08. The Bedlam Stacks, by Natasha Pulley

It’s really hard to sum up The Bedlam Stacks. We start in 1859. Merrick Tremayne used to smuggle plants out of colonial Asia for the East India Company, but now, thanks to a badly injured leg, he has been sent home to Cornwall. He is quietly stewing in the family manse, relegated to a bedroom at the top of three flights of stairs despite his injury and unable to do anything at all without the approval of his older brother, when he receives a letter: the East India Company wants him back. Malaria is on the rise in India, and it’s bringing down too many colonial administrators; there is a way of treating it, with quinine, but the supply is tightly controlled. Merrick’s job is to find a rumoured forest of cinchona trees, from which quinine is made, in the highlands of Peru; he is to take cuttings from the plants and bring them back to London, so that the East India Company can grow its own supply. Initially dubious, he is convinced to take the job by an old friend, Clem, and Clem’s wife Minna, both of whom will be accompanying him. But the situation in Peru is far stranger than Merrick imagines: his guide, Raphael, is a Catholic priest, but rumours swirl around him of stone saints and mysterious wild men, and an uncrossable border in the forest…

There’s also a city perched on a natural bridge spanning a river, the columns of stone criss-crossed with streams of obsidian from an ancient volcanic eruption, so that sunshine on the river is refracted by the glass, causing the water to boil. There’s luminescent pollen that infuses a whole rainforest. There’s irresistibly funny dialogue, first between Merrick and Clem and then between Merrick and Raphael; both friendships are fractious, but witty. In fact, the relationships between all of the characters are so convincing, and so endearing, that I kept imagining the book as a mini-series, something cast and shot with the same sort of mindset that produced the BBC’s adaptation of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.

Pulley excels at creating a sense of the alien, and because the book is set in 1859, there is a sense of slippage between the merely foreign and the truly supernatural; the mysteriousness of The Bedlam Stacks is that, for a long time, the reader is never sure whether the oddness Merrick encounters is just a result of the limitations of mid-Victorian knowledge. I described it earlier as part David Mitchell, part Haruki Murakami; like those writers, Pulley’s version of the fantastical is a kind of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it uncanniness. That her book understands the political ramifications of the phenomena it describes, particularly when its characters belong to an era and nation convinced of its own right to commit rapacious conquest, brings me back to comparisons with Strange and Norrell, though I think, like Clarke, Pulley could have committed herself more thoroughly to exploring the power dynamics that she draws attention to. Perhaps most to the point is the fact that I simply could not put The Bedlam Stacks down: it’s suspenseful, the writing is more than competent, the jokes land every time. Really marvelous.

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07. The Madonna of the Mountains, by Elise Valmorbida

One particular risk of having a reading list or challenge is that it’s easily possible to read several books in a row that, while fine, don’t really excite you; that you’re reading because there’s no reason to put them down and they’re doing their job, but which you don’t feel a pang parting from when you reach work, or the end of your lunch break. This has happened to me: May, A Station On the Path…, and The Waters and the Wild all ended up three-star reads, quite all right but not especially haunting, and not propulsive while I was reading them. (Actually, The Waters and the Wild was, but the structure did most of the work; I found that even as I was racing through the final pages, the relentlessly circuitous prose was frustrating.) The upside of a patch of average reading is that when you do find something emotionally compelling, it breaks upon you like a wave of delight. The Madonna of the Mountains is a book like that. It’s quiet, but it’s brilliant.

It starts in 1923, with a girl called Maria Vittoria embroidering sheets for her dowry trunk. She’s twenty-five, alarmingly old to be unmarried. Her papà has gone to find her a husband. He returns with a man – Achille Montanari, tall and strong and wrapped in glory as a result of vaguely-defined heroism in the last war – and they marry. From there, Elise Valmorbida spins the story of Maria Vittoria’s life: her marriage, her children, the ascent of Mussolini’s government and the onset of WWII. It finishes with her family’s eventual emigration to Australia in 1950. In between these events, Valmorbida demonstrates, life goes on: the war isn’t the point of the novel any more than the question of whether Maria Vittoria will have a husband, a question solved in chapter one. As a result of its refusal to be “about” any one particular event, The Madonna of the Mountains feels both universal (fears about infidelity, a child’s health, how to protect your family in uncertain times) and deeply, richly specific: Valmorbida is interested in process, whether that’s washing laundry in the stream, raising silkworms from eggs, or the arduous hunt for, and fiddly preparation of, snails to eat when there’s no other meat.

