Reading Diary: season of mists

The Binding, by Bridget Collins: I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from this – it’s getting the extremely-pretty-jacket treatment, which experience has taught me is often an early warning of a great idea badly executed – but it turned out to be rather good. The thought-provoking premise is that books are not, as we think of them, made-up stories, but are rather the true memories of a person, magically bound between covers, which a person cannot retain  once they’ve been bound. It functions as a form of confessional and forgetting, and binders are treated with wary respect. But it’s also a power that can be abused, and Emmett Farmer, our young protagonist, is soon plunged into a world of wealth, cruelty, and complicity. Bridget Collins has thought out the implications of her initial idea with admirable thoroughness, and the book’s written in a slightly breathy but perfectly palatable style that’s just the right side of YA. (Emmett’s romantic entanglement with another young man, Lucian, which forms the novel’s emotional core, is mostly responsible for this, I think. It’s nice to read anyway, and although I’m not a gay teenaged boy, from my perspective as a reader Collins seems to write sensitively. She’s especially good on institutional power dynamics, in a relationship as well as in the society that Emmett and Lucian live in.) Released in January, this will be an excellent antidote to the post-Christmas blahs.

Something Of His Art: Walking to Lubeck with J.S. Bach, by Horatio Clare: This is based on a “slow radio” series that Horatio Clare presented on Radio 3. I’m new to the concept of slow radio, but it seems not unlike slow television, a broadcasting trend that seeks to reverse frenetic media consumption and bring us all back to the important things in life, like watching seven hours’ worth of Norwegian train journey. Clare’s programs sought to follow in the footsteps of Johann Sebastian Bach, who as a young man walked from Arnstadt to Lubeck in order to hear Dietrich Buxtehude play the organ. (Buxtehude was sort of the Bach of his day. The only excuse Bach ever gave his employers for disappearing for four months was that he wished to learn “something of his art”. Because the record we have is in the third person, it’s unclear whether Bach means his art, or Buxtehude’s, or – more pleasingly – both.) Unsurprisingly, I wanted more Bach and less birdsong, but Horatio Clare is really a travel writer so this seems a slightly unfair demand. He also hints at some truly interesting moments – there’s an especially surreal dinner in a German mountain canteen that used to be a Cold War militarized zone – of which the brevity of this format and project doesn’t allow elaboration. Terribly atmospheric anyway, though.

The Penguin Classics Book, by Henry Eliot: I bought this for myself as a celebratory present after the US midterm elections, which doesn’t make a lot of sense because it’s not like I was singlehandedly responsible for the midterm results, but there you go. It’s a handsome, heavy, clothbound compendium of (and companion to) the Penguin Classics imprint, beautifully illustrated with colour photographs throughout and including little essays and text boxes about the imprint’s early days. E.V. Rieu (whose translation of The Odyssey was the first Penguin Classic ever) edited it for a long time, as did Betty Radice, who seems to have been both marvelously clever and quite wonderful as a person. Little notes on each entry provide pieces of trivia about translators, many of whom were the sort of eccentric academic types that only English intellectual society in the twentieth century could have created and sustained. It’ll also remind you of how much there is in the way of world literature; the texts from antique and medieval Asia, in particular, were often new to me. There are a couple of awkward typos (along the lines of “weak” instead of “week”), which shouldn’t exist at all in a book where so much design effort has clearly been put in, but the production of the object on the whole is first-class. I spent an extremely happy rainy weekend on the sofa with this beast, and if you’re a nerd, you should too.

The Ship, by Antonia Honeywell: In the spirit of full disclosure, Antonia is my friend and has – extremely kindly – looked at my nascent book, but neither of these things really has any bearing on the fact that her book is very good. Sixteen-year-old Lalla lives in a London where Regent’s Park is home to a tent city; Oxford Street burned for three weeks, and the British Museum shelters homeless squatters. Food and security are scarce. She has been protected by her parents to such an extent that her conception of the state of England – indeed, the world – is desperately, terrifyingly naive. But her father, Michael, has been making plans for some time, and the shooting of Lalla’s mother forces them, finally, to leave London behind on the heavily provisioned ship that Michael has been stocking for years. The ship is full of people – an elect few, chosen for their ability to hold onto humanity as the world burns – but Michael soon becomes a Messianic figure, and Lalla chafes against his vision for the people of the ship. There are a lot of religious themes and parallels here, with Noah as well as with Christ, the Protestant doctrine of predestination, and the Adam/Eve story (apples constitute a recurring symbol). Lalla’s naivety is infuriating to the reader as well as to the people who surround her, but that is the point: even if she grows up late, she has to grow up, and that means being responsible for yourself, instead of waiting for others to take care of you. The ending is scary, but hopeful, as all points of no return must be.

