a gallimaufry

round-up: July 2024

This month I stuck with easy reads but ventured away from rereads to new books.
Babel or the Necessity of Violence, by R.F. Kuang

After finishing The Secret History I wanted to carry on reading more of it but of course, that isn’t possible. Reading Babel was my attempt to stay in that mood. I admit, I started it anxiously, the subtitle and Kuang’s reputation suggested that my squeamishness would take a battering. Fellow wimps: it is not too graphic. The story is set in an alternative nineteenth century and it has a brilliant concept, which Kuang uses to explore both the Industrial Revolution and Imperialism. The concept is this: if you inscribe in silver two words from different languages with approximately the same meaning, the gap in meaning becomes charged, magical. So you can use these silver bars to power everything. Had Kuang left it at that, it would have been terrific, but she couldn’t resist elaborating on the idea at length, which (a) became a clog on the story and (b) resulted in some contradictions. I am not usually that bothered about show vs tell but there was an awful lot of telling in this book and this held it back from greatness, though it was good.

Hell Bent, by Leigh Bardugo

Like Babel, this is a novel which I think needed a few more edits to refine. This is the sequel to Bardugo’s first novel for adults, Ninth House, and again it’s set in a version of Yale where there are secret societies practising magic. The whole Yale university scene is so weird I was astonished to find elements I assumed Bardugo had invented are in fact true. There are indeed secret societies and they are called things like Skull and Bones and they do have special houses they call tombs… Anyway, Ninth House was clever and fun but Hell Bent, while very readable, is messy. The central problem is too much plot, with insufficient foreshadowing so it feels as if things are being made up on the hoof just to enable another plot twist, and characters reduced to mere puppets of the narrative. Plenty to enjoy but it did feel like a missed opportunity.

Five Bad Deeds, by Caz Frear

Married with three children, up for a good teaching job and planning the extensive renovation of her dream house, Ellen has an enviable life with solid friendships. Unfortunately, someone sets out to destroy it. Also unfortunately, pretty much everyone in this novel – which is told from the viewpoints of several different characters – loathes Ellen, and she’s pretty unkind about them too. Although the constant sniping did get me down a bit, this well-plotted thriller bowls along at a neat pace and gave a few deft swipes at middle-England’s values.

The Harp of the Grey Rose, by Charles de Lint

Loved this. Very much in the mood of The Hobbit or the Prydain Chronicles, it’s a gentle fantasy about a harpist who falls in love with a young lady who is not all she seems to be and embarks on a quest to save her and overcome an evil that will destroy the world. The music, the delicately melancholic feeling, the talking bear and magical creatures – this is a fantasy world you would like to live in.

King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, by Roger Lancelyn Green

Although I’ve read Arthurian romances, lais and poems, I’ve never made it through a whole cycle and when I saw this in an Oxfam bookshop it just fell into my hand. A quick and easy read, as you’d expect. Surprises: Arthur doesn’t seem to be that great a king and just sends out his knights to sort out problems. It’s a relief when Nimue carts Merlin off, since as soon as anyone does anything, he bobs up and says, ‘Oh no you’re doomed now and Logres shall founder and the darkness will return,’ which has a damping effect one would imagine. Gearing up for Malory now.

Amari and the Night Brothers, by B. B. Alston

Amari joins the Bureau of Supernatural Affairs when her brother disappears, determined to find him. As a trainee, she’ll have to pass a series of competitive assessments. Since she is smart and possesses extraordinarily strong powers, this should be straightforward: unfortunately the sort of powers she has are reviled and make her an object of suspicion. Very Men in Black meets magical school story, this is funny and endearing.

High Rise Mystery, by Sharna Jackson

Meticulous Nik and her dramatic sister Norva are horrified to discover the body of their art teacher, Hugo Knightley-Webb, at the bottom of the rubbish chute in their block of flats. Knowing everyone in the Tri, they are ideally placed to solve the murder and make a perfect team. The story crackles along, and you will hear Nik and Norva in your head long after you’ve closed the book.

