a gallimaufry

The Last Murder at the End of the World, by Stuart Turton

Having – is ‘enjoyed’ really the right word? ‘admired and been so wound up by I could not put it down’ is a better description – Stuart Turton’s first novel, The Seven Lives of Evelyn Hardcastle, there was absolutely no way I could walk past The Last Murder at the End of the World when I spotted it in our library.

Both books are detective novels, very much in the Golden Age tradition – but with added existentialism, which piles on the sense of urgency. The Last Murder is set in a post-apocalyptic future – no! Wait! Don’t let that put you off! It’s set in a village on an island. Much of the village is in a former military barracks, but the villagers have painted bright flowers and animals over the crumbling concrete, planted old jeeps with flowers and converted an old radar dish into a bird bath. In the mornings, they work in the service of the village – farming, fishing, teaching. In the afternoons and evenings they rest, eat communally, perform entertainments for each other. It all seems a pretty idyllic existence, if simple and with limited medical resources. (Worryingly, books are in short supply and seem to be mainly Sherlock Holmes stories.)

(And there is a map! Always a bonus. From here)

However, this is the last outpost of humanity. On the horizon hums a fog of insects which kills everything it touches and which has destroyed the rest of the earth. Only the island’s emitters keep them at bay. Other not so fun facts: the climate is hot, there’s a nightly curfew and everybody dies in their sleep the night they turn sixty. Despite this, the villages seem content – except perhaps Emory, who doesn’t seem to be good at anything except asking annoying questions.

Then someone is murdered, triggering the switching off of the emitters and the gradual encroachment of the fog. Emory has 107 hours to solve the murder before the insects cover the island and kill everything on it. That’s a bit more pressure than Poirot generally faces.

Oh, I haven’t mentioned the most curious thing about this novel, and that’s the narrating voice. Abi is an entity who can see into everyone’s minds. She is described at one point as a sort of communal conscience, but she’s also a security system. When a villager is upset or angry, she can reason with them, talk them out of destructive or hurtful behaviour. She too works in service to the common good. But she wipes everyone’s memories of the night of the murder, so that even the killer doesn’t know they’re guilty. Why has she done this?

What makes this novel so clever therefore is that, on one level, we’re with Emory, racing against time to save her island. On another, we’re trying to work out what Abi is and why she is, because this explains the what and the why of this society’s existence. And the further we go, the more moral questions are thrown up for us to consider.

I can’t really write any more than this because working things out is one of the joys of the book, of course, and I don’t want to spoil that for you if you haven’t read it yet. Can I use the word ‘metafictional’ without being pretentious? Because yes, this is. Other joys: the richly imagined island world, the characters who are genuinely trying to do their best for each other, the sense of a quasi-communist society which seems rather pleasant, questions about memory and history, about power and benevolence. The big surprise? Finding halfway of so through the novel that you would prefer humans to become extinct…

 

round-up: August 2024

This month I’m still not up to reading anything very challenging, but that doesn’t mean to say I haven’t read some excellent books.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessl (reread)

Still seeking something to quench my The Secret History thirst, at the beginning of this month I turned to a novel with some similarities in its set-up. Blue Van Meer’s life with her professor father has been peripatetic, with never more than a term or two in any one town. But then they arrive in Stockton, NC, where Blue is to spend her final year of school preparing for Harvard. Lonely Blue is flattered to be invited to join the Bluebloods, a group of students favoured by the film studies teacher, Hannah Schneider, who hosts them at her house every week. And then on a camping trip in the forest, Blue finds Hannah hanged from a tree. I enjoyed this novel a great deal more than when I first read it and it was massively hyped: now I can see it more clearly. Blue’s narrative is precocious, snobbish and perceptive, and the story twists satisfyingly, though I could have done with a lot fewer of the mainly invented bibliographical references with which the text is increasingly unconvincingly and annoyingly peppered. Also features probably the most insufferable father figure in literature.

