I read this book due to its longlisting for the 2022 Desmond Elliott Prize for debut novelists.
The author of the book has previously been a publishedI read this book due to its longlisting for the 2022 Desmond Elliott Prize for debut novelists.
The author of the book has previously been a published poet and also runs a think tank and is a writer and speaker on areas such as worker’s rights and the future of work – and both his poetical writing and (to a lesser extent) his writing on work are important to this novel.
If I had to summarise the book, I would say that:
It’s a tale of (life)-time, love and loss, laughter and labour
One which perhaps could be said to be something of a masculine version of the elliptical and aphoristic writing of female authors such as Jenny Offill.
The author himself has talked about the book as about a
“Tale as old as time ………Boy meets girl – boy loses girl – boy loses mind ……….. it asks questions about what love does to us, and why …………. Every love story has a happy ending if you tell it backwards. But sadly, life isn’t lived backwards, so in the end, we lose things. … if we are [un]lucky, we lose things suddenly, and way too early. How do we do this with some semblance of grace? How do we let go of things we love without debasing and ruining their legacy in the process?”
Which I think is an excellent explanation of the underlying narrative.
As the book is told in the first person – in a kind of part poetic, part aphoristic, and sometimes part bizarre series of 2-3 line observations, each set out in 2 page sub-sections as the narrator, looks back on his relationship with an ex-lover to who his narrative is largely addressed. All are set against a background of the day to day life of the City in which he lives, as well as a number of unfulfilling jobs the reluctantly holds and the ways in which those jobs interact with his feelings around his relationship.
The sub-sections are grouped into 3 parts (of around 30 sub-sections) which broadly look at the genesis of the relationship, its highs and then breakdown, and then the narrators post-relationship life (and at least partial breakdown).
The author has explained the title and the structure of the book:
”An hourglass is a curious sort of object. Whereas a clock tells us one thing, namely the time, an hourglass does something altogether more interesting. It shows us the past, the present and the future all at once. The sand at the bottom is the past, the sand heaped at the top is the future, while the present is reduced to the tiny, steady flow of grains that fall through the centre of the glass. There is something interesting about that arrangement. The past and the future looming so large compared to the present, despite the present being the place we actually exist, materially speaking at least. What would it mean if we worked to equalise those proportions? If we stretched out the present so that it loomed as large as the past and the future? The book plays with this idea and its implications. Divided into three identically sized sections, each with an identical number of subsections, it looks to disturb the interplay between these three temporal states. Tiny moments are magnified, stretched, distorted. Whole years disappear from one sentence to the next.”.
A description which I think perhaps is a little stronger than the temporal experience I got from reading the book. Or perhaps its more accurate to say that I think a reader is less likely to remember the book in terms of its innovative approach to time than for the distinctive voice of the narrator.
Alongside his futile quest for fulfilling and remunerative employment, the narrator writes and posts to magazines semi-serious, semi-humourous essays on odd (dare I as a near-boomer say millennially obsessive) topics such as “Why Expensive Biscuits Are Always in Vertical Rather than Horizontal Packets and What That Tells Us About Renterism” or “The Climate Crisis Has Taken that most Banal Conversational Topic – the Weather – and injected it With a Constant Undercurrent of Existential Dread, LOL!”.
In his writing to his love object/us, he is a master of what I can only describe as the Patricia Lockwood style non-sequiturial simile, for example after losing two teeth and hearing of a First Nation belief that we literally embody many mini-souls we get this.
told you I was two teeth and two souls lighter and that the difference between a knife and a dagger is that a knife is only sharp on one of its edges.
Asked if you would push a bit of chewed up potato into my mouth as if I were a baby bird.
I remember that you said you didn’t mind. And I remember that you did.
And I remember that it tasted like an unexpected trumpet played by a happy fat man.
A style with which I think many readers will have a love/hate relationship but which is undeniably striking.
And the narrator also has a rather injudicious inability to know when to stop sharing his trenchant views and humourous observations which ultimately proves the beginning of the end of his relationship and his descent into breakdown.
The joint impact of the narrators personal style together with his post-relationship ennui can be a little wearing at time.
I think my own prejudices came out a little here, and preference for female over male company which further translates to a preference for female narrative voices (particular in books which are heavy on the narrative voice and stylistically if not literally auto-fictional).
At one stage in Part 3 another lover when leaving says it has been “like living with the sad ghost of a failed comedian” – which struck me as very apposite and also that he author was aware of the reaction he was aiming to provoke.
So overall I felt this was a really ambitious debut – one which tried to be different and largely succeeded on its own terms. Exactly the sort of novel and author the Desmond Elliott prize should be spotlighting....more
Sophie Ward’s debut novel was the outstanding “Love and Other Thought Experiments” – longlisted (but disappointiShortlisted for the 2023 Polari Prize
Sophie Ward’s debut novel was the outstanding “Love and Other Thought Experiments” – longlisted (but disappointingly not shortlisted) for the 2020 Booker Prize – it was an original, entertaining and rather unique blend of novelisation of philosophical thought experiment, science fiction and a family tale about love and grief over the loss of others. The publisher compared it - for its synthesis of fiction and philosophy - to the young adult bestseller “Sophie’s World”.
This her second novel is a rather more conventional blend of a revenge thriller, a police procedural and a young adult diary set in an experimental school in the 1970s, (both of which involve missing girls) with an overarching theme of guilt and grief over one’s own actions. I might compare it to Sophie Mackenzie’s YA novel “Girl, Missing”.
The book has three main elements to it – two set in 1990 and one in 1975.
In 1990 a deaf girl Isobel, working in a University library spots two 9-10 year old girls (whose presence there is incongruous) having a whispered conversation. But her whole attention is focused on a letter she receives from an old school teacher which brings the horrors of her past back into present day focus as she finds that a man has been released from jail.
Also in 1990, a Detective Sergeant Sally Carter – is called in to investigate the disappearance of a 10 year old girl from a primary school. Suspicion is immediately focused on the parents and on local registered paedophiles - but Carter also thinks the headmaster may be hiding something he knows or suspects.
In 1975 we read the diary Isobel wrote when she started at a new school at 11 – an experimental school (similar it seems to one the author attended) with a mix of pupils – some handicapped, and some like Isobel with parents who want their children to have a freer and less conventional education.
The stories initially link when Isobel comes forwards a potential witness – albeit no one else in the library appears to have seen the children (one of whom she claims looks like the missing girl) and who she saw the day after that girl went missing.
The storylines further link when Isobel herself and those close to her are subject to violence – seemingly related to the man released from jail and to the mystery of what happened 15 years ago and lead to Isobel’s deafness and also her guilt about the part she played in not preventing a tragedy. There is also a rather gratuitous additional coincidental link which emerges over time with a link to what Isobel was involved in, in 1975, and Carter’s first ever missing child case as well as with hints of Carter’s own troubled childhood which means both the 1975 and 1990 cases resonate with her.
