Love Your Library, July 2023

Hosted, as ever, by Bookish Beck. I had an absolutely immense library month in July! Bromley Central Library and the London Library both really came through for me, delivering many reservations all at once. And almost all of them were books published this year or last.

Several People Are Typing, by Calvin Kasulke (2021): The premise of Gerald, a corporate PR worker, having his consciousness accidentally absorbed into the Slack app—a conundrum which none of his coworkers at first notice, or, once noticed, believe, since staff sporadically work from home and it’s assumed Gerald is just “committing to the bit”—was irresistible. Written entirely in Slack messages, the novel reproduces with perfect satirical clarity the micro-environment of work group chats: the camaraderie and nonsensical inside jokes, the way managers write messages (and the way their presence in a group chat subtly changes the social dynamic), the subgroups and bizarrely specific use of emojis. The actual plot, which is sweet if slight, concerns one of Gerald’s coworkers Pradeep, who attempts to help Gerald return his consciousness to the physical plane (in the process, evicting Slackbot, which has escaped the app and taken up highly chaotic residence in Gerald’s body). There’s also some gloriously surreal content surrounding the dog food company for which the PR business is currently contracted to write social media posts, as well as Gerald’s experiences inside Slack (at one point, Slackbot turns him into a .gif of a sunset for 24 hours). There was scope here to tell a slightly darker story about corporate productivity culture that Kasulke doesn’t lean into enough, but it is the first book in absolutely ages to make me literally laugh out loud, more than once. At the very least, I guarantee it will get you obsessed with the :dusty-stick: emoji.

Bournville, by Jonathan Coe (2022): A state of the nation novel with heart and guts, a return to form for Coe, and the first Brexit/covid novel I have read that seems to actually answer the brief. I wrote much more about it here.

Standing Heavy, by GauZ’, transl. Frank Wynne (2022): First published in French in 2014 under the title Debout-Payé, which literally means something like “paid to stay standing”. I wrote more about this International Booker Prize-shortlisted novel that follows three Ivoirian men working as security guards in Paris here.

Boulder, by Eva Baltasar, transl. Julia Sanches (2022): First published in Spanish in 2020. I wrote more about this IBP-shortlisted novel that traces the fallout of a lesbian couple’s decision to have a baby in Reykjavik here.

Venomous Lumpsucker, by Ned Beauman (2023): My first Beauman, but it won’t be my last. A blend of goofiness, cynicism, hope, and dry humour set in a future where “extinction credits” provide a way for governments to get around environmental conservation regulations, Venomous Lumpsucker throws two characters together—amoral moneyman Mark Halyard and quietly despairing animal intelligence specialist Karin Resaint—to determine whether the titular fish still exists anywhere on earth. Mark needs to find out because, thanks to a global biobank hack of epic proportions, the price of extinction credits has just soared, and he’s about to get discovered in a nasty little fraud; Karin needs to find out because she was hired to do so, and also for secret reasons of her own. If the novel gets a little shaggy-dog in the middle, it does so with tremendous verve and style. I loved the section set in the refugee camp in Finland, where migrants from “the Hermit Kingdom”—Britain, now a North Korea-esque closed country out of which a very few agricultural workers are occasionally permitted to trickle—brew appalling analogues to tea and respond to almost any setback with a maniacally upbeat “mustn’t grumble” attitude. (One of them remarks on what lovely weather they’re having when it is in fact cloudy and grim outside, at which Karin loses her temper, only to be met with “Well, it’s not raining!”) An interesting read in conjunction with Bournville, and a great taster of Beauman’s wild imagination and assured authorial style. I’m tracking down the rest of his work in libraries now.