The Little Friend, by Donna Tartt

Finally had the chance to fill the void left by The Secret History when this arrived in the post. Lacking the narrative drive of TSH, The Little Friend is a very slow and immersive novel to read, but I alone perhaps of all readers everywhere think it’s a better book, stuffed with extraordinarily vivid writing. When she was a baby, Harriet’s brother was murdered and his killer never caught. This summer, twelve-year-old Harriet intends to avenge him, a journey that takes her to dark places and dangerous people. Tartt explores the effects of the original traumatic event on Robin’s family and friends, and the deeply unequal society in which they live. Awful and amazing.

The Edible Woman, by Margaret Atwoord (reread)

Marian is engaged to be married but her subconscious seems to have doubts. An entertaining look at the life prospects of a young female graduate in 1960s Toronto, it was Atwood’s first published novel and impresses with its wry, pragmatic humour. In some ways, life has improved so much for us since then. In some ways, it hasn’t changed at all.

Barbara Comyms: A Savage Innocence, by Avril Horner

I have been waiting for years for this, a life of one of my favourite writers, and this is a good solid biography. Comyns drew closely on her own life for some of her fiction, and that life was pretty colourful, which makes for an interesting biography: a childhood filled with animals and eccentric, neglectful parents; early artistic ambition blighted by extreme poverty and a useless husband; racketeering in World War II; marriage to a second husband who was suspected of being a spy; ex-patriot life in Spain. Even in the middle of the last century, publishing was fickle and it wasn’t until Virago championed Comyns’s works in the 1980s that her talent was properly recognised. Time to reread her novels again…

The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler (reread)

Read this first so long ago that I had forgotten most of it but odd whiffs came back to me, usually minor details. What a smart writer Chandler was, how ably he constructs his world, every word really works for its place. Not always convinced by his female characters, if I want to carp.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, by John le Carré

My first le Carré! Not what I was expecting, very cynical, very sordid, very good.

In the Forests of Serre, by Patricia McKillip

In every way, the diametric opposite of le Carré. McKillip’s fiction, especially her later works, are what I read when I am sad. They are magical, ambiguous, beautiful and hopeful. Even the villains are noble. It is quite hard to describe them, as they tend to have a chorus of characters rather than a central character, who must somehow achieve harmony together in order to resolve a problem which they may not even understand after it has been resolved. A big wallow in loveliness.

Cinderella is Dead, by Kalynn Byron, and A Study in Drowning, by Ava Reid

In Cinderella is Dead, a cruel king oversees a society where the legend of Cinderella is used to oppress women. In A Study in Drowning, a student of architecture is commissioned to design a house by the sea for the heir of her favourite writer. I’ve chosen to put these two YA novels together because I thought they both had lots going for them, considered theme both flawed, yet felt more forgiving of the flaws of one than of the other. And I have been wondering why that was, and yes it depends on the flaws. I suppose that it always comes down to a quality of the writing, that it does a bit more than just tell you a story but creates a mood or atmosphere, or conveys more than just what is on the surface. And secondly I suppose that if you have a mysterious dead author, Welsh mythic vibes, fairies and a vast, mouldering house, I am always going to cut you more slack.

Tidemagic: The Many Faces of Ista Flit, by Clare Harlow

There’s a lot of really good children’s fantasy being published at the moment and this is a prime example. In Shelwich, people have been being snatched by monstrous grilk, including Ista Flit’s father. And magic, which is fuller when the tide is high, is growing stronger. Can Ista and her friends find the missing people and discover the secrets hidden in the caverns under Shelwich before it’s too late? I think you know the answer, but it’s a fun adventure getting there.

October, October, by Katya Balen

Have been wanting to read this since it was first published and it was absolutely worth the wait. October lives an idyllic life in the woods with her father until he has an accident and she has to go and live in London with her mother, from whom she is estranged. Magical and astoundingly written in a child’s stream of consciousness, so hard to do well and this was just perfect.

 

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.

 

round-up: June 2024

This blog has been neglected too long!

I am busy wrestling with the children’s book I’m writing, and this takes up most of my spare headspace and time. The long book reviews I used to write here would take hours and hours. So! New plan. Every month I’ll write a round-up of what I’ve been reading – or a selection of it, anyway.

This month, for reasons I don’t intend to go into here, I haven’t been able to concentrate on anything demanding or complex, and I started a lot of books I was unable to finish. Now I’ve typed them up, I can also see that most of them were rereads. So, essentially, this is a comfort-read edit.