Isobel’s 1990 storyline seemed to introduce rather gratuitous amounts of drama and violence in what seemed an attempt to graft a thriller onto a police procedural. That police procedural interested me as much as any other book from that genre – i.e not really at all – and was additionally hampered by some rather odd breakthroughs by the detective and further some key elements of the eventual resolution of the disappearance seemed to me to make no sense. And I found the diary sections particularly uninteresting – they read like a 11 year old’s diary but I do not really want to read a 11 year old’s level of literary ability. And the early letter rather removed for me much (in fact pretty well all) of the tension as to what happens – I simply found myself flicking through the entries looking for when the various people mentioned in the letter appeared.
I feel like the review has been very negative. I do congratulate the author on writing something very different – too many authors, literary fiction authors as much as genre authors, largely write and rewrite the same book (see for example the latest novels of Douglas Stuart, Jennifer Egan, Ali Smith, Moshin Hamid – four of my very favourite authors).
But my disappointment is entirely driven at my love of “Love and “ – and my own thought experiment which had imagined that her second novel – even if very different – would share the freshness of the first, whereas this feels like a pretty standard genre novel.
I recall that Sophie Kinsella blurbed “Love and Other Thoughts Experiments” and tweeted her the author to congratulate her on her longlisting, so in what seems to be a clear tradition of “sophie-stry” in her writing - I think we can expect a book about shopping (which also explores love and grief) from Sophie Ward next.
My thanks to Little, Brown Book Group UK for an ARC via NetGalley...more
DJ Taylor has twice been longlisted for the Booker (in 1998 when the longlist was a less distinct concept, and in 2011) and also won the Whitbread (noDJ Taylor has twice been longlisted for the Booker (in 1998 when the longlist was a less distinct concept, and in 2011) and also won the Whitbread (now Costa) Biography award in 2003 for his biography of George Orwell. He has also published a short story collection with the Norwich based small press – Galley Beggar (a compilation of various stories written published over many years), and this is his second collection is published by the North Norfolk (Cromer) based small press – Salt.
Small literary trivia observation I have made: the overall Costa was won that year by the phenomenon that was “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time” but more interesting was that the First Novel award was won by “Vernon God Little” – which a few months previously had, rather controversially, won the Booker Prize – a decision regarded as beyond discussion by four judges and with bemusement by the fifth – a certain DJ Taylor.
On the topic of biography – the author’s own is very relevant to this book: educated at the prestigious Norwich School (one of the very oldest in the country), studied at Oxford before eventually returning to Norwich with his bestselling novelist wife Rachel Hore and a lot of additional background to this collection is set out in this Eastern Daily Press article (https://www.edp24.co.uk/lifestyle/dj-...) where he explains that the collection unlike his first was written as a more coherent and specific collection during lockdown – a lockdown which (via food bank deliveries) introduced him to areas of Norwich he had not visited for years. He also explains his love of the Breckland area (the area of my own childhood).
This is a collection which ranges: over time (from the 1970 of the author’s late childhood and youth right up to pre COVID); across Norfolk (from the Brecks, to the North Norfolk Coast, to the various postcodes and districts of Norwich); and perhaps most interestingly across class (with three particular strands being the Oxford-aspiring private school educated “elite” of Norwich, the denizens of the rougher parts of Norwich and the Brecks, and the urban middle class relocating to the county - of which it has to be said the first seems the most authentic writing).
Overall as the author has said it is a love letter to Norfolk – and as that is my birth county, location of almost all my extended family and location of my second home – it is one I found naturally interesting.
But as much as Norfolk is home, short stories as a literary form is an alien territory for me (I much prefer the novella and even the well crafted novelistic epic) – and so it is perhaps more impressive and notable that I really enjoyed the way that this collection was written – both in the individual stories and in the way they gelled together, as well as for the sense of wistfulness/melancholia with which many of the stories end and which is captured in the title....more
Today is the anniversary Of your death And if today I were to write you a letter That you could read Even though you are dead and read nothi
Timesong 18
Today is the anniversary Of your death And if today I were to write you a letter That you could read Even though you are dead and read nothing I would say I have been looking for you And I have not found you But I have found traces of your absence Alongside the other absences That rear up before my eyes like startled horses A wave breaking on the shore The moon shifting into view from behind dark clouds I would say I have been comforted By the crowdedness of it all
And I would say to you who does not listen That time is both longer and shorter Than I ever imagined: Land becomes sea, sea becomes land, Ice into desert, desert into salt marsh, Salt marsh into birds and fish, animals and people, Everything forgotten and remembered and forgotten again,
The ostensible subject of this rather unique book is the author’s investigations into Doggerland (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland) – the area of land that connected Great Britain to Continental Europe (particularly the Netherlands, Germany and Jutland) until being inundated by rising sea levels some 8-9000 years ago, and which was rediscovered starting in the late 19th Century before being named in the late 20th Century.
The author’s connection to the area is:
Personal- her late husband was from the Netherlands and at different times the two worked on either side of the sea that now covers the land bridge between them, further as the opening quote illustrates his death permeates the book and interlinks with the idea of a lost society and landscape and of a replacement of permanence with fluidity and change;
Location specific - she now lives near the crumbling East Coast of Suffolk so that the idea of land being reclaimed by sea is very relevant to her, further her last book was on the Norfolk fisherman artist John Craske, and this book naturally covers much of the same coastline as the author investigates the traces of early human activity found from West to East along on the Norfolk Coast from the Seahenge at Holme Next The Sea, to the West Runton mammoth, to the ancient forests off Cromer, to the 800,000 year old footprints at Happisburgh)
Thematic (much of the author’s earlier non-fiction writing, incidentally she has written only 2 novels and both were Orange Prize shortlisted, was around Aboriginal peoples and she draws on some of this to imagine the lives and more particularly beliefs and worldviews of the inhabitants of Doggerland)
The basic outline of the book is for the author to either recount something from her past (for example visits to those who interacted with Aborginal people, or other travels) or to outline visits she has made as part of researching this book (for example to visit Tollund man or other preserved ancient bodies, to meet with those who have been researching the Doggerland area, or in particular to meet with amateur fossil and bone collectors who cover the area or the surrounding coastlines). These visits, particularly the latter, have something of a poignancy to them and are also related in comprehensive detail including minutae of say the conversations of passers by. Woven into all of this is the author’s imaginings of the lives of the peoples (set out in a very crude chronological fashion with occassional maps showing how the area was gradually flooded) interleaved with a series of 18 Timesongs (in almost all cases these are effectively the author’s free verse summaries of books she has researched as part of her writing, or sometimes of Bushman legends) and with some slightly odd (to me) *to quote the Guardian) “blurry cryptogram” illustrations by an artist friend of hers.
The overall effect is I think best described as slightly circular and overlong to read, but memorable in a slightly unsettling way once completed. I am glad I read the book but at times it felt rather like invading someone else’s memories/impressions and listening to someone else’s dreams....more
Really lovely book produced by the Norfolk Coast Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty Partnership (https://www.norfolkcoastaonb.org.uk/) which is a mixtReally lovely book produced by the Norfolk Coast Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty Partnership (https://www.norfolkcoastaonb.org.uk/) which is a mixture of stunning photography and some strong poetry - both of which I felt were marked by an originality which is challenging in an understandably much written about, much celebrated part of Britain.