Because we’re so deeply embedded in its physical world, The Madonna of the Mountains also feels effortlessly emotionally engaging, without resorting to either melodrama or apparent anachronism. Third-rate historical fiction forces us to care about characters either because we identify with them (often because they have political opinions much like our own, which are suspiciously progressive for their own time, as in The Burning Chambers), or because they’re forced to endure trial after trial, which requires a grudging sort of respect from the reader. Here, neither of those things occurs: Maria Vittoria is very much of her time, a God-fearing Catholic countrywoman whose husband hits her on occasion but whom she will never dream of leaving, who feeds her eldest son first, and who disinherits a daughter with pain but no regret when she brings dishonour to the household. The challenges she faces are both personal and political (indeed, in Fascist Italy, the two are often the same), and in every adversity, her responses are so consistent that it really feels as if you are peering into the head of, let’s say, your great-grandmother; someone whose world is not your world, whose socially conditioned responses are alien to your own. The Madonna of the Mountains is one of the most restrained, yet profoundly convincing, historical novels that I’ve read in years, perhaps ever. I’m delighted to have found it.

06. The Waters and the Wild, by DeSales Harrison

I’ve always thought Benjamin Britten would have written great music for it, the Yeats poem that gives this book its title:

Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

The poem appears in an envelope addressed to Daniel Abend, a psychoanalyst who lives in New York City. Along with the poem—handwritten, in the distinctive block capitals of the woman whom Daniel loved twenty years ago in Paris, who killed herself shortly after they ended their relationship—there is a photograph of Daniel’s former patient Jessica Burke, who died in her bathtub of a heroin overdose. She is supposed to have died alone, but the photograph suggests otherwise; someone else was there, someone who knows Daniel’s life and history, and who is bent on revenge.

Daniel reveals his story through a long confession written and sent to Father Nelson Spurlock, the vicar of the church in New York that conducts Jessica Burke’s funeral. Thus, as Spurlock reads the document, we too discover the secrets that Daniel has been living with, and keeping from his daughter Clementine. By its very nature, the confessional structure is a slow reveal; it takes almost the entire book for us to learn things that Daniel knows from the start. Sometimes it’s too slow. Harrison, like Benjamin Wood, wants us to see this story as somehow special or profound. He uses as many tricks as he can to imbue the narrative with weight: heavy foreshadowing, complex or inverted sentence structure that echoes biblical or poetic phrasing, introduction of religious themes (Daniel’s beloved is on track to become a nun), and of course that Yeats poem. Again, though, I don’t see that it works, and I don’t see why it’s even necessary to reach for it: the particular sins of Daniel’s life, his failures and his lies, are so commonplace and human. They have extreme consequences—a person’s death, a child’s life—but Harrison seems to want to introduce a metaphysical significance to the events of the plot that simply isn’t supported. There is a lot about shame and guilt and God, but these things can and should be invoked and felt deeply by the characters, without necessarily being a moral framework through which the reader ought to perceive the book.

The Waters and the Wild is helped, though, by that confessional structure: you want to read it all the way through because you do—even if frustrated by Daniel’s withholding—want to know what happened in the past, and how it is affecting the present. You want, perhaps most of all, to know his level of culpability: how much is he at fault? He is a thoroughly realised character, seemingly open but concealing much, perhaps because he is deceiving himself. That particular brand of unreliability makes a nice change from the other unreliable narrators of domestic noir, who tend to be alcoholic women. The Waters and the Wild is flawed in conception and execution, but it sets its sights much higher than most other books of its genre.

05. A Station On the Path to Somewhere Better, by Benjamin Wood

The back cover of my proof of this doesn’t give much away: merely the names and relationship of our two protagonists, Francis and Daniel Hardesty, father and son, and the promise of a road trip that ends in an explosion of violence, which continues to haunt Daniel twenty years after the fact. Given the road trip element of the book, I was expecting a darker version of Let Go My Hand. What I got was, indeed, dark, but there is no question of redemption or forgiveness in A Station On the Path… In Francis Hardesty, a man whose temper, capacity for manipulation, and sense of entitlement drive him ever further towards acts of intimidation and murder, Benjamin Wood has created the scariest literary father since Daddy, of Fiona Mozley’s Elmet, or Martin Alveston of My Absolute Darling.

It’s not particularly easy to talk about this book in a critical way without some significant plot spoilers, so if you intend to read it and you don’t want to know specifically what happens, look away! If you don’t think you’ll read it but you want my opinions on it anyway, for some reason, or if you don’t mind knowing some details of the promised violence before opening the book, read on.

Wood effectively creates a manipulative, shitty ex-husband and self-centered absentee father in Francis Hardesty; the opening pages, where he arrives to collect Daniel for a road trip whose purpose is, for a while, unclear, cement his unreliability in our minds. The fact that Daniel’s mother doesn’t trust him to enter the house speaks volumes. There’s a bit of heavy-handed retrospection as they drive away: “That was the last time I saw her,” Daniel tells us, narrating from the future. Several more of these ominous sentences are scattered through the book; it’s not the gravest of authorial sins, but it’s never been a strategy I particularly like. If you’re going to foreshadow, do it implicitly. Otherwise, build an atmosphere of menace and let that do the talking.