Black Maria, by Diana Wynne Jones (reread). Delightfully bonkers Wynne Jones novel, one of the ones where she throws about a dozen plates in the air, keeps them spinning beautifully and then resolves everything in time for tea (see also: Archer’s Goon).

The Lives of Christopher Chant, by Diana Wynne Jones (reread). Wynne Jones was unlucky with many of her covers; this one is, to my mind, genius, passing beyond the merely bad to a new level of marvellousness. I am confident I would never have picked this up as a child, and first read it as an adult. Quintessential Wynne Jones: multiple worlds, magic, at the centre, enterprising and realistically portrayed children.

Cotillion, by Georgette Heyer (reread). When you are in the mood for a Georgette Heyer, nothing else quite hits the spot, and this is one of her good ones. It is the one where Kitty will inherit nothing unless she marries one of Mr Penicuik’s four nephews; fortunately, she is in love with one of them; unfortunately, he refuses to play along, so she devises a Cunning Strategem. Spirited heroine (part-French, of course!), ridiculous intrigue, enormous good humour, nice frocks and a happy ending – all present and correct and great fun too.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles, by Agatha Christie (reread). The first novel to feature Poirot, a Belgian refugee during the First World War to Styles St Mary, an Essex village, and narrated by a rather self-regarding Hastings. Who has poisoned the wealthy Mrs Inglethorpe, and how? A neat and excellent mystery which I failed to solve correctly (despite having read it in my teens) (that was a long time ago, in fairness) but which has a very satisfying ending.

The Secret History, by Donna Tartt (reread). Must have first read this shortly after it came out in paperback, when I was a student or recently graduated, and had forgotten all but the broadest lines. It still holds up! Richard’s enchantment with Henry, Francis and the twins is so convincingly rendered, the desperation and complicity, the slow unravelling.

Linnets and Valerians, by Elizabeth Goudge (reread). One of those books that just makes you feel happy. Old houses, beautiful countryside, animals, magic, humour and reconciliation. (I wrote more about it here.)

Shadowstitch, by Cari Thomas. This is the sequel to Threadneedle and evidently there is at least one more book to come. The world-building is as absorbing and imaginative as ever, but this instalment is a bit flabby, with the pacing too slow in the middle and too fast at the end. There are two main threads (ho ho). The first involves Anna and Effie’s investigation of their family curse, which drew out the best parts of the story and allows Thomas to explore her wonderful magical worlds. The second concerns the rise of an inquisitorial group; I found this thin and not really very believable. Still, I enjoyed it and I will be reading the next book.

 

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?

Notes from the Henhouse, by Elspeth Barker

Do not be misled by the cover of this book, or even the title, both of which suggest the memoirs of Barbara from The Good Life. If you pick up a copy of Notes from the Henhouse, you are picking up a collection of essays and stories whose loose theme is perhaps Et in Arcadia ego written by someone with a sharp eye, a dry wit and a deep love for animals and poetry.

Born in 1940, Barker grew up in a Scottish castle where her parents ran a prep school for boys. (I can’t help thinking of Jane Gardam’s Bilgewater here, although there probably wasn’t much similarity at all.) Here she rescued a jackdaw with a crossed bill, named him Claws, fed him with a silver mustard spoon and raised him (her bedroom becoming ‘a guano-ridden cavern’) to become her constant companion:

The most marvellous of all his gifts to me was in essence metaphysical. I would see him, a dark speck among the tumbling clouds, and see him swoop from the heavens in an unfaltering ellipse to my shoulder. To call a bird from the air is so extraordinary, rivalled in my experience only by the appearance of one’s abstraction of thoughts and images in the tangible form of a book. And even then, the bird wins.

Claws lived with Barker for eleven years before tragedy struck when she left to study Classics at Oxford. From childhood she ‘used to pray to the moon with tightly clasped hands and pray “Bring me a poet”, and when she was about twenty-one she met and fell in love with George Barker. They moved to a ‘ramshackle’ farmhouse in Norfolk where they had five children, zillions of animals and plenty of parties oiled with ‘Bulgarian vintage’. Barker taught Latin and wrote a single, brilliant novel, O, Caledonia, she also clearly charmed everyone who met her and, while being clear-sighted about life’s realities, sprinkled a sort of wild magic over everything she encountered. Perhaps you might describe her writing as revealing the quotidian as pulsing with the dark, eternal forces of the classical past.