“High Norfolk” by Rob Knee
Becalmed on this great lung of far seen stretching air back dropped by skies deep draughted with autumn, I catch the dark crowded spinneys of the night, open casts of tree and hedge, infusing oxygen, infusing sight. Inland, gaunt tombstones of church towers, scattered, bereft, irregular shadows, way markers to the old, sought by few but the passing; kestrels, walkers, sails, alone in this forgotten sigh of mazed, neglected trails.
Rather generic nature observation book which I bought from the newly re-opened second hand bookshop at the National Trust’s Blickling Estate, the largRather generic nature observation book which I bought from the newly re-opened second hand bookshop at the National Trust’s Blickling Estate, the largest second hand bookshop in East Anglia....more
She was a pioneering female Land Agent (for the Lord Walsingham/Merton Estate in Breckland) and well known for her regular article writing/broadcasts at a local and national level, her innovations and her eccentricities (for example a strong belief and practice in Dowsing and an insistence on holding Rogation services to bless her crops)
Less edifyingly she was known for a formal involvement with Oswald Mosley (as – perhaps similarly to Henry “Tarka the otter” Williamson she found the socialist part of his National socialism and his protectionist British agricultural policies appealing).
The book effectively starts with her trying to find a tenant for what was perceived as a barren farm (Bagmore in Sanford) in a distressed farming market (post-depression years), she decides to take on the farm herself. The book contains details on the various fields she owns and strategies she employs both as a land agent and a farmer – some of which lacks a little interest.
The most interesting part of the book though relates to the subsequent events when war breaks out. The author makes reference to the suspicion/persecution she was under: suspected – not surprisingly to the reader – of being a Nazi sympathiser. But the key to the novel was the establishment of a battle training area at Stanford which initially just interferes with her farming (and also causes her to be upset at the arrogance and war-hunger of men) but eventually leads to a forced evacuation of Tottington and effectively the confiscation (with limited compensation) of her farm.
Later, after living in self-assembled huts on the edge of the Battle Ground she takes a second smaller farm – finding out only afterwards that the previous incumbent killed himself. Tragically a postscript records that Lucille herself killed herself in 1950.
Overall an interesting book - particularly as I grew up on the edge of the Battle Ground – which still exists with Tottington one of a number of now effectively ghost/abandoned villages within it.
I bought this book from the newly re-opened second hand bookshop at the National Trust’s Blickling Estate, the largest second hand bookshop in East Anglia....more
This book featured in the 2022 version of the influential annual Observer Best Debut Novelist feature (past years have included Natasha Brown, Caleb AThis book featured in the 2022 version of the influential annual Observer Best Debut Novelist feature (past years have included Natasha Brown, Caleb Azumah Nelson, Douglas Stuart, Sally Rooney and Gail Honeyman among many others).
The author - Emile Pine - is an academic (Professor of Modern Drama at University College Dublin), whose previous publication - “Notes to Self” - a series of deeply personal essays exploring topic including infertility, miscarriage, menstruation and family alcoholism originally published by the brilliant Tramp Press in Ireland - won the 2018 Irish Book of the Year award and went on to become something of an international bestseller.
This, her debut novel, shares a concentration on interior voices and also explores some very similar topics to her essays.
The book is set over a single day in 2019, on the day of the worldwide climate change protests (which took place on 7 December of that year).
The novel follows two largely separate storylines (based around each of the titular characters).
Pen is a neuro-diverse sixteen-year old, still struggling with the aftermath of a bullying event at school and her subsequent relapse into self-cutting - something she explores both with her divorced mother (a University lecturer) and her unnamed therapist. Her one true friend is Alice and she has agreed with Alice to bunk off school and attend the climate change protests, having meticulously planned (without Alice’s knowledge) to turn the day, including a surprise invite to an evening concert, into a first date.
Ruth is in her mid-thirties, married to Aidan but with their marriage straining up to the precipice of dissolution, under the strain of a series of failed attempts at IVF, including a miscarriage of the most successful attempt. Ruth is building a growing therapy practice - her practice partner and closest friend off on maternity leave. On the day Aidan has unexpectedly stayed over in London the night after a business trip, and while he makes his way back Ruth has to go alone to a hospital check up on uterine fibroids.
I must admit I found that both storylines took their time to interest me. Pen’s initial sections - with details of the bullying she experiences, and of her habits (stimming, an obsession with Latin and with English idioms), as well as her beliefs around the urgency of climate action, felt rather over-familiar from teenage fiction.
And Ruth’s sections seemed to lack any real draw.
This did improve over time - mainly I felt as we also got to explore the interior viewpoints of Alice (who has her own wants and struggles - particularly around the very concept of being touched by others) and of Aidan (himself really struggling with both the increasing reality of his and Ruth’s inability to have children and with what he perceives to be Ruth’s passive acceptance of that situation)
The stories overlap physically via a couple of encounters which are I would say are pleasingly fleeting but still importantly empathetic.
What is more impressive is how the storylines increasingly overlap thematically.
Ultimately, via both major characters but also via the Alice and Aidan, this is a book around the ideas of: consequential/milestone life decisions; of how to mentally and verbally explore complex and ambiguous feelings; and most of all of how to shape (particularly female) self-identity when one’s aspired identity is challenged both by circumstances and by the equally difficult identity choices of others.
Overall this is an interesting novel which rewards perseverance.
My thanks to Penguin General UK for an ARC via NetGalley...more
Moshin Hamid has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize (from his four previous novels) most recently for “Exit West” – a novel which examined thMoshin Hamid has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize (from his four previous novels) most recently for “Exit West” – a novel which examined the issue of migration (and particularly a world which aimed to close borders) both conventionally via the story of a tentative relationship, and very unconventionally via the use of a magic realism device which effectively took supposedly uncontrolled migration to its logical extreme by postulating a series of mysterious Narnia-style doors which open between different parts of the world and which permit (at least temporarily) instant migration, and which from there explored less of a dystopian world than a utopian (or at least optimistic one) as people come to terms with the need to adapt to migration.
The book was a short, easy and enjoyable read but one which prompted reflection on its themes. It was one marked by a distinctive style of writing which was at some times very lyrical and other times almost mundane and with a mix of extremely long paragraph or page style sentences mixed with much shorter sections (although even there the use of “.And” to start sentences gave those sections a similar “run-on” quality when read in one’s head). I described the novel as very reminiscent of the writing of José Saramago, and particularly his “Blindness” - a fable type novel exploring the development of a premise of an alternate world, but also set against a gentle love story. In fact I said it was Saramago but with more punctuation.
This Hamid’s latest novel follows very much in the same lines - in this case examining racism as well effectively as the general mixing of races over time.
In this case the magic realism is introduced immediately - in the first line of the book, which is a very conscious echo of Kafka’s Metamorphosis
“One morning Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown”
And from there we have a society where over time, everyone white turns dark, until as per the title there is one man left white (and even that only temporarily).
We experience the story through one couple in a tentative love relationship - Andres (a gym instructor) and Oona, a yoga teacher (both originally white) as well as Ander’s traditional widower father (dying of cancer) and Oona’s conspiracy theorist widowed mother (still mourning her son, Oona’s brother).
The narrative style is for me a natural extrapolation of “Exit West” with far more run-on sentences - in this case with less punctuation and even more like Saramago.
