Really enjoyed this book. Great cast of characters and you get a real sense of being a patient in the TB clinic.. Good sense of place and time and the book was really easy to read and enjoyable despite the subject. Highly recomended. Would make a great bookclub read... lots to discuss...

This unfortunately ended up being a DNF. I'm afraid I may have read it at a bad time in my life. The premise sounds just up my alley but the execution ended up feeling unendingly dull and passive. I struggled so much to actually sit down and read it that I ended up giving up.

I’ve had a copy of Linda Grant’s most recent novel “The Dark Circle” on my shelf since it was published in November, but for whatever reason I didn’t get to reading it despite being extremely moved by her previous novel “Upstairs at the Party.” So I was delighted to find it on the Baileys Prize longlist as it gave me a great excuse to get it down and finally read it. Although this novel is very different from her previous one I was immediately drawn in by the eloquence of Grant’s prose with its excellent witty dialogue and vibrant characters. The story concerns a brother and sister (Lenny and Miriam) in 1950s London who contract tuberculosis. The city and social environment are vividly rendered where the continued deprivation of the war and effects of the bombings are still intensely felt. A very different scene is evoked when the pair are taken to a sanatorium in Kent which was once an exclusive facility for the privileged but it’s now taking in patients under the new national health care system. This creates an intermingling of people from all walks of life who are plagued by this illness and pining for a rumoured miracle cure. The result is a spectacular evocation of the passage of time and changing values through the lives of several fascinating characters.

The medical facility that's purportedly for recuperation feels like a truly stultifying environment. Patients are encouraged to be as inactive as possible to prevent themselves from getting too excited. They are prescribed to take in fresh, bracing air so many are set out on a veranda in the freezing cold weather. Most terrifying of all is an upper floor of children confined to their rooms and put in straight jackets if they become too active. Whilst purportedly giving their bodies a rest their minds rot from lack of stimulation. Yet, some of the patients form special connections based around interests like literature and music. There's a particularly forceful American character Arthur Persky who introduces an element of chaos into the strictly ordered facility. Gradually the stories of their particular backgrounds unfold amidst these interactions. New arrivals Lenny and Miriam are looked down upon as London working class Jewish people by some of the medical staff such as the terrifyingly named Dr. Limb. He feels that “the government had opened the door of the slums. It was difficult to be discerning about such an undifferentiated mass of humanity.” That there were such classist opinions about socialized health care in the early years of the system seems particularly striking when thinking about recent debates about funding for the NHS.

One of the most poignant stories in the novel is about a mysterious German patient named Hannah. She's someone who survived the horrors of war and brutal confinement only to find herself trapped within another institution with a terminal illness. Luckily she has a lover named Sarah who works for the BBC and exerts her influence to get a preciously rare experimental drug to Hannah. This sets in motion a chain of events which puts governmental scrutiny on how the facility is run. It was surprising and wonderful to find a lesbian love story at the centre of this novel. This is handled really sensitively where both women show a savviness to live how they want despite the prejudices of the time. They have a steadfast faith that “the new reality would emerge. It wasn’t a dream.”

Grant has a fascinating way of writing a historical novel that is conscious of future developments. During the narrative she'll sometimes refer to future novels that will be written or events that are simultaneously happening elsewhere which the characters can't know anything about. This creates a compellingly rounded view of history and a hopeful tone for how civilization is progressing despite the provincial attitudes of some people in the institution. It also lays the groundwork for the later parts of the novel which skip forward into the future at a point where the horrors of tuberculosis have largely been forgotten. It's skilful how Grant does this while also faithfully and vividly rendering a feeling for the 1950s milieu with its misguided medical practices and rumblings of anti-semitic attitudes. Individuals are forced to take drastic action to help themselves in some really dramatic and arresting moments. Certain scenes are described so sharply that they are particularly memorable. For instance, the grim way Lenny and Miriam's father died is something that I'll never forget. “The Dark Circle” is a gripping and finely detailed story.

dark-circleLenny and Miriam are British Jewish twins that grew up in the shadow of The Second World War. But now they’re at the end of their teens and a new decade is beginning. These East End kids have the world in front of them, even if they might need to live on the edge of the law to make a good life for themselve. But then Lenny goes to sign up and it’s discovered that he has tuberculosis. Miriam is examined and she has it too. The pair are sent away to a glamorous sanatorium in Kent at the expense of the brand new NHS.