The Order of the Day, by Eric Vuillard: Vuillard’s Prix Goncourt-winning novel is so short (160 pages) that I feel I’d be justified in making anything I wrote about it commensurately shorter. (Although I realise that, by its grace, I’ve managed to participate in Novellas In November.) It is, more or less, fiction, but you could be forgiven for reading it as a kind of chatty, intimate history; there is no protagonist, and no narrator save for an omniscient voice that has somewhat the flavour of Thackeray’s knowing asides to the reader. The story is of how Germany became the Third Reich: the meeting of industrialists (Krupp, Siemens et al.) who bankrolled Hitler, the bulldozing of the Austrian chancellor, Kurt von Schuschnigg, the way Germany took over Austrian state mechanisms while retaining a thin veneer of legality, and finally the actual invasion. It reads, in a way, like a piece from an older time; the novel’s interest in the interior lives of its characters is most often demonstrated not by taking us into that character’s head, but by describing that character to us with utter clarity and insight, somewhat as George Eliot does in Middlemarch. Yet it succeeds in being moving, even heartrending, in its descriptions of men who caused terrible damage but whom Vuillard wants us to see clearly. I rather suspect it will be a bit of a sleeper hit.

When All Is Said, by Anne Griffin: Maurice Hannigan is drinking. On a bar stool in a hotel that used to be the country home of the family that employed and abused him, he makes five toasts, one for each of the important people in his life: his son, his wife, his sister-in-law, his brother, his daughter. Because tonight is not going to be like all the other nights; tonight, Maurice Hannigan has a plan. Anne Griffin’s debut novel has more than a touch of the commercial crossover about it, and some of the execution is a little awkward (when are writers going to learn some restraint with speech indicators?), but the book is rescued from mawkishness by being genuinely felt. There has been real sadness in Maurice’s life, as well as real joy. He has not been a perfect husband or father, but he hasn’t been a monster: his obsession with acquiring money and land is revealed to be part of an obsession with avenging wrongs against his family that he has been angry about since he was a boy, and it has affected his relationships as an adult in unattractive ways. But he’s honest with himself and us, and the final chapter—when his greatest decision yet becomes clear—is surprising, moving, and bold. I’ve not read another novel in which the author allows her character the particular type of dignified choice that Griffin gives hers.

Loyalties, by Delphine de Vigan: Another very short novel, bordering on novella—192 pages—from a French author, this one by the writer who brought us the queasy stalker autofiction of Based On A True Story. In Loyalties, she dissects the web of lies that children spin for adults, and the willful blindness that adults show to each other. Several characters tell the story: there is Théo, a charismatic eleven-year-old; Mathis, his privileged but easily led friend; Hélène, their teacher, who suspects something but can prove nothing and whose own past may be colouring her judgment; and Cécile, Mathis’s mother, who has found something terrible on her husband’s computer and now finds everything about her life with her family to be in question. Théo is easily the saddest and most convincing of these protagonists: his descent into alcoholism and deception is charted clearly, and without agenda, as stemming from his separated parents’ inability to keep their child out of their quarrel with each other. Mathis’s confusion about what the “right thing” to do might be rings very true, and Hélène is sympathetic, if perhaps too damaged to be totally convincing. Cécile is a curious character, just coming into a sense of who she might be apart from her husband and child; I’d read a whole book about her, though she doesn’t get to do much in Loyalties. It’s a fable, really, not much more than the sum of its parts, but those parts are extremely interesting in themselves.

The Redeemed, by Tim Pears: Tim Pears might be British literature’s best-kept secret. (It used to be Sarah Moss, but I think she’s hitting the big time now, despite her lack of prize wins.) The Redeemed is the third in his West Country Trilogy, of which I have only read the second (The Wanderers), but with which I am nevertheless obsessed, and for which I have the profoundest awe. The Redeemed opens with Leo Sercombe, exiled from the estate where his parents worked and which served as his childhood home, having joined up with the Royal Navy and about to see action in World War I. Lottie Prideaux, his childhood playmate and the daughter of the manor, meanwhile, has managed to get herself taken on as a veterinary assistant to Patrick Jago, whose young male assistants are all away at war. Over the next twelve years, Lottie and Leo live their lives, and it’s to Pears’s immense credit that he manages to keep us in suspense about whether they will find each other again, and a way of living that fulfills them, without resorting to cheap tricks of plotting. (He’s not averse to a cliffhanger chapter ending, but he does it with such elegance.) His writing is beautiful—not self-satisfied or self-conscious, but engaging all the senses, plain and clear without being dull, delicate without being precious. The Horseman and The Wanderers described a world that’s now gone; The Redeemed describes that world’s passing, and shows us that a decent world, in many ways a better one, replaced it. Read Tim Pears, please.

Thoughts on this batch of reading: There’s some really cracking stuff coming out in January, of which the Pears and the Vuillard are my top picks. I’m so glad I finally read The Ship, and The Penguin Classics Book is proving an invaluable work resource as well as a fun thing for myself. I seem to have read a fair amount of short books, too (Vuillard, de Vigan, Clare), which is no bad thing for me, as I tend to prefer a doorstop tome.