Despite the huge similarities there are two senses in which the book is a reverse of “Exit West”.
The immediate introduction of the fantasy device is I think weaker than its mid-story introduction in “Exit West” as we get little sense of Andre and Oona’s former life or relationship. Instead what we get is a lengthy post script to the scenario, playing out in a society where everyone is brown but concentrating really on Andre and Oona - their relationship and their mourning for their loved ones. The upside of this is that it broadens the scope of the book beyond a didactic parable - as the book becomes a wider exploration of grief and of being truly seen, but the downside is that the book does seem to lose momentum.
And it is also very different to write the book from the viewpoint of white people, rather than the choice of migrants in the previous book, albeit this was a deliberate and effectively anthropological choice by the author based on ”This sense that whiteness itself was worth thinking about from within”.
The novel in its more fable-like element does have some nice initial touches - as Anders reacts violently to his own self (a concept perhaps taken a little too far in an incident in which a gun-toting homeowner confronts and shoots an intruder who is himself).
And another memorable and comic aspect is Andre’s cringy attempts to befriend the already dark cleaner as his previously white-only gym.
Oona’s mother was for me the real highlight of the book.
Already fiercely proud but defensive of her identity and “kind - the only people who could not call themselves a people in this country, and there were not so many of them left”, her conspiracy theories prove initially founded as she had read rumours of some early changers and after that her paranoia about the erasure of her identity (the culmination for her and those she follows of something they had warned about for many years) as well convinced that some form of backlash will come (a rather brilliant cameo has her feeling a little thrill when she hears an explosion that at last “something was happening, something big, maybe the tide was shifting, maybe the last real heroes had come” only to dissolve in tears when she realises it was thunder.
And like Exit West the book is effectively an optimistic one - in this case describing how, at least for some characters, they realise it is possible to embrace memories of their past and their previous identity while also accepting a new and much more inclusive identity.
Overall I thought this was another excellent, easy to read, enjoyable but thought provoking novel.
My thanks to Hamish Hamilon, Penguin Random House for an ARC via NetGalley....more
The author was recently selected for the decennial Granta Best of Young British Novelists list (2023 edition).
This novel (her latest) was shortlistedThe author was recently selected for the decennial Granta Best of Young British Novelists list (2023 edition).
This novel (her latest) was shortlisted for the 2022 A Post Irish Book Awards Novel of The Year and the 2022 Goldsmith’s Prize.
I have read and very much enjoyed Sara Baume’s two previous novels – her debut “Spill Simmer Falter Wither” and the Goldsmith’s shortlisted “A Line Made by Walking”
Both were books which drew on autobiographical elements (the latter particularly), both involve people who have deliberately distanced themselves from society in a rural setting, both draw heavily on the natural world – and this her third novel draws on very similar ideas, while also sharing with her debut the centrality of a dog (here dogs) as a key character.
The basic, ostensible plot of the book is of a couple (strictly Isabel and Simon but referred to other than once as) Bell and Sigh, who against the advice of their friends move into together into a remote and run-down country cottage with their two dogs – the “spry and devious” terrier Voss and the “hulking and dull witted” lurcher Pip; their move being something of an experiment “to see what would happen when two solitary misanthropes tried to live together”
Their cottage has sat for seven decades at the foot of a mountain, from which you can see “seven standing stones, seven schools and seven steeples” – and the book itself is set over seven years, each marking a year of their occupancy of the house – one designed to be transitory but which becomes increasingly permanent.
The chapters are I believe best interpreted as written by the mountain itself as it looks over and observes:
Bell and Sigh’s quotidian life together in all its minutiae or ritual and habit;
Bell and Sigh’s convergence - initially we are told very deliberately of differences between them or different positions that they take, but over time we can see, and it is signalled, that they are increasingly blending not just their possessions, but their clothes and even their attitudes, speech and quirks;
Pip and Voss – often with their behaviour interpreted by Bell and Sigh;
The house and its contents and their gradual but steady decline, deterioration and degeneration;
The local flora and fauna (from the insects in the house, to the trees and plants in the garden and hedgerows, to the mountainside and coast, to the nearby fields of bullocks and donkeys, to the roads and puddles and at one stage a dead robin which of course is immediately reminiscent of the opening of “A Line Made by Walking”);
Bell and Sigh’s gradual disassociation from their past lives – deliberately losing touch with and any social obligations to their previous friends and family, and from the society around them – other than daily interactions with the nearby farmer, necessary ones with their landlord, weekly shopping trips to town and the radio and television programmes they listen to and watch. Rather brilliantly I felt the book somehow inverts the dystopian genre – showing two people living away from society but not due to societal collapse (the ostensible implication is that society is functioning perfectly fine without them – albeit Bell and Sigh do sometimes imagine its dissolution – “And how they talked about how small their life had become, almost nothing, about how unlikely it seemed that some society other than that of their rooms still existed out there”) but due to their own deliberate choice
And much more besides.
Note that the book, with its seasonal observations of nature is very reminiscent of Jon Mc Gregor’s brilliant “Reservoir 13” - although less rhythmically repetitive than collectively progressive as here the four seasons are covered over the seven years (while McGregor repeats the four seasons each year).
But where it more significantly differs is in that while McGregor’s book also observes the workings of a whole community, this book is, in human terms, largely limited to Sigh and Bell - and their increasingly insular existence. It is also rather accidentally an analogy for lockdown life.
Each chapter starts with an observation that Bell and Sigh have still not got around to climbing the mountain and ends with a lyrical and figurative reference to an eye.
And in the last chapter Bell and Sigh finally climb the mountain and we are left with a closing few lines which I think, rather brilliantly, can either be taken as simply an observation on the increasing melding of their lives (the author’s intention) or as causing us to question the entire premise of the novel.
Overall this is another brilliant and beautiful book by Baume and I would even venture that it is her strongest novel to date.
My thanks to the publisher for an ARC via Edelweiss...more
Practice breathing gently while allowing your diaphragm to inflate for five and half seconds, followed by Breath through your nose as far as possible.
Practice breathing gently while allowing your diaphragm to inflate for five and half seconds, followed by a steady five and a half second exhale.
Advice that anyone with COVID or long COVID symptoms may recognise and easily the part of the book I found to be simultaneously most interesting and most credible.
It is probably a reasonable rule of thumb that any book which spends pages setting out how the ancients (of various vintages) knew far more than the blinkered scientific experts of today is unlikely to be entirely convincing. And when some of the featured “experts” who clearly know better than all their peers turn out on Googling to have a cult like Incel following it kind of confirms the view....more
Fascinating book by an astrophysicist (and also apparently first female presenter of “The Sky at Night”) in her real area of academic expertise - the Fascinating book by an astrophysicist (and also apparently first female presenter of “The Sky at Night”) in her real area of academic expertise - the Sun and particularly one area in which she further specialises - so called “coronal mass ejections” and the changes in the Sun’s magnetic field which causes them.
The book being written by an academic (rather than a “popular science” writer) gives the book a lot of authenticity - while occassionally straying a little too far into the auto-biographical (scientists she has worked with, her own areas of interest and involvement). I also think it was quite an omission to have just black and white photos in the text - this felt like a book which needed a series of colour plates to bring it to life.
