Swastika Night #1937club

Written by Katharine Burdekin, but published under the male pseudonym Murray Constantine, Swastika Night has got to be one of the earliest “what if the Nazis won?” novels, given that it was published before Britain even entered the war. Constantine takes a long, and a dim, view: seven hundred years (!) later, the Nazi Empire rules half the world, while the Japanese have the rest. As one character explains, there are two ways to maintain an empire of this size: assimilate all your subject peoples (à la Rome), or stratify your society ruthlessly. The latter is the choice these Nazis have made: Germans are better than any other nationality, Knights (a hereditary priestly and administrative class) are better than any other Germans, Christians are tolerated only in their own ghettos, Jews (of course) don’t exist, and women–all women–are subhuman. Literacy is permitted only for men whose work absolutely requires it. Even then, there’s nothing to read except for technical manuals and the “Hitler Bible”. State religion is based on the worship of Adolf Hitler–always represented in statuary as a seven-foot muscular Aryan Übermensch–as God incarnate.

Into this established world comes Alfred Alfredson, an English man on pilgrimage to the holy sites of Germany. I like that Constantine is vague but evocative about what these actually are; we hear mention of Munich as the Holy City containing some relic known as the Sacred Aeroplane, and other sites known as the Holy Forest and Holy Mountain, but there’s no exploration of what events they memorialise, and that’s preferable. We can fill in the blanks from the names alone. Alfred is friends with a German Nazi agricultural labourer named Hermann, who previously spent time in England. Hermann beats a teenage German boy to death for attempting to rape a Christian girl (not because rape is a crime, although there are rules about attacking the underage, but because intercourse with a Christian should be repulsive for a German). This brings both men to the attention of the local Knight, von Hess, who immediately sees something trustworthy in Alfred (why? Unclear) and entrusts him with a great and terrible secret: an authentic photo of Hitler which gives the lie to his portrayal in German culture, and a handwritten book that memorialises the lost civilisation, history, and culture of the pre-Nazi world.

Swastika Night pre-dates Nineteen Eighty Four, but clearly influenced it. In particular , the many arguments between Alfred and von Hess seem to pre-figure the excerpts from Goldstein’s work and the conversations between Winston Smith and O’Brien in the latter. Similarly, both books suffer from an excess of argumentation, although Orwell’s book is technically better, and more famous, because it manages its philosophical content somewhat better. What Constantine is good at is imagining the deleterious, indeed self-destructive, traits of a fascist empire. The focus on violence and bloodshed, and the utter denigration of the female, is going to wreck the Nazi Empire within a few decades, von Hess guesses. There finally isn’t a war on anymore, which is one problem. And there aren’t enough boys being born, which is another. The women, somehow, subconsciously, are producing more and more girls.

It’s a really interesting, and horrifying, idea and premise. The biggest issue is that I don’t buy it. Not that I don’t buy gross misogyny and the fetishization of violence, but I don’t buy that every trace of pre-Nazi culture could be destroyed. I simply don’t. Von Hess claims it took about a hunded years and cost a fortune, but it was done; obviously this was an analogue world, not a digital one, but even so I don’t buy it. Alfred belongs to a resistance group (bafflingly only mentioned once); if such a thing, even toothless, exists after 700 years of Nazism, I simply don’t believe that organised underground preservation of cultural material wouldn’t have happened. From that, all else falls down too: men are indeed capable of hating and demeaning women to this extent, and internalised misogyny is also a thing, but Constantine seems to argue that the global population of women acquiesced pretty readily in their Reduction (it’s capitalised), and again, I don’t buy it. Not in the 1930s, not in the 2630s. Not all women, all at once, everywhere. It gives far too much weight to a desire to conform, not nearly enough to the possession of individual mind.

It’s still totally fascinating as a document from 1937, though–who else realised this early what the stakes might be? Apart from Eric Ambler in Epitaph for a Spy, perhaps.

Read for Kaggsy and Simon’s 1937 Club!

Faust, by Ivan Turgenev

Faust, by Ivan Turgenev (1855), transl. Hugh Aplin (2003).

Previous Turgenev experience: I’ve read quite a lot of Turgenev’s major work over the last two years: Fathers and Sons, Sketches from a Hunter’s Album, Home of the Gentry, Rudin and Smoke in 2022, and On the Eve in 2023.

I have read enough Turgenev at this point to be able to identify that the man has a pattern. Many of his books are said to be about “superfluous men”, or those caught in the cultural transition from tsarist feudalism to a more Westernised, modern-looking society. (This is all pre-Bolsheviks, of course; the tension was there through most of the century preceding the Revolution.) They’re also about men who fall in love with women they can’t have–usually because those women are married, not interested, or both–and often they’re women whom these men knew as children or adolescents before encountering them again as adults. In all of the romantic relationships in Turgenev’s fiction there seems to be this deep-rooted longing to recover lost innocence.

Faust follows this pattern to a certain extent. An epistolary novella, it’s told entirely through one side of a correspondence: the letters of a man in his mid-thirties named Pavel to his friend Semyon. (Pavel’s age is inconsistent within the text; pegging it to the age of his love interest, Vera, he appears to be about six years older, but then he’s described as both thirty-five and thirty-eight while she seems to be about twenty-nine. He also makes several mentions of being “nearly forty”, which might just be an indication of a neurotic character. Thirty-five isn’t nearly forty; even thirty-eight is, I would say, more observing forty ahead of you on the road than nearly there.) Anyway, Pavel has come back to his old family dacha for a bit of a holiday and soon realises that there’s a family living nearby: Priyimkov, his wife Vera, and small daughter Lydia. Vera, it turns out, is known to Pavel: he met her years ago through friends–when she was sixteen and he in his early twenties–and wanted to marry her, but her mother, a peculiar woman with Italian heritage who forbade her daughter from ever reading fiction or poetry, discouraged the match and Pavel moved away shortly thereafter.

The novella is about the annihilating power of fiction. Befriending the Priyimkovs, Pavel finds that Vera has still never read a line of poetry. Determined to introduce her to the world of beauty in literature, he arranges a dramatic reading of Part 1 of Goethe’s Faust. Priyimkov is polite but unmoved by the experience, but it changes Vera permanently. She doesn’t go into immediate raptures, but after the reading, she moves outside, out of the summer house into the night air. It’s as though she doesn’t have words for what’s happened to her. Indeed, she doesn’t: her reading has been strictly factual until now and she genuinely can’t articulate what the poetry has achieved. But she feels it. This might have been my favourite part of the novella: the moment when some completely new experience of art crashes into a person. Obviously it can’t end well.

