February 2020 Books

By all accounts this month was an excellent reading month; even those novels that I've categorised as 'lows' I found to be more interesting and worthy than I sometimes do. I hope that this is a sign that I'm getting better at putting down or avoiding books that don't work for me.

This month I've also really been trying to think more carefully about my Goodreads ratings. Whilst ratings are sort of arbitrary it is something I come back to over the course of my reading because it forces me to think about my most basic assessment of a novel (including how it compares to other books), and I often find myself weighing up different elements; is how much I enjoy a novel more important than its formal flaws? Do I rate based on taking the novel as it is (even if I might not be its intended reader) or whether it worked for me specifically? What about books that I admire but don't enjoy? What constitutes a five-star read for me; must it be perfect in every way or just markedly much better than everything else I read? I've also noticed that the days (or even weeks) after I finish a book have become increasingly important and I find myself constantly tinkering with my ratings (and internal reviews) long after I've put a book down. And then I question which holds more weight, the rating I give whilst in the heat of the moment as it were, or the rating I give afterwards (I tend to think it's the latter but it does suggest interesting things about the experience of reading itself). I think my ratings are probably a bit all over the place as I'm constantly shifting the criteria, but thinking about it often throws up interesting questions and conflicts for me as I read as I'm sure you'll find in these reviews.

Highs

The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy

I read Levy's novel Hot Milk last year and found it to be wonderfully layered and ambitious, executed in taut surreal prose and accomplished in relatively few pages for the big ideas it contained. The Man Who Saw Everything is not so dissimilar, despite the fact that its plot and themes are completely different.

This book will be somewhat tricky to describe, so bear with me/forgive me my poor attempt. It follows a young historian named Saul Adler in the 1980s; when we meet him he has just been knocked down by a car on the infamous Abbey Road crosswalk while he waits for his girlfriend. She is going to take a picture of him crossing it Beatles-style for his hosts in Communist East Berlin, where he has recently been invited to conduct research. Then she rather unceremoniously dumps him and he leaves for Berlin. The first part of the novel follows this story in a relatively straightforward way. Well, as straightforward as Levy ever is. Saul finds himself in situations which at times seem otherworldly and his interactions are surreal which seems to comment on his own sense of himself, but also the historical period he finds himself in. And there seem to be strange anachronistic details, and various objects seem to haunt him and become touchstones for memory and experience.

Then comes the second half of the novel, where its real thrust seems to be. We pick back up with Saul in 2016, and here he is being hit by a car again on the Abbey Road crosswalk, this time landing him in hospital. In Saul's addled mind, his memories whirl and he confuses the timeline of his life and the people in it; in the earlier section he is going to scatter his father's ashes in Berlin, whilst in 2016 it seems his father is still alive. He confuses his doctor for a Stasi agent and his long lost girlfriend seems to appear by his side. It becomes clear that Saul is a man who has done wrong over the course of his life and been irresponsible in various ways, just as those around him have failed him too. It is about a life lived, about what we owe to others and how we can do better, on a personal and historical level.

I found this novel really came alive when I thought about it in conjunction with Karen Barad's Meeting the Universe Halfway which I have been reading intermittently over the past few weeks (I'll be reviewing it as best I can for March). It's a multidisciplinary book looking at what we might make of the overlap between quantum physics, contemporary philosophy and feminist theory amongst other things. She proposes an idea called 'intra-action' instead of interaction which has lots of epistemological and ethical consequences but for now let me just say that it affects the way we might conceive of causality and time. In this novel, time seems to work both backwards and forwards, to be enfolded into pockets and accessed through different objects. The historical and the personal seem to 'intra-act'; there's an essay in there somewhere I’m sure. It speaks to the complexity of Levy's novel and I really appreciate how thought-provoking and exciting her work is.

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Ah, now here's a book. A seriously good one.

With the final instalment of Mantel's Thomas Cromwell trilogy being released this month, I thought it was high time I start reading the Booker-prizewinning books (yes, parts one and two of the trilogy both won the Booker prize which is practically unheard of).