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Reading Diary: of monstrosity

The Mere Wife, by Maria Dahvana Headley: Described on Instagram as “the contemporary feminist Beowulf retelling of my dreams”, this takes the action of the Anglo-Saxon poem and relocates it to a gated community in upstate New York (I suppose it could be Connecticut), Herot Hall. Roger, the man whose family created Herot Hall, and Willa, his wife, are our Hrothgar and Wealhtheow; their earthly paradise is threatened by the presence of Dana Mills and her son, who live in the mountain that looms over Herot’s manicured backyards. Dana is an ex-soldier who fled a never-named Middle Eastern conflict after being captured by the enemy, her beheading staged for the Western media but not actually carried out due to her pregnancy. The liminality of her existence – her death is on tape, but remains unreal – is a brilliant way of translating the terrifying liminality of Grendel’s mother into a modern idiom, as is the heritage of her son, whom she names Gren: his father was (probably) an enemy combatant. It seems likely that he was conceived with Dana’s consent, but that isn’t ever totally clear. Dana is permanently terrified that her baby, her dark-skinned, too-tall, too-big son, will die a victim of the fear of people like the ones who live in Herot; it’s a painfully resonant fear for anyone who pays attention to the news. The tragedy of Beowulf from this point of view is that she’s right, and – as in classical tragedy – all the measures she takes to protect her boy only draw his fate nearer to him. The peril of making ancient tales contemporary, as the editors of the Hogarth Shakespeare ought to know by now, is that while some stories are timeless or universal in a certain sense, all stories arise out of a particular culture and context, and it’s very easy to sterilize the meaning of an old story by over-zealously mapping character names and plot points while forgetting to consider how that story’s conflicts might manifest in the twenty-first century. Headley mostly avoids that, although there are a few details (the train in the mountain – what is it with contemporary retellings and trains?; the fact that the Beowulf character’s name is Ben Woolf) that seem a little on the nose. On the whole, though, The Mere Wife is a phenomenal, brave reimagining of one of Western civilization’s oldest stories; unafraid to target institutional authority, Headley also forces us to question the original poem’s allegiances. It’s the sort of book I didn’t know I was waiting for someone to write.

Evening in Paradise, by Lucia Berlin: Berlin’s earlier collection, A Manual For Cleaning Women, is the book that changed my mind about short stories. She uses the raw material of her own life–alcoholism, young sons, constant moving, the American West and Southwest–in stories that constantly circle around similar themes and characters. They are written in startlingly lucid yet straightforward prose, vivid with imagery, often illuminated by a single unexpected word or phrase. Evening in Paradise is the second collection of her work to be published after her death, and it isn’t, by any means, a collection of the second-best; it’s superb. The first two stories, told through the eyes of a child, engaged me the least, but starting from “Andado” (subtitled A Gothic Romance), Berlin’s voice becomes the voice that enchanted throughout A Manual For Cleaning Women. “Andado” features Laura, the daughter of an American businessman in Chile, being used as a sexual pawn to advance her father’s career; a country weekend with a much older man leads to the loss of her virginity (she’s perhaps fourteen), which she takes in her stride, although the reader can see the grooming and calculation behind the seductive gestures. From then on, the stories focus on women who share some aspects of Laura’s background and differ in other ways; they explore sexuality, marriage, the bohemian life, poverty, whether making good art requires you to lead a cruel life. Berlin is simply brilliant; her memoir, Welcome Home, is out next year and I’ll be reading it.

The House on Vesper Sands, by Paraic O’Donnell: This is the book that The Wicked Cometh wanted to be. Young women are disappearing from London’s East End, mostly orphans and servants that few, if any, will miss. A seamstress throws herself from the top of a lord’s Mayfair townhouse; at the autopsy, a cryptic message is found stitched into her skin. What does it mean? And can young Gideon Bliss–recently arrived in London from his theological studies in Cambridge, but unable to find the mysterious uncle he’s meant to be meeting—work with Inspector Cutter, not only to keep London’s women safe, but to save Angie Tatton, the woman he loves? It’s all very pseudo-Victorian Gothic, but it works beautifully, partly because O’Donnell’s descriptive voice combines detail with restraint and partly because his characterization is so good. Cutter, irascible though fair, calls Bliss a “chattering streak of gannet’s shite”; Bliss, true to his intellectual training, cannot use one word where a dozen might do; even Esther Tull, whom we know only for one chapter, is a person with conflicting desires and duties whose departure from the narrative (and from life) feels like a real loss to the reader. O’Donnell is also frequently funny: there really are elements of Dickens at his best in the dialogue. The plot does, surprisingly, rely upon the supernatural, which is the opposite decision about Gothic tropes to the choice Susan Fletcher makes in House of Glass (see here for my review), and which might put people off. Oddly, though, I rather liked it. Everything about The House on Vesper Sands has such a flavour of ghost story that its payoff is gratifying: for once, an author isn’t messing with our heads or with genre expectations, and in this post-post-modern era, that feels oddly refreshing, especially when it’s so well executed. Highly recommended.