The atmosphere of menace is, in itself, top-notch. Daniel and Francis are driving towards Leeds, where Francis is a carpenter on a television show called The Artifex, about the friendship between a young boy and a strange woman who says she’s an alien, but who may just be mad. (More of this parallel wouldn’t have gone amiss: the point is that the show is about not just the line between reality and fantasy, but that between fantasy and insanity. That line is one that Francis Hardesty tightrope-walks for the first half of the book, then falls off of spectacularly in the second half. If we take the metaphor at face value, though, it pushes us towards the interpretation that Francis is deceiving himself as much as he deceives his son and everyone who comes into his orbit. That would make him a pitiful figure, but he is instead terrifying, capable of inventing a complicated lie within seconds and always poised to verbally or physically attack the skeptical. He is not insane; he is abusive.) As inconsistencies mount up – Francis keeps them in a pub waiting for a contact instead of taking them straight to the studio; the contact is very late; the initial approach to the studio is furtive and, ultimately, unsuccessful – Daniel becomes aware that his father is not just unreliable, but teetering on the brink of something that cannot be walked back from. Because the reader lacks Daniel’s need for love and acceptance from Francis (and is also an adult, not a child), we’ve come to this realisation earlier, but watching Daniel get there is nail-biting.

If I have a major issue with A Station On the Path, it’s that it seems to be reaching for a moral weight with which to invest its horrors that doesn’t appear warranted. Francis Hardesty murders four people and himself. Whether he does it because of deep-seated psychotic rage, a sense of entitlement, a combination of the two, or something else entirely isn’t ever made clear, and doesn’t really need to be. There’s a final section where we see Daniel as an adult, with a beloved partner, and realise that the book has been driving, all along, towards the question of whether he can bear to be a father, whether it is irresponsible for him to taint a child with the bloodline of a mass murderer. That is a weighty moral issue, and had Wood spent longer in that place, narratively, it would have made more sense. But as it is, the bulk of the book is spent describing the horrible events of the past, and there can be no particular reason to treat those events as though they’re special. Angry men kill people all the time. If Wood had let Daniel acknowledge the sheer banality of his father’s evil, it would have made for a stronger book.

Reading Diary: all the stuff that’s not #20booksofsummer

Believe it or not, I have been reading things that aren’t #20booksofsummer, and I’m reliably informed that some people miss the reading diary format. So here’s a longer roundup post for y’all; I’ll continue to write reviews that count towards the challenge as individual posts.

Femme noir beach read, I see you! I see you so hard! Sunburn is Laura Lippman’s latest book, and given how minutely it dissects the ways in which men can be manipulated by women using patriarchal entitlement as a weapon, it’s the closest thing I’ve read to a successor to Gone Girl. Our protagonist, Polly, has walked out on her dying marriage to Gregg and her toddler daughter, Jani. We first meet her in a bar in Belleville, Delaware, a nowhere-town that comes to life only during beach tourist season. She soon takes up with Adam, a regular at the bar who quickly becomes the chef, but Adam is hardly an ideal summer fling: he’s a private investigator who’s been hired to find her, by someone who’s not Gregg. Meanwhile, Polly is trying to keep more than one layer of secrets about her past under wraps… It’s been two and a half weeks (?) since I read this, and honestly, much of the plot has already left my head (though I can at least recall that it’s got insurance fraud and arson). The reason to read it is Polly, who can twist men (always men; women never like her) around her little finger, but who has also had such a rough shake from life that the more we learn about her, the more we think she deserves whatever she can garner for herself. Lippman’s plotting sags a little in the third quarter, but the tightness of the denouement makes up for it. This should be at the top of the stack of paperbacks next to your sun lounger.

The Wonder is not a book that fears to wear its allegiance on its sleeve: its central character, Lib Wright, is a nurse trained by Florence Nightingale who has seen active service in the Crimea, and she is intellectually dedicated to the rigours of the scientific method. She is therefore both uniquely prepared for, and uniquely disadvantaged to play, the role that she takes on at the start of the book: to keep a two-week, twenty-four-hour watch on a young Irish girl who claims to have been living on air (or, as she puts it, “manna from heaven”) for the last four months. Ireland in the 1880s is still so deeply enmeshed in the twin grips of rural poverty and the Catholic Church that Lib finds herself totally alone in her skepticism: the local priest, Mr. Thaddeus, waits for proof of a miracle, while the half-cracked elderly village doctor is convinced that Anna represents the first step in humanity’s evolution into something superhuman (“perhaps reptilian”, he suggests). It’s only when Mr. Byrne, a journalist from Dublin, enters the village that Lib has an ally, but time is running out for Anna… The Wonder isn’t perfect; Donoghue hammers home the price of superstition, making even supposedly educated people into credulous caricatures. The ending, too, although deeply satisfying in a certain emotional sense, is a little neat. The chances of a happy ending to this sort of story are so slim, after all. What saves the book from mawkishness is Donoghue’s ability to get us desperately invested in the truth: as Rebecca rightly notes, the geographical isolation of the setting makes The Wonder almost a locked-room mystery, and the satisfaction of figuring it out is compelling.