If you want a historical novel that will place you firmly in its world, this is the one to read. As many before me have said and I'm sure many after me will say, Mantel completely reinvents the historical fiction genre, making it seem immediate and all-encompassing. I read this in Saint Lucia but I frequently remarked to my family that it felt like I was swimming up through Tudor England every time I closed it.

Some caveats: as I said before this is not your typical historical novel, and you are not without company if you find the style tricky. But I feel if you manage to find its rhythm it is a very rewarding book. There are no grand feasts or opulent detail - though there is certainly richness in what it does offer - as it mostly takes place in dark, private rooms (where its arguable power really goes to work, as this novel does). Lots of people have difficulty with the repetition of 'he', making it sometimes confusing as to who is talking/doing - a good tip is that with the more obvious exceptions, the 'he' is usually Cromwell. My interpretation of this is because Cromwell is insidious in his power; the characters around him, even the narrative voice which comes close to his own many times does not always notice him enough to cite his name, but he is always there (especially in the earlier sections). Or maybe its that Cromwell himself - after inviting you into his mind - is looking upon himself in the third-person, inventing and reinventing himself. Finally, in order to fully grasp the intricacies of this novel, its good to have at least some sense of the historical period (it’s an interesting one anyway) and even then you'll probably find yourself referring to the family trees and character lists. But honestly, all this is worth it.

This is a revisionist history of Cromwell, which imagines him in a more nuanced and sympathetic way than the weaselly man most traditional portrayals offer (at least that's what I remember from my school days). He came from nothing (very little is known about his early life) to become one of the most powerful advisors to King Henry VIII and was one of the main proponents of the English Reformation and much Tudor policy. We see him as a family man, a man who must 'arrange [his] face', must bluff and charm and advise to the best of his ability. Its difficult to describe the way Mantel plots; this novel goes up to the crowning of Anne Boleyn as Henry's second wife, but it does not get there in a straightforward way. You might be tempted to describe the scenes as vignettes, but they do not read as disconnected as some novels - especially ones of this length - might have you feel. It feels instead like Cromwell is coming into view before your eyes from the scraps and wisps of what Mantel presents to you, and these scraps and wisps have enough tension and depth to be satisfying, too. And there is always the underlying thrust of the plotline which is how Cromwell helps get Anne Boleyn to her throne, ingratiating himself to the King all the time.

On top of all this, there are real moments of genius and beauty in the prose. And I can't imagine the level of intimacy you have to have with the history to create something that feels so textured and real. It is a novel that simply comes alive, and I can't wait to start Bring up the Bodies.

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

Here's another novel that I think - like Wolf Hall - will easily find itself in my favourite books of the year. This is a deliciously creepy novel that also happens to be extremely clever: a winning combination for me. I actually watched the film before I read this book and loved it. The plotlines of the two diverge enough to make me feel that it was almost the right way round to do it; I loved how the atmosphere of the film informed my reading (though obviously its all there anyway because it is the source material) and made it all the more enjoyable. Food for thought if you're looking to read this book, anyway.

Where to begin? A group of women - a psychologist, biologist, surveyor and anthropologist - make their way into the unknown that is Area X. For years this place - a 'pristine wilderness' surrounded by a confounding and mysterious border - has been swallowing up expeditions, causing them to report all sorts of strange and often violent things back to headquarters (an agency called the 'Southern Reach'). Where before most expeditions would completely disappear, now Area X seems to be returning people, only they are zombie-like versions of their previous selves and soon die of cancer.