A Different Drummer, by William Melvin Kelley: Quercus is overtly positioning this as the next in the long line of “rediscovered classics”; the proof copy lists Suite Francaise and Stoner as forebears in this rediscovery tradition. Kelley’s book comes with a fantastically illuminating essay by Kathryn Schultz that originally appeared in the New Yorker; he was the inventor of the word “woke”, way back in the 60s, and after A Different Drummer his star never quite rose in the way it perhaps ought to have. Partly, Schultz suggests, this is because of his focus: he was writing about white people, their inner lives and reactions to black people, trying to understand them, at a time in American history when Black Power and the civil rights movement were creating an artistic and social milieu that didn’t give a single damn about what white people thought or felt. His daughter recalls that his lack of success didn’t particularly faze him: “he was utterly unafraid”, Schultz quotes her as saying, “of being poor”. A Different Drummer is perhaps a book whose time has come. It’s basically speculative fiction; the book commences with a story told amongst white men about a huge slave, known as The African, who evades being auctioned for several weeks and is the progenitor of the black family known as the Calibans, but the action proper begins with a scene in which Tucker Caliban shoots all his livestock, salts his fields, burns his house, and walks out of the (fictional) Southern state in which he lives, accompanied by his wife and their baby. The entire black population of the state follows suit, and the rest of the novel takes the points of view of various white men, including a small boy and the son of the white family for whom Tucker Caliban used to work, as they grapple with the consequences of losing half the population of the state, and with their own attitudes towards their black neighbours. Kelley writes sentences with the clarity and declarative confidence of Hemingway; his characters are vulnerable and sympathetic even while they express ignorance, prejudice, and–at the very end–bloodthirsty cruelty. (In fact, it’s the very sympathy that Kelley has previously evoked for these Southern farming men that makes the ending so horrible. The reader, especially the white reader, is placed in the same position as thousands, millions, of Americans throughout history: we know these people by name, they’re our neighbours and friends, and yet here they are, masks flung aside, lynching a preacher.) It is a totally brilliant book, one I’ve been thinking about long after finishing the last page.

House of Glass, by Susan Fletcher: I’ve already written about this as part of the blog tour that Virago ran to promote the book; you can read what I had to say here. In brief: Fletcher is dealing with Gothic romance tropes (as does Paraic O’Donnell, and, in fact, Lucia Berlin in “Andado”, though Berlin explodes them in a very different way from Fletcher; she chooses not to deceive us before revealing that there’s nothing behind the curtain, but to show us that what’s behind the curtain is so much worse than ghoulies and ghosties for being man-made: the venal pimping of one man’s child to another man, the unequal but queasily exciting exchanges of power and sex that constitute the engine that drives Gothic fiction). Fletcher’s protagonist, Clara, is quite unforgettable, and the book’s engagement with genre ideas makes for not only a gripping story, but a genuinely thought-provoking one. It’ll make an excellent autumn or winter read; pair it with Melmoth or The House on Vesper Sands and you’d have reading sorted for a chilly weekend getaway.

Devices and Desires: Bess of Hardwick and the Building of Elizabethan England, by Kate Hubbard: Things I wouldn’t ordinarily read: historical biography, in general. Things I’ll make an exception for: Bess of Hardwick. She was married four times; each marriage served as an opportunity for her to amass more land, build more homes, and acquire more material wealth in the form of plate, textiles, jewellery, et al. With her best-known husband, William Cavendish, she founded the dynasty that became the Dukes of Devonshire. Her final marriage, to the Earl of Shrewsbury, suffered under the strain of Queen Elizabeth’s request that they serve as jailers to Mary, Queen of Scots; Elizabeth clearly trusted the Shrewsburys, and continued to give Bess the benefit of the doubt even when, in her old age, she was maneouvering for advantageous marriages for her children and grandchildren (particularly her granddaughter, Arbella Stuart, whose claim to the throne Bess championed). The strength of her will comes across clearly; so does the particular nature of each of her marriages. She seems to have truly loved Cavendish, probably to have been fond of St. Loe (husband number three), and to have loved Shrewsbury before the marriage soured irreparably. (Husband number one died young and it’s not clear that Bess ever really cared much about him; she was married at the behest of her parents, for land consolidation purposes, as most young women of the minor Tudor gentry were.) Her appetite for construction was insatiable; there was a lot of house-building in Tudor England, which, with the dissolution of the monasteries, became one of the most upwardly mobile societies in the history of the world, but it was mostly done by men. Bess was a visionary builder, constantly commissioning work on any one of half a dozen houses. Commanding, tough, and fair, she’s hard not to admire, even if (as Kate Hubbard notes) personal correspondence from this period keeps contemporary readers at arm’s length, unlike letters and memoranda from just a century later.

Thoughts on this batch of reading: Many of these books resonate with each other: Berlin, O’Donnell, Fletcher and Headley are all exploring similar ideas, in very different ways. Even William Melvin Kelley has things to say about human monsters. Meanwhile, Devices and Desires is a standout biography, even though it’s not thematically related to anything else in this post; I’m really glad to have read it.

