The Lion Tamer Who Lost by Louise Beech

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Louise Beech

I find myself once again sat on a bus wondering whether the other passengers have noticed the tears welling up in my eyes. Hopefully, they are too absorbed in their own thoughts, companions and mobile phones to have any time for a fellow passenger turning the pages of a book, occasionally wiping away the blurry dampness, finally closing the cover and sitting back.

Louise Beech’s first novel How to be Brave was published in 2015 and her fifth will be published in April 2019, the stories seem to flow from her but the quantity and regularity of her output in no way lessens its quality or impact. Maybe they have all been dwelling inside their author all along, jostling for position, waiting for freedom, for someone to release them from the safety of their compound into the wild.

“I had written four of my books when How to be Brave got me my book deal. I’d already written Mountain, Maria and Lion Tamer. I did edit them a lot after Brave, but they were there. Then in 2017 I wrote my fifth one, Call Me Star Girl. I guess, yes, that had been simmering there. I had for a long time thought I’d set a book in a radio station as I’ve spent a lot of time in them as guest presenter, and always thought what a claustrophobic and spooky setting it could make.”

Louise writes with such emotional integrity that her characters transcend the fiction as you share their stories, recognising their wounds in yourself and the people around you. She tells stories that break your heart, but she does it so exquisitely that you do not want her to stop, the pain paradoxically fuelling joy. Our existence is a mysterious tragedy. There is no life without death, no wonder without suffering, but when we accept our place in that cycle, somehow, we can hold the two together and live.

“Writing is healing for me. It soothes and comforts me to write. I find my own healing there. I guess I mend after a broken childhood/early adulthood. If you witness painful things, perhaps you have a natural empathy when exploring them? I do love humans. As a whole. Have great hope in them! So maybe that is why there’s always positivity there?”

And there is the crux. Hope is what sustains us and somehow when we lay ourselves bare, when we open ourselves to be vulnerable to the inescapable pain of life we find it, or at least we do if we have company. Is that ultimately our purpose? To be good companions, navigating the miracle and tragedy of being alive, together. If so, then Louise’s novels can help guide us.

“I do gravitate towards writing about pain/difficult things. I’m not afraid to explore any topic. This is why, despite jumping genres it would seem, I’m not a genre writer. I hate boundaries/rules/confines. I write what I have to. And I love every minute of it.”

The Lion Tamer Who Lost captures all of this. It is the story of Ben and Andrew, an enviable love but an impossible one.

Synopsis

Be careful what you wish for…

Long ago, Andrew made a childhood wish, and kept it in a silver box. When it finally comes true, he wishes he hadn’t.

Long ago, Ben made a promise and he had a dream: to travel to Africa to volunteer at a lion reserve. When he finally makes it, it isn’t for the reasons he imagined.

Ben and Andrew keep meeting in unexpected places, and the intense relationship that develops seems to be guided by fate. Or is it? What if the very thing that draws them together is tainted by past secrets that threaten everything?

A dark, consuming drama that shifts from Zimbabwe to England, and then back into the past, The Lion Tamer Who Lost is also a devastatingly beautiful love story, with a tragic heart.

The Author

Louise Beech is an exceptional literary talent, whose debut novel How To Be Brave was a Guardian Readers’ Choice for 2015. The follow-up, The Mountain in My Shoe was shortlisted for Not the Booker Prize. Both of her previous books Maria in the Moon and The Lion Tamer Who Lost were widely reviewed, critically acclaimed and number-one bestsellers on Kindle. The Lion Tamer Who Lost was shortlisted for the RNA Most Popular Romantic Novel Award in 2019. Her short fiction has won the Glass Woman Prize, the Eric Hoffer Award for Prose, and the Aesthetica Creative Works competition, as well as shortlisting for the Bridport Prize twice. Louise lives with her husband on the outskirts of Hull, and loves her job as a Front of House Usher at Hull Truck Theatre, where her first play was performed in 2012.

The Lion Tamer Who Lost is available now.

Thank you to Louise Beech for answering my questions for this review, included in quotation marks above.

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The Mountain in my Shoe by Louise Beech

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Louise Beech

It’s hard not be a little bit in love with Louise Beech. She tells stories, and although her novels are fictional they are rooted in human experience. I can’t help but think that the world would be a better place if we all told our stories and more importantly, if we all listened to other people’s. How often do we pass our judgment on someone, who they are or have been, or project our own anxieties onto others, rather than listen to them tell us for real? Stories have power and with both How to be Brave and The Mountain in my Shoe Louise proves it.