The first part of the book explains the basic make up of the sun and the way in which it produces the light we see on earth. This part is particularly fascinating for the way in which it relies on two (in probability terms) incredibly rare happenings (but taken from an enormous sample so that there are in fact lots of instances). This is explained well in this Guardian review of the book (https://amp.theguardian.com/books/201...).
Some of the subsequent sections I found rather heavy going - particularly those around flux rope formation - my lack of love for Physics (despite successfully taking an A Level in it), and particularly my lack of interest in magnetic fields was not a great match for the areas which both most interest the author and which I think are naturally the most complex to understand (even for scientists).
However sections on solar flares and solar wind were interesting (if also complex at times) and I particularly enjoyed the chapter on sunspot cycles (sunspots themselves having been covered in an earlier and relatively easy to follow chapter). What I found interesting here were her conclusions (given I would say slightly reluctantly given her views on the importance of the sun) that fluctuations in earth’s temperature due to sunspot cycles are completely swamped by the impact of man-made influences.
Later she goes on to discuss how it is becoming clear that the period over which scientific solar observations have been made has actually been an historically anomalous one with high solar activity and that actually more needs to be done to understand longer term solar cycles.
Finally at the start of the sunspot cycle chapter she quotes x(with no further detail at all as to who wrote it or where it was published) a headline from 2010 from a newspaper quoting an observer of sun-spot activity who claimed the sun was entering a period of reduced sun spot activity and (more controversially and less correctly) that a mini ice age would follow.
Now my antennae were alerted at this point - around 2010 I was involved in industry and professional working groups on the then emerging science on climate change/global warming, including working with a number of leading climatologists. Now I recall a certain attendee at some conferences who spoke on this topic (from the audience if not permitted a place on stage) - and I quickly Googled the topic to confirm who I thought the article was written by - correctly identifying it as Piers Corbyn (the then slightly better known eccentric brother of a relatively little known Labour MP - now of course rather better known for his anti-lockdown protests brother of an extremely well known ex-Labour MP). Even better though the first link that came up (https://amp.smh.com.au/environment/we...) was written by a then Mayor of London now known for his lack of compliance with his own laws....more
A rather timely and easy to read investigative journalistic style account of the role of Britain and many of its dependencies (for example the BritishA rather timely and easy to read investigative journalistic style account of the role of Britain and many of its dependencies (for example the British Virgin Islands and Gibraltar) in facilitating (via financial services, legal assistance, legislation and by a lack of investigation) various oligarchs, kleptocrats and other activities (including gambling).
The author (perhaps not fully convincingly) traces this back to Britain’s search for a role post Suez (perhaps slightly ignoring London’s role as a centre of global trade and finance for a long time before that). He perhaps also rather over-does the Jeeves/Butler metaphor. Less arguably and almost forensically he demolishes many of the arguments used to excuse British inaction by contrasting them to what occurs in the USA.
I would be surprised not to see this book featuring on a number of non-fiction prize lists over the next 12 months....more
I read this book due to its longlisting for the 2022 Women’s Prize – and unfortunately expect it to appear towards the very bottom of my longlist rankI read this book due to its longlisting for the 2022 Women’s Prize – and unfortunately expect it to appear towards the very bottom of my longlist rankings as this is a book which almost entirely failed to work for me.
This is the author’s fifth novel. Her second “Daughters of Jerusalem" won two young writer awards (albeit it has a string of 1 and 2 star reviews in top Community reviews on Goodreads) and her fourth “Almost English” was longlisted for both the 2013 Booker Prize and 2014 Women's Prize (it has a ranking of 1.8 among my 5 Goodreads friends to review it and average Goodreads ranking below 3 – which is very unusual). Much of the criticism of both books seems to match my reaction to this one.
I found the milieu involved (upper middle class, North London, high end arts prizes) far from conducive to my empathy for the characters (and to be honest their actions and words to little to compensate in this regard – a simultaneously pitiful but privileged family is not a great combination. I cannot help wonder if the apparent difference in reception between prize juries/critics and readers is down to the former being disproportionately from similar backgrounds to those the author portrays?
The basic story of the novel is set out in the blurb – reading it after its longlisting one of my Goodreads friends Wendy commented “a summary that describes each family member as the beautiful one, the sensitive one, the insecure one, with self-sacrificing artist mother makes me think this is a book with one dimensional, stock character” – to which I can say you may not be able to judge a book by its cover but it seems you can by its blurb.
The book takes place over a long weekend (Friday-Sunday) in February 2010 and is about the Hanrahan family – a rather clumsy opening “Tolstoy was an idiot” sets us up that this is effectively a story about an unusual unhappy family who pretend (for the sake of the deluded and badly-read patriarch) to be happy.
Ray is a one-time famous, now largely overlooked conceptual artist. He lives in a large crumbling and rambling-gardened North London home which he appropriated from his parents (to the unspoken chagrin of his brother and his wife),with his first wife living in a side part of the house, his second wife Lucia (the central character of the novel – more later) and his “Victorian-spinster” 30 plus oldest daughter Leah (devoted to his every whim), and with his stepson (Lucia’s son) Patrick living in a caravan in the garden as his odd job man (and suffering it seems from extreme nerves if not more serious mental conditions).
His youngest daughter Jess has managed to leave home – and teaches in Edinburgh, where she is in a close relationship with a fellow teacher Martyn (a relationship she is currently looking to break off with the added complication that she may be pregnant) – Martyn is obsessed with Ray and desperate to move into his house with Jess.
The core of the novel is that while Ray’s star is fading, Lucia’s is rising – something the ridiculously egocentric and narcissistic Ray regards as both entirely correlated and casual and as a complete betrayal by Lucia. The book opens with her realising an even bigger break through is likely due to a call from her agent – something she intuitively panics about it due to what she knows will be its impact on Ray, particularly on this weekend of all weekends, when in a desperate last attempt to resurrect his career Ray and Leah have planned and funded a viewing of his latest art (art which no one seems to have seen – even Leah).
As the family are all summoned to help – their tensions play out with the additional complication a clandestine nascent affair Lucia is having with a well-known Midlands constituency representing but local living female Hindi Labour MP and (just to add to the melodrama) realisations occurring about a past affair that Ray had (Ray’s ex-wife and the subject of his affair of course naturally being invited to the opening).
While I felt that the portrayal of emotional abuse by the family patriarch was partly convincing at least as it applied to say 1-2 of the family members, it was I believe taken past the grounds of credibility when applying to not just a second wife and a daughter, but also a step son, a wanabee son-in-law and a brother - particularly when combined with a portrayal of the patriarch as a spoilt child with a complete absence of charisma and with a long faded talent. And even with the daughter the idea that an intelligent and attractive 30 something year old would be so ridiculously determined to pander to her father (as to be fixated on the impact on his mental health and not her mother's mental health when the latter has an operation to remove a cancerous growth) and devoid of any friendships other than a hopeless crush seemed beyond far-fetched to me.
And amid all the manufactured drama, the set piece scene of the art unveiling in the exhibition manages (quite spectacularly it has to be said) in its denouement to be simultaneously both completely absurd and entirely predictable: “Did you guess in advance” asks one character to which the other replies “Of course not. Did you” and by the time the first counters with “No! Absolutely. Why, do you think anyone did?” – this reader was metaphorically jumping up and down with my hand in the air (and not because I wanted to be excused – although I would gladly have been excused from reading at a much earlier point).