House of Glass, by Susan Fletcher

At first glance, House of Glass seems to fit neatly into the tradition of English Gothic haunted-house stories: an unusual or unreliable narrator (Clara Waterfield, age twenty and a sufferer of osteogenesis imperfecta, which renders her bones dangerously brittle; her beloved mother is dead of cancer and her stepfather not unkind but distant) is summoned to a stately home (Shadowbrook, in Gloucestershire) that represents some kind of sanctuary (the opportunity to use her newly acquired horticultural skills in the cultivation of a glasshouse for Shadowbrook’s owner, the mysterious Mr. Fox). “Trouble” is darkly hinted at (by the man who drives Clara from the station to the house), but our narrator remains skeptical of anything that can’t be touched or proven. Still, the house’s staff seem to be hiding something (the overly cheerful housekeeper, Mrs. Bale, and two frightened maids from the village, Harriet and Maud), and eventually our narrator experiences some uncanny goings-on for themselves. Intellectually frustrated by the apparent impossibility of the supernatural, our narrator seeks to uncover the truth, while simultaneously revealing themselves to the reader as being an ever more untrustworthy and subjective observer.

Roughly, that is what happens in the first half of House of Glass, but Susan Fletcher innovates by making Clara not less believable, but more so. Learning to shed her preconceptions about rationality and the nature of knowledge, she also learns to shed idealized images of other people: too frail throughout childhood and adolescence to have a normal social life, she is forced to meet people at Shadowbrook who are – like all real people – contradictory, confusing, and illogical in their actions. This will eventually prove the key to solving the mystery of Shadowbrook, which – it’s whispered – is the ghost of Veronique Pettigrew, the daughter of the family that used to own the place. To say too much more would be to spoil the clever way in which Fletcher undermines the tropes of the Gothic romance genre: the crazed, over-sexed woman (Bertha in Jane Eyre, Cathy in Wuthering Heights), the deceptive housekeeper (Mrs. Danvers, Mrs. Fairfax), the brooding romantic hero whose role, in House of Glass, is spread over several male characters and in one instance combined with the trope of the taciturn-but-sexy man of the soil. Fletcher makes us consider the difference between real life and fiction. We think we are reading one sort of book, one particular set of accepted illusions, but that too is an illusion: House of Glass is a different book at its end, once we grow to understand – along with Clara, whose book-derived ideas about life echo Catherine Morland’s in Northanger Abbey, though to an effect that’s alarming rather than amusing – what it is we’re actually reading.

About three-quarters of the way through, the device that has brought all of these characters together in one place is revealed, and it’s the weakest part of the book, as such devices tend to be. Still, if the book resonates with Jane Eyre in its early sections, it’s worth remembering that Charlotte Bronte resorts to a universally-derided and equally implausible trick in order to reunite Jane and Rochester; Fletcher’s use of convoluted coincidence can be read as another comment on the genre she’s working with. House of Glass is fluid, addictive, and very clever, all at once: I can’t recommend it more highly.

This post is a stop on the House of Glass blog tour, which runs all week; other stops can be found below. Thanks to Virago for the review copy!

Reading Diary: RIP XIII and otherwise

It’s the end of October – autumn is really here now, almost winter. It’s dark early. It’s cold. I’ve been back in the UK for less than a week, and already it’s clear: we’re in a different season. On the upside, I guess: stews, scarves, the three-month festival of eating that is Halloween + Thanksgiving (/Friendsgiving) + Christmas + New Year. And books!

A lot of what I read in October qualifies for RIP XIII, it turns out. Here, at last, is the rundown.

First, a few things that don’t really qualify, including Georgina Harding’s new novel, Land of the Living. This, I’m afraid, I shall have to be fairly brief about, as I read it before I went away (so about three weeks ago now), but it did serve as my introduction to Harding’s work and a good one it was. It’s a novel about a farmer called Charlie, back in England and married after the end of the Second World War. He was posted in Kohima, and his experiences there haunt him: not just the murder of a lost (or deserting) Japanese soldier, or the deaths of the other members of his platoon, but also the strange period of time during which he gets lost in the mountainous jungle and is rescued by a remote tribe that seems never to have had contact with white people. Harding’s descriptions of the north Indian jungle landscape are the stylistic standout of the book: so lush and evocative, you’d swear you can feel the steam rising from the vegetation. The narration jumps back and forth between Charlie’s time in India and his life now, farming, with his wife Claire. He tells her stories about the war and about foreign places, which she accepts with the incredulous equanimity of an Englishwoman in the late 1940s who, while not a fool, has never been abroad and can’t quite believe in the reality of the people her husband describes to her. Meanwhile, Harding also shows us Charlie through Claire’s eyes: a lovable man but one permanently distanced from his wife, as much by the fact that he’s a man as by his vaster life experience. That narrative even-handedness is what invests the reader; it’s not as though there’s a dearth of WWII novels, but the standouts are the ones that articulate an idiosyncratic kind of war, an individual’s war. Land of the Living is a standout.