Goethe’s Faust is a very loaded work. The Doctor Faustus story is powerful in the Western imagination: selling your soul to an eternity of torment for the chance of ultimate knowledge, wealth and fulfilled desire here on earth. It’s odd to use it as a writer of fiction, in a story about the power of fiction. Are we to assume that Vera is damned? She thinks she is: falling in love with Pavel and agreeing to meet him secretly, she sees what she thinks is the ghost of her disapproving mother on the way to the rendezvous, falls ill (as women seem able to do on a dime in the novels of the past), and dies several days later. If forbidden love is sin and dam nation, is fiction then Vera’s Mephistopheles? And the role of her mother in all of this: is she the condemnation of society at large, in which case we should view her appearance as providential, a way of saving her daughter from sexual transgression through the much-to-be-preferred death? Or is she something else, something crueller and colder, a vengeful, abusive parent whose control extends beyond the grave (even if only in hallucination)? Or, possibly, a third option, in which Vera’s mother does represent society’s opinion and yet should be viewed with horror all the same?

Vera’s death makes everything about Faust darker, even if Turgenev only meant to write a fable-like tale. Whether the ghost is “real” or not seems to me beside the point: the weight of terror at what will happen if a woman crosses a line–reads poetry, falls for someone not our husband, feels something–is enough to kill. In that sense, Faust feels like a horror novella, in the way so many nineteenth-century fictions do: the stakes are very high in a stratified world, and the game is rigged from the start.

This is the fourth book in my 2024 B-Sides reading project, an attempt to explore the lesser works of authors whose “big” or “famous” books I’ve already read.

Holiday reading plans

Next week we’re flying to Virginia for a thirteen-day visit to see my parents (and my brother and his girlfriend, who are traveling down from New York to join us partway through), and to attend my old school friend Matt’s wedding. April in Virginia is much more reliably warm than April in London—temperatures will be between 21 and 30 Celsius, as opposed to about 10-19 Celsius here—but they’re also getting a lot of intermittent rain, so who knows. I’m packing a lot of sundresses, a pair of slip-on Vans and some sandals, and hoping for the best (where “the best” includes “the option to borrow cardigans and hiking boots from my parents’ wardrobes if necessary”). My partner M, meanwhile, is so thrilled about attending a Southern spring wedding that he’s been on a linen-clothing spree on Vinted and will, I think, spend the entire fortnight clad in it.

The pressing question is always what books to bring. The plane journey is about eight hours and we’ll spend at least four traveling to and waiting in the airport, in either direction. My folks have well-stocked shelves of their own while I’m there, although there’s always less time to read than I imagine there will be, given how rarely we’re together as a family and the high premium placed on quality time. So, for the first time, I’m doing something rather bold (for me): I’m taking my Kindle, and that’s it.

It’s both not as extreme as it sounds, and pretty extreme. I have a big enough pile of unread Kindle books to last me a holiday twice as long, and there’s enough variety in them that I’ll probably be able to find something that fits my mood no matter what that mood is. (My usual strategy is to work backwards from the longest-owned unread, which at this point is either Dorothy Dunnett’s The Game of Kings, a 500+-page historical novel about a falsely accused, rogueish nobleman in 16th-century Scotland, or Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, a slip-streamy feminist sff time-travel novel that also deals with mental health and the ideal society.) There are at least three Netgalley PDFs for May on deck. I’ve also managed to locate a free PDF copy of the book I want to read and review for the #1937club (which is probably also an illegal version, but it was right there and consists of a manual scan, so at least AI and/or OCR hasn’t been involved in creating it), which is Kindle-compatible. I’ll also have my phone, which is where I read library-issued ebooks, and happen to have just borrowed Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast, a 19th-century seafarer’s memoir which is referenced in the nonfiction book I just read.

In addition, I know what I’m like, I know where my favourite bookshops in Charlottesville are, and I know I’ll visit them. (New Dominion Bookshop—where I had my first job!—on the Downtown Mall; Daedalus Books, a towering house containing three floors of secondhand paperbacks, on 4th Street; Heartwood Books, my mum’s old grad school haunt and purveyor of secondhand titles to the population of the University of Virginia for nearly fifty years, on Elliewood Avenue.) One purchase per shop is probably too much restraint to hope for. Last time we were there, I held out for a week, then bought two titles at New Dominion and six from Heartwood on the same day.

But, but… it’s going to feel so weird embarking on a long trip with nothing more than (what feels like) a slim paperback in hand! It’ll free up luggage space, of course, and it’s certainly the most efficient way to carry multiple books at once, and I shan’t be spoiled for choice, but… the psychology of it all! So much safer to carry on a hard copy of Wives and Daughters or Kristin Lavransdatter and know for sure that you’re set, isn’t it? Or not. Maybe it’ll make no difference. Maybe I’ll become an evangelist for travel e-reading, despite Am*zon’s appalling business practices. (The Kindle was a present, I didn’t buy it, and now I have it, it’d be daft not to use it—is how I justify it to myself.)

How do you feel about traveling with books? Do you have strategies? Is the Kindle (or equivalent e-reader) the way to go?

Mummies and Daddies: Soldier Sailor, by Claire Kilroy and May We Be Forgiven, by A.M. Homes

Soldier Sailor, by Claire Kilroy (2023): I tend to avoid novels about early motherhood because the demythologising impulse seems to have swung wildly into the red zone. They are generally cautionary tales about how much having a baby sucks; how infants and small children ruin your marriage, friendships, body, sense of self, the fabric of reality. This is both unencouraging, even to a reader who is unlikely to have her own children, and almost certainly not representative. People do keep having kids, after all, so there must be some sort of positive element to the whole experience, though from the “raw” and “unflinching” accounts of the last ten years-ish, you’d never know it. Soldier Sailor is not one of this category—despite an opening chapter in which it appears to be settling in as a very well-executed example of a subgenre of the early-motherhood novel, in which the thing that sucks isn’t having a baby per se, but having a baby with a straight man. It’s the cracks in our protagonist’s marriage that are the source of agony here, the recognition that, despite having believed she was in an equal partnership, the statistical realities of parenting relegate her to being “just a woman”. The baby screams and cries and gets sick aplenty, but it’s never the baby she hates. It’s the husband. And rightly so. There’s a thirty-page section where the baby is teething and vomiting at three a.m. and the husband’s sole contribution is to complain that he has a big day at work tomorrow and slam the bedroom door shut. For some reason they don’t get divorced by the end of the novel (she asks him to leave for a period of some months, but they reconcile off-page), which is my major complaint about the plot. Girl, leave his ass. Going it alone would be easier.

Anyway, the thing is, it’s still a really good novel. That’s partly because it’s funny: babies and toddlers are absurd and Kilroy captures that well. Her protagonist, like so many protagonists in these novels, is unnamed, but feels like a person with a personality, specific and individual memories and reactions, values and priorities. The moment I knew I’d have to give Soldier Sailor my full attention was an account of the mother’s near-suicide on a Good Friday (read, in a moment of book serendipity, on Good Friday!) Her return to reality—the end of her psychotic break and the recognition that life needs her in it—is so transcendently beautiful and terrible, a moment in a forest that includes a dying hatchling bird, a stumble that leads to a full-length sprawl in briars, and an almost supernatural alertness to the sound of her baby crying, left swaddled in a pretty blanket (so that he’ll know she loved him) far away on the cliff path. The whole scene feels all the scarier and more mystical for having the ring of actual personal experience. I appreciate, too, that the mother is vocal about her affection for her child, even if she finds caring for him frustrating: “Loving you was always the easiest part,” she writes. Soldier Sailor is a really powerful little book, with more than a hint of Sarah Moss in its tart tenderness; if it won the Women’s Prize this year, that would be just fine.