The book has a few redeeming features: the title is quite clever and the author does do a nice line in metaphors – as the family tiptoe around Ray’s inflated self-worth and ridiculous self-delusions for example we are told “It’s like playing Jenga: any threat to his self-esteem, a tiny wobble and the whole thing comes crashing onto your knuckles”. I would not go quite as far as John Self in the Observer who said Her new novel is so devoid of secondhand sentences that it’s quite possible she spent all nine years since its predecessor polishing her jokes and turning phrases round until they shine. not least as the book gave me a sense of humour failure - but she does have a much better touch with prose that she does with character I believe.
I also found the relationship between Priya and Lucia interesting – in that (at least in my view, I slightly worry the author sees it as liberating) it seems to share some of the same abusive/dependent traits as Ray/Lucia with Priya using her confidence and power to largely play with Lucia’s affections and lack of self-worth (not aided by a bodged mastectomy) and with Lucia already allowing her happiness to be subject to the rather arbitrary whims of another.
Overall not the book for me.
My thanks to Pan Macmillan for an ARC via NetGalley...more
I read this book due to its longlisting for the 2022 Women’s Prize.
It is perhaps one of the most ambitious but also difficult books on the longlist - I read this book due to its longlisting for the 2022 Women’s Prize.
It is perhaps one of the most ambitious but also difficult books on the longlist - a piece of literary fiction which draws on Egyptian mythology, horror and magic realism to deliver a distinctive but also a times troubling read (due to it not just dealing with the subject of child abuse - but allowing an abuser a series of third party point of view chapters where he recalls the way he groomed his victims).
The plot of the book is difficult to describe - but centres around the Anacostia neighbourhood of Washington DC in 1977 (note that I did feel much of the novel was wasted on someone like me with almost no familiarity with any of the areas described as this feels like a novel imbued not so much with a sense of place as one trying to describe and capture an alternative sense of a seemingly well known place).
Nephthys operates a nocturnal taxi service 1967 Plymouth Belvedere (again I felt having no idea what type of a car that was, detracted from my positioning an ideal reader) - one which she operates in a physical and metaphorical fog allowing her to anticipate where to pick up her passengers - typically the broken or endangered - at their time of greatest vulnerability or need. The taxi - sourced from a local scrap dealer and mystery solver Find Out - has the ghost of a young white girl in its trunk.
Nephthys is during the day a largely solitary alcoholic, in mourning for her twin brother Osiris (they were cojoined at birth by one finger) found seemingly murdered in the Anacostia River. Osiris’s daughter Amber lives in a nearby hollow with her 10-year-old son Dash - she has an ability to foresee deaths via dreams and is greatly fared by those in her neighborhood. Amber and Nephthys have fallen out since Osiris’s death due to the latter’s resentment that Amber seemed unable to foresee her father’s fate..
As the book opens Dash, deeply troubled both by something he witnessed at school and his mother’s clear implication that she has dreamt of his own fate, finds himself drawn to the river where he sees a mysterious figure, who he christens The River Man (and who we quickly identify). Meanwhile Amber agonises what she has dreamt and how to prevent it happening and Nephthys is drawn back into the life of her niece and great-nephew by a nurse at Dash’s school (with who Nephthys has her own troubled history) worried by his behaviour.
And linking many of these threads is the pernicious influence of the school caretaker.
I would say that what is impressive about the book is how the author manages to exhibit such mastery of what initially seems like a storyline expanding out of control. Ultimately very few of the book’s details do not prove subsequently significant (and even then it is to very deliberately signal unsolved or unknown mysteries - such as that which Find Out cannot find out). I would contrast this with another book on the Women’s Prize shortlist “This One Sky Day” which too often relies on adding gratuitous levels of magic.
The book is it has to be said is almost “mannered” and replete with “affectation”; with certain phrases and formulations recurring throughout the novel, many of them voiced by a very prominent omniscient narrator - some of which expose the thoughts of the characters but many of which are effectively commentaries on things the characters do not know.
Examples of the recurring phrases or formulations include:
The phrase “the unbearable inertia of one” to convey Nephthys's ennui as the last surviving twin
The concatenation of three words - sometimes by taking a familiar concept and removing spaces “winlosedraw” and sometimes creating a new one - most crucially to the book “signs omens bones”
The “Conundrum of Three” …. “where the mind sought the memory of a body long gone, and the body withdrew from the mind and the spirit, and the spirit chased the echo of the other two”
The often water-linked imagery of blues (particular Indigo - something which brings them back to her mother) as associated with Nephthys, and a far more fiery world (despite his designation by Dash) in which Osiris dwells (with the red imagery perhaps too obvious in the case of Dash’s father);
Comments on the “irony” to which “creatures of passage” are subject (when something either serendipitous or more commonly unlucky) occurs;
Narrator references to things which would either occur in society in future “Many years later” linked to tragedies in the book’s timeline (for example references to aids, to internet porn) or to things which happened in the past (typically in the same location as where the character are currently based) - all of which finish X “had no way of knowing this when” Y. Note that I think this idea is crucial to the book - the book itself mainly explores passage through the world and even into the world of the dead, but these sections remind us of the passage of time;
A recurring idea (which actually gives the book its Section structure) of the five ways in which creatures of passage die (“Moving through space”, “Staying in one place”, “Resigning life to another”, “Surrendering one’s life”, “Entering the void”);
The States of America are consistently referred to as Kingdoms - I must admit this idea did not really seem to work for me - the idea of Kingdoms seemed to suggest some form of more ancient tribal type identity and a rejection of the boundaries imposed by white settlers and slavers; but by using the names of the States (not just their designation) it felt like the opposite was implied. I think it would have worked better had the author had say drawn on Native/Indigenous names for territories. It is possible this draws on the West African origins of many of the protagonists who are heavily drawn from the Gullah People (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gullah) but here also I was struggling to match this with the heavy use of Egyptian mythology;
Overall I found this an interesting book an a good edition to the longlist despite its challenges and my own deficiencies as a reader....more
I read this book due to its longlisting for the 2022 Women’s Prize
My low rating does not reflect the competence of the writing in the book or the enjI read this book due to its longlisting for the 2022 Women’s Prize
My low rating does not reflect the competence of the writing in the book or the enjoyment that others may get from it, but the complete lack of engagement I got from it: I was tempted to abandon the book on so many occasions and would have done if not wanting to complete all the longlist.
The Guardian Culture pages have a weekly How We Made Series (https://www.theguardian.com/culture/s...) in which “two collaborators on a seminal art work talk us through their original creative process” – and I occasionally stumble across the series en route to the Book pages.
6 months ago there was a feature https://www.theguardian.com/music/202... on Skunk Anansie: an alternative part rock/part punk with a charismatic and maverick black female singer with a memorable voice and a distinctive shaven look and whose songs often confronted racism and misogyny (including that to which she was exposed in her career).
The 1 page article engaged me, as I was something of a Skunk Anansie fan (at least enough to buy some records and to see them live) and also it included a link to a You Tube video of the song being discussed enabling me both to remember the song and the band’s style.
