The next meeting will be held on Mon 10th November 2025 at 7:30pm in the Ferryhill Community Centre.
The book under discussion is ‘Sparrow’ by James Hynes.
One thought on “November 2025 – Sparrow”
“Shame” “Far too cruel and explicit” “All so brutal” “There’s a good story in it, kindness, relationships, the day-to-day; the other side of the coin to the brutality” “Annoyed with the author” “You knew the boy would be raped and, as I read, it was a horrible weight on my shoulder”.
Comments from our discussion about James Hynes novel “Sparrow”. Not views from all our Ferryhill Book Group as others had “stopped reading”; “couldn’t get passed the beginning”; “didn’t like it”; “returned the book” and weren’t at our meeting. My response to reading “Sparrow” was similar. I was embarrassed, repelled. But I didn’t anticipate such visceral distaste for the book from all at Book Group.
I’d been a lone voice disliking descriptions of sexual violence in “Snow Crash” and in my intense disgust at “His Bloody Project” glorying in femicide. But here, we were at one against James Hynes, seeing his writing too violent, too cruel. Why this author, this book when we’d all appreciated JM Coetzee writing in “Disgrace”? Is it Hynes deceit, his conceit, in placing a “really dirty book”, “obscene, offensive”, within the cover of an historical novel?
We were angry; “There was a good story to it, a better writer could have done better”.
We were annoyed with Hynes “he could have told the story without that” [rape of a child, buggery, fellatio, violence].
I wonder at the intention of the author. Is he aroused writing, describing debauched sex acts, imagining readers’ eyes watching over the scene?
I’m angry at Hynes inveigling us to conspire in this depravity.
No. We are not all “whores” as his character Melpomene declares. No. We do not share her opinion that “the whole world is a whorehouse”.
Who comprises Hynes’ audiences: pederasts, prurient, sadists?
My preferred setting for a story of the slave in the Roman Empire would be in households of Galen, Pliny-the-Elder, or Dioscorides. Why? I have an interest in healing, the natural world, materia medica. I’m not interested in the setting of a tavern and brothel, even with a garden “where chickens jerk their heads this way and that among the drooping leaves of heat-wearied plants.”
I am weary of sexual violence in story, particularly the tropes of violence against women and children. And I worry that stories, such as “Sparrow”, are corrupting, ethically dangerous, and continue the violence. Pornographos wrapped as historical fiction diminishes us all.
“Shame” “Far too cruel and explicit” “All so brutal” “There’s a good story in it, kindness, relationships, the day-to-day; the other side of the coin to the brutality” “Annoyed with the author” “You knew the boy would be raped and, as I read, it was a horrible weight on my shoulder”.
Comments from our discussion about James Hynes novel “Sparrow”. Not views from all our Ferryhill Book Group as others had “stopped reading”; “couldn’t get passed the beginning”; “didn’t like it”; “returned the book” and weren’t at our meeting. My response to reading “Sparrow” was similar. I was embarrassed, repelled. But I didn’t anticipate such visceral distaste for the book from all at Book Group.
I’d been a lone voice disliking descriptions of sexual violence in “Snow Crash” and in my intense disgust at “His Bloody Project” glorying in femicide. But here, we were at one against James Hynes, seeing his writing too violent, too cruel. Why this author, this book when we’d all appreciated JM Coetzee writing in “Disgrace”? Is it Hynes deceit, his conceit, in placing a “really dirty book”, “obscene, offensive”, within the cover of an historical novel?
We were angry; “There was a good story to it, a better writer could have done better”.
We were annoyed with Hynes “he could have told the story without that” [rape of a child, buggery, fellatio, violence].
I wonder at the intention of the author. Is he aroused writing, describing debauched sex acts, imagining readers’ eyes watching over the scene?
I’m angry at Hynes inveigling us to conspire in this depravity.
No. We are not all “whores” as his character Melpomene declares. No. We do not share her opinion that “the whole world is a whorehouse”.
Who comprises Hynes’ audiences: pederasts, prurient, sadists?
My preferred setting for a story of the slave in the Roman Empire would be in households of Galen, Pliny-the-Elder, or Dioscorides. Why? I have an interest in healing, the natural world, materia medica. I’m not interested in the setting of a tavern and brothel, even with a garden “where chickens jerk their heads this way and that among the drooping leaves of heat-wearied plants.”
I am weary of sexual violence in story, particularly the tropes of violence against women and children. And I worry that stories, such as “Sparrow”, are corrupting, ethically dangerous, and continue the violence. Pornographos wrapped as historical fiction diminishes us all.