May We Be Forgiven, by AM Homes (2012): This Women’s Prize winner—one of the few left over that I hadn’t read—starts off violent, surreal and comedic, and continues in that vein for 480 pages. Self-effacing Nixon scholar Harold Silver is at a family Thanksgiving, at which his bombastic and aggressive brother George is holding court. Helping to clear the table and organise the leftovers, he finds himself being kissed by his sister-in-law, Jane. Almost immediately afterwards, George kills two people in a car accident that may not have really been an accident, as such. In the aftermath, while George is being psychiatrically evaluated, Harold and Jane begin an affair, but George manages to escape the hospital, returns home, and bludgeons his wife so brutally with a lamp that she dies a week later. With criminal charges pending against his brother, his sister-in-law dead, and his high-flying corporate wife divorcing him in disgust, Harold finds himself in charge of his niece and nephew, pre-teens Nate and Ashley; the family home in Westchester, New York; an elderly dog named Tessie and a soon-pregnant cat; and all of the finances.

Nothing about this book is particularly realistic, let’s be clear on that. The children speak and behave like teenagers (leading to a pretty uncomfortable plot point which we’d now call child sexual abuse—not by Harold, though; he’s a genuinely good guy). The number of women who want to have sex with this middle-aged, slightly schlubby professor is wildly implausible. Health crises abound; conversational misunderstandings happen with the regularity of an Adrian Mole book. There’s some really unfortunate weird racial stuff, including a bit of a fixation on Chinese people and what I can only call a “magical Negro” situation. Homes controls it all with tone: Harold is wry, detached, almost permanently bewildered, and clearly pretty deeply traumatised. My read on the surrealism is that it represents what it actually feels like to have your life totally spin out of control. New love, bereavement, life-threatening illness, a family member doing something unspeakably terrible: these things shake up a life like a snowglobe. It does feel absurd. You do find yourself attending a swinger’s party at a mall laser tag place with an almost-stranger (or, you know, some version thereof) and thinking, What the fuck am I doing here?

And despite the nudist-laser-tag interlude, what Harold is doing the most—what he finds himself doing—is parenting. I would say “fatherhood” or “fathering”, but actually, a huge amount of Harold’s work in taking care of his household is gendered as female labour (foreshadowed from page one, as he and Jane tidy the table around his bloviating brother and disengaged wife): going to parents’ day at school, doing laundry, sorting out permission forms and passports for holidays, providing meals, making arrangements for the pets. George, whom we meet several times during the novel, is so toxically masculine it’s a pleasure to get away from him; Harold, by contrast, settles into George’s place in the children’s lives with a gentler touch and a sense of true, weighty responsibility. The novel spans a year, and by its end, there is a family structure back in place: adult, children, even an older generation (though I won’t spoil how this comes about) and an infant one (in the form of the cat’s kittens). Some may find the ending too sickly-sweet, and the book is certainly too long by at least a hundred pages. But I really enjoyed the process by which trauma and tragedy open up a new life and the possibility of fulfilling a paternal role for a man who never thought he deserved such things. May We Be Forgiven is a wild ride, and I can’t imagine it winning the Women’s Prize now, but I’m glad that once upon a time, the world liked a wild ride enough to reward it.

March 2024: superlatives

March was a good reading month, with fifteen books finished. Seven of those came from the library; I wrote about two (by AS Byatt) here and rounded up most of the rest here. This month’s B-Sides Project read was Elizabeth Gaskell’s fascinating and curiosity-inducing tale of fallen womanhood, Ruth. Everything else is covered below (and note: I’m going to start listing, when possible, where the non-library books I read come from).

most grown-up-ly melancholy: A Game of Hide and Seek, by Elizabeth Taylor (1951). The longest-owned unread book on my Kindle, a small pile at which I’m carefully chipping away. You know, there’s a lot of love in the blogosphere for Elizabeth Taylor, and I agree that her work is very polished and subtle and skillful. I’m not sure she’s really for me, though. The fringes and edges of passion always seem too neatly tucked under, in her novels. A Game of Hide and Seek is the second novel of hers that I’ve read (after the underwhelming, Spark-ian Angel a few years back). Its story of two adults who fell in love as teenagers and come back together in middle age, when one is already married and the other engaged in a not-terribly-successful acting career, while deeply melancholy, also struck me as a bit… I don’t know, limp. Taylor keeps taking the focus off of that central couple, Harriet and Vesey, to look at Harriet’s friend Kitty in her appalling marriage, or Harriet’s daughter Betsy’s crush on her schoolteacher, Miss Bell. These are brilliant bits in their own right, but I couldn’t help thinking I’d rather read individual novels about all of those people. Harriet and Vesey are both a bit too opaque for me to care much about them.

springiest book: A City of Bells, by Elizabeth Goudge (1936). Taken from my grandmother’s bookshelves when she moved into sheltered housing last year. The plot spans a year, but this has got to be one of the most spring-like books, in its effect, of any I’ve ever read. It deals with the rehabilitation of injured Boer War veteran Jocelyn Irvin, who retreats to the cathedral city of Torminster to live with his grandfather (a kindly canon), his grandmother (rather stricter), and his two young cousins-ish. It also deals with the cousins themselves, specifically the girl, Henrietta, who is adopted, and whose appreciation for beauty and meaning is slightly preternatural—Goudge never makes her affected, though, and her rumbunctious adopted brother Hugh Anthony is a nice counterweight to her ethereality. Goudge writes children well, with that particular mix of innocence, curiosity, willfulness and perspicacity displayed by many bright kids growing up in adult-heavy environments. Jocelyn’s growth is contrasted with that of Gabriel Ferranti, an obscure poet who has recently left Torminster under a cloud of depression; the emotional healing and ultimate fates of the two men are intertwined. Goudge was a Christian writer, and there’s plenty of God in this, but in a way that seems to me about as sensible, practical and compassionate as any theological fiction can get. And there’s so much evocative writing about an English country cathedral town in good weather! Think The Secret Garden for grownups.

best portrait of an era: W-3, by Bette Howland (1974). Kindly sent in a parcel of proof copies by Rebecca! A short memoir of a few months Howland spent in a psychiatric ward after attempting suicide at the age of thirty-one, this is much less a personal excavation—as the introduction by Yiyun Li notes, Howland is barely present in her own retelling—and much more a kind of encyclopaedic guide or handbook to the denizens of the ward. Both men and women live there, which surprised me slightly, and the treatment strategy of heavily medicating the inmates while also failing to even mildly chastise them for doing things like standing on the dinner table and revealing their bare buttocks to other patients feels extremely of its time. In fact, most of W-3 feels like this, a portrait of a world that was at least as terrifying outside the ward as inside: rape is a fact of life for most of the women, children and vulnerable young adults are given no special consideration, let alone a call to social services, and physically disabled patients are trapped in wheelchairs with all the manoeuvrability of a small moon, in environments that no one even contemplates attempting to make “accessible”. Howland was very observant, and she survived, but I didn’t really enjoy reading this, not so much because her descriptions of mad people are disturbing (though they are) but because of the sense that the real madhouse was Chicago in the ’70s, and there was no getting out of that.