Skin (the lead singer) also wrote a well received autobiography: “It Takes Blood and Guts” – but I did not read that, as to be honest my views on punk/rock songs mirror those I have on sausages: I like to consume them but I really would rather not hear how they are made.
And for me writing about songs (rather than listening to them) does not work:
Attempts to convey music by (and I actually quote from the book but this kind of prose seems endemic to writing about music) “the guitar was "wah-wah-WAH-la-la-la, wah-wah-WAH-la-la-la, " and the bass was "dum-dum-doo-dum-doo-doo".. fail to capture the experience of listening on so many levels.
And let us be honest that even the most meaningful song lyrics, while they may feel profound if you are singing them back to the band with thousands of others, are not even close to literature when written a page (Nobel Prize Committee 2016 – hang your heads in shame).
So what am I to make of a book which is like a 300 page version of “How We Made” but about a made up band – and so attempting to describe songs and a legendary (but tragic) performance which you cannot view because they don’t exist
The answer inevitably – almost complete disinterest.
Opal is it has to be said a fascinating and distinctive (if perhaps not entirely likely) lead character – and in fact happens to share many of Skin’s characteristics as described above – with one slight flaw of not actually existing and the second more serious one of being surrounded by other carboard cut-out characters: her deeply religious sister, flamboyant costume designer and hillybilly member of another band at her label being the three worse examples).
The choice to render the novel as a journalist compiled oral history means that the impact of the central incident at the heart of the narrative (the racist murder during a concert of Opal’s lover, the journalist’s father) is inevitably and correctly noted at the start of the novel: but that completely destroys its power and effect.
I can see this might work really well as a film or mini-series, even as an audiobook if given high production values of a multi-voice cast and some actual invented song extracts – as a novel not so much....more
I read this book due to its longlisting for the 2022 Women’s Prize for which it is now shortlisted.
I had previThis review contains a Twigger warning.
I read this book due to its longlisting for the 2022 Women’s Prize for which it is now shortlisted.
I had previously received an ARC of the book ahead of its publication in August 2021 - I confess I had requested the book as part of reading books tipped to be longlisted for the Booker Prize, struggled with an element of the novel and decided only to revisit it if and when it received a prize listing.
The element I struggled with was that a very large part of the book is narrated by a fig tree (hence my warning).
Returning to the 2022 Women’s Prize - the longlist this year was a surprising one, missing out many books heavily tipped to appear, and also a weaker than normal one as it was light on the usual Women’s Prize inclusion of a number of very literary books.
The list also stood out for an unusual preponderance of three types of book: Books which are Young Adult not just in their protagonists but also their writing style; Fantasy/Magic Realism - and particularly ghost stories; and non-Human narrators. And interestingly this book sits at the intersection of all these tendencies.
The book takes place over two main timelines (which also exploring crucial points in between): 1974 Cyprus (about to be racked by coup/civil war, invasion and war crimes - something which of course adds an accidental topicality to the book) and late 2010s North London (plus an exploration of a crucial point between).
In 1974 in a rather clichéd plot two a sensitive (and plant/animal loving) Greek boy Kostas and a more down to earth Turkish girl Defne, conduct a tentative forbidden romance - a romance which to add additional cliché takes place in an atmospheric and famous tavern (at one stage we are even given the menu) marked for both the fig tree which dominates its interior and its owners (two men - of course one Greek, one Turkish and of course in a doubly forbidden relationship).
In 2010 North London (where far too many literary novels are set) - their daughter Ada (Island), now without her mother (who died due to an accidental mix of alcohol and pills) and increasingly starting to be distanced from her eccentric father (now a biologist and researcher) suddenly screams for a full minute in her school history class. This incident and the visit of her newly divorced and mother’s sister (estranged for many years from Kostas/Defne due to their transgressive relationship - but now free to visit after the death of her parents) causes Ada to revisit the past of her parents and on how she may have inherited their trauma.
And an intermediate phase we revisit Cyprus in the early 2000s, as Kostas visits Cyprus for the first time since he was made to go and live in London in 1974, and deliberately engineers a meeting with Defne (with who he lost all contact in involuntary exile) and the two rekindle their relationship against a background of Defne’s harrowing work as a foresnic archaeologist with the (real-life) Committee for Missing Persons - trying to bring reconciliation and closure by finding buried bodies.
But - and it is a very big but, alternate chapters of the book in all three timelines are narrated in first person by the fig tree that was originally in the tavern and which was transplanted (as a cutting) by Kostas to London when he and Defne moved there. And the fig tree relies (particularly in the intermediate timeline) on a mosquito and some ants as an unlikely and rather convenient source of information.
And there are a number of issues with this choice (besides the obvious one of its slight ludicrousness).
Firstly, there seems to be a contradiction at the heart of the choice which then reflects in the narrative voice. I feel that the author is simultaneously setting out and exploring the world of trees and their root systems (in a way which I suspect is now rather over familiar to active readers of non-fiction writers such as Merlin Sheldrake and Peter Wohlleben; and of the many literary fiction books they have inspired); while also trying to write a fairly conventional story of human conflict, love and social interactions - I would contrast this say the writing of Richard Powers in “Overstory” which emphasises and prioritises nature over humanity (incidentally we are told that Kostas does the same but don’t necessarily see it). And this tension reflects in the rather confused voice of a tree which seems to spend much of its time pointing out the differences between trees (and other flora and fauna) and humans, while also adopting an extremely anthromorphic set of expressions, feelings and emotions.
Secondly the Tree appears to have access to Wikipedia but not to a story telling imagination - so that large parts of what the Tree recounts (not just about Flora and Fauna but even more glaringly about the history of Cyprus) feel like a rather clunky factual cut and paste
Thirdly while some of the analogies between tree life and human life work well - for example the idea of hidden trauma, how your hidden roots effect your health and a more complex one about an epigenetic reaction to experienced trauma which then carries down to non-traumatised descendants - even these are often repeated (having both a tree and a tree expert in the book inevitably means both seem keen to explain the same ideas). And some ideas just don’t seem to work - for example one key assertion is about how the cyclicality of arboreal life contrasts with the linearity of human life - which is an interesting one, rather undermined by using tree rings as an example (which are surely an annual record of decades or centuries of linearity).
Ada’s screaming incident is also captured on camera and ends up fuelling a worldwide social media meme and movement which is an interesting idea but one the author seems to completely lose interest in, in a rather anticlimactic ending to the human part of the story. Similarly at two separate points the book flirts with mysticism (both in Cyprus and later England) - in both cases rather fizzling out in the light of the scepticism of Ada and her mother.
However, the tree part of the story does end with a rather nice twist which both reinforces the not-inconsiderable emotional heft of the novel; while also causing one to question some of one’s criticism of the tree’s narrative (albeit second thoughts seem to show that the surprise in the twist is really due to it not really following that logically).
Overall and despite my criticisms this is nevertheless an enjoyable book - with lots of very moving and lyrical writing, a very strong and evocative sense of time and place, and some difficult and unfortunately very resonant for 2022 themes. As a result I would be surprised - and not disappointed - if it did not make the shortlist and not completely shocked if it even won....more
He has several ....... entities he talks to, and many others who talk to him. His Aleph is one of them. He says s
Winner of the 2022 Women’s Prize.
