Broken By Messines In WWI

Dr Mark Wardlaw (MMSandJWardlaw.co.uk, £9.99 incl UK postage)

Dr Wardlaw decided to write a book about the grandparents he never knew after the discovery of a collection of their letters in his late parents’ home in Leith. The letters had been kept by Catherine Bell Hay, and chronicled her long-distance romance with her future husband Peter Hutchinson Wardlaw, both from Alloa, from their first meeting in 1910 up to 1917. Their relationship was sorely tested, because in 1912 Catherine went to New Zealand to work in a girls’ school and they became engaged while living on separate continents. For the next five years, as the First World War raged, the couple continued to write to each other. Peter fought in the Artillery in Gallipoli and then at the Somme before the fateful Battle of Messines, and we can see from his letters how war was changing him. It’s a moving slice of social and family history, and one which has to be read to the very end.

Slipping

John Toomey (Dalkey Archive, £12)

The thread of dark humour subverting the gloomy tragedy of Slipping isn’t quite apparent at first, opening as it does with a grumpy author receiving an audio recording which is effectively the confession of a man who murdered his wife, and has been sent to him by the killer’s (even grumpier) psychiatrist. The patient, Albert Jackson, has requested that fiction writer Charlie Vaughan tell his story rather than a journalist, seemingly aware that the finished book will be “something neither true nor untrue”. The Albert Jackson that emerges from the transcripts is an articulate misanthrope who would be a comical figure were it not for the awful consequences: a suburban Raskolnikov being driven mad by other people and the banality of their interactions, with his unfortunate wife becoming the focus of his disaffection. In this powerful, adversarial character study, witness statements throw a different light on to Albert’s testimony, and questions arise as to the extent that Vaughan is being manipulated.

Useful Verses

Richard Osmond (Picador, £9.99)

Poet Richard Osmond, 30, lives in two worlds at once. He’s a lover of nature who delights in ancient herbal lore and forages for food in deepest Hertfordshire, but nevertheless describes the groove in a stick of celery as “where the peanut butter goes”. The archetypal Osmond poem mashes together the archaic and the bleeding edge, referencing the colour schemes of online brand identities only a few lines after name-checking traditional feast days. He pays lip service to the “original mnemonic function” of verse, then writes a poem based on the principles of search engine optimisation. His back-to-nature modernity is a stance that could easily be mocked, if one didn’t sense that Osmond had got there first: this unapologetic assertion of identity is tempered with a healthy degree of self-awareness. Although his hybrid sensibility does sometimes seem a little forced, he’s an engaging and entertaining poet; even if, as he puts it, to be entertained “is to be disappointed/and not realise”.