“Turning For Home” by Barney Norris (2018)

“In the first young years of the new century, a team of researchers affiliated with Boston College attempted to collate an oral history of the Troubles, recording the recollections of combatants on both sides.”

I last read Barney Norris in 2017 and hugely admired his prose from the off, but not without a little jealousy about how good it is. I finally made my way back to him with Turning For Home to find that, if anything, he’s somehow got better.

Every year, Robert hosts a birthday party for his enormous circle of family and friends. It’s a chance for them all to catch up and his rambling old house and talk about their lives. This year, his eightieth birthday, however, he doesn’t really want to be go through with it and be reminded of what has happened in the year since they last met. Neither, as it happens, does his granddaughter Kate, who has been absent from these parties for the last three years.

However, both are determined that the show must go on. Kate, after years in hospital, is finally going to confront her mother. Robert, meanwhile, finds the celebrations interrupted when he receives a phone call from Frank, an old contact he knew back when the Troubles were at their height. Frank needs to meet immediately, and Robert, fearing what is about to happen, invites him to the house. This is a family laced with secrets, and maybe this celebration might be the time to let go of some of them at last.

As I said last time, there is something quite magical about Norris’s style. As before, he inhabits more than one narrator and while they are – to my knowledge – nothing like him, he manages to entirely get under the skin and make them vivid and believable. Here we’re got 80-year-old Robert, struggling with loss, loneliness and mistakes he made in his youth. On the other side, we’ve got Kate, in her mid-twenties and recovering from a very serious eating disorder that almost killed her. The detail is gripping and you are pinned to the page, desperate to know what happens to them and whether they will be OK.

His use of language is something other-worldly. The books are set entirely in reality, however, but he manages to describe things and explain feelings in ways you had never quite been able to. One of my favourites was this description of a birthday cake:

The cake is heavy with candles, a petrified forest of wax and years, enough to burn your eyebrows off. How can I have gathered so much fire so quickly, when it seems only yesterday that we looked round this house for the first time?

If you like your books beautiful and true, then stick with Barney Norris. I know I will be.

Did you know that as well as reviewing everything I read, I also write novels, too? My books blend black humour with light horror, crossing genres with ordinary characters dealing with extraordinary circumstances. Head over to wherever you buy books to take a look at my two offerings. The first, The Atomic Blood-stained Bus, introduces you to a cannibal, an ex-god and the last witches of Britain, while the second, The Third Wheel, follows a man who is tired of being single while all his friends get married, but has a change of priority when aliens invade the planet. I hope you enjoy!

“Five Rivers Met On A Wooded Plain” by Barney Norris (2016)

“Long before the steep trickle of the Channel widened to make an island of England, before the first settlers arrived and started claiming the land around, laying down tree trunks to make pathways through marshes from ridgeway to mountain to hill, something unusual happened in the green south of Wiltshire.”

Every so often you stumble across a book that feels particularly special. All the truths of the world are hidden in the lies of novels, and Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain has done something really rather wonderful. I’ll get my bitterness over the fact that the author, Barney Norris, is only a year older than me and wildly more successful and talented out of the way as quickly as possible and on we go with the review.

Set in the beautiful city of Salisbury and its picturesque surroundings, Five Rivers… brings together the overlapping stories of five residents. Rita is the wrong side of sixty, selling flowers in the market by day and dealing drugs by night. Sam has just turned sixteen and is dealing with the hormonal headache that comes from falling in love for the first time. George has just been widowed from his wife of fifty years and doesn’t seem to have a clue what’s meant to happen next. Alison is a desperately lonely middle-aged woman, left alone for weeks on end with a son at boarding school and a husband serving in Afghanistan. And Liam is a security guard, running  away from his problems and finding himself back where he began. A car crash brings the five together and their lives loop around one another, bringing to the surface feelings that they’ve tried hard to hide.

Despite his relatively young age, Norris slips into the roles of his five narrators like a man trying on a series of tailor-made suits on Savile Row. He inhabits the role of the nervous, awkward Sam as naturally he does the older woman Rita. His style is mesmerising, and each character leaps off the page as a complete individual, despite us few if any clues as to their physical appearances. It doesn’t matter though, because they feel plenty real enough.

Norris has tapped into something utterly remarkable here, and frequently I found myself having to stop for a while, tears threatening to expose themselves, as he reveals yet another painful truth about the world. As Sam himself notes, “It’s so strange when a song or a story can […] put your own feelings into words as if you’d hidden them there yourself”. The text is full of emotions and thoughts that have definitely occurred to me, but I’ve never been able to get them out quite right. Some writer I am, huh. Norris makes it look easy. Sam’s chapter is the one I had particular difficulty in dealing with, as I saw a lot of myself in him, right down to some painfully specific details.

While the book contains all sorts of themes on the smallness of the world, how to find happiness, and how to decide what really matters in life, there are two overwhelming themes for me. The first is the relationship between parents and their children, in particular that of mothers and sons. Most of the characters have issues in this field, and we explore them from different angles. Sam has lived in a quiet house where he and his parents have never spoken about anything “important”. Alison feels herself drifting from her teenage son and wonders if she’ll ever be able to be friends with him. Liam’s parents are moving on with their lives and starting again in their fifties, leaving him feeling lost. The strongest theme is, however, loneliness. Despite being cripplingly afraid of loneliness myself, I seem to keep finding books about it and almost without fail falling in love with them. Each of the five main characters is lonely in one way or another, either cut off from their family, or unable to open up, or feeling isolated and trapped. So many of us plod on through life, but how many of us are actually happy with what has happened to us?

A deeply beautiful book from an author who I shall be keeping an eye on, because I think this could be the start of a very promising literary career.

My novel contains much less in the way of beautiful, worldly truths, but instead fills Salisbury with bickering gods and an ancient cannibal. Get hold of The Atomic Blood-stained Bus on Amazon if you like that sort of thing.