At a christening party in Los Angeles, Albert Cousins kisses his host’s wife. What might have been a mildly embarrassing social faux pas becomes much more when Beverly Keating divorces her husband and marries Bert, moving across the country to live with him in Northern Virginia, nearer his parents. Complicating the situation are Bert’s and Beverly’s children, a multifarious brood who sometimes get along, sometimes don’t. A tragic accident one summer haunts the whole extended family; years later, Franny Keating, whose christening party was the scene of the initial forbidden kiss, is grown up and working as a cocktail waitress, having dropped out of law school. At the bar where she works, she meets Leon Posen, a Great American Writer clearly imagined in the vein of Roth or Bellow. Her family’s story becomes the plot of Posen’s comeback novel, and the repercussions of this second betrayal follow her and her siblings for decades to come. Ann Patchett’s grasp of family dynamics and the way people speak to each other is majestic; Commonwealth has a large cast of characters, complexly interrelated, but for the most part Patchett keeps them all clearly differentiated. The book is an exploration of what families owe to one another, and of where, if anywhere, the boundaries of “family” can be drawn. Franny and Posen’s long-term relationship is drawn exceptionally well: a long chapter during which friends from the publishing industry impose on Franny’s hospitality for weeks at a time reveals so much about the inequalities of age, wealth, and social capital that will eventually capsize their lives together. I’d rather read Patchett on dysfunctional families than Franzen, any day: she’s funnier, and kinder.

The Burning Chambers is brain candy, there can be no question, but it’s the sort of brain candy that does you no harm. It is set during sixteenth-century France’s Wars of Religion, in the old medieval town of Carcassonne and in the city of Toulouse. Although religious conflict does play a role in the plot, the real story is about the heritage of our heroine Minou. (This, I am told, is the equivalent of naming an English character “Pussy”, with all of the same connotations. Whoops.) She is a classic romantic-adventure protagonist: gutsy and morally sound without being moralising, remarkably openminded regarding an individual’s freedom to worship as they see fit, bookish but not intellectual, and possessed of a single defining physical characteristic (mis-matched eyes. Her love interest, Piet Reydon, has another standard iteration of this: red hair.) Minou and Piet are caught up in the machinations of the evil cleric Valentin, once Piet’s best friend at university, now a zealot whose interest in maintaining the iron grip of Catholicism is motivated less by religious passion than by a lust for worldly power. He all but rubs his hands together and cackles, á la Frollo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. (He also has one distinguishing feature, a streak of white in an otherwise-black head of hair.) And Valentin is entangled with a woman who has never met Minou, but who, for reasons we slowly come to learn, wants her dead. It all sounds quite ridiculous and indeed, it is—the denouement, which involves an enormous pyre in the middle of a mountain forest, becomes almost farcical as various characters run in and out of the scene—but it works. Mosse keeps all of her plates spinning, never seeming to lose each character’s place in the plot; her action scenes are exciting and fast-paced, just begging the eye to fly down the page; and she’s done her research. Minou’s politics might be conveniently progressive, but sixteenth-century Carcassonne comes to life in Mosse’s brisk but detailed prose.

“Progressive” is not the word anyone would use to describe the politics of the characters in Cressida Connolly’s After the Party. Focalised through the memories of one woman, Phyllis Forrester, the book is a dissection of the Sussex “county set” in the late 1930s, and particularly of the upper-middle-class people who believed passionately in the values being preached by the British Union of Fascists. The word “fascist” is never used; nor are the names of Oswald Mosley or Diana Mitford, as far as I could see, but that is, self-evidently, who and what they are. The book’s marketing is slightly misleading, in that it emphasises a tragic death that occurs after a party held by a local couple, and Phyllis’s sense of responsibility for it; that event does have some significance, but it is not the reason why she goes to prison, which is the other thing that we know about almost from the outset. What Connolly seems to be doing—and it’s not at all clear to me whether she means to do this or not—is inculcating in the reader a sense of sympathy for the average British fascist, the sort of people whose analogues in Nazi Germany were spending these years “just following orders”.