One of the many joys of bookselling is that moment when a publisher’s rep flips to the next page of their sales catalogue (now usually in PDF form, though I understand they used to be made of Actual Paper) and says something like “Ever heard of this author? No? Well, we’re reprinting their backlist anyway, with natty new jackets, and I’m going to spend the next five minutes trying to convince you to buy every title, despite the fact that you’ve never heard of them and they died in 1987.” That all sounds sarcastic, but it actually sometimes is a joy – who doesn’t want to find a great, underrated author and get in on the ground floor of their renaissance? Pamela Hansford Johnson, it turns out, actually is fairly well known, except by me: she wrote twenty-seven novels, reviewed extensively for newspapers and magazines, and married C.P. Snow. The Unspeakable Skipton seems, at least at first, as though it might be not unlike The Talented Mr. Ripley: an Englishman abroad in Europe makes his living by conning people. The difference is in the protagonists: Ripley is cool and psychopathic, while Skipton is frantic, hotheaded, and pathetic. Convinced of his own genius as a novelist, he lives in Bruges and spends his days writing letters to his long-suffering London editor in defense of his unpublishable manuscripts. In the evenings, he latches on to expatriates and provides various services (procuring and art dealing chief among them) for money. In a way, the vast gulf between Skipton’s conception of the world – his own righteousness and the rest of humanity’s crass ignorance – and the way the world sees him is reminiscent of A Confederacy of Dunces. Certainly there’s an absurd humour in watching Skipton’s mad antics, although Hansford Johnson is hardly likely to make you guffaw the way Toole is (and she doesn’t want to, either). Mostly, though, it’s a novel about an unpleasant man getting his just desserts from equally unpleasant people. It’s neatly observed, and if it’s the sort of thing you like, you’ll like it, but it’s an awfully hard book to love.

Back to books that qualify for RIP XIII, the next of which was Red Snow, Will Dean’s follow-up to his smash hit Dark Pines, which featured bisexual deaf investigative journalist Tuva Moodyson. (Yes! All those adjectives!) I have to confess I didn’t read Dark Pines, although if it comes anywhere near Red Snow for atmosphere and detail, I can see why it did so well. The pleasure of Dean’s writing is in his ability to convey uncomfortable experience with the authority of one who’s lived it: not only the mental effects of a long, cold, dark, isolated, rural Swedish winter (and he does know about that, because he lives year-round in rural Sweden), but smaller things that contribute to characterisation. Tuva wears hearing aids, and in the cold they become uncomfortable; Dean lets her tell us about that, about the minutiae of her lived experience, in a way that’s dignified and convincing. (It isn’t just Tuva’s deafness that gets this treatment; he remains the only male writer I can think of who has memorialised in print the intense joy of a woman coming home after a long day at work and taking her bra off.) The crime and investigation in Red Snow, oddly, is the least convincing element of the book: there’s an apparent suicide at a liquorice factory, which has been the major employer of the tiny town of Gavrik for generations, followed by a bizarre murder in which the victim’s mouth is stuffed with liquorice and his eyes covered with liquorice coins. The pacing of the investigation (both the police and Tuva’s) is bafflingly slow and circular, readers are expected to sympathise with the family that owns the factory simply because the author and protagonist tell us we should, and the impact of the final revelation is (I suspect) diluted if you haven’t read the first book. Read it for the atmosphere, though, and for Tuva: prickly, curious, and no one’s fool. (RIP categories: mystery/suspense)

I doubt there’s anything I can say about Perdido Street Station that hasn’t been said before. Its impact on the fantasy genre has been so huge, despite the fact that it was published just eighteen years ago, that the aspect of it that seems to have most thrown readers for a loop when it was originally published didn’t have that much of an effect on me: the in- and subversion of genre tropes for which Mieville’s book is so famous has now become largely internalised by the genre itself. In other words, thanks to the fact that Perdido Street Station fucked with its readers’ heads unexpectedly, we now expect fantasy to fuck with our heads. It’s a theory, anyway.

Perdido Street Station is a very long book, although it doesn’t read like one, and there’s a lot going on in it, but once it gets going, it’s mostly about a ragtag bunch of criminals, outcasts and refugees who have to band together to save the city from a nest of soul-sucking menaces known as slakemoths. (They eat, or rather drink, your dreams, and they’re immoderate about it: slakemoths feed by literally putting their enormous tongue in a victim’s face and devouring every part of the brain save for the brainstem, leaving their prey alive but vegetative. They’re basically dementors.) Fundamentally, though, it’s a book about a city: Bas-Lag, which is lovingly mapped and described and explored and traversed throughout the course of the novel. It’s neither medieval London nor steampunk New York, though it’s reminiscent of both; really what it reminded me of was Ankh-Morpork if you drained all the zaniness and replaced it with menace. The comparison is a little unfortunate because it makes Mieville seem po-faced, which he isn’t quite, just serious: about this city, about this story, about story in general, its illusions, the way a person can be misled. His project in the New Crobuzon books, if we extrapolate from this first one, must be to make a world, and indeed Bas-Lag already feels more solid to me than Ul Qoma/Beszel of The City and the City. Perdido Street Station is a phenomenally accomplished start. (RIP categories: urban fantasy)

