I’m not certain why the cover design for Christie Watson’s memoir The Language of Kindness is so abstract; there is certainly nothing abstract or theoretical about the endlessly challenging work of nursing that she describes in this book. Falling into the profession as a seventeen-year-old, Watson bounces all over the place through the course of her career: from mental health wards to geriatric care homes, to working with learning-disabled adults, to oncology and paediatric intensive care. She writes with great tenderness and insight about the toll that the job takes on you; about nursing children who die, and what it is like to wash and prepare their bodies before their parents can come to see them; what it is like to go to their funerals. She writes about the stresses of having few resources and little sympathy, either from the government or from the general public. She writes about her own father’s death from cancer and the way in which his nurse, Cheryl, became more than a professional, something closer to family. Cheryl is there at her father’s funeral. Watson has actually written two novels, but the style of her memoir is stripped-back and matter-of-fact, which both suits the subject matter and emphasises the simple appallingness of human vulnerability, which it is the nurse’s job to dignify and comfort. This isn’t out until May, but I will be recommending it to absolutely everyone. As Watson says, we never know what will happen to us, to people we love; we never know when we might be the ones sitting in the waiting room or propped up in the hospital bed, in need of care and compassion and kindness.
Mick Herron has made a trademark of writing espionage fiction that features dry sarcasm. His characters’ banter flirts constantly with being too much, usually but not always coming down on the right side of the line. London Rules is his fifth book featuring the “slow horses” of MI5: no-hopers, alcoholics, fuck-ups and dickheads who have been reassigned to a bureaucratic hellhole in Aldersgate Street called Slough House in the vague hope that they’ll resign and save the Service the trouble of firing them. Jackson Lamb is the head of this dubious team; veteran readers of Herron will know and love him, although loveable is the last word you’d use to describe the man, whose characterisation is generally conveyed by his propensity to fart, drink, smoke, swear, eat takeaways, and make profoundly politically incorrect comments to everyone around him. This is mostly justified by the reader’s awareness that, although Lamb is a disgusting boor, he’s also shrewd and loyal: he usually knows what’s going on before his superiors at Regent’s Park do, and, unencumbered by political ambition, can often make better and faster decisions. One doesn’t necessarily read Herron for the plots, which are usually flashy but shallow; London Rules is a decent stab at plotting, though, with the most shocking opening since Slow Horses. (It also borrows from that book’s clever reversal of our expectations about what can be allowed to happen in developed nations vs. developing ones.) Spook Street, the book before this in the series, was a return to form after two lesser outings, and London Rules suggests that Herron remains on the top of his fairly specific game.
The Sealwoman’s Gift is an utterly brilliant book hampered by a fairly terrible title; you’d think, to look at it, that it’s a kind of Celtic romance involving a dreamy, windswept woman who spends a lot of time gazing out to sea. It’s actually based on an event that really happened: a Barbary pirate raid on the Westman Islands of Iceland in 1627. We know from historical sources that among those captured were the Reverend Ólafur Egilsson, his heavily pregnant wife, and three of their children. Egilsson’s memoir of the voyage, his brief time as a slave in Algiers, his release on a mission to beg for ransom from King Christian IV of Denmark (then the colonial ruler of Iceland), and his return to his home, was a major source for Magnusson’s book. What she tells us, though, is the story of Egilsson’s wife, Ásta Thórsteinsdottir, a literate and strongwilled (if impractical) woman whose myriad losses—her liberty, her husband, each of her children in one way or another—ought to have floored her. Magnusson’s success is in balancing on a line that could easily tip her into anachronism or sentimentality. Ásta is clever and resourceful, but believably powerless: her owner in Algiers, although he begins to have feelings for her, is never capable of seeing her as anything more than a mere woman, inherently confusing and irrational. Her agonies over religion are also beautifully conveyed: as the wife of a Lutheran priest, albeit one who has been known to tell tales of the elves and the hidden people, she is in a particular bind when it comes to the potential conversion to Islam of her small children. Her fear that she will not only be separated from them in this life, but in the next, is piercingly convincing. And Magnusson’s prose never falters, never slides into awkward phrasing or excessive lyricism, even maintaining a light, dry humour that doesn’t feel out of place. What an exceptional and moving fiction debut this is.