Although I had no idea that members of the Union were interned in the early 1940s without trial or explanation—and although that is a horrifying thought, particularly as many of those imprisoned were profoundly low-level and did little more than file reports or make tea, while far more senior organisers and theorisers were left alone—there is something about the very attempt to make British fascism palatable, or understandable, or even mildly sympathetic, that I pull strongly against. It does not advance the cause of global peace and dignity, in these days, to dehumanise your opponents; I understand that, and I appreciate that Phyllis is so very human a character, slightly weak, slightly bored, clinging to fascism well after it’s fashionable because without it, all the losses of her life will have been for nothing. But I am very wary of what a conservative or right-wing book review page (The Spectator, perhaps) could do with After the Party, very wary of anything that lends itself to the interpretation that we should all hug a fascist. The past eighteen months have made it abundantly clear that Phyllis Forrester’s time is not over and gone; last Sunday, supporters of Tommy Robinson marched in London; and to ask one group of people to try and understand the humanity of another group that refuses to extend that same dignity to them is revolting and absurd. That’s not to say that those adjectives apply to After the Party—it’s an extremely nuanced novel, and literature abounds with protagonists whose personal convictions the reader finds appalling (Humbert Humbert, anyone?)—but it is, without a doubt, a book that could only have been conceived and written in this particular way by someone in a position of significant relative privilege.

From boom times to penury: The Death of Mrs. Westaway, Ruth Ware’s latest novel, opens on our protagonist Harriet—known as Hal—trudging through rain and wind with a fish and chips she can’t really afford under her arm. Hal does tarot readings on Brighton pier: she inherited the booth from her mother, who died in a hit-and-run accident three years ago. Now twenty-one, Hal has unwisely taken money from a local loan shark, and is in desperate need of three thousand pounds before his steel-toed-boot-wearing enforcers come around. So when a case of mistaken identity results in a letter from a lawyer’s office in Penzance, referring to her as the beneficiary of her grandmother’s will, she decides she might as well use her cold-reading techniques to see what she can get. When it turns out that the bequest isn’t just a few thousand pounds, but most of the estate, Hal realises she has two choices: confess now, or stay in it for the long haul. She chooses, of course, the latter, but things at Trepassen aren’t what they seem, and she finds herself unraveling a conspiracy of silence that stretches back decades. This is the first of Ruth Ware’s novels that I’ve read (a shocking admission given how well they go down at Heywood Hill), and it’s highly impressive. It’s so easy to lose the thread of thriller plotting, particularly when your subgenre is psychological intrigue, where so many of the significant plot points happen inside characters’ heads, but Ware never does: there’s always that sense of forward momentum, no scenes that feel like they’re treading water. Tarot, and the interplay between superstition, fate, and self-determination, is woven through the book: is life something Hal can navigate for herself, or does the past determine the present? Ware deals with these questions subtly, and creates a protagonist whose constant calculations are made necessary and sympathetic by the precariousness of her situation. Very good stuff indeed.

Thoughts on recent reading: All female authors, all highly readable, and a surprising recurrence of themes around lost or thwarted heritage. Quite pleased with the summer’s start.

04. The Stopping Places, by Damian Le Bas

Damian Le Bas grew up around the Hampshire-Sussex border; he name-checks Petersfield on the first page, which is where my grandparents live and where I spent my summers from the age of seven onwards. Le Bas’s childhood, however, was spent selling flowers at the market there, and bombing around the countryside with various uncles and cousins, working on construction projects. He comes from a family of Travellers, or Gypsies, or Romanies—he uses the word Gypsy of himself and of people he knows, although my understanding is that for gorjies (outsiders), using either “Traveller” or “Romany” is less likely to give offense. He doesn’t, however, look particularly like a Traveller; he is light-skinned, fair-haired, blue-eyed. His education also marks him out: he won a scholarship to Christ’s Hospital as a schoolboy, and went on to study theology at Oxford. Like many people whose life has taken them to places their early childhood never hinted at, Le Bas has anxieties about his identity, about what he can call himself and how to reconcile his heritage with the endless comments of “you don’t look like a Gypsy”. To that end, he decides to spend some time driving around Britain in search of atchin tans or stopping places: spots that traditional Traveller families knew as good sites to camp or to halt at, temporarily, on the road.

Despite Le Bas’s reminiscences of his childhood, the resulting book is really much more a travelogue than a memoir. His wife, Candis, for instance, appears regularly—she joins him for some of the later legs of his journey—but we don’t really get a sense of her as a personality, nor of how they met and entered into a relationship with each other. They seem not to speak much while they’re on the road, and he only rarely describes any particular feelings towards her; she’s just sort of there. Perhaps this is to free up space to talk about the atchin tans, which are interesting, although for at least the book’s first half there is a strong suggestion that the whole thing might end in failure: Le Bas finds himself unmoved by many of the stopping places he first visits, and there are several dark nights of the soul where he ponders why he’s making these trips in the first place. The reader could be forgiven for wondering the same thing.