Life inside the sanatorium is both fascinating and enervating as they make new friends and discover their pasts and personalities while simultaneously succumbing to the ‘cure’ and losing their own. But when Miriam seems in danger of dying a chain of events no one could have foreseen is set in motion.

Linda Grant’s characters are terrific. They’re not perfect but they are full of life. By the end of the first page I knew I wanted to follow them on their journey no matter where it lead. And for the majority of the book I was glad I had. It opened my eyes to the scourge that Tubercolosis was as recently as the 1950’s. It also showed be the birth of the NHS and reminded me just how amazing this national institution of ours is. Instead of dying slow and expensive deaths, Lenny and Miriam were given the chance at happy and successful lives.

The supporting characters were also diverse and well written, giving a microcosmical glimpse of the new worlds of televison, the politics of the day and the attitudes to sex and sexuality.

My only criticism of the book was the end. I know many people want to know what happened to the characters after a book ends but this book follows both of them right to the end of their lives. It really wasn’t necessary nor did it feel that the author had a message to deliver to us readers by sharing the rest of their lives. It’s not awful, just not necessary and takes some of the power out of the story.

4 Bites

NB I received a free copy of this book through NetGalley in return for an honest review. The BookEaters always write honest reviews

I absolutely loved this rich, evocative book. Offering an unusual perspective on the advent of the national health service - how the availability of medical treatment to the poor broke up traditional class boundaries - this book is an absorbing and lovingly crafted read.

I love Linda Grant, and she has featured on the blog a lot. This is her new novel, and it is an absolute corker. I read it a while ago but didn’t write about it straightaway, for a reason I will explain shortly, and it has lived in my mind very solidly since then, I keep thinking about it.

The story starts in post-war London, a young brother and sister racing round, living life to the full, with hope and enthusiasm and possibilities. They come from a textbook Jewish family, live in the centre of the city, and are as close as brother and sister can be. So you think it is going to be one kind of book, but then it isn’t. After a brief bright colourful section where they interact with all kinds of current goings-on (post-war fascists, a flower shop, national service) they are both diagnosed with TB and whisked off to a sanatorium in Kent.

The book is a great novel in terms of presenting a number of different characters for us to get to know and understand, to follow their stories. But it also gives an extraordinary picture of life in a sanatorium, I wouldn’t have had the faintest idea what this was like, and I can’t be alone in that. This is just after WW2, and a new treatment, streptomycin, is going to become available for TB – but no-one is certain about it, and there is a very limited supply. This thread slides through the book, and there is an urgency about how to choose who will get it, but we can see it is not going to save most of these people.

The matter-of-fact life at the sanatorium is absolutely horrifying. People were sent there for years ‘five years is considered an effective stay’: people simply dropped out of their real lives. Mothers didn’t see their children. Some patients were abandoned by their families and had no visitors. Miriam and Lenny are among the first NHS patients to come in: most of the others are paying privately. The treatments sound appalling, and completely useless. People had total bedrest, and slept in wards open to the air. There are some very dubious-sounding operations.
To the nurses and medical staff, the patients were always occupying points on a calendar closer or farther away from death.
The patients build their own lives, and it all sounds somewhat like a prisoner-of-war camp, or the ward in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The only thing you can think is ‘it’s not a concentration camp.’ There is a desperate sadness, it is absolutely heart-wrenching, and carries complete conviction – Grant obviously did her research very carefully.

Of course, this tragic reality is the perfect setting for a novel, with the different stories intersecting, with the clash of cultures, with the women’s differing attitudes to their appearances, with the excitement of the arrival of the untrustworthy American – and Grant makes the most of all this. There are discussions of makeup, card schools, a visit to the races, radio and dancing. The reading aloud of books was one of the most compelling strands. There is a weird adventure when two of the patients find out exactly what is going on in a secret separate floor of the hospital. Everyone swaps stories, and there is a very entertaining description of shoplifting.

There are occasional chapters looking at what is happening to the patients’ connections outside, and these all seem very strange and inconsequential, almost too bright, after the flat whiteness of the wards: the reader has become institutionalized too.

