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Ghost Town Catriona Troth Books

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Ghost Town Catriona Troth Books

I was captivated by the world of Maia and Baz from the first paragraph. Two people who didn't quite fit anywhere find each other amid racial tensions and rioting in 1980's Coventry, England. Every single character is a fully realized human being and the language and situations are rich and natural without ever being overblown or melodramatic. I could see the town and the people and felt real sympathy for the situations and troubles they found themselves in. Do yourself a favor, Read. This. Book.


Tags : Amazon.com: Ghost Town (9780957618046): Catriona Troth: Books,Catriona Troth,Ghost Town,Piebald Publishing,0957618042,1981; Coventry; Novel; Two Tone; racism; skinheads; racial conflict,Cultural Heritage,Fiction - General,Fiction Literary,Fiction : Cultural Heritage,FictionCultural Heritage,Literary,Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)

Ghost Town Catriona Troth Books Reviews

Ghost Town by Catriona Troth recreates Coventry in 1981, where racial tensions bubbled up into hatred and violence. Maia, a young white graduate carrying a child by a black South African man, becomes the girlfriend of Baz, whose birth to a Sikh father and white mother ensures that his journey through this terrain is far from easy. Through this relationship, and working for Baz at the homeless shelter he runs, she finds herself in the thick of the city’s racial dynamics—albeit with occasional flickers of feeling like an outsider, which diminish with her growing comprehension. It becomes clear that no one person in any of the various intersecting racial/social/political communities (including skinheads, the police, arts venues, and the charitable homeless shelter) is really in control of events or has a bird’s-eye view of them, because these events are not only complex, but also fast-moving and driven by powerful hidden undercurrents that tend to erupt unpredictably into visibility. There’s also a sense of apprehensive uncertainty, where unexpected assailants can appear, unseen vandals smash windows and set fires, weaselly rabble-rousers are sometimes glimpsed gloating over the rabbles they’ve roused, and precious little reconciliation or understanding between opposing forces is possible.

There’s a pleasurably subtle, gently restless, level-toned yet unsparing quality to many aspects of Ghost Town, including these ones the elusive nature of Maia, a reliable narratorial lens and yet a full individual with her own dramas too, whose open innocence manages to remain unsullied by seeing such ugliness and suffering around her; the novel’s smooth inclusion of quite a breadth of facts, terminology and historical detail (including several vivid trips out of Coventry, down to riot-torn Brixton); its ambitious and successful insistence on being at once a political story, a love story and a coming-of-age story; and the neat, quiet, clean division whereby about half the chapters are written in the first-person viewpoint of Maia, and the other half in the third person from the specific viewpoint of Baz.

It feels true and appropriate that there are no easy answers in the book, no clear single climax or pretty aftermath at the end, but rather an uneasy calm, a sense that the characters’ resilience has been much tested but remains strong, and a resignation to the ineradicable brutishness in people. And yet, by the end there’s a feeling of hope for we’ve also seen a lot of compassion too, not to mention finding love, humour and fun along the way, leaving us with a sense of the hard-won but authentic joy that may be snatched and caught and held onto, from this messy but fascinating journey we’ve all been pushed into together.
I was captivated by the world of Maia and Baz from the first paragraph. Two people who didn't quite fit anywhere find each other amid racial tensions and rioting in 1980's Coventry, England. Every single character is a fully realized human being and the language and situations are rich and natural without ever being overblown or melodramatic. I could see the town and the people and felt real sympathy for the situations and troubles they found themselves in. Do yourself a favor, Read. This. Book.