Bush Meat

I got the nod about a book launch before Christmas, at the Grove Bookshop in Ilkley. It was for a novel by a local writer called Mandy Sutter. I was surprised that our paths had never crossed. I recognised neither the face nor the name.

Mandy read a couple of passages and I enjoyed those enough to be persuaded to buy myself a copy. She was also a lovely, almost self-effacing lady. It’s rare for me to buy books on impulse these days. I have so many to read that a book has to call me very strongly to be added to what has become a teetering pile. I rely these days on getting a combination of hits - hearing good things from a couple of independent and trusted sources. One is never enough. 

Bush Meat consists of a number of interconnected short stories. I’ve recently read a few novels structured in this way and I’m becoming increasingly interested in the form. Mandy has mostly based her stories on her own experience, focussed - both directly and indirectly - on a period spent in Nigeria as a child, when she was just six years old. The stories adopt different viewpoints, allowing us insight into different aspects of her total experience as she plays with memories and weaves her stories from them.

I had no great expectations of the novel and imagined that it would be a book that I would pick up just occasionally and take some time to read to the end. As it happened, it won priority over a number of other books I’ve got on the go. There was an easy charm to her stories that kept calling me back.

A lot of that is to do with the beautiful prose style: clean and tight and wonderfully evocative of whatever period is being described. It’s the kind of prose I aspire to write myself. The stories that worked best for me were those describing a young child’s experience of going to school in a very foreign country. I found myself being transported back to my own childhood. Although it wasn’t as exotic as Mandy’s, I could relate strongly to the things and feelings she described. She speaks to universal themes: the clash of cultures, across continents and across generations. 

Each of the twenty stories stands on their own and can be appreciated in isolation. Together, they build a momentum and a bigger picture. It’s a book that deserves to be read a second time, so that the earlier stories can be appreciated more deeply within the context of the whole. I’m also hoping that there will be further stories to come. There was a hint at the event that there might be. 

I can thoroughly recommend this book to anyone, but if, like me, you started going to school in the sixties, I think you will especially enjoy it.

PS  A book review for a day when I never left the house - other than to pop upstairs to assault one of the builders working on the flat above, demolishing walls. Poor guy thought I was genuinely upset about all the noise. I told him he could make amends by letting me take his photograph. He thought that was a fair deal.