Usually, I have my Six Degrees post scheduled in advance, but this month I kept putting it off, partly because I’d start down one path and not like it only to start down another that turned out equally unappealing. I think I like what I ended up with – well enough anyhow! I wonder whether it will make sense to you. If you don’t know what #SixDegrees is and how it works, please check Kate’s blog – booksaremyfavouriteandbest.

The first rule is that Kate sets our starting book. This month, she nominated a book that has hit the ground running, and that sounds like one I could like. It’s Maggie O’Farrell’s Land. GoodReads reviewer Karma – whom I once knew via a wonderful online reading group – started her review with “Land is the story of a place and how it changes over generations, a saga about multiple generations of people who inhabit that place over millenia, and a reflection on colonialism and how history and language are recorded and by whom”. I had been playing with these ideas, but the way she put it gave me a start I could develop.

My first link is to another novel which tells the story of place over time, this one the Illawarra Region in Australia, from the 1700s to 2700s, so one millennium, not many but good enough because in fact that land does have a history reaching back millennia. The novel is Catherine McKinnon’s Storyland (my review). The explorer George Bass tells his young sailor that “the land is a book, waiting to be read”, and this, essentially, is what the book’s about. 

My next link is to a book that’s close to my heart, given it’s by my brother, Ian Terry. Titled Uninnocent landscapes (my review) it explores, in his words “What memories do the landscapes of lutruwita/Tasmania hold? What stories are embedded in the rocks, the trees and grasses, the waters of rivers and lagoons? What could the landscape tell us about invasion, colonisation and the destruction of First People’s life and culture? What could it tell me about my own life here on this island?” In other words, it’s about reading the land.

My third book is set in a community whose landscape, which had been essentially untouched for centuries except by weather and nature, was about to be changed by electrification, that is, by the installation of wooden poles across the land. These poles provide a visible metaphor for the massive social and cultural change that electrification heralded. The book is Niall Williams’ This is happiness (my review).

Williams’ novel is set in a small fiction community in western Ireland in 1958. Another book set in a small community in Ireland – this one a real community in the southeast – is Claire Keegan’s Small things like these (my review). It is set thirty years later, in 1985. As a coal and timber merchant, Bill Furlong, knows his community well, particularly its hardships, but he had not known what was really going on at “training school” run by the Good Shepherd nuns, though he’d heard the rumours. Once he knows, he cannot let it go, though others in the community suggest he should.

Many novels deal with moral dilemmas, but the one I am linking to, because it is also church and child-abuse related, is John Clanchy’s In whom we trust (my review). Set mostly around 1910’s Victoria, it features another man who, in this case, is forced into confronting his and others’ moral failings.

For my final link, I am picking up on the issue of trust, albeit played out in a very different scenario. The book is Angus Gaunt’s Anna (my review). It starts with a young woman, Anna, walking in the woods, being followed by a young man, whom she recognises as a guard from the place she’s just left. Through their initial interaction, we learn that “the war is over” and the gates had been opened, so he has no jurisdiction over her. But, she is wanting to get to the place of exodus, and may not be able to do that on her own. The question is can she – or, how far can she – trust him?

I’m not sure there is an easy link back to Land, but I suspect that in Land, trust and connection may also play a role. This chain has seen us spend time only in Ireland and Australia, which is unusual for me. Even more unusual, is that four of my six authors are male! These are all books that have moved me.

Have you read Land? And, whether or not you have, what would you link to?