Discontent

Thursday

Madeleine Feeny

Problem parents: My Phantoms, by Gwendoline Riley, reviewed

From our UK edition

Gwendoline Riley’s unsentimental fiction hovers on the edge of comedy and bleakness, and has drawn comparisons from Jean Rhys to Albert Camus. First Love, her fifth novel, put a toxic relationship under the microscope, winning the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 2017 and being shortlisted for five others, including the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Expanding on one of its strands, her sixth book zeroes in on child/parent dynamics. In My Phantoms, Bridget, an academic, reflects on her relationship with her late father and mother. Glimpses of her suburban upbringing reveal a mother miserably yet willingly shackled to convention. When Bridget asks Helen why she married the monstrous husband she left seven years later, she’s told: ‘It was just what you did.

Thursday

Philip Hensher

1968 and the summer of our discontent

’68 will do as shorthand. Most of ’68, as it were, didn’t happen in 1968. It was, at most, the centrepoint of a long accumulation of radical protest. It began with duffle-coated marches against nuclear war, a well-mannered and respectful movement whose spirit persisted to the end of the decade. (In October 1968, a rally against the Vietnam war finished with demonstrators linking arms with policemen and singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’). It continued into the 1970s with real political violence — the Baader-Meinhof gang and many other groups. It is not very much like 1848 as a year of political upheaval, more the symbolic statement of a large-scale change of mind. That change of mind is probably still happening.