most oddly resistant: Operation Heartbreak, by Duff Cooper (1950). Found on the free bookshelves of our local train station. This is a very, very short little novel which speculates on the identity of the man whose corpse was used in the real-life British counterintelligence op, Operation Mincemeat. (The identity of the body has never been disclosed.) Cooper suggests that he was a military man, lacking blood relations and dead of pneumonia, whose ambition far outstripped his competence, and whose love of old British imperial culture was both naively touching and under threat from the rise of modern warfare—indeed, the modern world in general. Willie Maryngton is at least as deeply and painfully a man out of time as is Christopher Tietjens in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End. The issue with the book is that, because the reader knows perfectly well where this is all going, it can be hard to summon up the interest in getting there. Operation Heartbreak almost reads like a fable, a moral tale, or a tragic joke: everything aims at the punchline, and although Cooper is certainly a competent novelist, that single focus dilutes the characterisation and plot developments that he manages.

most unfairly missed out of a #LoveYourLibrary post: The Sentence, by Louise Erdrich (2021). A library borrow that should have been included in March’s roundup, but I didn’t quite finish it in time for the Monday deadline! There’s a lot going on in this novel, and I mean a lot: Covid-19, a bookshop-based haunting, Indigenous American identity and faith rituals, incarceration and police violence, the murder of George Floyd and subsequent worldwide demonstrations, PTSD and childhood trauma… that’s really just for starters. I’d love to say it all hangs together, but I’m not even sure that it does (did we need an inconclusive digression on whether the protagonist’s stepdaughter’s baby-daddy is a werewolf?) And yet I loved it. Mostly that’s because of the voice of the protagonist, Tookie. Incarcerated after a misunderstanding involving transporting a drug-holding dead body across state lines, she’s out after ten years and has married the tribal police officer who arrested her. She works in a thinly fictionalised version of Erdrich’s own bookshop in Minneapolis (Birchbark Books), and as the novel opens, she thinks she’s being haunted by the shop’s recently deceased most irritating customer—Flora, a white woman who persisted in claiming Indigenous identity despite a truly overwhelming lack of evidence.

There’s a core story in here. It’s to do with the ways in which Tookie and Flora are connected, rather against Tookie’s will, and the ways in which Tookie’s mother failed her. It’s also to do with her complex resentments stemming from her arrest, the traumas she endured in prison (beatings and restraints at the very least), and the very gnarly feelings raised by the fact of her marriage to an ex-tribal cop as an ex-con during the year that Minneapolis revolted against police brutality. It’s a little frustrating that these beats are half-hidden, like buried Coke bottles poking out of the earth, by the proliferation of characters and subplots, but we get such riches from that proliferation too: stepdaughter Hetta and baby step-grandson Jarvis, brilliant young coworkers Asema and Pen, sensible manager Jackie, even Louise Erdrich herself (who at one point, endearingly, appears clearing mouse shit out from under her sink while muttering “fuckity fuck fuck fuck”). I love reading about behind-the-scenes work, and Tookie’s experience of bookselling during the pandemic is one I’m uniquely placed to assess (it rings a hundred percent true, apart from the fact that our customers got very cranky about shipping delays and hers don’t seem to). The Sentence is also a love letter to the Minneapolis community that pulled together in the terrible summer of 2020, with real local characters affectionately name-checked. Tookie feels real in her very lack of focus and inconsistencies; she’s funny, pissy, occasionally childish, a lot battered and bruised by life but never totally down. This is not a perfect book, but it is a wonderful one, and it would have been a better choice for Women’s Prize winner in 2022.

baggiest: Shuggie Bain, by Douglas Stuart (2020). Kindly sent in a parcel of proof copies by Rebecca! This might have lost out in this category to The Children’s Book by AS Byatt, had I not already reviewed that one. Shuggie Bain is, of course, sad: as everyone and their cat knows by now, it is about a young boy growing up gay in 1980s Glasgow and trying to keep his alcoholic mother alive. Stuart conveys the sheer emotional brutality of the place and time, and its brief, piercing joys (a household chocolate binge; a shared toy that looks pretty and smells nice; a single day of sunshine) really well. But the problem with writing a novel about an alcoholic is that alcoholics are relentlessly, ruthlessly boring. Addiction is repetitive and dreary. Some authors deal with this by creating a heightened sense of an individual’s reality: Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano comes to mind. Stuart chooses a more straightforward style, but that makes the book too long for the quantity of event it actually contains. It might be better to think of it as creative nonfiction, really, or fictionalised memoir (Stuart has been open about Agnes Bain’s resemblance to his own mother). It’s a genuinely affecting book, but on pure technical merit, I’m surprised it won the Booker against Brandon Taylor’s Real Life.

most outside of my comfort zone: Deadly Autumn Harvest, by Tony Mott, transl. Marina Sofia (2023). Received as part of a kind proof copy pile from Corylus Books! I’m not usually one for police procedurals, and this was very procedure-heavy, with a lot of wheel-spinning until the protagonist makes a leap-of-deduction three-quarters of the way through (for a reason that we don’t actually learn until after she’s explained her revelation). I’m glad I read something so outside of my usual fare, though, for variety’s sake. Plus, Mott is good on the sexism and machismo that still exists in Romanian culture, where even a badass forensic behavioural analyst has to deal with her boss also being an ex-boyfriend who literally stalked her in a previous (as-yet-untranslated) installment of the series.

---

Happy Easter! Tell me what you’ve read this March, or if any of my March reads speak to you.

#LoveYourLibrary, March 2024

Hosted, as always, by Rebecca at Bookish Beck, posting on the last Monday of every month. There’s no set formula to this; you can post anything about libraries, whether you’ve recently been to an event at one, heard about an initiative at one, whatever! I use it for rundowns of my monthly library reading. Join in on your social media space of choice using #LoveYourLibrary.

March has been a great library month, in comparison to a slightly lean month in February. As well as two of AS Byatt’s books, which I wrote about separately here, I finished (in a frenzy) a series that I’d been slowly meandering through since early 2020, tried out a classic of a genre I don’t usually read, and found the best read of the year so far (and certainly the most disturbing and long-lasting in memory.) Full details below.

