Books in the Media: RNLI volunteer Dominic Gregory's 'powerful' memoir is a hit
This week, a memoir about volunteering on lifeboats hit the review pages, while in fiction novels about the afterlife and the Black Death made an impression.
Lifeboat at the End of the World: A Volunteer’s Story (William Collins) by Dominic Gregory, a Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) volunteer in Dungeness, Kent, is a “powerful” memoir about the small boats crisis and the RNLI, wrote Alice O’Keeffe for the Times. “It is only around page 200 that the small boats start to appear, at which point the narrative crackles to blistering life,” wrote O’Keeffe. “Gregory leaves you in no doubt as to the evil of the traffickers: women and children are packed into flimsy dinghies, sitting in a toxic wash of seawater, vomit and effluent, often with petrol from the boat’s fuel cans swilling around them.” The Telegraph’s Duncan Craig called Lifeboat at the End of the World an “unflinchingly candid and [extraordinarily] powerful memoir”. Gregory “writes in a digressive style, distracting at first… One moment, he’s lyrically evoking the idiosyncratic flora of Dungeness’ ‘shingle desert’. The next, we’re a couple of miles out in the Channel, surging towards some unfolding disaster. There’s no opportunity to gather breath; little chance for reflection. This is the life, we’re invited to infer, of a lifeboat crew”.
In an interview with Gregory, The Bookseller’s Caroline Sanderson wrote: “While reviews and media coverage will likely focus on the modern-day migration stories at the surface of this book, in its depths it is a heroic narrative about the profound altruism that motivates ordinary people with jobs and families and dry-land lives to go to sea, to save the lives of all those they can.”
Jenni Fagan’s The Delusions (Hutchinson Heinemann) portrays an afterlife where the dead are asked to complete a questionnaire about their life. The honesty of their answers determines whether they pass to the next stage or get vaporised. “The aesthetic here is more Luton Airport on a post-Brexit bank holiday weekend blighted by baggage handler strikes,” wrote Patricia Nicol at the Times. The novel’s narrator, Edi, is a “Processing Admin”, taking the role after her premature death from cancer in the hope she will reunite with her son after he has passed. “There is a wondrously clever, imaginative and slyly satirical world-building,” continued Nicol, who concluded that Fagan is a “fierce talent”. Writing for the Guardian, M John Harrison selected The Delusions as the book of the day. The novel “fizzes with impatience, invention and humour”, found Harrison. “Fagan’s targets are exactly what we’d hope: greed, politics, celebrity. Smartphone culture. Fantasy culture. The billionaires, the media, the ‘conversation’.”
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The Guardian’s Lisa Tuttle included Christopher Buehlman’s horror Between Two Fires (Gollancz) in a round-up of the best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror. Set in France during the Black Death, the novel is a “remarkable blend of fantasy, horror and historical fiction”. Tuttle continued: “With what feels like a genuinely medieval mindset, this vividly written book depicts a world of monsters and miracles, with scenes that echo elements from Gawain and the Green Knight to the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch.” In an interview with Buehlman, The Bookseller called the novel a “visceral, propulsive and reflective read”, adding that Buehlman skilfully injects horror into the story’s nightmarish landscape. “My personal suspicion… is that humour is short-circuited horror,” said Buehlman. “Humour is a response we make to reassure each other that something bad was okay.”
Naomi Mitchison’s Travel Light, first published in 1952 and now reissued by Virago, was also selected by Tuttle. “This original fairy tale by a multitalented feminist icon manages to feel very old but always fresh and new,” the review noted. The story follows Halla, raised by both bears and dragons, who wants to see the world and reject the confinement of stereotypical femininity. “An essential classic in a lovely new edition,” concluded Tuttle. The Spectator’s Oliver Soden also reviewed the novella: “This is a brave and unusual work from a fascinating writer, and an influential strand in the thoughtful unrealism by intellectual women… that runs through the dense weave of English literature.”