I mention all of this because Barker drew on her own life for her fiction and non-fiction; often it is hard to guess where one begins and the other ends in the pieces in Notes from the Henhouse and one can’t help feeling that she didn’t much care about drawing a line between them since they are both full of truth. She was a storyteller and it’s the story that matters.

(Photograph of Elspeth Barker from The Times, here)

Barker writes with great pleasure about animals. Her hens are ‘romantic, racist, cruel, heroic beings’, who huddle ‘malevolently along the kitchen dresser shelves, beady eyes fixed in triumph on the egg cups smashed below’. Her brave Bantams are slaughtered by dogs as they attempt to protect their chicks. She rescues a frog, massaging it back to life, only for a passing hen to swallow it down. Portia the pig, wine drinker and kitchen haunter, ‘a gambolling pig, a pig fleet of foot, bucking and caracoling’, dislikes ‘most men’ and bites them. There’s a ‘gallimaufry of dogs’:

Dogs are us in heart and soul, but better. How privileged we are to love them and know them and make guesses about them, and how painfully do we even as infants learn that the price of love is loss, but also that love and memory will outlive death.

(Some of the dogs do sound horrific: there is the Dobermann pinscher which roams the village terrorising people and trapping them in the telephone box; for reasons undisclosed but perhaps not too mysterious, Barker is forbidden from keeping lurchers after ‘problems with a nearby commercial enterprise involving pheasants’; and of course there are the hen murderers.)

This love infused with the knowledge of death runs through the whole book. Barker writes about the death of a mother, perhaps in part her own; about the loss of her beloved animals; about her widowhood and immense longing for her departed husband. Even her driving lessons end in a fatal accident. In ‘Dogs of Athens’, the narrator (who may be Barker, but not exactly) arrives in Athens to visit her acquaintance Christina, passing in the airport some ‘cheerful’ stray dogs and :

Three ancient crones, wrapped in black. The Three Fates, Clotho, Lachesis and something. Why couldn’t I remember the third one’s name? It is depressing to survive for fifty years only to begin to forget things you have always known.

But Christina is now in hospital, which the narrator reaches despite her fifth-century Attic Greek. Christina is ‘in disguise; she had dolled herself up as some kind of invalid country and western lady’. The narrator tells her a story, and then:

I felt a pang of terror. [Christina’s] eyes seemed to have receded into her skull; she gazed out as though from a cavern, withdrawn from the rest of the world, unreachable. And then she was back...

Then Christina tells a story, of how she once met Rudolf Nureyev on a path by a lake.

When the narrator gets home, in London, she learns that Christina has died. ‘I thought of Christina and the crones and the dogs of Athens, sleeping by their own cathedral, littered in shaggy heaps about its glassy forecourt’. Nothing is insignificant; on the contrary, everything is freighted with ancient and enduring symbolism. An airport lounge, three old ladies and some dogs suggest other journeys to other realms; in the particular is the universal.

(Photograph of Elspeth Barker at home, from the Telegraph, here)

The Agency for Scandal, by Laura Wood

I generally find January a difficult month. All the sparkly Christmas lights have been cleared away and the denuded Christmas trees lie dying on pavements or at the end of gardens. The weather is always grey and dispiriting. At our school, it is the end of one semester and the beginning of another, often demanding extra administration or meetings when really all you want to do is hide under a pile of blankets. And of course, I have blown all my New Year’s Resolutions by the end of the first week and feel disgusted and frustrated with myself.

(Walter Sickert, Girl at Window, Little Rachel, 1907, oil on canvas; Tate Gallery, London; found here)

In short, Dry January or any of the other improving initiatives on which people embark this month are not for me. I require all the booze, chocolate and hot-water bottles I can lay my hands on to get through it without becoming a right old git.

