Love and Ruin by Paula McLain

review by Maryom

In 1936, young aspiring author Martha Gellhorn walks into a Key West bar and meets Ernest Hemingway. The attraction is immediate, but he's married (to his second wife) with three children, and she's much younger and already been badly let down in an affair with a married man. A year later, they both head off to Madrid as journalists covering the Spanish Civil War, and, thrown together, fall rapidly and recklessly in love.

This is a story I was already familiar with, if only in outline - the sort of thing picked up from the author biography at the back of paperback - and it's not necessarily easy to turn fact into readable, engrossing fiction, but Paula McLain has. It isn't entirely new ground for her - she's already visited the subject in The Paris Wife, which told the story of Hemingway and his first wife Hadley Richardson - but Martha Gellhorn stands out from the other wives (there were four in all) as being well known in her own right, as a war correspondent.

When they meet, Hemingway is well on his way to being a literary superstar, and Gellhorn still trying to find her feet as a professional writer, but in Spain she finds her calling, reporting the horrors of war, bringing home the impact on people caught up in conflict, and as the years pass the balance of power - in the shape of literary success - begins to shift between the two; after the huge success of For Whom The Bell Tolls Hemingway's career grinds to a halt, just as Gellhorn's starts to really take off. She soon finds herself facing a choice - become a stay-at-home wife and mother, as women were in the '40s, or carve out a career for herself, and risk losing her husband.

Told primarily from Martha's point of view, McLain captures the passion that brings these two  together, the differences and similarities that ultimately tear them apart, and the trauma of war in which she finds her calling. The short passages told from Ernest's perspective give in insight into how he feels, a desire for a settled 'normal' happy marriage, and an inkling of the black moods that enveloped him later. As I say, I knew the outlines of the story already but McLain gives a fascinating insight into this doomed relationship, brings the characters to life and by the end I felt I knew them well. For what it's worth, my suspicion is that Gellhorn and Hemingway were too alike to ever be happy, both ambitious and focused on their work, but it was that similarity which attracted them to each other, and if Martha had become the home-maker Ernest wanted, the relationship would still have failed.





Maryom's review - 5 stars 
Publisher - Little, Brown
Genre -adult, 

The Paris Wife by Paula McLain

review by Maryom

 From their first meeting in October 1920, when Hadley Richardson is 28 and Ernest Hemingway 21, The Paris Wife recounts the story of their relationship, through struggling years in Paris, to the beginnings of fame with the publication of Hemingway's first novel, and the break-up of their marriage.

I've come to this book a little in reverse - when I read Naomi Woods Mrs Hemingway, everyone was asking if I'd read this too, but instead I read Paula McLain's second biographical novel Circling the Sun Now at last, here I am!

Told mainly in the first person from Hadley's perspective, it's obviously slightly biased in her favour, but it captures the first flush of love, her fears that her feelings might not be reciprocated, and her seemingly headlong rush into marriage, excellently. It did however leave me  wondering if there could have been a different interpretation of her actions - a desperate last-ditch attempt for a spinster in her late twenties to secure a husband.
When the story moved to Paris in the early '20s, I had a feeling of it being on more solid ground, covered many times by Hemingway's biographers - but here things began to hit the problem that all fictionalised biographies face -  the reader most likely knows how the plot will pan out. I did, recognising the 'villain' when she first appeared on the scene and being able to anticipate the ending.
Some of the settings and supporting characters are familiar too, through the novels of both Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald, and it's curious to see them in 'real life' rather than their fictionalised counterparts.
Overall, I enjoyed it and it brought to life a relationship of which I've heard a lot, though oddly by the end my sympathies lay with Hemingway's second wife, knowing her marriage was doomed too.

Maryom's review - 4 stars
Publisher - Virago
Genre - Adult Fiction, fictionalised biography

Circling the Sun by Paula McLain

review by Maryom

Beryl Markham is perhaps best known as an aviator; she was the first woman to fly across the Atlantic from east to west - a feat accomplished in September 1936 - but even before that she'd lived an extraordinary life. While she was still a small child, her parents moved to Kenya and she grew up there, almost wild, playing and hunting with the local children in the bush, till she was bundled off to boarding school. She married young, had several society-shocking affairs, and a second marriage, became the youngest, and first female, licensed horse trainer in Kenya, having considerable success at prestigious races in Nairobi, then, through big-game hunter Denys Finch Hatton, discovered flying - all of this at a startlingly early age.
So what was the woman behind the headlines actually like? In a long flashback from the cockpit of Beryl's aeroplane high above the Atlantic, Paula McLain explores the life of this remarkable woman, and tries to find out what drove her to achieve so much, from her lonely childhood to her troubled adult years.

There's a lot of Kenya that feels familiar from other sources - Beryl moved in the same 'set' as Karen Blixen (author Isak Dinesen) and Denys Finch Hatton (both known through the film Out of Africa based on Blixen's writing), and the drinking, drug-taking, racing, high living crowd of "Happy Valley" (brought to life in the film White Mischief) - and sometimes the incidents Beryl recalls were ones I'd heard before, although from a different angle. Something that shone through in many places was the beauty of the country - its huge empty spaces, rolling hills and acres of pasture which the author conjures admirably.


Overall though I felt the story read more like a straight biography than fiction. There was a little too much "tell", not "show", for my liking - I didn't really feel Beryl's character come to life and I was left feeling a little outside it all, not sharing Beryl's thoughts and emotions.

 Maryom's review - 3.5 stars
Publisher - Virago
Genre - Adult Fiction,