He has several ....... entities he talks to, and many others who talk to him. His Aleph is one of them. He says she lives in trees. …. And another he calls the B-man, or sometimes the Bottleman, whom he describes as a hobo with a prosthetic leg. These appear to be complex visual hallucinations—he can see them and describe them in some detail. In addition, there’s the larger group of elementary auditory hallucinations, including miscellaneous objects like teapots, table legs, shower heads, scissors, sneakers, sidewalk cracks, and glass window panes, to name a few. But there’s one that’s different, a primary and complex auditory hallucination, an entity he calls the Book.
I read this book due to its longlisting for the 2022 Women’s Prize, although I would have read it anyway (I was awaiting the paperback publication on 24 March) as I was a fan of the author’s Booker shortlisted “A Tale for The Time Being” and indeed asked my first audience question at the In person Booker shortlist readings about that book (on the quantum mechanical aspects).
And in a Women’s Prize longlist which seems to be ratcheting up its focus on alternative voices: three tales of ghosts and magic to offset a bias towards reality: two books with talking animals to counter the resulting anthropocentricity: a book with a talking tree to make the case for the plant world against the colonialism of the animal kingdom: this book takes things a step further by having at its very heart a backlash against (my term) animatenormativity by giving inanimate objects the voice they have long been denied in fiction - here both with a novel effectively narrated by itself and in active dialogue in its own pages with the teenage boy whose story it is telling, and with the key characteristic of that boy being his unwanted and often deeply troubling ability to hear the cacophony of voices of the everyday objects that surround him physically and crowd him aurally.
Amusingly even within the inanimate kingdom it seems that further hierarchies occur - although I think this does rather neatly capture how many present day tensions and injustices (from the caste system to skin colour distinctions) are the legacy of colonialism.
“In the beginning, before there was life, when the world of things was the entire world, every thing mattered. Then life happened, and eventually you people came along with your big, beautiful, bisected brains and clever opposable thumbs. You couldn’t help yourselves, and it was only a matter of time before you caused a rift to occur, dividing matter into two camps, the Made and the Unmade. Over subsequent millennia the schism grew. Haltingly at first, in fits and starts—a pinched pot here, an arrowhead there, a bead, a hammerstone, an ax—you worked your way through the material world, through clay, stone, reed, hide, fire, metal, atoms, and genes, and little by little you became better makers. Cranked by the power of your big prefrontal cortices, the engines of your imagination gathered steam until, in tumultuous leaps of what you came to call progress, the Made proliferated, relegating the Unmade to the status of mere resource, a lowly serf class to be colonized, exploited, and fashioned into something else, some thing that was more to your liking.
Within this social hierarchy of matter, we books lived on top. We were the ecclesiastical caste, the High Priests of the Made, and in the beginning you even worshipped us. As objects, books were sacred, and you built temples for us, and later, libraries in whose hushed and hallowed halls we resided as mirrors of your mind
Like a number of other books on the longlist it has a child/teenage protagonist and putting that together with what at times is a rather didactic approach (with the voice of the book often switching into a rather portentous lecturing style - as the above shows) does I feel mean that this book read perhaps more like a young adult book than a literary novel. Although there too I am perhaps showing that my genre snobbery one also held by books it would seem
Is it odd to see a book within a book? It shouldn’t be. Books like each other. We understand each other. You could even say we are all related, enjoying a kinship that stretches like a rhizomatic network beneath human consciousness and knits the world of thought together. Think of us as a mycelium, a vast, subconscious fungal mat beneath a forest floor, and each book a fruiting body. Like mushrooms, we are a collectivity. Our pronouns are we, our, us. Because we’re all connected, we communicate all the time—agreeing, disagreeing, gossiping about other books, name-dropping, and quoting each other—and we have our preferences and prejudices, too. Of course, we do! Biases abound on library shelves. The scholarly tomes disparage the more commercial books. Literary novels look down on romance and pulp fiction, and there’s an almost universal disregard for certain genres, like self-help.
This is nevertheless one of the more intriguing books on the longlist - a lengthy and varied book which perhaps as a consequence is at times very successful and at others can feel in dire need of a traditional editor’s blue pen. However when a novel speaking as a character in its own pages itself strongly makes the case for (my terms) a bibliocentric view of novels with authors largely as intermediaries between books and readers; it is perhaps not surprising that the editing of this book feels like it concentrated more on encouraging and expanding and rather than reducing the wide ranging scope of the novel.
This is also a book which has as its main female lead who is both: a collector of facts and news (via her job as a “scissors lady” working as a reader and print clipper for a media monitoring agency - an agency with an obsession with document retention which only too easily fits this employees own proclivity); an increasingly obsessive hoarder whose tendencies there are not helped by the loss of her jazz musician Japanese-Korean husband who perhaps acted as the one check on her and whose very death introduces an additional need to memorialise.
So it is perhaps not surprising to see similar tendencies in the author herself and in her writing if the book.
When writing her previous Booker shortlisted novel - the author changed tack half way through (I think as a result of the 2011 Japanese earthquake and Tsunami) and did not use around 300 pages of material on an eccentric cast of characters (a young female and rather troubled radical conceptual artist, an alcoholic wheelchair bound Slovakian poet philosopher) who inhabited a large public library with a possibly haunted bindery at its heart. But in the best tradition of hoarding this material was neither deleted or discarded but kept for when it could might prove useful in the future. And in what is perhaps a radical departure from the more obsessive hoarder that moment actually arose and the material was successfully deployed in this project.
And having the “scissors lady” at the heart of the novel also gives the author all the excuse she did not really need (as it is I think an inherent tendency) to throw in current affairs (particularly climate change, anti capitalist activism, the Trump electoral win and its aftermath of protests and police brutality) and any other scraps of information that intrigue her (for example on space exploration).
The novel I think shows a spectrum of research in its myriad of influences: personally experienced (the role and worldview of a Buddhist Priest); rather overworn and cliched (the Marie Kondo decluttering trend); very empathetic and detailed (Hearing Voices and the world of municipal libraries); intermediate (the life and works of Walter Benjamin); rather superficial (the jazz of Benny Goodman).
In terms of some missteps I would include the frequent references to “hobos”, the two very stereotyped Chinese characters and the voice of the poet - as in this example which is actually the first to explain the book’s title
Poetry is a problem of form and emptiness. Ze moment I put one word onto an empty page, I hef created a problem for myself. Ze poem that emerges is form, trying to find a solution to my problem.” He sighed. “In ze end, of course, there are no solutions. Only more problems, but this is a good thing. Without problems, there would be no poems.” Benny thought about this for a while. He thought about his mother and her fridge magnets. He didn’t write those stupid poems, and that was the truth, but his mother thought he was lying, and that was a problem. He had a lot of problems. “Is that what you write about? Your problems?” The poet shrugged. “Not so much my problems. But ze world’s problems, yes. I listen and write down vat I hear.”
But overall there is enough here to make it a worthwhile read.
My thanks to Canongate for an ARC via NetGalley....more
Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer
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Books:
2022
(193)
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