The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson. Review by K Blade

There are three easy steps to falling into the psychopath trap: first discover the Hare checklist for scoring psychopathic qualities, second apply the test to everyone, third realise that anyone you've had doubts about – including yourself if you are the anxious kind – is in fact a psychopath.

The Psychopath Test opens in the vein of a conspiracy thriller, with Ronson investigating mysterious deliveries of books to a worldwide selection of neuroscientists. This anecdote tenuously links in with the premise of the book, by reminding Ronson that there are some odd people out there.

The narrative fidgets back and forth through time, picking a path through assorted interviews, assignments and oddments of research, pulling them together to suggest there was a plan in place from the outset. There is a broad cast, Ronson draws in Douglas Hofstadter, David Shayler, Scientology, Broadmoor prisoners, Haitian paramilitary leaders – even Sean Connery makes a fleeting appearance. The Sunday magazine style of writing makes for easy reading, but suffers from heavy-handed pointers to the date by reference to world events and blatant product placement. Although why a coffee shop chain would want to be linked to psychopaths is never made clear.

Ultimately the story told is of the limitations and abuses of psychiatry, through electrotherapy, induced comas and mass LSD dosing to flawed psychological profiling and unwarranted imprisonment. Along the way we learn of mental disorders of times past that reveal much of society at the time and raise questions about the value judgements behind current categorisations. In the 19^th century the disorder drapetomania, only ever seen in slaves, had one symptom namely the desire to run away from slavery. It was about 1980 before homosexuality was removed from the definitive text of mental disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association.

Ronson's self-portrayal has a mocking tone, making it clear that conclusions he draws at certain stages are soon to be over-turned. He grabs the Hare checklist with glee, revelling in the power it gives him to unlock the secret signs of a psychopath in body language and nuances of sentence construction. Then, having diagnosed psychopath potential in himself he wonders how to act sane if he ever had to convince somebody – perhaps he would try too hard, how do you cross your legs in a sane manner?

In “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” the Voigt-Kampff test, applied by an expert, can be used to detect androids. Tell-tale signs are lack of autonomic responses to emotionally provocative questions. In the real world, the Hare checklist is used in much the same manner. Psychopaths are not believed to feel emotions, so they do not show normal emotional responses. On being shown a picture of a frightened face and asked to describe the emotion, one psychopath said he didn't know but it was the face people pulled just before he killed them. The consequence in Philip K Dick's story is death at the hands of a bounty hunter, here life imprisonment is more likely. Unfortunately, the test is often applied by people who spent the course twiddling their thumbs and doodling.

The spotlight turns at times from criminals to executives – suspicious because of their clinical lack of empathy – to journalists, cold-heartedly exploiting vulnerable members of the public to produce entertainment that reassures the rest of the public that there are others out there madder than them. Not just journalists, but also their interviewees score highly on the psychopath test – grandiose sense of self-worth, failure to consider consequences and a need for stimulation to alleviate boredom being likely reasons many agree to be interviewed.

Survival tips for psychopaths and non-psychopaths
Avoid London (psychopaths gravitate to bright lights)
To avoid your quest for world domination being uncovered be boring (journalists will never write about you).

Profile of YA Author Ruta Sepetys by Anita Rowe

One night a few weeks ago I began to read Between Shades of Gray, a young adult book by first time American author Ruta Sepetys, and couldn't stop turning those pages until I finished at five a.m. as the sun rose over Cardigan Bay. The novel follows 15-year-old Lina, snatched in her nightgown from her home in Lithuania by Stalin's army in 1941, as she and her family are deported in cattle trucks to Siberia and eventually incarcerated in a prison camp near the shore of the Arctic Ocean with minimal food and no suitable clothing. This ethnic cleansing, in which over 300,000 Lithuanians were forcibly removed so that Soviet citizens could take possession of their homes and jobs is one of the least known stories of the second world war, and I wanted to know why and how Ruta had come to write this fictional account of it – such a welcome trend from the recent teen and YA obsession with fantasy. So I was delighted to be offered the opportunity to interview her.