Force of Nature, meanwhile, is a follow-up to Jane Harper’s much-lauded debut of last year, The Dry. It is, if anything, even better than its predecessor. The premise is great: Alice Russell, a corporate bully and soon-to-be whistleblower, goes missing on a teambuilding exercise, hiking in the remote Giralang Range. Not only is she about to provide crucial documentary evidence of her company’s involvement in money laundering, but the Giralang Range is also where serial killer Martin Kovac stalked, abducted and murdered four women twenty years ago—women who look alarmingly like Alice. (He is an invention of Harper’s, but echoes the real-life “backpacker murderer” Ivan Milat.) Aaron Falk, the taciturn cop who headed up the investigation in The Dry, has been handling Alice’s evidence against her employers, and gets caught up in the operation surrounding her disappearance. Harper uses flashbacks to excellent effect throughout the book, alternating past with present as we learn more about the events leading up to Alice’s vanishing. The real strength of the book is its emphasis on the pressures brought to bear on women—especially mothers—in high-achieving environments, and the way that pain can echo through generations if parents and children fail to communicate adequately with one another. It’s been a while since I read The Dry, but Force of Nature feels like an altogether subtler book, with a sadder, more human ending. It’s an excellent, rock-solid crime novel. If Jane Harper can keep knocking these out, I’ll keep reading and recommending them.
Thoughts on this week’s reading: Every single one of these books was a proof, which feels a little imbalanced; I mustn’t forget to read backlists. I’m pleased that one was nonfiction, though.
The House of Impossible Beauties, by Joseph Cassara, is a gorgeous book, set in the drag queen ball scene of New York, from the late ’70s to the early ’90s. Angel, our main character, becomes the mother of the House of Xtravaganza, the first house for aspiring Puerto Rican queens (a drag queen house is something like a Formula 1 team, but a thousand times more fabulous, and its members relate to each other like a family). Angel is joined by sassy and beautiful Venus (born Thomas); shy banjee boy Daniel; and skilled seamstress and lost boy Juanito. There’s also Dorian, an even older queen who serves as a mentor and cultural guardian. Cassara’s prose is so evocative; he effortlessly summons the smells and sounds and sights of a world most of his readers will know nothing of—the piers where kings, queens and johns cruise and mingle; Times Square strip joints; bars on Christopher Street—and his dialogue is perfect, witty and human and liberally sprinkled with Spanglish. It’s a tragic book, as one set amongst the gay and trans community during those decades must be: many sisters fall, to the virus or to illegal drugs or to malevolent strangers. It’s also defiantly, spectacularly beautiful, constantly reaffirming the value of the family you choose for yourself. Fans of A Little Life, RENT, and Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City will all find something to love here.
And then for something completely different: Graham Greene’s novel The Power and the Glory. The thing that always surprises me with Greene is how humane he is; for some reason I expect his Catholicism to be curdled and grotesque, like Evelyn Waugh’s, but it always turns out gentle and pitying. This novel follows an unnamed “whisky priest”, an ordained man on the run from the authorities in a Mexican state where Catholicism and the priesthood have been outlawed. The priest’s fugitive condition is set against that of Padre José, who has succumbed to the government’s demand that ordained men enter marriage. José is constantly shamed and belittled by children and by his new wife (formerly his housekeeper); he is a man who has lost his dignity, his sense of purpose, almost his humanity; Greene portrays him as you might a confused dog. The whisky priest, meanwhile, is a weak man and a bad Catholic, but in his final acts, in his attempts to encourage kindness and love, he redeems himself. Greene is also spectacularly good at suggesting interiority while maintaining firm boundaries between the reader and his characters; we always feel we’re standing somewhat outside of the whisky priest, watching him do things or have things done to him, but as we continue to observe him, our understanding of him grows. It would make a very interesting companion read to Shusaku Endo’s Silence (which I’m afraid I’ve only seen the film of).
The cover of The Wicked Cometh, Laura Carlin’s debut novel, should perhaps have made me wary; anything that’s getting the Sarah Perry/Jessie Burton design treatment is something on which the publisher wants to make the big bucks, and making the big bucks is not always commensurate with flawless prose and editing. The Wicked Cometh begins with about a hundred pages of somewhat overwrought scene-setting, in which we meet young Hester White, the orphaned daughter of a clergyman who now lives with her father’s former gardener Jacob and his wife Meg in a foul slum in London’s Whitechapel. Rumours abound of disappearances: ordinarily steady men, women and children are vanishing, never to be seen again. When Hester is involved in an accident with a carriage, and invited to recuperate (and work as a maid) at the country house of the man who caused the damage, she begins to unravel a horrifying conspiracy. The writing tends to teeter back and forth between melodrama and the kind of flattening present tense that constantly tells a reader how to feel, which hampers attempts to engage with the story. But if you can get past the initial pages and reach the point at which Hester returns to London with her friend and beloved, Rebekah Brock, you’ll make it to the end. The conspiracy is really rather fiendish, if somewhat over-complicated, and I liked that Carlin develops a love story between two women in the nineteenth century as though there’s nothing out of the ordinary about it (which, in fact, there isn’t.)