In Memoriam, by Alice Winn (2023): Another interesting read to compare to Bournville, as well as a read from last month, A Marvellous Light. Winn’s debut has already had lots of buzz: it follows two school friends, Sidney Ellwood and Henry Gaunt, from rugby matches and poetry recitations to the trenches of France, tracing the development of their romantic feelings for one another alongside the depredations of war on their extremely young psyches. I’ve read some less glowing reviews as well as some very positive ones, and understand the criticisms (mainly that In Memoriam shows us little that WWI literature hasn’t already covered in detail), but actually I think there’s something quite original about the way Winn weaves trauma with gentleness. These young men/boys have already been damaged, before they ever set foot on a battlefield—Ellwood and Gaunt are reminded by a younger soldier who comes from the same school that they once tied him to a chair and beat him all night, and they respond only with a kind of dismissive, jolly nostalgia—even those characters we’re given to understand are genuinely good people, characters we really are rooting for. Perhaps especially those characters. The combination of brutality and innocence that these teenagers have already absorbed from their society is a commonplace of WWI lit, sure, but I’ve never felt it conveyed so starkly, and also with such an acknowledgment of the limited, but real good things that could come out of that system: the comradeship between young men, the tenderness they show for each other when they’re wounded or depressed, the comfort of a shared repository of culture and memory. (Winn doesn’t shy away from class conflict, either; Hayes, an officer far more capable than the men who continue to be promoted above him, is a clerical worker from Lewisham whose accent and poor tailoring are conspicuously the reason for his failure to advance. His portrayal is sensitive, nuanced, and complicates the picture drawn of our posh young protagonists.) I enjoyed and was deeply moved by In Memoriam—Winn reanimates the past with great care and skill.

Wildfire at Midnight, by Mary Stewart (1956): On my birthday earlier this month, I took myself outside with a picnic blanket and a pile of books, and the one that won out—unsurprisingly—was Mary Stewart. I’m not sure there’s a better author to read on your birthday. The five (!) books I’ve read by her so far have all been good, though some better than others; the most recent one—also on my birthday, last year—was The Moon-Spinners, which was fine but felt like a dress rehearsal for This Rough Magic. Wildfire at Midnight, by contrast, is a return to form. Set on the Isle of Skye over a rainy Coronation weekend, it contains an excellently witty and sympathetic heroine in the form of Gianetta Brooke, a young model and divorcée; truly horrifying murders; a terrific suspenseful scene as Gianetta flees a killer in a blinding mist; and tremendous atmosphere in the form of a Scottish fishing hotel, complete with taciturn ghillies, kindly cook, and uniformly English guest list. Stewart at her best is capable of really expressing the moral evil of killing, and she does that again here: we understand the victims as not just bodies and plot points, but people who were truly loved and deserved to live. There’s also rather a good subtext about the arrogance and danger of colonising indigenous or pagan traditions. Wildfire at Midnight joins This Rough Magic, The Ivy Tree, and Thunder on the Right in the top tier of Stewart for me, so far.

What have you enjoyed from your library this month?

Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis

Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis (1922).

This is the story of a midlife crisis.

One of the historical criticisms of Babbitt has been that it has no plot. George F. Babbitt, the protagonist, is a realtor, with a brown, drab wife named Myra, a serious daughter in her 20s named Verona, a son in his late teens, the irrepressible Ted, and a ten-year-old daughter nicknamed Tinka, who retains her childhood aura of innocence and indifference throughout most of the novel. They live in the unimpeachable suburb of Floral Heights in the small Midwestern city of Zenith, variously said to have been modeled on Cincinnati, Kansas City, Minneapolis, and Milwaukee. The first few chapters take up just one day in Babbitt’s life, getting the reader fully acquainted and situated with the social atmosphere of middle-class, business-owning Zenith. Babbitt is a Republican voter, a Presbyterian, pro-business and anti-immigration, jovially and impersonally antisemitic, a member of the Athletic Club, the Boosters Club, and the Order of Good Fellows. He is, in other words, a certain kind of Americana personified. What precipitates the change in his life, partway through the novel, is his friend Paul. Paul shoots his own wife, Zilla, in despair at the aridity and unhappiness of their marriage, for which he can see no end in sight. He doesn’t kill her, but maims her for life, and is sentenced to several years in prison.