In this book which is the first of three (I'm gleefully reading the second Southern Reach novel now), we are reading the biologist's journal from her time in Area X. It is suitably strange and suspenseful, and VanderMeer is a master of horror. But also it's so clever. It's the second novel this month which I think would work wonderfully with Karen Barad's theories (and much contemporary theory in general). It's about our inability to stay objective when we encounter the world around us, and the merging of subject and object. It's about the mutability of borders, the power of words, the limits of knowledge. It's also fundamentally about ecological issues and about what it might mean for nature to fight back. I think for some people this book doesn't have enough with regard to traditional storytelling or Science Fiction/Horror, but I think most of VanderMeer's choices are intentional. The biologist seems strangely removed even when she encounters even the most traumatic of things, but as she reveals more of her background you have to wonder how complicit she is, and how unreliable she is. This book is short, and there is no omniscient narrator giving us the full picture, instead we have part of a puzzle. To enjoy it you must be okay with not knowing everything - maybe never knowing everything - about this world. For me these things add to its texture and its brilliance, and I loved it.

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

This was Morrison's debut novel, and it really packs a (gut-wrenching) punch. Definitely need to put a trigger warning on this book because it deals with some heavy themes.

It's difficult to review authors like Morrison because you can quickly feel rather unworthy to do so, but I will try. This book follows a poor black family in a town in Ohio in the 1940s called the Breedloves. Told in the voice of another (slightly less downtrodden) local girl, it primarily focuses on Pecola Breedlove, a girl who is found to be ugly by society, and who internalises this ugliness. She wishes for blue eyes, and this impossible desire ultimately drives her to the point of breakdown. This is a hard, devastating book that prompts us to question our role in policing beauty along racialised lines and who gets to be beautiful, and what this can do to vulnerable people. It is all couched in what became Morrison's signature poetic and rich language, and I found I particularly appreciated the narrator Claudia, who jumped off the page in her liveliness and gave her opinions without falter. An important novel to read that will continue to haunt me.

Lows

Cloudstreet by Tim Winton

Here is a much beloved novel that is considered a classic within Australian fiction, sometimes even called the Great Australian Novel. It follows two working-class families - the Lambs and the Pickles - who end up living together in a ramshackle old house in Perth from the mid-1940s to the 1960s. This is one of those books where I careened between loving it and hating it, eventually landing closer to the latter (and giving it a rating of two stars). Nonetheless, compared to most of my 'lows' this novel had something to it, but it simply had one too many problems to rate any higher. I'd be interested to know if Winton resolves some of these issues in other books and if so, please let me know down below.

To start with I had very high hopes for this book; the language is lyrical and layered and Winton does an excellent job at creating the atmosphere of 1940s Perth. Consider this rather lovely opening:

Will you look at us by the river! The whole restless mob of us on spread blankets in the dreamy briny sunshine skylarking and chiacking about for one day, one clear, clean, sweet day in a good world in the midst of our living. Yachts run before an unfelt gust with bagnecked pelicans riding above them, the city their twitching backdrop, all blocks and points of mirror light down to the water's edge.

Perhaps some of you perceptive folks are thinking that the above passage is a little overwritten, and indeed I was willing to concede quite early on that the lyricism often worked but sometimes felt overwrought. Ultimately I felt it was also patching over a rather thin plot which seemed to have a more vignette-like structure than the style and initial direction it seemed to be going in suggested (not to mention the fact that it's quite a long novel for this stylistic choice). I wanted this to be a more A Thousand Acres style psychological family drama, but it never seemed to quite get there, instead using flowery language and (sometimes gratuitous) tragedy to gloss over the fact that there never seems to be a real apex to the novel. And on top of my issues with the writing, I then found it was beset with one too many problems with regards to its attitude and treatment of women, Aboriginal culture, disability and mental health.

The Outsider by Stephen King

Not really a 'low' in the usual sense but I found this book to be a bit of a disappointment. I feel this probably wasn't the place to start with Stephen King (I tried listening to It a couple years ago which also wasn't a great idea - not a great audiobook experience if you are easily distracted plus I'm just not sold on the scary clown thing). I was in the mood for a crime novel and something a bit easier to read at the time, and the blurb just sucked me in so I couldn't help myself. Because this is a mystery novel I recommend you stop reading if you are worried about spoilers because there will be a few in this review just to get my point across.