Devil in a Blue Dress, by Walter Mosley (1990): Voice and atmosphere are perfect in this neo-noir, 1940s-L.A.-set crime novel featuring Black WWII veteran Easy Rawlins, who takes a commission to find a white girl who likes frequenting jazz bars and almost immediately regrets it. Mosley is terrific at voice: Easy feels real and contextualised right from the start. His experiences with the racism and unaccountability of L.A. cops are particularly well portrayed. As often seems to happen with novels of this kind, though, I really struggled to keep the plot clear in my head. Lots of different characters are introduced for fairly brief appearances, they’re all connected in one way or another, but oddly, there doesn’t seem to be enough page time for each link in the chain to bed in (to mix a metaphor) before the next event takes place. Maybe this is to do with historic publishing constraints—genre novels were still short by definition in the ’90s. Does anyone know if Mosley’s plots get more convincing as the Easy Rawlins series progresses?

Persepolis Rising, by James S.A. Corey (2017): Yessss! This is what I’ve been hoping the series will do for the past few books: stop mucking around with low-stakes internecine strife and get back to the protomolecule. Or, rather, render the internecine strife high-stakes by bringing the protomolecule into the frame again. Which is exactly what happens here. Some other changes give the series a much needed shake-up: for one thing, our primary cast are all about thirty years older. (They do not, in my opinion, think or act much like people in their mid-sixties, but it’s the future, I can accept that ageing might change.) The Martian Naval breakaway colony, Laconia, that constituted an almost throwaway plot point in an earlier book, is back with a bang as a would-be fascist space empire with astronomically accelerated tech—a much more convincing and menacing enemy than Marco Inaros and the Free Navy, one whose existence alone creates major changes to human society’s structures. After four intermediary books (everything post-Caliban’s War, with the possible exception of Nemesis Games) that felt like the series was “on the float”, it’s satisfying that the engines have kicked in again. Oh, and nice to know that Elvi Okoye, the exobiologist from the otherwise-inessential Cibola Burn, is going to have something to do in the next installment.

Penance, by Eliza Clark (2023): Wow. Here it is, then: the best book I’ve read so far this year. The story of a teenage girl’s gruesome murder by three of her schoolmates, on the night of the Brexit vote, in a decaying North Yorkshire seaside town, it uses the generic devices of true-crime writing and the metatextual frame of a slightly sketchy true-crime writer, Alec Z. Carelli, whose comeback book this is supposed to be. (No review I’ve read has yet commented on the anagrammatic relationship of “Alec Z. Carelli” to “Eliza Clark”, which means either it’s much too obvious to be mentioned, or no one else has noticed. For what it’s worth, I think it’s a clever way for Clark to self-implicate in the moral dubiousness of creating and consuming the genre—even though it’s not really an example of the genre, since this is a novel and this crime never took place.)

Games about what’s “true” or not aside (and the whole point of the final section, a pastiche Guardian interview with Carelli, is that we can never cast aside the games about what is true), Penance is incredibly well written. As Laura’s review says, better than I can, teenage girls are often poorly served in fiction, but Clark presents these teenagers as people, not symbols or archetypes. Their obsessions with serial killers and school shooters, nerdy or uncool Tumblr fandoms, urban legend horror stories and local folklore, are presented by Carelli as the soil in which their capacity to murder grew, and the way Clark (keep up!) depicts the verbal dynamics of mid-2010s texting, Reddit forums, and Tumblr posts is brilliant, better than any I’ve seen. But Clark carefully seeds other possibilities, more rooted in “IRL” concerns: primary-school-era grievances, histories of sexual abuse and neglect, loneliness, jealousy, a need for control. Plenty of teenagers are active in weird online communities and don’t kill anyone; often those communities serve as refuges from what’s going on in the physical world. That’s the world we should be looking at to answer the question “why would anyone commit such a horrific crime?” Brilliant, dark, disturbing, sad, and recursively interrogative about the consequences of telling a story like itself, Penance is an easy entry on my books of the year list.

Tiamat’s Wrath, by James SA Corey (2020) [spoilers follow]: More yessss! As this penultimate volume of The Expanse opens, James Holden is a political prisoner in Laconia, Naomi Nagata is helping to orchestrate the strategy of the galactic underground, Amos Burton has gone dark after taking on an extremely dangerous infiltration mission, and Alex Kamal and Bobbie Draper are serving as underground strike force pilot and captain, respectively. The gang does feel older now (and there’s some mention of anti-ageing treatments that explains a little about their relative physical good health). Two other point-of-view characters take us further into Laconia’s power structure: Teresa Duarte, teenage daughter of High Consul/dictator Winston, and Elvi Okoye, the exobiologist now at the heart of Laconia’s attempts to demystify the protomolecule, its creators, and whatever killed them. Teresa’s chapters are excellent, showing us how her understanding of her very limited and contingent freedom progresses from childhood naivety to appalled disillusionment. Elvi’s work is going to be the answer to the end of this series, so of course I was happy to have her back again. And—the narrative choice to take Winston Duarte off the board? Absolute genius move. Utterly horrifying in its execution. I got the final book out of the library the minute I finished this.

Leviathan Falls, by James S.A. Corey (2021): Great ending to the series. Sad, but totally correct. All the character work has been leading up to this, and it doesn’t surprise when it comes, though it is very moving. (Also, people in books don’t say “I love you” to their loved ones when they part nearly enough, and Leviathan Falls is no exception.) Corey also preserve(s) enough enigma about the nature of the dark gods to make them feel satisfyingly vast and unknowable right to the end, which is a good choice. I’m mildly bereft to have finished these deeply immersive novels—happily, there are at least two collections of Expanse-set short stories to explore.

---

Have you picked up anything from your local library this month?

Ruth, by Elizabeth Gaskell

Ruth, by Elizabeth Gaskell (1853). ~~The usual caveats apply regarding the impossibility of “spoiling” a book of nearly two hundred years’ standing with its own Wikipedia page, and the presence of plot details in the following.~~

Previous Gaskell experience: I read Cranford in 2009 as a high school senior, North and South ten years later (terrific; Pride and Prejudice with socialists), and Wives and Daughters a few months after that, on a plane to America (I remember virtually nothing of it apart from liking it, which is a shame; I should read it again).

Here, in brief, is the plot of Ruth. Ruth Hilton, the child of a country cleric, is orphaned in her early teens and sent—by an executor of her father’s will chosen for his standing in the neighbourhood, but who has never met her—to be apprenticed to a dressmaker in the nearest town. While there, she meets and forms a slightly inappropriate friendship with a wealthy young man named Mr. Bellingham. Her employer turns her out upon discovering the friendship, and Bellingham easily prevails upon her—fifteen years old, naive, terrified and alone in the world—to come to London with him, where she becomes his mistress, and pregnant. A holiday in Wales ends badly when Bellingham falls ill and is swept away by his deeply unsympathetic mother. Ruth, left alone again, still pregnant, and now suicidal, is picked up by a kindhearted, hunch-backed Dissenting minister, Thurstan Benson, who is there on holiday. She comes to live with him and his spinster sister Faith, delivers her child (a boy), and—pretending, with the Bensons’ help, that she is a widow—becomes involved in the life of their town, Eccleston, even becoming nursery-governess to the young daughters of a pompous local businessman, Mr. Bradshaw. The truth emerges and she is ostracised, but her dedication to penitence, mildness, and self-sacrifice wins out: she is the only person willing to work as a nurse during a brutal typhus outbreak, and the town recognises how much they owe her. Discovering that Mr. Bellingham (who, under a different name, has been elected MP for Eccleston) has also fallen ill, she insists that her duty is to nurse him too, after which she is infected with typhus and dies within days.