This event is an earthquake for Babbitt. When he first hears that Paul has shot Zilla—recounted to him over the phone by Myra—he is too busy boasting to her of his election to vice president of the Athletic Club to listen to what she is saying; she has to repeat herself more than three times. The news shakes his provincial self-satisfaction to the core. This feels right to me. Bereavement, crime, the intrusion of violence: those are things that can change the material quality of a life in a moment, and therefore they are also things that can force introspection, a kind of reckoning. In Babbitt’s case, he is not intellectual enough to think through his own dissatisfaction, but he is just sensitive enough to feel it properly for the first time in years. His response is to have an affair with a customer, the splendidly-named widow Mrs. Tanis Judique. Tanis’s friends are bohemians, or as bohemian as you can get in the Midwest in the 1920s: they flout Prohibition openly, drive too fast, throw loud parties, stay up late, quarrel publicly. Babbitt’s sojourn among “the Bunch” is, in a manner of speaking, a bid for mental and spiritual freedom (reflected also by his vocal championing of Seneca Doane, a local lawyer he had previously decried, along with his Booster Club pals, as an unpatriotic socialist). But ultimately it’s just as empty a life as the suburban rounds of Sunday School committees and dinner parties, and Babbitt isn’t well suited to this form of rebellion, either.

What brings him back is Myra’s sudden illness. She has already confronted him, in desperation and anger, about his affair, in a passage which contains some of Lewis’s most incisive and honest writing on the sexual double standard and the cruel asymmetry of white suburban middle-class male entitlement to the labours and loyalties of their wives. When she is suddenly taken into hospital and has to undergo major surgery, Babbitt repents: he realises that he does love her, cannot bear the thought of her death, and he has already lost nearly all of his friends over his sociopolitical non-conformism. It is the mirror image of Paul’s attempted murder, and it has the same effect, like an amnesiac being hit hard on the head again. The threat of mortality can bounce us out of our daily rut, or throw us back in.

At the end of the novel, Babbitt has returned to the bosom of Presbyterianism, Republicanism, monogamy, and commerce. His son Ted, however, ends the book on a note that echoes the generational-change aspect of The Age of Innocence‘s ultimate scene. He elopes with Eunice Littlefield, the literal girl next door. Ted’s announcement that Eunice is now his wife is met with horror and resistance by both Myra and Verona (whose allegedly radical social ideas demonstrably do not stand up to the test). But Babbitt—the conservative patriarch par excellence—wonders if it’s really all that bad. After all, what’s done is done, and Eunice seems a nice girl. The final sentence of the book has “the Babbitt men” setting out to confront the disapproval of their womenfolk.

So it’s the story of one man’s midlife crisis. But it’s also a tragedy, read one way—Babbitt is ultimately too complacent to change his life—and a bittersweet Shakespearean comedy read another way—Babbitt runs around the Athenian woods for a while but ultimately finds his way home. It’s also worth thinking about the novel as a microcosmic representation of something that was happening on a wider scale. America’s midlife crisis, perhaps, as its manufacturing and political importance became global, as it became pompous, morally compromised by prosperity, lost its youthful zip.

This is the seventh book for my year-long American Classics reading project.

The Great Reread, #8: Kingdomtide, by Rye Curtis

Kingdomtide, by Rye Curtis (2020). First read: February 2020.

What I thought then: I absolutely loved it; it was the first entry in 2020’s Books of the Year. I wrote: “Imagine that Olive Kitteredge is a septuagenarian Texan Methodist, then add a survivalist bent worthy of Cormac McCarthy, and you have the outline of Cloris Waldrip, Curtis’s protagonist in this brilliant, heart-bending debut. Cloris is the only survivor of a light plane crash in the mountains of Montana that kills her husband of many decades and the pilot. She must walk out of the hills if she wants to live: no one from the outside world believes there were any survivors, except for tenacious, alcoholic park ranger Debra Lewis. Oh: and Cloris isn’t alone in the mountains. Encompassing theology, sex, grief, and culpability, Kingdomtide asks what we owe to each other, individually and as a community, and challenges the contexts in which we judge one another. It’s also, dryly, quite funny.”

What I thought this time: Well, I loved it this time around too. One of the purposes of this Great Reread project—perhaps the primary purpose—is to see whether things I loved on first reading have held up, and Kingdomtide has.