A little book to end the week with: I wasn’t sure whether this really counted, but it has its own ISBN, so why not. It’s Calm, one of the Vintage Mini books that comprise excerpts from an author’s larger work on a particular theme. Calm is a 95-page chunk from Tim Parks’s book Teach Us To Sit Still, about his experiences with Vipassana Buddhist meditation, chronic pain, and spirituality. Parks was raised in a deeply religious household (his father was an Anglican priest), from which he seems to have fled both physically and mentally at the earliest possible opportunity; faith is obviously a deeply vexed issue for him. He writes pitilessly, with great wit and self-deprecation, about his attempts to be more mindful, to meditate better, and about the depths of his despair when a meditation retreat seems to promise nothing but more physical pain and suffering. When, at last (and very briefly) the meditation does work, he writes of his body’s feeling of liberation and release with an illumination and a joy that is reminiscent of mystics like Margery Kempe—and also acknowledges how fleeting such joy must be (his return to discomfort is “liturgy after revelation”). I’d very much like to read Teach Us To Sit Still in its entirety now, and perhaps try to pick up my own meditation or yoga practice again.
Gregory Norminton’s new novel The Devil’s Highway is not a long book, but it is a full one, resonant with history and myth. Bouncing back and forth between three time periods—Roman Britain, the present day, and a far future of harsh drought and a return to brutality—it stays focused on one place: Bagshot Heath, in Surrey. Here, a young Celt, Andragin, tries to barter for mercy for his brothers by delivering a kidnapped decurion back to his legion; here, Harry, a soldier just back from Afghanistan, bumps into a young girl whose father is determined to preserve the heath at all costs; and here, a pack of feral children led by the ruthless Malk attempts to make it to “the West Cunny”, where, it’s rumoured, there is still rain. Norminton’s evocation of the heath’s atmosphere is superb: this book is less about individual people and their choices, and more about the ways in which a particular landscape can fate us. Each time period is linked to the others by a palm-shaped stone that resembles a crude carving of a woman, and which is so ancient that it’s old even in Andragin’s time. Norminton is a subtle enough writer to leave the connection at that (though we may draw our own conclusions about the relationship between the young Celtic warriors encouraged to their deaths by a religious mystic, and the jihadis whom Harry fights in modern-day Helmand), giving the book a feeling of David Mitchell tinged with Paul Kingsnorth’s aesthetic. The futuristic sections are perhaps the least successful—there’s only so many times authors can rehash wild-child Riddley Walker dialect—but the book as a whole is both bold and delicate, and quite unforgettable.
Equally unforgettable is Afua Hirsch’s memoir/work of cultural analysis, Brit(ish) (can we talk about the genius of that title?), which is out on the 1st of February. Hirsch’s heritage is mixed: her mother is Ghanaian and her father the child of German Jewish refugees. Both her parents had a strong cultural identity of their own, but for Hirsch and her sister, being mixed-race in Wimbledon in the ’90s meant they didn’t belong anywhere. Hirsch is never less than willing to cop to her own privilege as a lighter-skinned black person in Britain: her account of meeting her boyfriend (now husband) Sam, a black man of Ghanaian descent from Tottenham, brilliantly dissects the differences in their upbringings, with Sam constantly focused on achieving professional success because the slightest lapse in concentration might drive him off-course forever, whereas Afua’s achievements at school, university, and the world of work feel like something she’s almost sleepwalked into. But her primary thesis is that, although Britain likes to call itself a “post-racial” or “multicultural” society, this is a national self-image built on a lie: the absolute refusal of white British people to acknowledge a history of deep and terrible institutional racism. She makes an extremely compelling case, citing the American civil rights movement and Black Lives Matter as upheavals that could only occur because American society has been forthright about the fact that it was founded on racism and slavery. By contrast, British society lauds the abolition of the slave trade, but history curricula and national days of observance rarely, if ever, acknowledge the fact that for Britain to have abolished a trade in the first place, it first had to participate in that trade; in this case, for over four centuries. Hirsch is also a fantastically engaging writer, leavening rage-inducing statistics with personal anecdote and investigative journalism. Her book ought to help kickstart the conversation Britain so badly needs to have with itself.
Speaking of which, Victor LaValle’s novel The Devil In Silver is a real thousand-yard stare right at the heart of the horrors of the American health-care-for-profit system. LaValle is known as a genre writer, but most of The Devil In Silver doesn’t seem like a horror or fantasy novel; much of it is more like a psych-ward version of Orange Is the New Black. Pepper, our protagonist, is a working-class white dude who gets thrown in New Hyde Hospital because the cops who arrested him for beating up his neighbour’s ex-husband couldn’t be arsed to do the paperwork down at the precinct. Pepper’s involuntary admission means he ought only to stay for seventy-two hours, but he takes some medication on his first day, and the next thing he knows, he’s been in for four weeks. The ward, Pepper soon discovers, is being terrorised by a Minotaur-like creature—a skinny old man with the head of a buffalo—who is apparently the Devil. The brilliance of LaValle is in taking the old what-if-humans-were-the-real-monsters twist and shoving our noses so far into the complicated morality of what being human involves that we can see how monsters develop. Casual cruelty amongst nurses and orderlies is prompted by a system that underpays them and finds more value in dead patients than in live ones; madness is a not irrational response to a system that really is out to get you. And LaValle comes down on the side of tenderness and of trying, every time. One character snarls to another, “You can’t save everyone.” The other says—the only line of dialogue he gets in the whole book—”You can help.”