It is a tragedy, and the bare enumeration of the plot can make it seem melodramatic and quintessentially Victorian. As I read, though, I was struck again and again by what (mostly) rescues it from being these things. One is the absolute sincerity—clearly deeply grounded in personal faith—with which Gaskell writes about religious faith as a form of salvation and delineates the hypocrisy of society at large. The other is the strong resemblance Ruth bears to a much older narrative form: the sentimental penitent-prostitute narrative.

Let’s work backwards. Penitent-prostitute narratives are old, but they start getting really popular in the mid-eighteenth century, at the same time that charities and institutions for “rehabilitating” prostitutes are becoming a major social interest of the philanthropic class. (It should be clarified, also, that “prostitute” was a label with very broad applicability: women who had been men’s mistresses, had premarital sex but not for pay, or even just developed close friendships and been regularly alone with men, could be referred to as prostitutes.) Sentimental prostitute stories have a number of shared characteristics. The “fall” of the woman is involuntary, usually a result of extreme innocence and sudden financial need. Little time is spent on the details of living by transactional sex. Individual charity is the means by which a woman is “saved” and “redeemed” from a life of prostitution. Religious awakening and moral recovery are analogised. Finally, the process of redemption is frequently completed through the death of the penitent fallen woman.[1]

How does Ruth stack up? An involuntary fall: check. Ruth is fifteen, terrified at the imminent loss of her livelihood, and has nowhere else to go. Extreme innocence and financial need: check. Orphaned and jobless, she also has so little understanding of the world, and of money, that an opportunity to flee the inn where Mr. Bellingham has told her to wait for him disappears because she has no cash, and fears she’ll be arrested if she leaves without paying for her tea. Skipping over the details: giant check. The reader has no firm evidence that Ruth and Bellingham have been sexually intimate until after he’s abandoned her, when her pregnancy is revealed. Individual charity as instrument of redemption: giant check. The Benson siblings take Ruth into their lives and home, while the only mention of a structural or state-administered solution is the heartless Lady Bellingham’s attempts to have Ruth placed in an institution precisely like the Magdalen House for Penitent Prostitutes. Religious awakening as the path to moral recovery: GIANT CHECK. This might be the biggest check of all. Thurstan and Faith Benson are Dissenters, Protestants who aren’t affiliated with the Church of England, and their religious convictions lead them to offer Ruth shelter. Her spiritual development is at the heart of the book: learning to disregard the cruelty of the world in the confidence that God does not love her any less, and teaching her son to live bravely in the same firm belief in his own identity as a child of God, is crucial to her processes of recovering and maturing. Redemption completed through death: you know it’s a giant check here too. Not only does Ruth die; she dies after nursing her completely unworthy seducer, winning the moral victory a decade and a half after the fact.

The question is, what is a sentimental prostitute narrative doing posing as a mainstream novel in 1853?

The height of such stories’ popularity was sometime in the last quarter of the 1700s. That’s an easy seventy-five years before Ruth is published. Most of my doctoral thesis deals with the expansion of literary representation options for women who had histories of transactional sex during this time, up to the point where, in 1825, Harriette Wilson became a bestseller by fusing the roles of top-shelf courtesan and authentic (if flippant) author. Such a fusion was barely thinkable in the 1760s and ’70s, when the stories of such womens’ lives were—if written at all—written by men, not the women themselves, and certainly not considered major mainstream publishing events. But by 1825, the situation has changed. So what changed—again—between 1825 and 1853? What brought the zeitgeist full circle in a century, so that open sexual transgression and open literary authority were unthinkably separate, then collided together and became, briefly, possible to combine, then separated again?

I actually do not know. But I would quite like to find out. This is, unfortunately, something of a failed review, because this question has grabbed my interest. I can tell you, however, that Ruth is worth reading. With far greater depth of character and variety of expression than its generic predecessors, it’s a genuinely gripping read: what will become of our beleaguered heroine, and how will her strange passivity win out in the end? You might find Ruth an occasionally irritating protagonist—at times, I was frustrated by her portrayal as a paragon of virtue in every way, save for one teenaged mistake—but I don’t think you can find her a hypocritical one. Her personal moral code is sincere; Gaskell lets us watch her grow and become more of who she really is over the years, and she really is this quiet, kind, unassuming person. You couldn’t ask for a more polar opposite to, e.g., Lizzie Eustace, and although Ruth dies and Lizzie lives, Gaskell’s point is the one made in the Beatitudes: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”

---

[1] See, for instance, Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Mary Peace, “The Magdalen Hospital and the Fortunes of Whiggish Sentimentality in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain: ‘Well-Grounded’ Exemplarity vs. ‘Romantic’ Exceptionality”, in The Eighteenth Century 48:2 (Summer 2007); Jennie Batchelor, “‘Industry in Distress’: Reconfiguring Femininity and Labor in the Magdalen House”, in Eighteenth-Century Life 28:1 (2004); and D. Bruce Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England (Oxford: OUP, 2005).

---

This is the third book in my 2024 B-Sides reading project, an attempt to explore the lesser works of authors whose “big” or “famous” books I’ve already read.

Oh, By(att) and By(att)

“Making up joke post titles is half the fun!” I scream, as the Taste Police drag me towards the door in the corner of the room.

Anyway. The great, and very sadly now late, AS Byatt is one of my favourite authors of all time; Possession is in my top three books. I’ve read that, her whole Frederica Quartet (The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower, and A Whistling Woman) and her creepy early novel The Game. Here are two considerations of works by her that I hadn’t yet read.

Portraits in Fiction, by AS Byatt (2001): Quite the surprise to find that my former employer is the reason for this book’s existence, as the title page says it is based on “the Heywood Hill Annual Lecture 2000, The National Portrait Gallery, London”. Given its origins, the book’s relative brevity—94 fairly generously-margined pages, plus two sections of colour plates—isn’t so surprising. I was, however, vexed by the almost entire absence of female fictioneers and female painters from Byatt’s gallery of examples: Virginia Woolf and Iris Murdoch are mentioned, but that’s our lot. (And is it unfair of me to think that Woolf and Murdoch are both representative of a style of fiction that men seem, stereotypically speaking, to be more able to tolerate from women? Fiercely clever, slightly ascetic, and not particularly interested in solidarity; women whose form of exceptionalism was to beat men at their own manly, brainy games.)