Cloris Waldrip’s voice continues to be moving, compelling, dryly funny at times. Her relationship with the “masked man” who saves her life more than once in the wilderness becomes a focal point for a strange, almost parental tenderness that grows between them, the masked man caring for her by providing food, shelter, and company, and she caring for him by withholding judgment and asking him perceptive questions. The reader becomes aware much earlier than Cloris does, through the interpolation of the secondary storyline, that the man is wanted by the FBI in connection with the disappearance of a twelve-year-old girl. In his conversation with Cloris where he finally admits to this, he represents that relationship with the twelve-year-old as true love, a claim that is almost certainly not what it seems. Cloris was raised a Texan Methodist, and she is not an idiot, but despite the opportunities for prejudice or even reasonable fear, she steadfastly meets him where he is, holding the contradictions of his behaviour—he has repeatedly saved her life; he may have hurt or even killed a child—together simultaneously. It’s one of the hardest things for a human being to do, I think, to hold a contradiction, and for a fictional character to do it (to be written to do it, I mean) with such self-awareness and clarity is really rare. It’s one of the reasons Cloris is so memorable.

We never get a chance to see much of her before her plane crashes in the Bitterroot wilderness, although there are memories that she describes, revealing her irrational loathing for a fellow Methodist woman, her brief and long-ago extramarital affair with a neighbour, a suicide attempt after discovering she can’t have children, and the quiet, undemonstrative, but deeply rooted love shared between her and her husband. But we do get the sense that Cloris before had fairly conventional attitudes, that her life choices (at least the external, visible ones) largely adhered to whatever her society had to say about women or sex or God. Her experiences in the Bitterroot do not make her a different person—she has obviously had the grit and pragmatism that she demonstrates for her entire life—but they make her, perhaps, more of the person that she is. Her three-month ordeal coincides with a now almost defunt liturgical season in the Protestant church known as Kingdomtide (hence the title), in which charitable actions are emphasised as well as “the message of the kingdom of God”, according to Merriam-Webster. You could argue all your life—people do—over what that message is, but I think it is reasonably uncontroversial to suggest that the message is love. To love someone, amongst other things, is to enable them to be the most of their truest self. In that sense, Cloris and the masked man love each other, and maybe Cloris and the wilderness love each other, too.

That’s not to say the novel has no flaws. I struggled a little more this time with the secondary storyline, which is apparently impossible to discuss critically without reference to Fargo; almost all the reviews do it! But it’s easy to see why: there’s a highly Fargo-esque feeling about the lavishly alcoholic forest ranger Debra Lewis, her bizarre team of rangers and volunteers, the eccentrics and cranks who live in the area near her station (including an Indian woman named Silk Foot Maggie who makes vaguely terrifying sculptures out of animal bones and trash), and the completely bizarre search-and-rescue specialist Steven Bloor, with whom Lewis has an unenthusiastic sexual relationship of frankly horrifying levels of cringe. Lewis is convinced that Cloris is still alive, even after everyone else has given up on her, but their storylines never intersect directly. (There is an indirect connection, which pleased me very greatly when I got to it.) Her storyline contains so many characters teetering on the edge of the grotesque, so many Gothic details (like the men in her station being obsessed with the ghost of Cornelia Åkersson, a trans woman murdered in the area in the 1800s who supposedly haunts the mountains on the back of a glyptodont), that it’s colourful but not very coherent. Similarly dramatic but improbable is the speed and quantity of Lewis’s drinking, which seems to have her downing about six bottles of wine a day whilst also somehow not crashing her car. Now that I come to write about it, maybe that’s the point—perhaps the whole heightened surrealness of life in the ranger station is Curtis’s contribution to the Gothic Southern/Western grotesque/folklore tradition—but it sits a little uneasily with Cloris’s sections, which feel so much more immediate and affecting.

Even so, an immensely worthy reread, still as moving and transcendent as it was on publication. I hope Rye Curtis is working on something else; he’s had three years, it would be so interesting to see where he goes next. In the meantime, this remains a keeper.

3 More Calvinos

I got very lucky earlier this month and found a nearly-pristine copy of the Vintage edition of Our Ancestors in an Oxfam shop for 99p! It’s a collection of three Calvino novels: The Cloven Viscount, The Baron in the Trees, and The Non-existent Knight. Those of you with excellent memories might recall that I read The Baron in the Trees already this year, back in April, so whence cometh the third of the Calvino books that this post title promises? Well—a few weeks previously I had found a copy of Invisible Cities, also in a charity shop, and read it just before finding Our Ancestors. Herewith, some thoughts.

Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino, transl. William Weaver (1972): I so very much wanted to like this more than I actually did. It is not the kind of book that is best read all the way through at once, and I probably did it a disservice by reading it that way, but it is so short that it’s hard to resist the temptation to do so. Structurally, it’s a collection of very brief vignettes, each describing a single fantastical city and purportedly the report of explorer Marco Polo to Kublai Khan. Italicised sections punctuate the descriptions, depicting the khan’s conversations with Polo and his growing suspicions that these cities shouldn’t necessarily be taken at face value. The gag is that Polo is simply describing, and re-describing, Venice, his hometown. But, frankly, it doesn’t work for me. It’s too abstract again, too removed from Venice’s physical historical reality and too happy to play in the realm of figurative truth (what is a city’s true form, how do we define city, etc., etc.) I know that’s the entire point of the book, and for those who like their fiction to be mashed into philosophy like blue and red PlayDoh, the one utterly inextricable from the other, Invisible Cities is a great example. I just prefer a different approach to the fantastical.

Such as…

The Cloven Viscount, by Italo Calvino, transl. Archibald Colquhoun (1952): Narrated, like The Baron in the Trees, by a young relative of the title character, this fairytale-like novella recounts the history of Baron Medardo, who is bisected by a Turkish cannonball and finds that his soul, or personality, has been likewise cut in two. The first to return home is the Bad ‘Un, who hangs peasants indiscriminately, persecutes a local goose girl, chops mushrooms, pears, and trees in half to reflect his own state of being, and repeatedly attempts to murder his little nephew. Confusion ensues when the other half of Medardo—the Good ‘Un—turns up, falling in love with the same goose girl and providing medical care, religious solace, and Good Samaritan-like deeds to the rural populace. These are not met with universal approbation, either; as the narrating nephew tells us, “we felt ourselves lost between an evil and a virtue equally inhuman.” Only when naive Pamela (the goose girl) agrees to marry one of the Medardos, and the two halves end up dueling each other, is the balance of wholeness restored. I absolutely loved this; it feels entirely of a piece with The Baron in the Trees, with whimsy and cruelty held in perfect balance. It takes joint first place as my favourite Calvino so far.

The Nonexistent Knight, by Italo Calvino, transl. Archibald Colquhoun (1959): Generally considered slightly less successful than The Cloven Viscount, an assessment with which I think I agree. Tonally, it’s of a piece with the previous book: Agilulf, a paladin in the service of Charlemagne, is just a suit of impeccable white armour, with no body inside, although that doesn’t stop him from participating in battles, attracting lovers, and defending his honour against impugnment. Structurally, the narrator is far removed from the scene of the action—we find out only late in the novella that she is a nun writing the story as an act of penance (and has a secret identity that is revealed almost on the last page)—and there is a certain diffuseness to the plot: Agilulf ends up embarking on a quest to prove that the woman he saved from rape fifteen years ago was a virgin at the time, but this quest only begins in chapter seven of twelve. Meanwhile, his squire, the madman Gurduloo; his protegé, the young nobleman Raimbaud; and another youthful knight, Torrismund, all have their own quests to execute, for love or parental recognition or (in Gurduloo’s case) simply to follow his deranged instincts, which leave him unable to determine whether he is himself or whatever he interacts with (soup, ducks, a horse, etc.) A lovely satire on the picaresque plot, just a little less concentrated in effect than Viscount and Baron.

It’s incredibly difficult to work out a complete bibliography for Calvino because some of his stories and novellas were republished in multiple different collections, but I’ve now read at least nine works: Viscount, Baron, Knight, Invisible Cities, Marcovaldo, The Complete Cosmicomics, If on a winter’s night a traveler, Collection of Sand, and The Road to San Giovanni. Where to go next? Clearly his short fable-like work is a winner with me, so I’m juggling the ideas of Italian Folktales, Mr. Palomar, possibly Into the War (I’ve enjoyed his nonfictional and autobiographical work a lot too). Thoughts?