One of the things Grant does remarkably well is clothes descriptions, but there isn’t so much in the hospital, just the glimpses of the others outside. I loved this: Lenny’s girlfriend Gina puts on

her spring coat which was glazed powder-blue cotton and her best pink crepe dress and her high-heeled shoes and blew on the gold of her cross and polished it with her sleeve and brushed her hair and put it up in a French pleat.
 
Another young woman on the outside goes swimming in a ‘new two-tone yellow and black suit, which made her look like a wasp’ – in another recent entry there was a black and yellow bathing suit, and I was surprised that the author said ‘that this made her look like some sort of strange animal, perhaps a cross between a chimp and a zebra’ – I’d expected a wasp, as Grant confirms.

I thought this was a wonderful book, one of the best I read last year. I was glad (no spoilers) that the ending was not as harsh as I had feared and half-expected.
The reason I didn’t write about it straightaway was that after finishing it I thought that this might be the moment to read Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann’s enormous novel set in a Swiss sanatorium at the beginning of the 20th century. I thought if I didn’t read it now I never would. And so I have, though it took a while. A blogpost will follow…

I loved this book! It was set in a time and place that I didn't really know a lot about before reading and because of this, I felt like I'd not only had a really enjoyable read - but I'd also learned a lot too. I loved 'When I Lived in Modern Times' so I was very excited to receive a review copy. Lenny and Miriam are fully-realised characters - twins whose lives have been derailed upon their TB diagnosis and they are sent off to recuperate at a sanatorium in Kent. Quite an uprooting for this pair of city dwellers and this for me was where the book's strength lies. Like a 20th century version of the Canterbury Tales, this location is a mechanism for bringing people together from many different backgrounds and walks of life, united through Tuberculosis. I loved the first part of the novel and felt it provided a fascinating slice of social history through excellent characterisation and a very interesting array of characters. I was less convinced by the other time frame but enjoyed the novel as a whole nonethless. I could imagine gifting this novel to a wide range of people that I know and think that they'd all get something distinct out of it - which is one of its key strengths. It constantly surprises you whether through plot diversions of character development - I loved the way that it kept me on my toes. Grant is a wonderful writer and I absolutely adored the twins and their takes on life. A definitely engrossing read that opens the door on a fascinating time in Britain's history and through strong characterisations makes us think deeply about the many things we take for granted via health, gender, society and class - not that many years later. Warmly recommend - a fantastic and diverting read!

Lenny and Miriam are Jewish twins living in the bustling East End, just starting out in life and finding their feet. Lenny plans to follow in his Uncle's (slightly shady) footsteps, headed for a career in property and Miriam dreams of owning her own flower shop.

When Lenny's declared medically unfit to join the army he presumes it will be because his Uncle had greased the right palm, not because he is suffering from Tuberculosis. Although she doesn't suffer as badly, Miriam is also found positive for the disease and together they are sent to the state of the art sanatorium, The Gwendolyn Downie Memorial Hospital. Thanks to the brand new NHS they are offered exactly the same care as the numerous private patients that also reside within it's walls. For many of the 'upper class' residents it is the first time they are exposed to people such as the twins and it is definitely the first time they have ever had the chance to meet a true Lady.

As their bodies deteriorate they find solace in the company of the other patients. Their friend, Valerie, teaches them her passion for books, keeping Miriam sane in the toughest times. They encourage in her a confidence she never had before. Sometimes they have nothing in common but their illness but

Still teenagers, the twins are forced to face their own mortality and decide whether they give in or fight with every breathe they have and live with the consequences.


Although Linda Grant's latest novel revolves around the degenerative lung disease tuberculosis she manages to keep the novel from every becoming too dark, instead injecting it with unique characters with different stories and outlooks. Obviously there are moments, where people give up and the disease takes hold, that twist your heart with pity and sadness but overall the novel lifts you up.

Set in 1949, it's a time of social and medical change with the introduction of the NHS and the country recovering from the war, the progression of medicine and how it is accessed. Miriam and Lenny's religion also adds another level to this novel, giving us an insight into how people saw them after the fighting stopped.