This would have thoroughly delighted me at sixteen, or even eighteen, I have no doubt, and it would serve as an introduction to ideas about art and representation for a smart teen. Unfortunately, in my cranky early thirties, I really need more. Byatt deals with so much material—dashing, in the first few pages alone, from the Darnley Portrait to The Wings of the Dove and Bronzino’s Lucretia Panciatichi to a Dürer vs. Holbein cage match—that nothing really gets its due. A reasonably long consideration of Zola’s and Balzac’s friendships with Cézanne, and their roman à clef portrayals of Impressionist painters in their novels, is probably the most extended treatment of a subject, but it still felt more like summary than analysis. It’s the sort of thing I get in trouble with my thesis supervisors for writing. Byatt was a novelist, not a professional art historian, but she was also a critic, so I wish that the strength of criticism here had been more penetrating.

The Children’s Book, by AS Byatt (2009) [some minor spoilers ahead]: This felt like a real thematic return to the interests that animated her Frederica Quartet: changing parameters of art, politics, class, and sexual mores as they manifest in individual characters’ lives over many decades. The Children’s Book is set between the 1890s and 1910s, which is a brilliant historical choice. There’s a rich gallery of social changes upon which to draw: the establishment of the Fabian Society and Theosophists, women’s suffrage, bimetallism, the Boer War, the Oscar Wilde trial that brought acknowledgment of homosexuality—and the cruelty of its criminalisation—to the fore of English public life, a thriving subculture of complex new ideas about sex, children, and family life that rivaled the 1960s for innovation and also for potential abuse. (There’s a nauseating, brilliantly rendered subplot about a genius potter, Benedict Fludd, who is sexually abusing his daughters, which reminded me a bit of Eric Gill.) Byatt’s art writing is beautiful as it always is in her fiction, much better than in her lecture: the pleasure she takes in describing colour, texture and form translates so easily to the reader.

My primary issue with The Children’s Book is that it’s both very long and very full. There are at least six main family groupings, with twenty-seven individuals in the regularly visited parent-and-child groups alone, never mind the secondary characters (tutors, professors, peripheral artistic figures). The narrative never settles on one character as a protagonist—it doesn’t necessarily need to, but with so much going on, and so much determined flitting between viewpoints, confusion is inevitable. (I wish two of the young men weren’t named Geraint and Gerald, as well.) The plot, perhaps naturally as a result of covering so many people over so many years, is incredibly baggy; there are subplots that rise and fall, recede and progress, but plot is less important than theme in The Children’s Book, and that also makes it harder for a reader to keep events and characters straight. I imagine that anyone who reads more slowly than I do (this took me three days, and is 615 pages of very close-set typeface) might lose momentum easily. Had this been published, like the Frederica books, as a quartet, or a trilogy, or even a duology, it would have been much more digestible.

Both of these titles were sourced from the public library #LoveYourLibrary

February 2024: superlatives

The shortest month of the year, but not the least busy. In life updates, I finally sent in my submission to upgrade to official PhD candidate status! We celebrated with dinner at a French bistro in a nearby village, and although it still hasn’t quite sunk in that I’ve reached this milestone—the half-way point, more or less—I’m happy that it’s now out of my hands for the moment. I read 12 books, including Bouvard and Pécuchet by Gustave Flaubert for my B-Sides project, and two novels by Téa Obreht which I wrote about separately. I also read Rowan Williams’s Passions of the Soul for a Lent book group, which I won’t write about, and I’ve already covered my February library haul, so here’s the rest.

most amoral heroine (and best reread): The Eustace Diamonds, by Anthony Trollope (1872). Re-read during a week’s sojourn in Glasgow and surrounds. It’s not original to say that Trollope’s anti-heroine, Lizzie Eustace, is reminiscent of Thackeray’s Becky Sharp—others have done so—but it’s true. The difference, I think, is that Lizzie can’t accept short-term losses for long-term gains, and Becky can. (Perhaps the real difference is a class one: Lizzie doesn’t grow up in genuine poverty, and Becky does.) Lizzie’s early, calculated marriage to a sickly lord who dies young produces a familial conflict over a magnificent diamond necklace, worth £10,000 in the 1860s (about £1.5 million in today’s money). Lizzie insists that it’s hers outright; the lawyers insist it belongs to the estate. She won’t give it up; the lawyers won’t give in. Around the central conflict swirl mercenary “friends”, MPs and Under-Secretaries, shady jewelers and dodgy gentlemen-about-town. Trollope’s books are always long, but always completely involving: he’s as much a world-builder as any sf/f writer, and far better at writing women than Dickens. If you want a new Victorian obsession, start here. My copy, the Oxford World’s Classics edition from 2011 edited by Helen Small, has two helpful appendices, explaining the Palliser novels’ internal chronology and real-world political contexts.

best war novel: Not So Quiet, by Helen Zenna Smith (1930). A novel, but drawn from the real-life diary of Winifred Young, who worked as a WWI ambulance driver in France (raising interesting questions about authorship, authenticity and marketing, but that’s for my PhD brain to think about). Smith captures brilliantly the camaraderie of women raised to be debutantes and to blush at the most elliptical reference to childbirth or sensuality, now swearing like the men and cleaning their ambulances by hand of vomit, shit, blood and pus, on an average of three hours’ sleep a night. Nor does the book shrink from supposed scandal: there’s an abortion, two lesbians outed (without it ever actually being said), and heartless premarital sex motivated by the terror of death. Bad food, bad leadership, and a total incomprehension of PTSD—there’s a terrible episode in which a driver is punished for cowardice, when she is clearly stricken with this—are somehow still less awful than knowing that, “back home”, mothers and fathers are blithely, boastfully sacrificing you to certain death, and expect you to be nothing but cheerful about “doing your bit” (a loathed phrase among all at the front). One young soldier suggests his mother would rather have his commendation for valour than actually have him. The emotions and understanding that Not So Quiet conveys are so vivid and so disturbing; I won’t forget this book in a hurry.

most iceberg-like: Nova, by Samuel R Delany (1968). All of Delany’s books are like this: surface-level fun, loads and loads of detail, ninety-six percent of it is going on under the surface. Nova is nominally about a mixed-race starship captain named Lorq Von Ray and his feud with the disabled (and incestuous?) scion of another merchant-royalty family, Prince Red, which leads Lorq to attempt flying directly through an imploding star in order to collect a super-rare material found in great quantities at its core. It might be a retelling of the Grail legend, or of Moby-Dick. There’s a strong thematic focus on tarot, the production of art, and the lifecycles of a culture’s mutual touchstones. Like the other Delany novels I’ve read, nothing much happens until about eighty percent of the way through, and the climax of the action is basically the end of the book. He’s not all that interested in plot except insofar as it provides a reason to look at characters, and he writes so shockingly, vividly well that you find yourself agreeing with him. The hard liquor of fiction: very concentrated, very intense, you can’t drink too much at once.