At her London hotel she told me about a knock at her door late the previous night. But it wasn't the KGB.

A voice said, ' Ms. Sepetys? Please check your email for an important message from your US publisher.' She checked – and learned that her book had just made the New York Times best-seller list. It's every writer's dream. 'But this is not about me, it's about this previously untold story.'

Ruta was born and brought up in the USA. 'I always knew my Lithuanian father had fled his home country. And I learned very briefly at school that the Russians had occupied the Baltic countries during WW2. But when I tried to talk about it with him, or with my grandfather, who'd escaped to the US later, the conversation was closed.' In 2005 Ruta was able to visit Lithuania for the first time and meet her relatives.

Little by little, details emerged. When she asked to see photos of dead relatives heads were shaken. No photographs. They'd had to burn them all because Ruta's grandfather was a member of the Lithuanian resistance. Countless numbers had died in the forced labour camps while survivors dared not speak of their experiences. And those who escaped abroad suffered guilt about those left behind – hence the silences.

When Ruta decided to write a book about these atrocities she made two further visits to Lithuania for research purposes and went into it all very thoroughly, even to the extent of volunteering to be locked up in a Latvian prison which had been preserved from the era of repression. 'It was a simulation experience which some students in Latvia had requested for some research they were doing.' The very real violence used by her 'captors' left Ruta with a deep sense of shame about her behaviour – she had been too frightened to try to help her young fellow victims. 'Before that, I felt angry with the bystanders. I thought, how can you stand by and let that happen to your neighbours?' Afterwards she understood, and this empathy has informed her characterisation of several minor players in her story – those shades of grey which inspired the title.

Put in that situation I suspect that I, like most of us, would also have been a bystander.

Prince Philip, Royal Rings and Sharing the Spoils

First published in the Western Mail column The Insider, Saturday 18 June

Fiona Bruce caused a minor stir in our household the other night. First we spotted her at Aberystwyth station en route to the Antique Roads Show. Then she turns up interviewing the Duke of Edinburgh for the BBC interview, which was mildly interesting, actually. Prince P’s childhood exile both from home and family appear to have divorced him from the ability to self-reflect. No wonder his own kids’ marriages took a nose-dive; nor that The Firm’s spin doctors are maxing out on a royal wedding and PP’s ninetieth birthday to redeem the HM brand.

Our own National Poet Gillian Clarke’s invitation from fellow Laureate Carol Ann Duffy to participate in celebrating Will and Kate’s nuptials must have been a hard one to call. Duffy was warned by poet Wendy Cope to desist from writing to the occasion. And at the time of Andrew Motion’s appointment as Laureate, Glaswegian lesbian Duffy herself fumed she’d never kiss the royal ring. But Duffy’s chance to laud an unorthodox range of love vows, including civil partnerships, was too sweet to resist. And she is obviously a spindoctor in her own right, dodging opposition to her own royal wedding poem, ‘Rings’ by creating a veritable epithalamium-fest. She commissioned twenty plus poets to write on ‘vows’, among them rival Wendy Cope, Gillian Clarke, Scotland’s ‘Makar’ Liz Lochhead and northern Ireland’s Michael Longley.

Gillian Clarke, delivering the British Council lecture at Hay this month, was full of praise for Duffy’s inclusivity, sharing commissions, dinners, websites creation and soap box perches with her fellow female national poets. Clarke’s has been a similar, arguably feminine style: publishing Welsh translations by Menna Elfyn alongside her own ‘state’ poems. The lecture, broadcast around the world with live questions, was also pluralist by nature. Despite being, up to now, a poet for adults, Clarke has a fierce following among teenagers, not least those studying her ‘Field Mouse’ at GCSE. Via her website, she responds to students seeking cribs on those of her poems on the UK and international curriculum. As the exam season starts to crush our kids, I can only ask: may Clarke be our Adolescent Mental Health Laureate, while she’s at it?

Clarke, a political peace activist, is no establishment figure. But should she have joked, as a plane grumbled over the Hayfields, that it must be The Telegraph’s complaint at her earlier pro-Guardian comments? The former replaced the latter as this year’s sponsors: Peter Florence stayed pokerfaced. After all, Clarke did accept the Queen’s Gold Medal for poetry at Christmas and membership to the Gorsedd of Bards last week. We all need our patrons, and literature more than most.