Fortunately, after a trip to France to join in the Continental Gypsy pilgrimage to the shrine of St Sara-la-Kali, emotional engagement seems to kick in. Le Bas’s descriptions of Appleby horse fair, past and present, constitute some of the best and most evocative passages in the book. He’s also skilled at evoking the world of Traveller masculinity and honour, the rigid codes that govern a society that only appears free-wheeling to outsiders. But the most effective elements of The Stopping Places are Le Bas’s conversations with his indomitable grandmother, who grew up one of ten children in a world where Travellers still used wagons (they’re mostly in caravans or bungalows now): her retelling of her memories functions as a kind of oral history project. There’s too much in the way of regurgitated itinerary, and we don’t get to participate in Le Bas’s emotions and thought processes nearly as much as we ought; instead we’re mostly relegated to passive recipients of what he informs us he is thinking and feeling. But the fact that I can think of no other currently published mainstream book about Traveller life and culture is indicative of The Stopping Places‘ significance. It’s certainly a tantalising beginning.

03. May, by Naomi Kruger

May is a novel about dementia. There have been a few of them recently, most notably Three Things About Elsie by Joanna Cannon and Elizabeth Is Missing by Emma Healey. A protagonist whose memory is addled by old age is a smart choice for a writer to make in a literary environment that remains obsessed with, among other things, the unreliable (and usually female) narrator. You cannot get much less reliable than a dementia patient. Every author who makes that choice, however, must then contend with an implicit charge of exploitation: dementia is not a personality trait, but an illness, and one that can cause emotional trauma to both the person who has it and the people that love the patient. How do you write about someone caught in the grip of that fatal confusion without making the reader’s interest in the terrible minutiae feel prurient? And how do you make your character’s illness integral to the mystery (because dementia novels, like all novels about memory, are fundamentally mysteries) in a way that doesn’t read as cynical? How, in other words, do you avoidwriting tragedy porn?

Kruger’s answer is, in part, to focalise the novel through characters other than May herself. Although the back cover says that the book is set over the course of a single day, chapters flash back to 1957 and forward to 2007, told by May’s husband Arthur, daughter Karen, grandson Alex, and carer Afsana. Each of these people, of course, has their own story. Through them, the reader tries to unravel May’s obsession, in her care home in 2000, with a mysterious red-haired boy who might be a figure from her past or might be a figment of her imagination. It’s unfortunate, given the title of the book, that the character and narrative arc I found most compelling wasn’t May’s at all; it was that of Afsana, her caretaker, whose background is revealed to us slowly and subtly, and is all the scarier for that. There is a whole novel – a longer and more interesting novel, actually – in Afsana, a girl of mixed Anglo-Pakistani heritage whose white English mother and devout Muslim father both seem keen to keep her in her place; who grasps at freedom when it’s offered her, despite the fact that it comes in the form of her geography teacher when she is only seventeen; whose marriage to that teacher has not only isolated her from her family, but has failed to provide her with support and understanding in return for what she has lost. It is extremely impressive that Kruger manages to convey this entire backstory without ever saying any of it out loud: we learn everything from small details of gesture and address and brief flashes of memory. But the technical skill with which she constructs Afsana’s story makes it all the more disappointing that it is clearly designed as a supporting narrative to the main tale of May, her family, and the mystery of the red-haired boy.

That mystery isn’t much of a one, and it’s resolved in the final few pages in a way that feels perfunctory. The fragmentation of May’s narrative voice on the page – her sections are typeset in a manner that recalls the poetry of e.e. cummings – does what it’s meant to do, in that it is a physical manifestation of her crumbling psyche, but since playful typography is a literary technique at least two hundred and fifty years old, it can’t really carry the weight of the whole book. What we are left with is the love of May and Arthur, which is sweet but doesn’t have any peculiarities in it that make it seem the natural focus of a story, and the question of whether Alex will ever come into his own, although it’s not clear that there’s really anything wrong with him other than a general aimlessness. If only, if only, the book had been called Afsana instead.