It may therefore come as no surprise to you when I write that I steer well away from challenging books in January. It’s a month of children’s books and classic detective stories for me (Children of Blood and Bone was outside my comfort zone but so compelling I had to read it anyway). And fortunately for me, the perfect antidote to January was published this month, and it comes in the form of Laura Wood’s novel The Agency for Scandal.

At the back of the book the author notes her love of Georgette Heyer and essentially The Agency for Scandal is a Heyer novel – of The Talisman Ring or The Masqueraders strain – set in Sherlock Holmes’s London and as such is absolutely perfectly pitched. If this sounds like your area of interest, then run don’t walk to the nearest library or bookshop and don’t pay attention to the YA marketing.

Our heroine is Isobel Stanhope, daughter of a baron who died leaving his family with no money. In order to keep her beloved little brother at school and her fragile mamma from learning the true horrors of the family finances, Isobel has secretly taken a job. One that makes use of her skills in acting, quick thinking and lock-picking. She works for the Aviary, an agency that investigates wrongs done to women and either rights them – or gives the women the material to blackmail their awful husbands into giving them a better life. Isobel is also hopelessly in love with the Duke of Roxton, who is of course desperately rich and handsome and unaware of her existence. Life begins to get even more interesting when the Aviary is asked to investigate Lord Morland, who just happens to fancy himself as the next prime minister – and who runs the British secret service... Soon there are burglaries, mysterious jewels, double-crossing and all-round dastardliness...

It is charming and well-paced, the characters are delightful and it is just a pleasure to spend an afternoon reading it. Yes, isobel’s skills with a lockpick and sleight of hand do rather strain credulity at times. I hope there will be sequels and I am looking forward to seeing how Wood will square a heroine who despises the empire and challenges the status quo with a hero who works for the secret service. Perhaps, though, that would be to smash with a hammer a light and skilfully written romantic comedy – and a good romantic comedy is a precious thing indeed.

(Louis Anquetin, Two Ladies in the Forest, 1889; pastel on paper; found here; a little too early for The Agency for Scandal but it captures something of the Aviary's spirit for me)

Happy 2023!

A belated Happy New Year! I hope you all enjoyed the holidays and have started 2023 in the nicest ways possible.

For me, one of the highlights of Christmas this year was going to see the Royal Ballet’s production of The Nutcracker in London with my mother and daughter. It was everything you would want a ballet to be: beautiful music, expertly played by the orchestra; lovely sets and costumes, and, most important of all, exquisite dancing. Not that I am an expert, but I actually cried a bit while watching it, and more than once too. The audience was filled with little girls in sparkly velvet and net dresses and it was one wonderful, happy experience. It’s shown every year and I thoroughly recommend it.

After a frantically busy couple of months, I finally and tardily finished reading Brian Attebery’s absolutely brilliant new book, Fantasy: How it Works, which I reviewed for Shiny New Books. If you don’t have time to wade through my turgid prose, just go out and buy/borrow it. It explains why fantasy isn’t just childish escapism, and analyses lots of books to discuss how it works and what it does. All in a very readable, chatty style.

(And look at that gorgeous cover!)

For the rest of the holidays, I enjoyed lounging about reading both in the UK and here in Belgium. In fact, I have rearranged a corner of the sitting-room for maximal reading and lounging pleasure. It’s also easier for me to write there, for I have been writing (just not here).

I spent September to the endish of December following the Golden Egg Academy 12-week Write Your Successful Children’s Novel course. It was brilliant and if you are thinking of writing for children, I highly recommend it. There are no entry requirements, and week by week you learn how you actually put a book together, what to think about, what to develop and how to structure it. It is really practical, and handily it’s distance learning so you can do it at your own pace. Pretty much every week there is a Zoom or FaceBook meeting with the course leader, Imogen Cooper, who is just the nicest person as well as hugely experienced, and you can ask questions and get advice. At the end you can send in your first 2000 words plus a synopsis for one of the Golden Egg editors to evaluate. I have to say that the feedback was very helpful and perceptive.