It’s very hard to describe what Turning For Home is “about”, because in the conventional sense it is virtually without plot: an old man, Robert Shawcross, has a birthday party, his troubled granddaughter Kate attempts to reconcile with her mother, and a figure from the past reappears at the party to complete some unfinished business related to Robert’s career as a civil servant, during which time he served as a diplomatic backchannel between U.K. government and the IRA. It is a book much more concerned with states of mind: Robert’s grief at the recent loss of his wife, his shock at the discovery that his contact was far more involved in IRA business than he realised; Kate’s struggle with guilt over an ex-boyfriend’s life-changing car accident, which manifests in an eating disorder that nearly kills her. This sounds a bit melodramatic, and occasionally Norris’s plot and character choices are, but for the most part, his writing lifts the events from pot-boiler territory. Instead he shows us ways to find beauty, and the keys to memory, in absolutely everything; for all the trouble in its pages, it is a very uplifting book. I preferred his debut, Five Rivers Met…, but will be recommending this to lovers of introspective literary fiction.
The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, by Stuart Turton, is NetGalley’s lead debut for February. I can see why: its tagline, “Gosford Park meets Inception”, is inspired, and it ticks so many boxes: Golden Age crime, time-travel, redemption story. The influence I see, however, isn’t Gosford Park; it’s Cluedo (or Clue, to Americans). The whole country house/missing host set-up is complicated by the fact that our protagonist, Aiden Bishop, keeps waking up in different peoples’ bodies; he’s informed by a shadowy figure dressed as a medieval Plague Doctor that he has eight days, and eight “hosts”, with which to solve the murder of Evelyn Hardcastle, the daughter of the house, which occurs at eleven p.m. on the first night of the house party. Should he fail, by day eight, to have solved the crime, his memory will be wiped and it will all start again; should he succeed, he’ll be freed. It’s a great premise, although the execution is slightly shaky: there are too many “hosts” insufficiently differentiated, a lot of time is spent on building Bishop’s confusion that could be better spent driving us towards the meat of the story, and why does Bishop never wake up as a woman? (There are tons of them at the party.) The ultimate explanation of the crime is clever, but the ultimate explanation for Bishop’s presence at the house feels a little Black Mirror, and—most frustratingly for a reader who’s now dabbling more than ever in sf—extremely handwavey. (The mechanism is never explained at all.) Everyone will be reading this, and I think most people will find it extremely fun and diverting—which it is, but there’s not a whole lot behind it.
Unlike The Book of Joan, by Lidia Yuknavitch, which, while diverting and even in places fun, has got a lot behind it. I described it on Goodreads as “Angela Carter in space”, which I stand by. The premise is that, in an ecologically ravaged future, what remains of humanity is a race of alabaster-skinned elites floating above the Earth on a platform ship called CIEL, run by the charismatic cult leader Jean de Men. Medievalists will recognise a corruption of Jean de Meun, author of the Romance of the Rose; the parallels continue as we learn our narrator is Christine Pizan, an inhabitant of CIEL who specialises in the only art form that is now permitted: skin branding, or “grafts”, telling stories both verbal and pictoral directly on the skin. Christine’s sort-of lover Trinculo, who makes a habit of appalling the authorities with smuttiness (sexuality is illegal, and humans are devolving; genitalia and sexual difference are now things of the past), is sentenced to die, but manages to pass her a message: Joan, a child-warrior who led the earth-bound resistance against Jean de Men years ago, is still alive; she wasn’t burned at the stake, her image broadcast round the globe and through the galaxy, but escaped, and Christine must find her. There is so much going on in this book about bodies, the female body especially, and the reproductive capacities of the female body; how bodies can literally tell stories, carry history; never have I been made so aware of the body as the ultimate site of political resistance. It is resonant with where we are now, as a world, in ways that are both subtle and in-your-face. Yuknavitch’s obsession with specifically female physicality (there’s a fair bit of vagina talk and symbolism) might lay it open to charges of cis-centricity; I’d need to read it again, and talk to a trans person about it. If it is eligible for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, I can’t not see it on the longlist. It’s breathtakingly good.
Elle Thinks 