01. Altered Carbon, by Richard Morgan

At last, I’ve read Altered Carbon! It’s interesting to have read this just before William Gibson’s Neuromancer; it’s like seeing influence in reverse, tracking details of Morgan’s worldbuilding and plot to their antecedents in Gibson. Anyway, Morgan’s innovation is the idea that humans have developed a way of remotely storing consciousness, so that your body isn’t the vehicle for your life in the same way as we understand it. Instead, that which is you—memories, cognition, personality—can be found in a small implant near the base of the neck, known as a stack. Bodies are referred to as “sleeves”; poorer people go “on stack”, their consciousnesses divorced from their physical selves, and rent out their bodies to those who can pay, who upload their own stacks into these sleeves. Incarceration happens along the same lines: a particularly egregious crime can see the offender being placed on stack for perhaps two hundred years, during which time their body, or clones thereof, can be used as a sleeve by whoever particularly wants it.

Prisoners can also be remanded in order to do particular jobs while they’re serving their time. This is what happens to Takeshi Kovacs, a former Envoy (or special forces officer) who finds himself decanted into the sleeve of a man whom he eventually discovers is an ex-cop from Earth, currently on stack for corruption. In this sleeve, he must do a job for Laurens Bancroft, an obscenely wealthy entrepreneur who “committed suicide” two months previously by taking his own head off with a flare gun. Bancroft, however, maintains that he was murdered: since he always has multiple clones on ice, and backs up his stack to a remote location every forty-eight hours, he argues, he would have known that shooting himself wouldn’t exactly be permanent. (One of the great weirdnesses of Morgan’s world is the distinction between killing someone’s body, and causing Real Death; the former is quite routine, while the latter—effected by destroying a stack, and the backed-up data if there is any—is considered a serious offense.) Kovacs must find out who shot Bancroft, and why, and who wants him on (or off) the investigation in the first place. And he’s got some demons of his own to exorcise, related to a military operation in his past that went horribly wrong and to a crime boss whose path he’d hoped never to cross again.

The resulting novel is hardboiled science noir, and it is a huge amount of fun. Morgan treads in cyberpunk territory, but he is happier to make things readily comprehensible than the great names of cyberpunk usually are. The action scenes are terrific, violent and delivered with cynical flair by Kovacs’s first-person narration. If it sometimes gets a little difficult to work out who’s on which side, well, that’s the point of the mystery. (I’ve read criticism that finds Morgan’s resolution of the mystery plot a bit of a let-down. Perhaps it is. I found it convincing enough, and also found that there was more than enough atmosphere and verve to carry me over whatever plotholes or lack of plausibility there might be.) Morgan’s female characters err somewhat on the side of being Tough Cool Girls; they are undeniably both tough and cool, but they tend to function as vectors for Kovacs’s feelings. Abigail Nussbaum notes that Morgan’s novels are “a rare example of the gap between taking the problems of masculinity seriously, and being interested in feminism”—in other words, feminist novel Altered Carbon is not, but it does engage seriously and thoughtfully with toxic masculinity, and the culture of violence and damage that it promulgates.

It’s worth noting that Altered Carbon contains graphic scenes of both torture and (consensual) sex, and the fight scenes are often also explicitly violent. If, like me, you find it much easier to read such things than to watch them on a television screen, you may not have much of a problem with the book—you can always read faster, or even skip ahead a few pages. (The fact that Kovacs is downloaded into a female sleeve for the torture is interesting from a critical point of view; for a noir hero to be personally subjected to the particular vulnerabilities of having a woman’s body is one of those things that Morgan does that both acknowledges female experience and makes it not quite the point, since Kovacs identifies firmly as a man, and is in a male body at all other times. It is also, however, one of the things that might make it harder for women to read this book.)

What remains is the fact that Morgan writes like a demon—gripping, compelling, bursting with brilliant, weird, revealing ideas about how societies work—and that makes me want to read his Clarke Award-winning novel, Black Man, as soon as possible.

Meetings With Remarkable Manuscripts, by Christopher De Hamel

It’s so nice when reading overlaps a little, and reading this back-to-back with Dragon Lords provided rather a good level of continuity. The first of the twelve manuscripts that De Hamel examines is known as the Gospel Book of St Augustine (of Canterbury), which dates from about the sixth century; saints and kings mentioned in Eleanor Parker’s book also get airtime here. De Hamel is the director of the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, so he knows whereof he speaks. Twelve manuscripts spanning nearly a thousand years are given the full-on examination treatment: we get the histories of the material objects, the significance of the writing and illumination within, and, last but not least, a travelogue style of narrating, where De Hamel shares what it is actually like to look at the manuscripts. As he points out, most people with the will and the travel budget can go to see the Mona Lisa, if they want to; it is far harder to physically access a manuscript in person, though they are some of the greatest cultural treasures in the world. And so he gives us the experience, insofar as he can. We learn what it’s like to walk inside the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, or the Black Diamond building of the Royal Library in Copenhagen, or the Pierpont Library in New York. (Some of this stuff is worth the cover price for the sheer gossip value: De Hamel is always utterly professional, but his strong feelings about various buildings and their staff still come through. Copenhagen’s library seems like a lovely place to visit, full, as he describes it, of serenely long-haired students like time-frozen hippies and helpful, cheery staff; his experience with the Morgan library, by contrast, is one of polite bafflement at America’s love affair with bureaucracy, authority, and procedure.)