After another busy few weeks at work I am keen to get back to work on my book. One of the elements I hadn’t been sure about was having a dual narrative, and the editor suggested that sticking to one viewpoint would be better. My book’s other massive weakness, caused by my tendency to plot as I go along rather than before I start, is that there is too much going on and not enough focus on the main theme. So it’s time to prune and plan (at least a bit) before getting back down to writing. The feedback has really enthused me to carry on. I hope to have a reasonable first draft ready by the end of the summer, so that I can re-apply for the 12-month course on developing your children’s novel.

Because of all this I have mainly been reading children’s novels, especially recently published ones. Here are some of them, in short!

The Poisoned Pie Mystery, by Nicki Thornton  

A boy to whom accidents just keep on happening, a talking cat who is also a master detective and a lot of cake… This is a brisk and chirpy novel for children of about 9+. The author does something quite daring with the parents, which I did not see coming.

The Hounds of the Mórrigan, by Pat O’Shea

An older work but a wonderful immersion into Irish mythology, as Pidge and Brigit journey through a magical landscape in search of a drop of the Mórrigan’s blood. Truly magical, the many joys of this book include the characterisation of the children, who act and speak like real children, and the creatures they encounter.

Children of Blood and Bone, Tomi Adeyemi

In a mythical sort-of version of Nigeria called Orïsha, the maji are people who used to have magical powers but lost them suddenly twelve years ago. Now they are oppressed and enslaved by the majority kosídan and their cruel king, but maybe there is a way for teenaged Zélie and her friends to restore magic and end the tyranny. This is the first YA novel I have ever read and my was it bloodthirsty! But the story is compelling and I loved the setting.

The Scandalous Sisterhood of Prickwillow Place, by Julie Berry

I don’t think this book is very well known outside the US? But it should be. An exciting opportunity is delivered to the students of St Etheldreda’s School for Young Ladies in nineteenth-century Ely, when their horrid headmistress and her brother both drop dead: poisoned. Rather than informing the authorities, the girls decide to continue as usual and enjoy their freedom, pretending that the two victims are still alive. Of course, this becomes increasingly farcical and meanwhile the murderer is still lurking about. A bouncy entertaining read and the American author gets pretty much everything British spot on and believe me that is high praise.

 

Sea of Tranquility, by Emily St John Mandel

(Nala recommends that you read this book...)

Olive is a novelist in 2203. Born and raised on a lunar colony, she is on a book tour of Earth just as a pandemic is spreading across the planet. In a lecture near the end of Sea of Tranquility, she utters one of the most consoling thoughts I have read recently:

‘ – and my point is, there’s always something. I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world. […]
‘But all of this raises an interesting question,’ Olive said. ‘What if it always is the end of the world? […]
‘Because we might reasonably think of the end of the world […] as a continuous and never-ending process.’

Sea of Tranquility is an elegantly constructed novel which encompasses almost five hundred years of human history with the lightest of touches. In 1912, Edwin St John St Andrew is a ‘remittance man’, a younger son of a wealthy British family sent off to the colonies to keep him out of the way, experiences something strange and inexplicable in a Canadian forest. This experience links him with Vincent in 1994, a young girl who films the anomaly, and her friend Mirella; with Alan, a violinist in an airship terminal in 2200; and with Olive. What can it signify?

The novel moves through time until 2401 when an investigation is launched. Then we move backwards again, with a new understanding of the earlier sections, until we reach the final revelation. The neatness of the structure, the resolution and the way the elements of the novel are related to each other create a lovely feeling of harmony. The book’s disclosures about time and existence are not exactly radical, but beautifully expressed through the stories of particular, fallible, likeable people. The sweep of history may be grand and impersonal, but what matters is us, always on the cusp of loss; the texture of our daily lives, our loves and griefs. I am still thinking about it. I like it a lot.

(... She has not actually read it herself, you understand)

 

Convenience Store Woman, by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori

Let’s skate over the fact I haven’t posted here for aaages and move on to this odd little novel, which I have just finished reading. I picked it up entirely because of the cover, which struck me as sweet but faintly unsettling too, and that cover sums up the novel itself extremely well. The protagonist, Keiko Furukura, has a narrative voice that is sweet and naïve, affectless almost, but this voice seems to suppress a sharper one, really quite dark, which surfaces now and again.