Gwen Davies

Dai George reviews Moor Music by Mike Jenkins and Zen Cymru by Peter Finch

Moor Music by Mike Jenkins and Zen Cymru by Peter Finch, two volumes put out by Seren last year, share a lot in common. Both contain visions of dead international celebs moonlighting in unlikely spots across south Wales (Elvis at the Splott Mecca bingo hall for Finch; ‘Einstein at the Comp’ for Jenkins). Both use music to inspire the subject matter and forms of their poetry. Both are hopelessly in love with the narrow corridor of the world from Cardiff city centre to the Heads of the Valleys Road. Most importantly, both collections are object lessons in how to pole vault the complacency that can set in for poets once they’ve been on the scene for forty-odd years.

Of the two, Moor Music represents a greater departure from its author’s usual methods. Writing in open form, Jenkins has hit upon an expansive new mode for his demotic sketches. To demonstrate what I mean, here is the beginning of ‘Came the Ram’:

Scrag-end

dog-eared

shaggy-coated

from a side lane came the ram

This ‘step’ effect characterises the volume: a line of what would ordinarily be about six or seven beats is decomposed, with each successive fragment placed one line down and a little further to the right. As a result, this book feels windblown. It is as though it has been composed directly on the gusty commons, moors and lakes of the poems’ settings.

One sometimes gets the feeling that Jenkins has chosen these forms in order to slip the leash of the copyeditor. (Why does he end ‘Chipoil Avenue’ with an unfinished parenthesis? This is not a collection for even the borderline obsessive compulsive.) And, to be sure, there is little true innovation here: Jenkins is not the first poet to untether his work from the left margin and regularised punctuation. Nevertheless, he is an adept convert, using the unusual space opened up by these forms to hint at the topography of his beloved home patch.

To say that it’s business as usual for Finch might sound like an insult. It shouldn’t. Finch has never been anything if not agile and improvisatory, and he remains both of these in Zen Cymru. The volume takes in many styles, from lists and dyspeptic bilingual experiments to fragmented sound poetry (the eponymous centrepiece of the collection owes more than a little to Edwin Morgan’s barmy ‘The Loch Ness Monster’s Song’) and longer prose poetry (‘Clinic’, a panicked memoir prompted by a visit to the urologist, is particularly fine).

Among Finch’s usual varied fare, Zen Cymru sees him take a moving step into the terrain of conventional lyric elegy. There is a handful of superb poems about his aging mother and deceased father, including the closer, ‘Now You Can Again Be Your Father’. As if to underline where his poetry overlaps with Jenkins’, this last poem contains the following lines:

He never liked the moors, my father,

but I did

full of space and incessant air

Ironically, this is perhaps the best single line about moors in either collection. Indeed, it could double as an inadvertent blurb for Moor Music, a book which exploits this sense of ‘space and incessant air’ to great effect. Unusually, perhaps, for Finch, this phrase applies equally to some of the delicate elegies in Zen Cymru.

Grace Williams Says it Loud by Emma Henderson. Review by Charlotte Penny

Grace Williams is keeping me from sleeping. I put down this Orange shortlisted novel, Grace Williams Says it Loud, some hours ago, seriously impressed by Henderson’s literary debut and unsurprised that such a finely drawn novel had reached the Orange shortlist. It is utterly convincing in its presentation of time, place and character. Or is it?

Grace’s world and her life feel compellingly real and accurate. Her family, her fellow residents and the staff at the institution The Briar, in which she is placed as a child, are introduced and developed with apparent ease, and I recognised them all. I felt I sat on the bed with her mother and Grace as she held in her hands the balance of all their futures. I cried for her brother when in trying to retain some order and normality he removes Grace from the fragmenting home and is faced only with the cruelty of the outside world.