Two International Booker Prize Shortlisters

I haven’t made a habit of following the International Booker Prize particularly closely, but I’ve just read two of the books that made the shortlist and will read the ultimate winner soon. Here they are:

Standing Heavy, by GauZ’, transl. Frank Wynne (2022): First published in French in 2014 under the title Debout-Payé, which literally means something like “paid to stay standing”. GauZ’ is an Ivoirian writer whose own experiences in Paris have coloured this novel, which follows three immigrant men as they work a variety of poorly-paid security jobs. Ferdinand enters the country during the 1960s, when Ivoirian students are still encouraged and tolerated; Ossiri and Kassoum both make the move in the 1990s, “the Golden Age of immigration”, but the chilling effect of 9/11 on French immigration policy makes their lives more precarious. We spend time in the mind and memories of each man, as well as an unnamed retail security guard whose fragmented observations are by turns humorous, sarcastic, philosophical, erudite and world-weary. (A representative quotation that seems to encompass all of the above: “How is it possible to be reminded of the Laplace transform when watching an old woman with a purple rinse rummaging through a dumpbin of Gaby–WAS €24.95: NOW 70% OFF!–goose-shit-green striped cardigans?” And then there’s this: “At about one o’clock in the morning, the high-class escort girls and trans women who ply their trade on the Champs Elysees and surrounding areas drop by to freshen their fragrance and touch up their outlandish make-up. They share the aisles with women in hijabs, who, for reasons no-one knows, are numerous at this hour.” It’s that “for reasons no-one knows” that I like so much; that sense of phenomena that a person paid to become familiar with an environment can observe but not explain.) The three named characters could have withstood more expansive treatment, particularly Ferdinand, whose experience of political activism by means of students’-rights and anti-eviction demonstrations could have formed a rich longer novel on its own. The book is so short—252 pages long—that it can feel like there isn’t enough space to give each strand the attention it’s due; I would happily have read much more of the fragmented observations of the nameless Sephora guard, who clearly has a scientific background and whose character could have developed in interesting, subtly articulated ways.

Boulder, by Eva Baltasar, transl. Julia Sanches (2022): Originally published in Spanish in 2020, though under the same title. Baltasar has said this is the second in a projected trilogy with the overarching name of “Triptych”, which is meant to explore the inner worlds of three different women. Eponymous Boulder starts off as a cook on a South American freighter (we never learn her real name) but soon falls desperately in love with an Icelandic woman named Samsa, for whom she gives up the sea and moves to Reykjavik. Their decade-long relationship is put under intolerable pressure when Samsa decides she wants to get pregnant and Boulder, uninterested in motherhood, feels unable to push back. It’s worth noting that although the birth and existence of baby Tinna has been presented in the critical discussion around this novel as the reason for the relationship’s failure, I don’t think that really gets to the heart of it. Boulder loves Tinna in her own way; she wants to spend more time with her than Samsa allows, and she wants to parent and be present for her in a way totally opposite to Samsa’s nurturing/smothering earth-mother-like constant attention. She is not maternal, but she is not uncaring. What sinks the relationship isn’t the baby; it’s Boulder’s and Samsa’s inability to connect up their individual capacities for care. Their communication, and the sense of them as a partnership, a team, is almost entirely absent from the novel. If this is Baltasar’s point, it’s a much more interesting and transgressive one than the exhaustingly prevalent babies-ruin-everything narrative; mainstream fiction has yet to plumb the depths of the emotional reality that babies are much more likely to ruin everything if there were cracks in the foundation to begin with.

Have you read either of these, or any other International Booker Prize candidates from this year?

Bournville, by Jonathan Coe

Bournville, by Jonathan Coe (2022)

I requested this from the LL months ago, expecting to like it but with no expectations as to how much I would like it, and therefore content to wait for as long as it took. Well, dear reader, not to keep you in suspense a moment longer: I loved it. It is, I think, the first Brexit/covid novel I have read that seems to actually answer the brief, to be attempting to engage with the political, national and international situation of Britain today without too much cuteness, overt allegory, or partisanship. (Coe is politically liberal, but his characters are not uniformly so, and we are encouraged to like and sympathise with people whose behaviours and principles don’t fall neatly into either half of the divide.) Perhaps that’s because it doesn’t start with Brexit and covid; it ends with them. Most of Bournville is an attempt to work out how we got here, and Coe is too honest and historically savvy not to recognise that a) the roots lie deep in the past, and b) there was no lost Golden Age. Even in his 1945 Britain, there are murmurs of cruelty against foreigners, homosexuals, anyone “different”. But the past isn’t a repository for dead bigotry: it’s there in 1953, too, and in 1966, and 1989, and 1997, and in every chapter of the book. A repeated line sums it up: “Everything changes, and everything stays the same.”