After eighteen years, Keiko is the longest-working member of staff at the Smile Mart convenience store at Hiiromachi Station in Tokyo. She has always felt herself to be an outsider, and she tells us of two incidents when she was a child which proved to her that she didn’t understand other people at all, and that she needed to be ‘cured’, somehow:

My parents were at a loss what to do about me, but they were as affectionate to me as ever. I’d never meant to make them sad or have to keep apologizing for things I did, so I decided to keep my mouth shut as best I could outside home. I would no longer do anything of my own accord, and would either just mimic what everyone else was doing, or simply follow instructions.

This is how she lives and for her, working in the convenience store is liberating. When it first opens, she says:

At that moment, for the first time ever, I felt I’d become a part in the machine of society. I’ve been reborn, I thought. That day, I actually became a normal cog in society.

Being a normal cog in society means memorising the store manual, mimicking the other members of staff and taking everything about the workplace culture absolutely seriously. Every day she is the most enthusiastic participant in the morning practice session, when the staff line up and shout out the phrases they use with customers (‘We pledge to provide our customers with the best service and aim to make our store the beloved choice of store in the area!’; ‘Certainly! Right away sir!’; ‘Thank you for your custom!’). She checks the weather forecast to see how that will influence the lunch choices of the store’s clients. An untidy display upsets her deeply, and she will always do her best to reach the sales goals of the latest promotion.

It is ironic that Keiko finds herself and her freedom in the mindless platitudes and corporate rules of the convenience store. A new employee, Shiraha, sneers at the morning practice session and tells Keiko it’s like a religion. ‘Of course it is,’ she replies. Her days are an endless round of performing services, care even, for the store: replenishing the stock, tidying the shelves, serving the customers and fretting for its well-being. It is a sort of organism.

Keiko’s relationship with the store goes further. When she says she is reborn there, she means it almost literally. The food and water she consumes come from the convenience store. Her speech, behaviour and clothing are all copied from the other members of staff there:

My present self is formed almost completely of the people around me. I am currently made up of 30 percent Mrs. Izumi, 30 percent Sugawara, 20 percent the manager, and the rest absorbed from past colleagues […]
My speech is especially infected by everyone around me and is currently a mix of that of Mrs. Izumi and Sugawara. I think the same goes for most people. […] Infecting each other like this is how we maintain ourselves as human is what I think.

This idea of infection between the members of the store staff is not really repeated in Keiko’s discussion of wider society. But it reinforces the idea that they are simply cells or smaller organisms serving a larger host. One day a disruptive customer is ejected from the store by the manager:

A wave of relief passed through the store, and the morning atmosphere returned to normal.
A convenience store is a forcibly normalized environment where foreign matter is immediately eliminated. The threatening atmosphere that had briefly permeated the store was sept away, and the customers again concentrated on buying their coffee and pastries as if nothing had happened.

When Keiko cannot sleep, she thinks of the convenience store ‘the transparent glass box that is still stirring with life even in the darkness of night’. She keeps fit and healthy so that she can work efficiently and well at the store. She hears its voice in her head.

It is conformism. But we are shown Keiko’s society outside the store – her family and friends – and they are increasingly putting pressure on her to conform to their ideals. Working in a convenience store when you’re thirty-six and a graduate is demeaning, in their eyes. She should either get a ‘proper’ job, or marry. Towards the end of the book, Keiko realises something about her sister Mami:

She’s far happier thinking her sister [Keiko] is normal, even if she has a lot of problems, than she is having an abnormal sister for whom everything is fine.

‘I’m a convenience store worker, a cog in society. This is the only way I can be a normal person,’ Keiko says. Normal people have social codes she doesn’t understand; the store’s rules are clear for her to follow. For eighteen years she is able to successfully repress herself, pass herself off as a ‘normal’ person and find a sort of freedom. Some religious regimens are like that: you rise through the repeated practices to a spiritual liberation. Yet now the rules have changed and her ‘normal’ act is itself perceived by her family as not acceptable any longer. They want a different normal for her, but one that she cannot give them. Thus, weirdly enough, Keiko’s choice to continue working in a convenience store becomes in the end not quite an uncomplicated act of defiance, but at least a conscious choice of the kind of conformism to which she wishes to adhere.