One of my favourite things about this novel is Linda Turners's way with words. Her insults cut deep (my personal favourite too rude to share here but you'll know it when you read it) and finding beauty in the every day.


'Sarah kissed her at the side of the building, under the corrugated iron roof of the coal shed. The smell of bitumen forever associated with love.'

The Dark Circle by Linda Turner is an unusual coming of age story of illness, passion and survival. Character-driven, touching and engrossing this novel will have you longing to return to the sanatorium.

Certainly a different and largely uncovered topic in historical literature. Quite enlightening on the initial treatment of TB and ultimately the introduction of antibiotics and indeed the start of the NHS in the UK. The story line was engaging, with believable development of the main characters. Throwing East Enders in with Academics and Aristocrats, and an American, in the sanatorium It left me wanting to find out more about post war UK health care and the NHS. Perhaps more people should read this type of book to understand what it was like before health care and all the advances that have been made. It's an engaging read and a novel that you will recommend, it has sadness and pain, but also happiness and good outcomes for some patients.

The Dark Circle
by Linda Grant
published by Virago, 2016

It’s four years since the end of the Second World War. Against a background of grey, post-war austerity and an embryonic NHS, the streets are ‘full of foreigners … Eyeteye boys…full of resentment and elegant curses, Maltesers with black eyes and strings of girls on the game, refugees from Europe… and the occasional coloured gentleman looking chilled to the bone.’ For Miriam and Lenny, Jewish twins from the East end life is just beginning. Miriam is working in a florists as ‘Mimi’, because it’s less Jewish, and Lenny is relying on his uncle Manny to avoid military service by pulling a few strings.
However, when Lenny’s ‘lousy rotten chest’ and ‘bad lungs’ are diagnosed as TB he really is unfit for national service, as is Miriam, ‘her life over at nineteen.’ They are sent away to the Gwendo, a sanatorium in the countryside, where ‘out on the balconies the ill lay in their beds, taking in the rays of light and breathing, breathing, breathing.’ Miriam is horrified to discover that the patients’ main activities are to ‘take our temperatures… several times a day… We spit a lot, we drink enormous amounts of milk…’ and at night there is ‘nothing but blackness and stars and a slice of moon as sharp as a knife to cut your throat.’
Here they join a fascinating cast of characters representing the social experiment that the ‘new health scheme’, the new NHS, has created. Instead of a ‘fashionable sanatorium’ envisaged by the director of the Gwendo the ‘government had opened the door of the slums.’ As the only alternative to months of bed rest and strict routines is invasive surgery which could leave the patient disfigured and isn’t guaranteed to work, everyone in the sanatorium is waiting for the new wonder drug Streptomycin which is still being tested.
Miriam and Lenny are just beginning to make friends and adapt to their claustrophobic, regimented life when an American serviceman, Persky, arrives. ‘A name to shatter glass, Lenny later thinks.’ Persky brings jazz, noise, fun and unconventional sex. He immediately rejects the sanatorium’s lectures on ‘learning how to be a patient’ and plans to ‘mould the environment to himself, not to be moulded’; like McMurphy in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest he rebels against the image of the ‘well-behaved citizen.’
However his plan to help Miriam by giving her stolen Streptomycin has unforeseen long-term effects; she is ‘maimed by an illness’ that is now so easily cured by antibiotics, that it ranks with a whole range of forgotten 1950’s staples including: ‘spam fritters and two-bar electric fires… outside lavatories and condensation …and no supermarkets.’
For too long we’ve taken antibiotics as a given to be used for any minor illness and according to many scientists we’re on the cusp of the ‘post-antibiotic era’ where once again there will be no simple cure for TB and many other presently treatable diseases. At the end of this novel Linda Grant issues a stark warning: the ‘dark circle’ of tuberculosis is still with us, ‘waiting for a point of weakness… then lodging in the lungs of humanity to make its sluggish progress through the body the magnificent shape of our temporary wholeness until we die and other species take us on.’ It is a warning that we should ignore at our peril.
Yet The Dark Circle is in no way a depressing read. On occasions the meticulous research shows, and sometimes there is a sense that we are being force-fed a1950’s diet of ‘pink blancmange made from cornflour’, but this is a novel that is both entertaining and funny, as well as deeply moving.

Photo of Linda Grant from the Guardian