A couple of blogs ago, I wrote about a Rose Tremain novel that I’d missed…

… that set me off looking through her works to see what else I hadn’t read, and I came across Islands of Mercy. More of that presently…

This week, I wrote about what the Epstein files really show up, and what I reckon we need to do about it…

…in short, getting rid of Mandelson won’t fix it. Getting rid of Starmer’s regime in the Labour Party won’t fix it. Getting rid of most of the current Westminster class of politicians would solve it for a little while but what we actually need is to get rid of a whole culture, a mindset, an ideology, that a lot of people haven’t really accepted the existence of.

Books and broligarchy

I learned that word from Carol Cadwalladr, who’s got a pretty good take on what’s wrong with everything. Here’s the Cambridge definition…

But I don’t think we’re looking at a ‘small’ group of men. Call it post-colonial wealthy white men culture if you will, but you’ll find some Black men and some women apparently thriving in it, and that’ll confuse you. Call it neoliberalism if that helps but to really get your head round it, you need to call it patriarchy. How do we persuade the ‘progressives’ in politics that feminism – real feminism – already knows what the problem is, and has made a lot of headway in exploring how to deal with it? How do we do that, when so many of the self-identified feminists out there have lost themselves in Zionism, capitalism or both? How, when even on the left, many are lost in the maze of post-modernist queer theory, and have forgotten what ‘oppression’ means, if they ever knew?

Well I’m only a couple of chapters into Islands of Mercy, and already I see pages packed with just the right think-food to cut through the maze and get the mind on that job. Try it, it’s a joy!

The women

Here’s the main character, having achieved a job in Bath – stuck in a basement assembling cloth flowers for hats, an activity which is miles away from the worst thing working class people have to do for a living, had to “keep reminding herself that it afforded her a ‘living’”, because she soon came to feel that “this living resembled nothing so much as a kind of ‘dying’.”

She was lucky. She had a saleable ‘heirloom’ and she sold it, thus buying herself into a business that felt far less like death.

Meanwhile another character, the nurse at the Baths, is asked regularly whether she performs – other services. She always declines. “The truth was she respected men, sometimes for their bravery, sometimes for their skill, sometimes for their dauntless yearning to be heroes. She also pitied them for their child-like natures and their emotional cowardice, but she did not love them at all.”

The men

Here’s the male version of being brokenhearted: “He had so often imagined this gift of his strength being offered to Jane that it was now almost impossible to accept that she would never experience it.” He wants to say, “To cast me away before I’ve given you the gift of myself is not reasonable, not fair.”

And we are introduced to another male character, not long after he’s been kicked out of the army in disgrace, thus: “Unrepentant, his heart still raging with unformed ambition, he fitted out a fine schooner and sailed south-eastwards across the Indian Ocean in search of adventure, power, sexual nirvana and the opportunity to practise philanthropy.”

He wins his parcel of land by arranging the deaths of a tribe of people a local sultan wants rid of, so he has a kingdom to be philanthropic in and the scene is set, the story begins…

Islands of Mercy

I may be wrong – I haven’t read it all yet but I couldn’t wait to get those quotes out there, and it looks to me like the perfect book to read whilst exploring feminism and the roots of patriarchy. If you’ve read it already, let me know what you think (but no spoilers.) If you haven’t, give it a go!

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