French’s first standalone novel, The Witch Elm, flips her usual perspective on crime: instead of filtering the world through the eyes of a detective, she gives us the experience of a victim. Toby Hennessy considers himself a lucky man: he’s got a wonderful girlfriend, he’s just managed to avoid a serious scrape at work with nothing more than a slap on the wrist, he owns and likes his flat, everything has always been okay. All that changes on the night two men break into his place, steal his valuables, and beat him almost to death. Left with potentially life-changing injuries, Toby struggles to recuperate until someone suggests that he move into the old family house, where his bachelor uncle Hugh still lives. Hugh is dying of a brain tumour, and someone needs to be on hand. Toby’s reluctant, but his girlfriend Melissa thinks it’s a great idea, and they move in. All is going well, until a family visit when one of Toby’s nephews finds a human skull hidden in the wych elm at the bottom of the garden. And then old secrets start to come to light… One of my favourite things about Tana French’s writing is how she wrongfoots you. This looks like it’s a murder mystery, and Toby looks like he’s the protagonist because he’s our narrator, but actually it’s a story about privilege, although French never uses that word. Toby is so shaken by his attack because he has never, not once in his whole life, experienced powerlessness or vulnerability, and the moment he sees himself that way, his entire self-conception falls apart. Moreover—and not to spoil anything—the body in the wych elm, it becomes clear, was killed for reasons relating very strongly to privilege and its misuses. The Witch Elm isn’t a novel about Toby at all. I’ll leave you to read it to find out which character is its true center. I highly recommend that you do. (RIP categories: mystery, suspense)

Vonnegut’s one of those writers whose first sixty pages I often find tiresome, but then I bear with it and get invested, and by the end I’m genuinely moved by and emotional about the whole book. The Sirens of Titan is his most overtly science-fictional novel, I think (having not read all of them yet), centering on the richest man on Earth, whose name is Malachi Constant. It’s almost impossible to do justice to the plot by summarising; let it be enough that the book is about free will, futility, war, love, and belonging. As ever with Vonnegut’s books, female characters aren’t mistreated so much as ignored; Beatrice Rumfoord, the woman with whom Malachi Constant eventually has a child (amusingly named Chrono), feels like a character-shaped prop, lacking even the distant, ironized sort of interiority that most of Vonnegut’s male characters are given. Yet she’s not unsympathetic; there are moments when her emotional responses are given narrative priority; and when you consider that this book was written three years before the first James Bond film, its treatment of women starts to look positively progressive. Vonnegut was at best ambivalent about NASA’s space program—he questioned whether it was worth spending money on exploring the stars when there were people starving right here on Earth—and his genre fiction, as well as his more conventionally realist novels, always seems to have this grounded sense of humanity at its core. The Sirens of Titan might be a good introduction to Vonnegut for a neophyte, in fact.

The Ear, the Eye and the Arm is a children’s/YA novel from 1995, of which no one outside the US appears ever to have heard. My dad brought it home for me in 2001, and it was so entirely unlike any other book I read as a child that scenes and characters from it have haunted the back of the immense broom cupboard that is my reading mind for years. It’s set in Harare, Zimbabwe in the late twenty-second century, which is kind of funny because most of the technological innovations that signal future-ness in the book are standard parts of our daily lives now: holophones (basically FaceTime), robot servants (Alexa). Flying buses and taxis are really the only thing we haven’t got now—oh, and genetically engineered talking blue monkeys. General Makutsi’s three children long for an adventure, and moreover, they want to earn their Explorer badges for Scouts. Their only human servant, a white man whose job is a form of ritualised flattery called Praise Singing (the imagined racial hierarchy of post-colonial southern Africa in this book is particulary interesting to an adult reader), lets them out of the house, but they’re almost immediately kidnapped and brought to a female crime boss known as the She-Elephant, who lives in a toxic waste dump and rules over its population of homeless, outcasts and petty criminals. When the She-Elephant decides to sell them, the children uncover a conspiracy involving a gang known as the Masks, who practice human sacrifice—but not before getting caught up both in an enclave in the middle of the city whose inhabitants live in a traditional African fashion, known as Resthaven, and in the home of the Praise Singer’s mother, a white woman looking for a fat ransom payout. In the midst of all this, eldest son Tendai has to find a role for himself and come to terms with his fear of disappointing his father. The Ear, the Eye and the Arm, meanwhile, are the three detectives sent to find the children, each of whom is from a different ethnic background within the nation of Zimbabwe, and each of whom has a supernaturally strong sense: the Ear has supersonic hearing, the Eye has inhumanly good eyesight, and the Arm is both unnaturally tall and an empath. A film ratings board would say that the book has “mild peril” at best, but that seems appropriate for a middle-grade novel. The strong flavour of Afrofuturism and focus on Zimabwe’s spiritual traditions (the ultimate villain is essentially conducting a form of voodoo warfare) makes the book both fascinating and informative, without being didactic. An excellent YA backlist title. (RIP categories: urban fantasy, I guess)

Thoughts on this batch of reading: Almost all of these were fantastic, and it was particularly nice to a) choose my own reading while I was abroad, instead of reading to a schedule imposed by bookselling/my own mad ambition, and b) feel okay about reading a little bit less in a month. It was also nice to find that a lot of what I read fit in naturally with the RIP XIII challenge. I’m now feeling emboldened to seek out additional seasonally appropriate reading, such as the Annual Winter Dickens, some might-be-described-as-Gothic fiction, some Victorian pastiche, and some more (perhaps historical) crime.

