Anthony Quinn – “Half of the Human Race” book review

Continuing my series of suffrage-themed posts, I’m particularly pleased to be reviewing Anthony Quinn’s second novel, Half of the Human Race (Jonathan Cape, 2011), for a number of reasons. 1) It’s an extremely sympathetic account of suffrage from a male writer, 2) it is only recently published, proving the enduring interest in this important historical period, and 3) it’s an absolute page-turner of a story.

Free spirited Constance is the daughter of a middle-class London family who have fallen on hard times since the father died. When the novel starts in 1911, she has abandoned her hopes of becoming a surgeon, instead taking up a post in a bookshop. However, her interest in the women’s suffrage movement keeps growing and she rapidly becomes involved in a series of increasingly daring stunts in support of the cause.

Alongside this is the story of Will, a county cricketer who falls for Constance, but finds her devotion to politics hard to handle in a world where women are expected to be meek.

The sheer detail that has gone into Quinn’s novel makes it hard to believe this is historical fiction, rather than a novel written in the 1910s. And he writes extremely convincingly from the female perspective, leaving the reader in no doubt that he is fully behind the need for gender equality. The details that are highlighted (from the difficulty of a woman being able to enter the medical profession, to the pressure to marry ANYONE rather than someone suitable) are handled delicately and sympathetically.

In the background of Half of the Human Race is a long-running strand concerning the social stigma of having a suicide in the family, showing how common this sadly is, but also how misunderstood mental illness was 100 years ago. We may think mental illness is stigmatised in 2011, but Quinn’s novel shows the associated shame now is nothing compared to what it was. This alone is an important element of the book that is valuable to highlight.

It is wonderful to see a new novel drawing attention to the suffrage movement, and doing so in such a tender and impassioned way. Quinn has clearly researched his topic inside out and writes with authority on this most important of historical periods. Half of the Human Race is so thorough and detailed in its development that it is hard to believe this is not a rediscovered novel from 100 years ago.

The Wild Bride – theatre review

Photo copyright Steve Tanner

Oh, joy of joys – the almighty Kneehigh Theatre Group are back in Bristol, this time with their touring show The Wild Bride. I first enjoyed them at the Bristol Old Vic last year in The Red Shoes (wistful sigh), so when I got wind of the fact they were riding back into town I made sure I booked tickets quick smart.

The Wild Bride (adapted and directed by Emma Rice) was performed at the majestic St George’s while the main theatre at the Old Vic is closed for refurbishment, and the smaller scale of this former church only adds to the intensity of the performance. 

The plot is straightforward enough: a simple farmer mistakenly sells his daughter to the devil, and then tries his best to wriggle out of the deal. Though the devil is a hard task master. However, if you read The Wild Bride as a feminist morality tale, you could argue that the daughter/bride is emblematic of women generally who have been dealt a hard deal at the hands of foolish men. 


The innocent daughter is sold by her dad to the devil, who then rejects her for being too pure. So he insists on painting her in muck, cutting her hands off, and then casts her out into the wild, where she is left to fend for herself... before a prince rescues her, briefly, and she ends up as a homeless single mother, again at the hands of cruel men. The tale of woman's woe doesn't end there, but I won't say more for risk of spoiling the plot. 


In typical Kneehigh style, the play is a combination of bluegrass music, inventive sets, multipurpose costumes, and wonderful singing and dancing from deeply talented people. Audrey Brisson, Patrycja Kujawska and Eva Magyar are all magnificent in varied ways as the Bride at different life stages, and Stuart McLoughlin is truly chilling as the devil (aided by the fact his devil seems to look like Jeremy Kyle!).

I hope it's not too long before Kneehigh are back in town with their next production.

This was the last night of the short run, so I hope you had a chance to catch it in Bristol while you could. If not, don’t fret as it’s on tour – full details on the link here.

Tyrannosaur – film review

 Having long been a fan of Paddy Considine’s acting and screenwriting collaborations with Shane Meadows, I was very excited to see his directorial debut Tyrannosaur. Not for the faint hearted, it’s got an 18 certificate for a reason…

Giving nothing away, the opening scenes see the protagonist Joseph (Peter Mullan) drunkenly and angrily kick his beloved dog to death after losing at the bookies. As if that’s not hard enough to stomach, Joseph’s ensuing remorse at killing his only friend leaves you confused about whether to loathe this character or feel a hint of sympathy for him.

To say Joseph is a troubled soul is to put it mildly. He’s a man whose wife died five years before, after he treated her miserably. He lives in a surprisingly well-kept house in a miserable area, and spends his time watching the young son of his neighbour being neglected by his mother and her rottweiler-wielding boyfriend.

Things start to change when Joseph stumbles into a charity shop run by middle-class, Christian do-gooder Hannah (Olivia Colman). She tries to help Joseph, little realising that her sinister husband James (the wonderful Eddie Marsan) is maliciously observing and stacking the implausible ‘evidence’ up as reasons to inflict further degrading torture and abuse on her in their comfortable home.

Considine’s script and direction hold nothing back. This is as bleak and as harsh as a film can be, and turns in not only amazing efforts from Considine, but an astonishingly brilliant performance from Colman. Having seen her as Sophie in the sitcom Peep Show (and briefly as Considine’s weary ex-girlfriend in the film Le Donk and Scor-zay-zee), in Tyrannosaur she proves that neither of those roles prepares you for the onslaught of her pared back performance as battered Hannah, whose face grows more bruised with every scene.

I could barely speak when the end credits rolled. Tyrannosaur will have you running the gauntlet of emotions from anger to sympathy, nausea and disgust, feel-good to feel-repulsed. The Watershed write-up calls the film “brutal” and “corrosive”, but that’s just the start of it…

This is an extremely impressive and arresting account of domestic abuse on film. But it’s not for the faint hearted.

William – An Englishman, by Cicely Hamilton

I harp on about Persephone Books a lot, but deservedly so. Since 1999, this independent publishing house has been reprinting long-forgotten or neglected books (which deserve to be classics), mostly by women writers, and doing so with beautiful grey covers, elegant endpapers, matching bookmarks and a sympathetic introduction to each volume. While I’ve read maybe 40 Persephone titles (from their 96 books to date), I’d never read their first one… so I’ve now corrected this.

First published in 1918, suffragette Cicely Hamilton’s book William – An Englishman is a confrontational tome in the most complex of ways. Lulling you into a false sense of security as a charming account of everyman William’s humdrum life and gentle new marriage, the characters suddenly realise World War 1 has erupted around them while they are on honeymoon, and chaos and brutal violence dominates.

While conceivably a book about the horror of war, William is much more than that. As a Socialist, William is also a staunch supporter of the suffrage movement and marries a militant suffragette, Griselda. Read in 2011, and having visited the London Stock Exchange occupation at St Paul’s last Sunday (and seen the Bristol occupation progress all this week), it is interesting to compare the socialist actions of William and his comrades in 1914-1918 with the current grassroots uprisings springing up all over the UK (and further afield). The stark tones of futility with which Hamilton describes the movement in the 1910s is perhaps depressing to read alongside the current actions and how they may fare, but it’s also interesting to draw comparisons with almost a 100-year gap of retrospection.

William is a difficult book. I read much of it while traveling on long train journeys and at one point was gulping sobs at a twist in the story, while trying to pretend in a typically British fashion that all was well (but in an equally British fashion, my fellow passengers ignored me). But it’s an excellent book and an important one. With its views on socialism, suffrage and war, William is a book of its time that also resonates across history.