book I most wanted to like more than I actually did: Minor Detail, by Adania Shibli (2020). So… okay. Hmm. On the one hand: Very Important Book about the rape and murder of a Bedouin girl by Israeli troops in 1949 and the modern-day experience of a Palestinian woman who becomes obsessed with this historical event. Especially important now, for obvious reasons. There’s some pretty solid symbolism (the constant washing, the obsessive hunting and crushing of spiders) and the parallels across sections work well (a petrol smell, a curled-up garden hose, a barking dog). On the other hand: very little interiority and virtually no characterisation. Who are these people? Does this possibly-autistic modern-day narrator have parents, a family, memories? Does the murderous, rapist 1949 commander have them? Actions and behaviours don’t come out of nowhere; they’re part of a complex web of inheritance and learning that stretches back beyond our own individual births. It’s weird that Shibli’s novella completely elides these. If it’s trying to make a point, it would seem to be that atrocities happen constantly and we can only be bothered to pay attention if there’s some tiny, serendipitous hook for our awareness to snag on, and also perhaps that paying attention does little material good anyway. I don’t object to the darkness of that conclusion, per se, but I wonder if Minor Detail would have made more sense as a short story: it isn’t long anyway, only about 140 pages, but its stylised approach might have seemed less so-what-ish if further condensed.

best find: Cindie, by Jean Devanny (1949). Purchased at Heartwood Books, a Charlottesville institution, during a visit to my parents in the snowy January of 2022, and I’ve only just got round to it but it was worth the wait. This is a novel about a family trying to make it as sugar cane growers in North Queensland, Australia, in the 1890s. It primarily focuses on their maidservant, Cindie Comstock, who finds that the increased social freedoms afforded to women in pioneer country give her a sense of purpose, pride, and achievement, and who rises from a patronised and belittled lady’s maid to become the manager of the entire estate. She is a fantastic character, the book’s beating heart, whose struggles to overcome her own learned racism and determination to deal fairly with everyone are completely absorbing. There are moments at which Devanny’s explanations of Australian politics at the time become obtrusive—they could have been smoothed out into the narrative a bit better, I think—and I’m not sure how I feel about the ending (mild spoilers: why must there always be a love story), but this is a deeply memorable book: surprisingly frank about the dynamics of sexuality and desire, illuminating about the conditions of change under imperialism, full of images and events that will stick with me. I’m so glad I bought it.

book I didn’t expect to like as much as I did: Permission, by Saskia Vogel (2019). It wasn’t the premise that made me wary (young LA woman grieving her father’s death enters a relationship with a local dominatrix)—I’m fascinated by the dynamics of sex work and BDSM, especially as it pertains to managing grief and loss. What put me on alert was the sense that this might be a disaster-woman novel (subgenre: sexy disaster), and some reports that the protagonist, Echo, was bland and inscrutable. Happily, for me, neither of these things were true. Echo is a disaster, but her father is dead—lost in a freak accident while rock-climbing over a dangerous stretch of beachside cliff—and she certainly has distinctive characteristics: as the child of a German-Dutch mother, her experience of life in LA is not unthinkingly accepting; she loves the sea, surfing, whales; her teenage career as a model and low-budget-film actress has shaped her in particular, not altogether healthy ways, and now (at twenty-four!) she’s aging out of her potential. But what I liked most about Permission was its very precise, beautifully rendered articulations of what trust in a domme/sub relationship actually means, the extent to which such a relationship can bring you to moments of almost mystic growth, development, epiphany. (Dominatrix Orly’s live-in house-slave, Piggy, is a fantastic secondary point of view character for this alone.) So commonly, books about contemporary sex make their characters weirdly emotionless; this doesn’t.

most lived-up-to reputation: The Godfather, by Mario Puzo (1969). I came to this very fresh; I haven’t even seen the movies—I just knew the two famous lines (“you come to me on the day of my daughter’s wedding” and “I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse”). It’s terrific. Not, like, High Literature, but extremely capably written, with scene after scene creating these vivid, cinematic tableaux. I like the structure, how Vito Corleone’s history is only described after the first two sections have established him as a Don in the book’s present day, and the final scene—explaining as it does the true nature of the Sicilian women’s relationship to God and the Church—is absolutely chilling. It’s wildly racist and wildly sexist, so be warned: there’s a lot of casual n-word, a lot of violence-against-women apologia, and a lot of #MeToo in the Hollywood scenes. Oddly, what it reminds me of a little bit is I, Claudius. Michael Corleone’s trajectory to the top is very similar: a combination of savvy self-under-selling and circumstance. As a portrait of a subculture, and the human effects of that subculture’s rigid principles and code, it’s supreme.

---

Read anything good in February?

Love Your Library, February 2024

Hosted by Bookish Beck and posting on the first Monday of every month; you can join in on WordPress or your other social media spaces using the hashtag #LoveYourLibrary (a hashtag which, ironically, I generally forget to include. Must Do Better.)

Just one library book in February?! Well, it’s a short month, and it’s not quite representative: Bouvard and Pécuchet was a library loan, but I wrote about it as a B-Sides project book. I also checked out Tom Brown’s Schooldays by Thomas Hughes (1857) but quickly decided that now was not the time to read it, and I have Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley (1990) out on loan—it’s next in my personal reading queue, but not yet begun.

Cuddy, by Benjamin Myers (2023): I had a library hold on this for literally months and I’m glad I held out! This is a novel about Saint Cuthbert, the unofficial patron saint of England’s North, and Durham Cathedral, which was built as his final resting place when the depredations of Viking raiders forced his monastic community to take his bones away from Lindisfarne Priory and journey through the north for a century, guarding them until an appropriate resting place could be found. “Cuddy” is the affectionate nickname that these haliwerfolc, holy man’s people, give him, and which has come down through the centuries to us. The novel is split into four long sections and an interlude written like a playscript, each set in a different century and each written in a different style. There are recurring motifs: a woman with an E-name (Ediva, Eda, Edith, Evie), a young man with eyes like an owl’s, the presence of Cuddy to those who pray to him, the immense stone solidity of the cathedral.

My favourite parts were the first—narrated in broken verse by Ediva, a woman traveling with Cuddy’s monks in 1093, who sees visions of a building like a mountain on a “hill-island”—and the last, set in 2019 and narrated in prose by nineteen-year-old Michael Cuthbert, a labourer living in a village three miles outside of Durham, whose mother is dying of cancer. (I do have to say that Evie’s dialogue in the latter section is totally unconvincing. Nineteen-year-old undergraduates are pretentious asses, but even the strangest of them has never said a thing like “it’s the budding researcher in me”, especially not to young uneducated men with whom they are on a sort-of date.) Other sections deal with the growing love between battered alewife Eda and kind stonemason Francis Rolfe, in 1346, and the shaking of an arrogant academic’s atheism and egotism during the secret disinterment of Cuddy’s remains, in 1827. These are great too, though they hit less hard. What I love about the first and final sections are the true sense of history as a continuum (Michael Cuthbert’s word), a well of human presences and experiences that it is possible to tap into, especially in spaces like Durham Cathedral, where you can stand inside it and see what another person might have seen a thousand years ago. The sense that, for people like Ediva, this continuum goes forward into the future as well as backward into the past is really beautiful to me. Not a perfect book, but highly recommended.

What have you been reading from your library in February? Are there any titles you’ve been waiting forever to come in?