Reading as a writer; writing as a reader
Once I started writing creatively, I found it increasingly difficult to read a book without a writer’s hat on. This was the case with ‘The Book of Jem’ which got me thinking in depth over the Christmas and New Year period.
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‘The Book of Jem’ by Carole Hailey
Published by Watermark Press 2020
ISBN: 978-1-8380043-1-6
‘The Book of Jem’ is the debut novel by Carole Hailey, creative writing alumni of Goldsmiths’ University, London, and Swansea University. Its publication announces an exciting and innovative voice to the field of literary fiction, and is an exemplar of ‘fiction unconstrained’, the rallying call of Watermark Press, the new kid on the block quality publisher which has wisely taken Hailey’s creation to market.
I read this novel during the dark days of lockdown over the Christmas and New Year period 2020/21. This added to my empathy of the experiences of isolation, and increasing regulations, felt by the inhabitants of Underhill, a community living in the aftermath of catastrophic religious wars. Religious wars that led to God being banned.
Into this ‘new normal’ comes Jem, a young girl with a mission: to ready the villagers to fulfil the purpose she says she has been instructed to lead by God. The novel charts the action and the chaos her arrival instigates in four distinct parts as the year progresses through Whiteout, Mudbound, Dust, until the climax during the First Storm of Whiteout when winter comes around again.
Jem’s presence, and her brand of religion called ‘God’s Threads’, polarises the villagers: those who are with her; and those who are against, and these perspectives are told by two main narrators, Eileen, Jem’s number one fan who makes it her business to record this religion in the Book of Jem, and Kat, who offers us a different perspective on religion in general. I particularly enjoyed the shift in Eileen’s voice as she switched to almost biblical syntax when recording her Jem book – a book within a book. But who, if either, is the ultimate reliable narrator?
This is a novel that made me think deeply about religion and philosophy. So many thoughts came into my head: Is Man created by God, or God created by Man? What is the difference, in essence, between worshiping Mother Nature, as in the Elder Mother in the novel, or worshiping an invisible, but all-powerful Deity? Will any god do? It also made me, for some reason, keep thinking of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’.
On a very personal note, though this novel is set in an imagined future, it took me back to the past too, and Advent the novel I have been writing set around the time of the Welsh Religious Revival (1904-1905). How are people drawn to certain figures whether it is fictional Jem or the very real Evan Roberts? How do people become converts? Is it the charisma of the messenger or the inexplicable energy that licks through the masses to cause an inferno? What is it about people who are attracted and can’t resist the pull of the message of God, and those who are repelled by it? So much to consider. That’s the stuff of good fiction.
It also made me stand in the imagined future that Hailey creates and look back on how we are living in the ‘current now’ and how we are taking the natural world so much for granted.
I will be looking out for more from Carole Hailey. She has recently been shortlisted for the International Bridport Prize Peggy Chapman-Andrews First Novel Award 2020 and is a London Library Emerging Writer 2020/21. I will also be on the lookout for more titles from Watermark Press with its promise of fiction with ‘distinctive vision’ of which Hailey’s is proof.