The Christmas Appeal, by Janice Hallett

Not sure why I felt like reading about Christmas in July, but I did. How did a skeleton end up inside the Fairway Players’ panto prop beanstalk? This short novel follows a similar structure to The Appeal, with our two plucky young lawyers Charlotte and Femi once again sifting through emails, text messages and other documents to ascertain the truth. The solution is pretty obvious but this isn’t important as the pleasure lies in the Players’ constant backstabbing and sniping, culminating in an unforgettable performance of ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’. Only proviso: read The Appeal first.

 

Yellowface, by Rebecca F. Kuang

I love a novel about the publishing world! This dark comedy was catnip for me and it absolutely lived up to expectation.

June Hayward is a writer whose only published novel fared poorly. She is sort-of friends with Athena Liu, who is beautiful, successful and rich, author of novels that not only sell well but are critically acclaimed. Ultimately, though, Athena’s luck runs out and she dies in a freak pancake-related accident. June has the chance to steal her next manuscript – and she does, passing it off as her own. Soon she has a deal with a massive advance, an attentive publishing team who throw money at development and marketing, and a buzz attached to her name – everything she ever wanted. Can she keep her secret?

June is funny, clever, manipulative, jealous and self-absorbed; she wrestles with her guilt mainly by casting herself as a victim and by weaving sophistries about honouring Athena’s memory. One of Kuang’s great skills is to make her really quite sympathetic; spiteful one moment, anxious the next, and then buckling under the onslaught of social media hate the next. We see the US publishing scene through her eyes, and Kuang gleefully portrays it as venal and cynical, pitting authors against each other, feigning its interest in diversity and only concerned with the next bestseller. For June, reviewers are driven by their biases and Twitter is a mob dominated by extreme emotions, quick to turn even on those they adored five seconds earlier. In other words, everyone in this novel is enjoyably awful.

Yellowface gets its title because June allows her editor to persuade her into using her full first name and her second name as her nom de plume – Juniper Song – which of course sounds Chinese or Korean when June is actually white. This is significant because Athena’s novel is about the Chinese Labour Corps, recruited by the British Army to serve on the Front during the First World War, now largely forgotten. On discovering that June has no East Asian heritage, many readers are disappointed. Others are angry: if you are not at least part Chinese, what right do you have to tell this story?

June’s reply (to us, not her critics as it would give her away!) is that Athena’s ethnicity gives her no special insight into the experiences of the Chinese labourers she wrote about, which were so very different from her own privileged twenty-first-century life in the US. She had to do just as much research as June did, and exercise her imagination just as far:

Can a Black writer not write a novel with a white protagonist? What about everyone who has written about World War Two, and never lived through it? [...] I think writing is fundamentally an exercise in empathy. Reading lets us live in someone else’s shoes. Literature builds bridges; it makes our world larger, not smaller.

But June’s point is undermined by her lack of understanding of the ethnicity and culture she is taking over, which she struggles to distinguish from other East Asian cultures. She makes crass changes to Athena’s book, such as softening the white characters, whom she considers ‘almost embarrassingly biased ... cartoonishly racist’ and adding a trite epilogue. For her, publishing’s commitment to diverse writers discriminates against her; she never considers how much discrimination gets thrown at non-white writers.

Kuang sprinkles metafictional jokes throughout the book, and at one point teases us with the possibility that what we are reading is itself June’s next manuscript. Sometimes it feels as if she is taking a cheeky wink at us. And she asks: stealing a manuscript crosses a line, but are there not degrees of appropriation here? Athena is always on the lookout for new material for her fiction, which she takes from other people. June calls her ‘a vampire [...] She collected true narratives like seashells, polished them off and presented them, sharp and gleaming, to horrified and entranced reader’. She uses an experience of June’s for a story. Her ex-boyfriend says:

Sometimes, when we fought, she would give me this very cool, narrow-eyed look. I knew that look, because it was the same look she got when she was drafting a scene. [...] Sometimes she would say things that made me upset, or ask about things I’d been through – and as time went on, all I could think was that she was mining me, using me as fodder.

Isn’t Athena, then, as parasitic as June? Whether the words you rewrite are a manuscript written by a dead author or the painful secret your friend tells you, is creating fiction inherently exploitative, vampiric? And where does that leave the publishers who make money from them and the readers who consume them and enjoy the suffering of others vicariously?