Three Things: October 2018

With thanks to Paula of Book Jotter for hosting—new participants always welcome!

Reading: I read so much less this month while I was in the States (five books over two weeks), and you know what? It felt great. It’s never been like that before. I’ve always felt vaguely guilty about slowing my pace, although it happens every time I go to stay with family. This time, it was perfect. Perhaps it’s time that I admitted it: professional reading is wonderful, but it’s exhausting. Just because I can read five books in a working week doesn’t mean I always should. And in the meantime? Apple picking, mountain hiking, cheese-eating, wine and cider-drinking, dress shopping, downtown strolling, coffee sipping, novel writing, movie-watching, TV-lounging, dog-petting. Most of all, spending time with my family (both extended and immediate), and with some stalwart old friends.

Looking: The West Wing is available in the US on Netflix, which is not the case in the UK. During a weekend in which my parents left me alone in the house while they drove to New York to see my brother in a play (I couldn’t go; I had a wedding to attend), I watched the entire first season in two days and started the second. The show was always basically fantasy, but it is now, astonishingly, a period piece. There’s a moment – not a big one, in the grand mythology of The West Wing, but it stuck out to me – where the press secretary, CJ Cregg (played with impeccable wit and weirdness by Allison Janney), informs the White House Press Corps that the President has done a certain thing despite not being legally obliged to do it. It turns out that this isn’t true: the law does, in fact, require him to do what he’s done. There is agonizing in the communications department about this. CJ is really worried about it; although no one is likely to find out or be hurt by it, it matters enormously to her and to her colleagues. I nearly had to turn the TV off for a minute just to absorb the fundamental integrity of that, and to consider the absurd, mendacious shitshow of the current White House press secretary, not to mention her predecessor. Imagine Sarah Huckabee Sanders being worried about having lied to the press. Imagine Sean Spicer even noticing that he’d lied to the press. Jesus wept.

We also went to the cinema en famille and saw First Man, but I don’t actually want to write about it; the more interesting thing that I watched recently was the third episode of the new Doctor Who, which is about Rosa Parks. For the most part I’ve been enjoying the new season of Who: Jodie Whittaker is amazing in a lot of ways, even if she still has to convince me of who her character is now (as opposed to who or what she isn’t). (That said, the writers have built in some acknowledgment of this; more than once this season, we’ve heard her say that she’s still figuring out her personality in this new incarnation.) There are things about the Rosa Parks episode that are weird, though. First of all: no Alabama accent sounds like the ones we heard on screen. Some of the actors came awfully close at times, but…no dice. Second of all: the idea that Rosa Parks’s protest is a fixed point in time without which the civil rights movement would never have happened is categorically false. Was it hugely and immediately symbolic? Yep. Was the curation of that symbolism also pretty carefully planned by people like Dr. King (who makes a cameo appearance in this episode) and other leaders in the black civil rights community? Also yep. I’m not denying Parks’s importance, but I don’t think it’s right to attribute everything that followed to her actions, nor is it right to portray those actions as the result of a purely emotional response to mistreatment. Parks wasn’t the first person to protest bus segregation in this way, but – as in the case of Loving v. Virginia – the NAACP considered her the most promising candidate for seeing through a court challenge after her arrest. I get that it’s hard to put all of civil rights history into a 40-minute episode, but possibly that’s a good reason for thinking really hard before you try to make a 40-minute episode that claims to pinpoint the moment that catalysed all of civil rights history.

Thinking: Perhaps unsurprisingly, I’ve been thinking about voting. A lot. Ordinarily I vote absentee, with a ballot that the State of Virginia sends me through the post (unclear why we can’t all just use email, unless it’s because of the Russians, but clearly they haven’t been daunted so far). This year that didn’t work, for a reason sufficiently obscure to me, even now, that I still kind of suspect the Russians were involved somehow. Anyway, thank God, I was home two weeks before the elections, so I went and voted early in person. Voting is the most incredible privilege, you guys. Anyone who is not white, a man, over thirty, and a property owner needs to know that. People died – were shot, were trampled, were lynched – for our right to do this. Do you rent your house or flat? You owe your suffrage to people who died for it. If you’re a woman, a person of colour, a woman of colour (double whammy), you owe your suffrage to people who died for it. If you’re between the ages of eighteen and thirty, of either sex and any gender, you owe your suffrage to people who died for it. My generation is supposedly apathetic about politics, but to be honest, most of the people who I see engaging most passionately with the issues of the day are my age. No matter your age, you have to vote when there’s an election. It is non-negotiable as part of life in a democracy. It doesn’t matter if your work day is busy. It doesn’t matter if your kids are vomiting and your babysitter’s just quit. It doesn’t matter if none of the candidates “excite” you. Not everything is always going to be perfect about your political options. You still have to vote when there’s an election. (I get to vote in the elections of two countries. I’ve only ever missed one election, in the UK, and that’s because I moved house the day before and had no idea an election was happening in that borough.) Everyone. Has. To. Vote.