But though I was there at Grace’s side as she traversed a spectrum of experience, from brutal and inhumane neglect and abuse at the hands of (some of) the institution staff, to the adventure and exploration she shared with her soul mate and fellow patient Daniel, and though I felt it all, I did not feel it deeply. And I believe that dislocation and distance was the result of Grace’s first person narrative.

Grace is physically and mentally disabled. In her ‘real’ life she is unable to communicate beyond two-word constructs but Henderson (whose elder sister was disabled and institutionalised) gives her a voice, and an eloquent one at that. This is an empowering act, the author giving character to someone who could represents an unheard section of society, voice. So, why my struggle with this voice? Who is to say how Grace would have thought? What form her internal monologues would have taken? As a reader I am certain I have accepted more challenging conceits. And isn’t this a story I wanted to hear told?

I spent the first years of my life in the home for ‘Mentally and Physically Handicapped Children’ which my dad ran. Without siblings, children like Grace were my companions, along side them I learnt to speak. I found my voice whilst many of them never could or would find theirs despite receiving all the care, attention and stimulation that patients in The Briar did not. Amid all the fits and fights and piss and shit, I had one particular friend. Her speech was limited to echolalia (which Grace is suspected of having) but despite this we got along well. Most of the time. Occasionally though, my friend would become completely out of reach, all connection would vanish and she would rock into her self or lash out at me. She couldn’t express what was going on in her head. We were divided from each other by her frustration. And even though Henderson has given Grace the words that my friend never had, it is frustration I feel now. Her narration is matter of fact, unsentimental and without a trace of self pity. For some perhaps this makes it an uplifting read, Grace becomes a figure of hope, a survivor rather than a victim. For me however, though the narrative worked to present Grace as a person rather than a list of disabilities, it somehow kept me one step removed. But maybe that was the point, that even with words this was Grace’s reality.

I, for one, will be watching out for Emma Henderson’s future work and will be prepared for the challenge it may present me with. And also, perhaps, a little lost sleep.

Review by Dylan Moore: Africa Junction, Ginny Bailey

Even those Westerners who have ‘lived in Africa on and off for most of [their] lives,’ like Ginny Bailey’s character Louis are ‘wary of talking politics’: ‘somebody would inevitably mention the legacy of colonialism and borders drawn by rulers with no respect for tribal allegiances. They would lay the blame for Africa’s ills at the feet of the former colonial powers, or the modern equivalent, the multinationals. They’d talk about the lack of nationhood in Africa and they might go on to bring in the curse of oil and the stifling effect of protectionism and subsidies in the West.’ Louis is wary of mentioning all of this, but the oppressor’s guilt he feels in every freckle on his white skin means that, like many of us, he falls prey to ‘a kind of egotism in thinking everything was his responsibility.’

Fortunately for the reader, this passage is atypical of Africa Junction. Ginny Bailey, who edits both Riptide – a journal that champions the short story – and the Africa Research Bulletin, treats us to a realistic portrayal of ordinary lives in Dakar and Timbuktu, Cardiff and Exeter, Ethiopia and Mali. Stretching across continents and lives, Africa Junction draws on all of Bailey’s background in short stories. Episodic and fragmentary, most chapters of this highly ambitious debut would stand alone as short fiction. The attention to detail inherent in this structure and the constant flickering between the familiarities of the UK and the dry deserts and sweltering cities of West Africa accentuates the descriptions of each and gives powerful resonance to the nuances of difference that dictate our lives.

It is a cliché to protest that the things that our common humanity is a stronger force than those things that separate us – material wealth, for example – but where fiction can sometimes be more powerful than all the facts in the world is by demonstrating rather than telling us of this truth. Africa Junction never shies away from darkness: its panoramic story – thirty years elapse between its first and last episodes – takes in child slavery, sexual exploitation, living with the threat of AIDS and civil war. It also touches on life experiences that we might feel are closer to home: the difficulties of growing up, failed relationships, the perils of online dating. Yet never do we feel there is a judgment being made; we never get the feeling that one set of hardships is more trivial than another.