The premise of the novel and the first part of it is instantly gripping; a popular baseball coach Terry Maitland is arrested very publicly for the brutal murder of a young boy. There are eyewitnesses who put him at the scene along with forensic evidence. Only he has a watertight alibi and evidence of him being in another town entirely at the time of the murder.

I read one Goodreads review from someone more familiar with King's work that this is one of his attempts at a more contemporary crime style; indeed, Harlan Coben himself actually turns up in this book. I was getting all excited to see how the premise would be resolved - would there be some secret conspiracy? Or would it be an indictment of the absolute authority we place in forensic evidence and show how investigations can be led off track? The answer was that there was no clever logical play, it was actually just a supernatural monster, the 'Outsider'. This reviewer said you kind of have to pick one or the other, either crime story or horror, otherwise it seems like a cop out (or if you do it you have to do it well and with better integration). I completely agree. In future I'm going to steer clear of King's crime novels and stick to the horror.

Everything in between

The Wall by John Lanchester (audio)

This dystopian novel describes the Britain of a not-too-distant future; in the aftermath of some climactic 'Change' there is now no longer coastline but instead an unbroken Wall. This Wall requires guards, and these guards are conscripted; young adults are made to patrol the seemingly endless concrete in the freezing cold for two years of their young lives. The metaphor at work obviously nods not just towards climate change and the danger facing our coastlines, but also Brexit Britain and attitudes towards immigrants, refugees and the rest of the world.

As readers we follow young Kavanagh, who has recently arrived on the Wall for his conscription. He describes to us the ins and outs of his routine for most of the book, though it does pick up with some action towards the end. The book suffers from being a little too monotonous with regard to life on the Wall, and also a lack of overall development; from the characters, to the world Lanchester imagines, to the plot. It feels lacking in the real lively detail that would bring it to life and more importantly make us care; as it is the novel doesn't go much beyond the surface of the metaphors above. It was quite clear to me that Lanchester was not an author familiar with dystopias and world-building in general.

I actually think I enjoyed this book more as an audiobook than I would have done reading it; as a first person narrative and with the voice giving it life, the monotony of some of the passages was broken up. If you are going to have a go with this novel I definitely think it's worth trying it in this form.

The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah (audio)

This novel belongs to a genre I don't read much of: romance. Young Leni and her family move into the unknown in Alaska ('America's last frontier') in the 1970s; there she finds herself surprisingly at home in a harsh environment, buoyed by falling in love and the kindness of the community. However her father is a Vietnam vet who suffers from PTSD and this causes him to be violent towards her mother, the abuse only exacerbated by the long Alaskan winters.

I can see why lots of people like this book and books like it; I listened to it and found it to be quite enjoyable (if enjoyable is the word considering the amount of hurt and trauma that went into it - big trigger warning on this one). Lots of Hannah's prose is quite lovely, descriptive in such a way that she successfully evokes 1970s Alaska and the terror of the Alaskan winter. In many ways I can appreciate it to be a nice example of a kind of literature I don't read too often, and I am loathe to critique it in a 'literary' way because it would be taking it to be something that it isn't, and destroying the magic for readers that like it.

Nonetheless, I couldn't always get past the problematic elements of the storyline; whilst it made motions towards a more progressive and less cliched agenda, I was concerned about the romanticisation of toxic relationships, the simplified portrayal of PTSD, and the ways some of the nonwhite characters were described. Additionally, the ending was rushed and felt markedly different from the rest of the novel.

As you can see I listened to this book, and the narrator was… not great. But in general it was easy to follow and at least kept me gripped over the course of many hours.

In Our Mad and Furious City by Guy Gunaratne

This was one of those books I kept changing my mind about; is it vibrant and exciting or hackneyed? Is it formulaic or does it bring something new to the table? I think my confusion partly comes from my experience reading it; for the first half I didn't find it particularly gripping but then I suddenly found I couldn't put it down. I ended up taking it from a four star rating to a three star after some reflection, partly because I couldn't quite pinpoint what might make it better than other books I'd rated lower. Perhaps nothing.

