Britain. Put simply, it is too writer-ly, obscure, quirky and parochial in its orientation and for that reason won't be a natural candidate for any reader's recommended reading list.

Mackay's story about a bunch of socially inept, period outcasts, antiquated relics and leftovers from the last world war, squatting and living uncomfortably together in a clamber-shell shaped building in South London called the Nautilus doesn't offer a very promising premise for an interesting story. It wouldn't be so bad to have the plot randomly overrun by a wide cast of tedious, colourless and instantly forgettable minor characters if we had solid central characters to serve as anchor for the story. The truth is that neither Rowena Snow - the novel's heroine - Celeste Zylberstein, Francis Campion, nor Gus Crabb make compelling characters. They're drab and boring and they don't leave any impression and that's the crux of the problem.

Mackay's prose is flawless, beautifully crafted and vividly imagined in fine descriptive language but it is also economical to a fault. Dialogue is used so sparingly there's a distinct lack of immediacy to the plot, causing the scenes to run into each other. Besides, Mackay makes no concession to the foreign reader, so you're likely to be lost (like me) in the face of constant references to landmarks, places and objects that will have no meaning to anyone living outside of the locale. It's not until you reach the final 30 pages or so that things start to happen, some measure of coherence is established and you begin to see the point of it all. By then, it's too late and you're just relieved you've made it to the end. And it's a short book.

Book prize nominee or not, I really didn't enjoy "Heligoland". The critics seem to love it. They have made their case but I cannot honestly imagine it having much of an appeal to the general reading public.

Dust Falls on Eugene Schlumberger
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Dust Falls on Eugene Schlumberger
Shena Mackay
Manufacturer: Minerva
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 0099270757

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