That is because of Adele, the central character through whom Bailey weaves all of the various threads of the story together. Adele is a French teacher and single mother living in Exeter, but through the novel’s mosaic we learn of her youth in Cardiff and her childhood in Senegal. Africa Junction traces Adele’s quest to find her childhood friend Ellena – a kind of twin - whose memory haunts her to this day. It is an adventure story as well as a heartfelt meditation on how we can rebuild broken lives.

When Adele reaches the point where she is finally ready to move on, when she realizes that the past doesn’t always have to drag you down, that guilt and fear don’t get you anywhere near as far as love and hope and kindness, you get the feeling Bailey might be talking about Africa too.

NWR Summer Books Choice

Getting ready for Hay next week has meant getting to know the delightful Horatio Clare, who I'll be interviewing on Monday together with Richard Gwyn, both memoirists recalling misspent youths at home and abroad. Borders broadband access permitting, I'll put up a version of the interview online on Tuesday (but don't let that put you off the bus-ride to Gelli'r Gandryll), together with extracts from the featured books, Truant and The Vagabond's Breakfast.

The NWR summer edition, out now, features Gee Williams on nordic noir; campus novels set in mid Wales and Bucharest respectively from Angharad Penrhyn Jones and Patrick McGuinness; Gwyn Thomas' personae on stage and screen; advance review of Tristan Hughes' first Canadian novel Eye Lake, out next month, a preview of Roshi Fernando's The Elephant's Wife, just snapped up by Bloomsbury. And an NWR original, the first in our new series of creative responses by the writers of Wales to our classic texts. Open to fiction and nonfiction authors alike, Maria Donovan starts the show with her interpretation of Margiad Evans' Turf or Stone, dubbed The Welsh Wuthering Heights. Get your own sneaky preview of Maria's "Slaughterhouse Field" or better still, support us and fellow readers & writers by subscribing to the mag (Hay, students and newbie special rates available). Our summer issue is on sale at Pemberton's Hay festival bookshop and at the Blackwell's stall at the marvellous philosophy and ideas fringe hub, How the Light Gets In. As long as you are polite, readers, potential subscribers, regular and potential contributors are welcome to grab me for a drink around 8pm this Monday, 30 May outside the Starlight Stage, Hay-on-Wye.

I'll be taking over Peter Finch's Western Mail books column from Saturday 11 June, so this will be a chance for me to support writers by getting news of their titles out there earlier. Will also take a look at UK booktrade trends and news as well as what's going on right here, and throw in some tasters from the current magazine as it develops. Any publishers listening: please send me your titles as far in advance as possible!

Speaking of which, just placed a batch of books for review in the mag. Unfortunately, said reviews won't appear until December because of our long lead-in, which does have its pros and cons. But these titles - a mix of nonfiction, poetry, literary, historical and speculative novels, short fiction and criticism - deserve an airing right now. This is the list: order your copy now but don't forget: you heard it here first. We are here to support writers and readers. Please support us right back by subscribing!

Dovetail, contemporary novel by Jeremy Hughes (launched last week in Abergavenny)

Clay, historical novel by Gladys Mary Coles (longlisted last month for Book of the Year)

The Wild Rover, Mike Parker, nonfiction on the politics of footpaths by the witty former stand-up

The Keys to Babylon by Robert Minhinnick, geopolitics meets magic realist short fiction, the fruit of ACW Creative Wales award

A Year of Flowers, John Barnie, nature poetry

Sound Archive, Nerys Williams, and Welcome Back to the Country, Graham Clifford - collection and pamphlet by two emerging poets, the latter a winner of the independent brewery-sponsored Purple Moose Award

Everything I Found on the Beach by Cynan Jones, novella by Aberaeron's King of Concise, author of The Long Dry

In the Shadow of the Pulpit, Welsh Writers and Welsh Nonconformity by M Wynn Thomas, Wales' foremost literary critic. Longlisted for Book of the Year

A Fish Trapped inside the Wind, novel set in Belgium with a touch of magic realism, by Christien Gholson, American living in Swansea

The Brittle Sea, New and Selected Poems, Paul Henry, the poet's poet

Terminal World by Alastair Reynolds, surprise entry for speculative novel at last week's Book of the Year shortlisting.