Love Your Library, October 2023

Hosted, as ever, by Rebecca at Bookish Beck, posting on the last Monday of each month. Join in with #loveyourlibrary on Twitter, or wherever else you post.

I had a great library month in October—I’m only covering here the books I haven’t written about elsewhere during the month. My RIP XVIII part two post was entirely library-sourced, as was the not-totally-enjoyable The House of the Seven Gables for my American Classics reading project. That’s a solid eight library loans (plus one DNF, which I’ll discuss below)!

I Have Some Questions For You, by Rebecca Makkai (2023): One of this year’s It Books, so probably doesn’t need summarising by me. I really enjoyed this; Bodie’s investigation in the present day, despite initially feeling like a whole bunch of boundary-crossing, somehow becomes even more fascinating in the novel’s second half, which I wasn’t expecting, structurally speaking, and which I liked a lot for surprising me. Meanwhile, her experience at the sharp end of an online mob is probably the best depiction of its kind I’ve read; the vocabulary of technically correct but brutally smug and self-righteous young activists is spot-on. And the ending is so bittersweet. I loved the experience of reading it, and will keep an eye out for Makkai’s back catalogue now.

Beast, by Matt Wesolowski (2019): Better than Six Stories. This comes further on in Wesolowski’s series and therefore contains some plot points in the framing narrative that clearly make more sense if you’ve read Changeling—but it doesn’t really affect the main narrative at all. A novel in true-crime podcast format, Beast sets out to re-examine the death of Elizabeth Barton, a much-loved YouTuber and budding influencer who is found naked, frozen and headless after a snowstorm in the ruins of a medieval tower near her hometown in Northumbria. The structure is used to better effect here—each episode actually adds to a broader picture this time—but I still find Wesolowski’s protagonist, Scott King, frustratingly passive as an interviewer, in a way that makes it hard for me to believe in the extreme popularity of his show. The hook of Beast is good, though, and the revelation of Elizabeth’s character has a dreadful inevitability that reminded me of how Tana French handles a similar reveal in her novel In the Woods.

The Glutton, by A.K. Blakemore (2023): Read somewhat on location, on long-distance trains through Switzerland and France. This is based on a real-life historical person, the Great Tarare, also known as the Glutton of Lyon, who worked in late eighteenth-century France as a kind of sideshow freak eating pretty much anything—offal, nails, dead rats—had a brief stint in the French Revolutionary Army as a potential spy (it didn’t work out), and whose career was alleged to have culminated in the consumption of a human baby. Blakemore’s achievement is in creating a tone and register that combines repulsiveness and beauty, horror and innocence, as we see Tarare’s life through his eyes. Violence, poverty and neglect are all defining factors of his existence, but so is his extraordinary capacity for locating transcendence in something as quotidian as the limpid eyes of a cow or the body of a young man bathing in a stream. (His queerness is brilliantly portrayed as something Tarare understands from a young age but also can’t act upon, not so much because of societal homophobia as because he has no understanding of his entitlement to love.) It’s beautiful and sad, the kind of book that made me heave a bittersweet sigh after the last page was turned.

Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch (2023): The only title on this year’s Booker Prize shortlist that interested me, and—having read it in a day—the one I hope wins. In a lot of ways the story isn’t new at all: violent, repressive dystopian regime encroaches ever more aggressively on the life of a protagonist who just wants to get by. Partly what makes it so effective for its intended audience is that it takes place not in Russia, China, or Syria, but in western Europe (the Irish Republic, specifically), and in a not-terribly-distant future. It’s hard to read Prophet Song as anything other than a resounding wake-up call with regards to the authoritarian creep of contemporary European politics. The consequences of the regime’s brutal illogic and opacity are terrifying. In the part that I found most haunting, protagonist Eilish spends a day going from hospital to hospital, trying to determine where her twelve-year-old son Bailey, injured by shrapnel, has been taken. It’s so evocative of the frightening facelessness of totalitarian bureaucracy, and Lynch’s writing is like a crashing tide that carries you along—propulsive, fluid, terribly unstoppable.

DNFd: The Franchise Affair, by Josephine Tey (1948). Read the first chapter of this standing up in a Swiss bookshop and found the premise—a teenager accuses a middle-aged woman and her mother of abducting, imprisoning and violently beating her for a month; although she can give a perfect description of the women and their home, they are adamant they have never seen the girl before—so irresistible that I downloaded a library ebook copy straight away. After reading two more chapters, the nastiness became too much: characters with whom we’re clearly meant to sympathise are confident that the girl is a lying slut (because she has blue eyes. I’m not kidding.) A fifteen-year-old! I did a little research and discovered that yes, The Franchise Affair is this reactionary and cruel all the way through, and the characters’ attitudes reflect Tey’s own social politics. No thanks.