It follows three families in and around an estate in Neasden (north-west London) in the aftermath of the local killing of a British soldier. We see these few tense days through the eyes of a number of characters, creating a polyphonic effect that allows us not just to see the ways race and class affect the younger characters but also the history of colonialism and immigration that led to this point through the views of the older characters (the Windrush generation is represented, for example). Radicalism is taking over the local mosque and racial and religious tension is ramping up, resulting in a climactic ending. It's certainly true that Gunaratne finds the poetry of London slang, and I sense that this is what makes this novel feel rather more fresh than it actually is. But then there are things like awkward rap battle scenes which leave me wondering if Gunaratne has taken this straight out of a movie; I'd certainly be interested in the opinions of anyone from the area on the book. Ultimately I'm still undecided about it and maybe it would bear a reread in a few years' time to see whether it holds up.

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe

A word of warning: this book isn't really the true crime story that it purports to be. Instead it's an interesting and oftentimes heart-breaking account of the lives of a few members of the IRA during the Troubles, essentially forming a well-researched and sometimes personal historical account. Whilst it was informative and it definitely sparked further interest in me on the time period, I don't think it quite worked for me because it wasn't any of the things I wanted it to be.

As I've said, it isn't really a true crime book, and as a historical account it lacked the reflection and detail that I would want from one. I read one reviewer describe it as an extra longform article, which I agree is sort of what it reads like (it's written by a journalist after all), and that is totally fine. I just wanted more from it, I wanted book-level contemplation and opinion. I wanted more moments when Keefe talked about the archival history and what it means to contain in an archive such contemporary and contentious information. When he questioned how we should approach the violence of the state - should they have a monopoly on violence or should they be held to a higher moral standard? - it was all too brief.

I think this would be a good book for readers that are totally unfamiliar with the Troubles because it provides a great overview of the IRA side of the conflict, and is written in an engaging way in that it is led by the stories of the people involved. However, for anyone looking for something more reflective, it probably won't satisfy.

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

Here is yet another book that I couldn't quite decide on, and I toyed between three and four stars for it, trying to decide if I enjoyed it enough to bump it up despite its flaws. In it, a group of diplomats and other important sorts have gathered in an unnamed Latin American country for the birthday of a Japanese business tycoon, in the hopes that he will invest in the host country and its infrastructure. To tempt him into spending his birthday somewhere he would otherwise have no interest in, they have secured the services of his favourite opera singer. However, the evening is waylaid when a local terrorist group bursts in and takes them all hostage. The siege goes on for hundreds of days, and as time begins to slow, love begins to blossom, the differences between terrorist and diplomat seem to dissipate and intimacies form.

If this sounds a little sentimental, it is. But I'm not immune to a little sentimentality in my novels. I liked the emphasis on the commonality and affectivity of music, and how the sense of suspended time created strange effects on the characters' priorities and responsibilities. I liked that Patchett showed the futility and difficulty of the situation, as well as the moral grey areas.

But alas, this book is based on a real event in a real place, and that is where the problems begin for me. The derision with which the unnamed host country is treated seems extra disrespectful (it was already feeling a little awkward for me) when you find out that the story which the novel takes its premise from is in fact Peru. The sentimentality and warmth that seeps throughout the book - not to mention the humour - seem crass once placed against what was presumably a traumatic and much more politically complex situation in the real Japanese embassy hostage crisis of 1996-7. Once you add into that the rather uncomfortable relationship between a vulnerable teenage female hostage taker and an older male hostage (who is supposed to be teaching her how to read and write) and a rather clumsy ending, your enthusiasm for it might deflate a little. Mine certainly did.

So whilst I enjoyed the reading of this novel and parts of its message, I couldn't quite get round its context. I wish Patchett had simply made a hostage situation up entirely to avoid some of that (and removed the awkward relationship, and the weird ending). But I will definitely be reading some of her other work in the hopes that it will improve a bit on this one.