The core relationship in How to be Brave was between a mother and daughter as they came to terms with a life changing illness. In The Mountain in my Shoe the focus is on Conor, a child moving through the care system, and his befriender Bernadette. Both of them need love and Bernadette provides stability to Conor by always returning and never letting him go in the way all the other adults in his life have, whilst she also receives a “saving” relationship herself that prevents her from sinking in an abusive marriage.

The story is told from three perspectives. Third person prose takes us through Bernadette’s experience as she desperately searches for the missing Conor whilst also reflecting on a life trapped within lost dreams. Conor tells his own story of a night of adventure and discovery, whilst between these two narratives, segments of his Life Book reveal his bigger journey through a series of looked after experiences since separation from his mother and siblings.

There is a sense throughout the novel of wounded people internalising their issues and struggling to deal with them, until they are faced with the most broken of them all and he heals them. As a society we do not deal with our wounds well, generally transmitting our pain to others rather than transforming it within it ourselves. This is reflected in the story as Frances inflicts hers on her children, Richard on his wife and Bernadette on herself, but Conor, who has been rejected time and again and hurt most of all, transforms each of them with the honesty of his love.

It’s important stuff that in Western culture we have largely pushed to the side and avoided. All of us suffer pain of some sort but it is in the vulnerability of accepting our wounds, and those of other people, that we can turn them into gifts. Bernadette had suffered great loss in a miscarriage but in time she was able to hold that pain and transform it into a love that could overturn a lifetime of rejection for Conor. Richard projected his pain onto his marriage resulting in an abusive relationship, but in Conor found a way to transform that negativity into something beautiful, saving both of them in very different ways. And somehow Conor manages to hold his suffering, despite his undoubted frustration, in a way that lights up the world around him.

Once each character was able to accept their own pain they were able to transform themselves and those around them. It is a novel, written well and with warmth, and it is also a window into a truth that can permeate our own lives. That’s why we need good writers to tell good stories.

This book is a gift.

And your story can be too.

How to be Brave by Louise Beech

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Louise Beech

Natalie’s world is turned upside down when her 9 year old daughter, Rose, collapses and is later diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. Her husband is in the forces and stationed in Afghanistan leaving Natalie and Rose to come to terms with this life changing event on their own. This is chick-lit right? Well actually no. It’s a piece of magic that will sustain anyone with a beating heart in their breast and even the slightest sense of wonder and mystery.

The mechanics of the story are that as Rose and Natalie try to come to terms with the impact of diabetes on their everyday lives and their relationship they are visited by Colin, Natalie’s grandad who during World War 2 was stranded on a lifeboat with a group of other seamen after their ship was sunk by a German submarine. The two strands run together as mother and daughter uncover their relative’s diary and retell his story in order to cope with their own struggle.

It isn’t the basic ingredients that matter so much though as the result. This is a yellow brick road of a novel that when it delivers you home will have you seeing all the people you care about anew, in glorious Technicolour. The stories are authentically told, in fact they are rooted in the author’s family history, and the characters are so real that they speak to anyone who knows what it is to be alone and what it means to be connected to others.

In the book Shoeless Joe by W P Kinsella there is a moment when Ray Kinsella’s prize baseball field is under threat and the character J D Salinger (yes that one) stands up to say that the field will be saved by its magic because “The people who come here will be drawn… They’ll walk out to the bleacher and sit in shirtsleeves in the perfect evening… They’ll watch the game and it will be as if they knelt in front of a faith healer, or dipped themselves in magic waters where a saint once rose like a serpent and cast benedictions to the wind like peach petals.”

How to Be Brave shares the same magic that Ray Kinsella’s “Field of Dreams” possessed. It makes you want to snuggle up with your own children in a book nook and hold them close. It makes you want to return to your own childhood and hear stories from your parents and grandparents of times when they were young, before you knew them. Colin’s story is exceptional and Natalie and Rose’s story is moving, but they are windows to our own stories too.

I will be honest and say that I was approached to review the book because of the lack of male perspectives in the arranged blog tour and it is not something that I would have naturally picked up from the bookshop, but I am delighted that it found its way to me. The writing is enticing and accessible and the stories poignant and affecting. It is a novel about the power of story and also a novel that proves that power.