Coe’s most fascinating character, and one written with a lot of love (she’s based on his mother), is Mary Lamb, née Clarke, who is eleven years old on VE Day and living in Bournville, the suburb of Birmingham founded as a “model village” by Quaker chocolatier Richard Cadbury in order to house workers at his factory. Every chapter of the novel centers around Mary’s family and what they’re doing on signally important days in post-war British history: the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, the England-Germany World Cup final, the investiture of Charles as Prince of Wales, his marriage to Diana, Diana’s funeral. Interestingly, the actual day of the Brexit vote is not included (perhaps Coe felt it was too soon to be able to contemplate it with proper historical context?), although Brexit’s repercussions are felt and explicitly discussed. Though we see through Mary’s eyes for the first few chapters, the point-of-view baton quickly shifts to her children and then to her grandchildren, sometimes even brief flashes from an in-law or neighbour. To Coe’s immense credit, these perspective changes are always accomplished seamlessly and with obvious intent (he doesn’t add viewpoints just because he can, a practice to which contemporary crime writers in particular seem to be addicted). In some ways, it’s a bit like Jacob’s Room or Mrs. Dalloway; that plethora of perspective gives us many, many facets not only of Britain but of Mary Lamb herself. She is a fascinating creation precisely because she would probably describe herself as so ordinary: intelligent but incurious and unintellectual, yet lacking the racial prejudice of her husband, Geoffrey, yet also capable of referring to a gay man as “the lowest of the low” in the 1960s, yet equally capable of embracing her youngest son Peter, when he comes out and tremulously asks her if that’s still her opinion of homosexuals, with the enjoinment not to ask her about something she said thirty years ago because times have changed and she can’t remember it anyway. Mary’s shifting capabilities—loving her mixed-race grandchildren unreservedly, yet also remarking on “what a nice colour” they are and failing to protest Geoffrey’s thirty-two years of being unable to meet his Black daughter-in-law’s gaze—make her feel extraordinarily human. (So, too, does the demonstrated cost of that shiftiness: the daughter-in-law in question, Bridget, finally explodes at the end of the book, with a single speech that both encompasses her love for Mary and painfully reveals just how alien she has been made to feel by her husband’s studiedly neutral family.)

There are, perhaps, occasional moments that feel a bit broad, a bit on-the-nose. Virtually every scene featuring Mary’s eldest son, Jack, an unreconstructed Thatcherite Brexiteer businessman, and his wife Angela—who is noisily weepy over the death of Princess Diana, and whose last appearance in the novel is made “popping into a newsagents” for a copy of a tabloid running a scurrilous story about Meghan Markle—is of this nature. But then, quite frankly, there are times when Britain itself feels a bit broad and on-the-nose to me. Having moved to the furthest reaches of it’s-really-not-London-it’s-Kent in the past two years, I have met wonderful human beings and am happy to have such good neighbours, but I have also had conversations that would have seemed unreal to me when I still rarely left Zones 1 and 2, conversations that have involved people having vehemently racialised opinions about Meghan Markle, suggesting to me that British colonialism in India was an overall good because it led to the development of railways, and wondering aloud whether parents forced into using food banks due to the cost of living crisis were “just making it all up”. (Not all in the same conversation, thank Christ.) So if Coe sometimes seems to be painting in primary colours, well… there’s something about contemporary Britain that seems to express itself in primary colours.

And yet Bournville is still beautiful, funny, and sad, a brilliant example of how individual human lives are woven into the collective life of a nation, how you can’t have one without the other. Nostalgia, regret, wondering about the road not traveled: all of this suffuses a person’s life as they get older, all of this is significant to the legacy of families, and all of this forms the story of a nation. Coe has done a magnificent thing here. Bournville is a love letter to Britain that is also an intervention that is also a passionate plea: to remember each other as people, to connect on that level, to memorialise both our failings and our triumphs. I’m so glad to have read it.