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

I thought I knew what this book would be like and it completely surprised me. And sadly not always in a good way. This book is extremely popular (at least amongst the bookstagrammers and literary circles that I try to keep up with online) and is the first in a quartet about the relationship between two women - Elena and Lila - from their childhood in a poor neighbourhood in Naples to their old age (or so I believe). This book goes up to their late teens.

Now I don't want to go right ahead with the things I didn't like, because at the end of the day I enjoyed this book, and found it to be a good beach read. I thought Ferrante did an excellent job at conjuring up 1950s Naples and showing what it meant to be a woman there, often subject to violence and restrictive social mores. And I've gone and bought the other books so that shows you that I didn't dislike it as much as I might be about to suggest.

I think the biggest problem was that I was expecting it to be more literary or artful than it was, when in reality it is a bit more pedestrian than that. And I just couldn't pinpoint why the two girls were friends - if there was anything I was expecting, it was to find comfort in the girls' friendship and see myself and my own female relationships there. Whilst I appreciate that Ferrante is showing how friendship - like romantic relationships - can be just as wrought with passion, love and jealousy, there was not enough of the good to outweigh the bad. For most of the novel Elena and Lila seem to be constantly jealous of one another, practically torn apart by their differing levels of education and appeal to boys. Again, I sort of understand that because of the toxic patriarchal violence they are brought up around that their relationship might be fraught with more problems than most (certainly more than I've ever experienced with my friends), but I needed just that little bit more warmth. I think their origin story with the dolls and the school scenes all mixed up didn't establish the close tie between them for me initially, and from then on there wasn't enough friendship glue to maintain it. I remember one moment that is almost completely insignificant before a violent scene where Elena remarks she was at Lila's house helping her fold sheets and I remember thinking that I wanted more of that; the small intimate moments when you might spend hours with your friend doing unmemorable chores. I had no reason based on all the petty jealousies and spiteful acts that had gone before that they might do things like that together. Plus I found the plot a little repetitive and it sagged in the middle, picking up again towards the end. And so for those reasons I couldn't really love this book (please don't hurt me, lovers of Ferrante!)

A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende

This novel is inspired by an elderly friend of Allende's who fled from Franco during the Spanish civil war, only to find himself having to flee France for Chile when World War II breaks out. When General Pinochet comes to power in the 1970s, Victor must move on again, this time to Venezuela. It covers many decades in the lives of Victor and his family, and many miles too. Allende's prose is everything you would want from a good historical novel; she sets the scene well and it is richly detailed and atmospheric. For the first fifty pages I wasn't quite sure where she was going with the novel (despite a punchy and moving opening scene), but then it picked up the pace and drew me further into the relationships and loves that were forming. For a novel of such wide scope it feels quite rapid, which explains why I maybe didn't connect with it enough for it to become a favourite, but it was enjoyable nonetheless and extremely interesting from a historical standpoint because I knew barely anything about both the rise of Franco and Pinochet. Worth reading if any of the above sounds interesting to you.

Goldenhand by Garth Nix

This could be grouped under a nostalgia heading in my reading. I absolutely loved the original Abhorsen trilogy as a kid, and when I found out Nix had released further books in 2014 and 2016 I bought them. But after reading the fourth instalment Clariel a couple of years ago and finding it extremely disappointing, I haven't been particularly keen to pick this one off my shelves. Luckily, it was far more enjoyable and had lots of the elements of the original novels that I loved. There's more action, and more of Nix's unique magic (seriously, to this day the world he builds in this series remains among the more strange of the fantasy books I've read). For the love of his world, and with the acknowledgement that this is a young adult novel I ended up rating this three stars, even though it's possibly an unnecessary addition to the series. And it's a little slow to get to a rather rushed ending, but I'm willing to forgive it for offering me a slice of my childhood back.

So that's it! Congratulations if you made it to the end of another mammoth post and I will be back soon with more books.