Not only is this book ridiculously beautiful (with lots of full-page colour illustrations, as you would hope), and outrageously informative (I know all about the difference between uncials, insular majuscule, and capitalis rustica now), it’s also far, far funnier than it has any right to be. De Hamel’s account of the day when both Pope Benedict XVI and the Archbishop of Canterbury bowed to him on live television (he was carrying an extremely old copy of the Gospels at the time) is characteristically excellent: self-deprecating, with a keen eye for the ridiculous, as when he describes various dolled-up prelates as “walking Christmas trees”. If all of this wasn’t enough, it’s full of trivia that makes you gasp: there’s a book called the Codex Amiatinus, for example, that is repeatedly referred to as being ridiculously huge, and when you finally see a photo of it, you immediately get it. (De Hamel says it weighs about 90 pounds; then, winningly, he adds that an eccentric antiquary of the Victorian era described it as “weighing about the same as a fully-grown female Great Dane”. De Hamel opts for the slightly more sensible comparison unit of a twelve-year-old boy. Either way, that is a very heavy book.) It’s not just for antiquarians, this; anyone who likes beautiful things, or old things, or books, in any way, would get a lot out of it. It’s certainly earned a spot on my best-of-2018 list.

In response to a reader request, I’m trialing breaking up these reading diary entries into individual ones on each book. It goes against my tendencies to publish posts that are so brief, but I’m sure someone will tell me if you feel you’re being shortchanged.

Dragon Lords, by Eleanor Parker

If you were to choose a book to be reading in public with the deliberate strategic purpose of getting the number of the guy who works in your local Indian takeaway, it is unlikely that you would choose this one, but truth is stranger than fiction and I must therefore tell you that that is exactly what happened when I wandered into the curry house on Crouch Hill holding a copy of Dragon Lords. “The history and legends of Viking England” is quite an enticing subtitle, so perhaps that had something to do with it; it was certainly a major factor in my requesting a reading copy of this from the publisher’s rep. It’s also a slightly misleading subtitle, since Dragon Lords is both more focused and less conclusive than an overview of late antique/early medieval British history might be. I think it might be a book version of Parker’s doctorate (she’s now a tutor at Brasenose College, Oxford), which is no bad thing, though it meant re-accustoming myself to writing that isn’t necessarily for a general audience.

Dragon Lords is primarily interested in early medieval narratives about Anglo-Danish interaction. (Sexy!) Since there were multiple waves of Danish/Viking conquests, the history is not nearly as straightforward as the phrase “Anglo-Danish” makes it sound; the conquerors of one generation became the naturalised inhabitants of England, and the people conquered, in the next round of organised invasion. Intermarriage and cultural diffusion happened, as they always do, and the resulting culture was a whole lot of things rolled into one: pagan-Christian, Anglo-Saxon-Danish-with-a-splash-of-Norman. Naturally, the stories that this motley culture told itself over several hundred years—about where it came from, and why—also changed: sometimes a Dane is a good Christian king, sometimes he is the leader of a band of ravening, monk-murdering sea-wolves.

Because Parker’s emphasis is on the continuity (or not) of narrative elements, the sheer accumulation of detail can sometimes be difficult to follow. In the second chapter, for instance, she follows the trail of a mysterious figure called Ragnar Lothbrok, who appears in Anglo-Danish narratives in all manner of guises. Sometimes he’s a thug with many sons, murdered at the hands of the King of Mercia and avenged by his children; sometimes he’s a more innocent figure, a stranger in a strange land betrayed by a jealous courtier. It’s impossible to make any concrete assertions about the historical figure (or figures) that might have been behind the Lothbrok stories—he’s like Robin Hood or King Arthur—but Parker’s greatest asset as a writer is her curiosity, and that carries the reader a long way, too. (My particular interest in Viking Britain is literary, and I especially enjoyed her long section on the early verse romance Havelok the Dane. There are also some interesting sections on stories, or story elements, that Shakespeare clearly drew upon when he was writing Macbeth and Hamlet.) Dragon Lords is unashamedly niche, but if you want to know more about pre-Conquest Britain—and trust me, there are hundreds and hundreds of years’ worth of eventful, exciting, violent history there—this is for you.

In response to a reader request, I’m trialing breaking up these reading diary entries into individual ones on each book. It goes against my tendencies to publish posts that are so brief, but I’m sure someone will tell me if you feel you’re being shortchanged.