January 2021 Books

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There’s not a whole lot to report from this month (rather unsurprisingly as we remain firmly in lockdown…) so no ramblings this time, let’s just get straight into the books!

The Great

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

I absolutely adored this book. Nothing feels better than discovering one of those literary gems that you know will stick with you for a long time to come, and I'm certain this will make it into my best books of the year. However, we have a slight problem and that is that I think this book is best approached knowing next to nothing about it. For some reason I sensed this early on (I must have read a review of someone who said the same!) and read absolutely no blurb or introduction to this book and I'm very glad I did. Because I believe this so strongly I won't be going into any plot points at all, but I will try and help you figure out if it's for you as much as I can.

Just like with Clarke’s previous offering Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell I think you want to approach this with caution if you are a fan of certain kinds of fantasy, particularly more plot-heavy works. This is a book about a different world and it does have fantastical elements but it is also subtle and quiet. I did read a few reviews by people who said they found the first hundred pages pretty boring, but I think one really productive way of approaching this book is to approach it as a mystery right from the start which is what I did. This world is strange and unlike any other you might have encountered, and we have a first-person narrator too who writes in quite a formalised manner. The first few pages of the novel might feel a bit like being thrown in the deep end in that regard, but Piranesi does go on to explain his world as he understands it fairly thoroughly, and then the real mysteries begin to unravel. You will get a grip on it soon enough! I found it extremely rewarding putting the pieces together over the course of the book to work out what was going on.

And what a world! It's incredibly beautiful and the ending made my heart ache. Piranesi is charming and lovable. As a whole the novel has a lot of meaningful things to say about personhood, our relationship to our world and the wonders in it, and the place of religion and a higher power in an increasingly secular world.

The Good

Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art by Rebecca Wragg Sykes

This is a nonfiction book that deftly summarises what we know of Neanderthals today and how far we've come from considering them unsophisticated cannibalistic cave-dwellers. Instead, Wragg Sykes lays out a depiction of Neanderthals which shows them to be as sophisticated as early Homo Sapiens in many ways, as creatures that used advanced tools and had a deep closeness to their environment, and perhaps even created art of their own kind.

I learnt a lot from this because it was a very thorough and sometimes quite overtly academic overview of Neanderthal study, which suited me nicely but did make it a bit of a more difficult read at times (particularly if you're trying to keep track of the various different important archaeological sites and the types of lithic tools). I think that this will possibly not appeal to every reader, so bear that in mind! I liked the little literary introductions to each chapter, and Wragg Sykes' willingness to allow Neanderthals the space for emotion and love and art whilst still keeping close to the actual archaeology. I also liked that she included a little analysis of how Neanderthals have been used for racist means, and the ways in which further study and use of land might affect indigenous populations today. This wide scope of vision made for a really satisfying read for me that I felt covered a lot of bases and was academia as I like it best - open and progressive and multi-disciplinary.

Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel

I'm just not quite sure what to make of this book even a few weeks after reading it. One minute I think I liked it and that there was a lot of literary merit here, the next minute I'm wondering whether it really ticked any boxes for me at all and who on earth I would ever recommend it to. I feel like whatever I write here will not really scratch the surface of those feelings for me.

Let's start with the plot; it's about a medium called Alison who - unlike some of her colleagues - actually has the ability to see and interact with ghosts and spirits. At the beginning of the novel she hires Colette as her assistant/manager, a rather unsavoury woman who is recently divorced and is generally bitter and repressed. Alison on the other hand is a soft, sensitive woman who has suffered a lot of childhood trauma, which often makes itself very known in her interactions with the spirits that surround her, and slowly comes to light over the course of the novel. So Beyond Black seems to tackle what it means to have had such a traumatic childhood and how that might affect someone using the idea of the medium to channel some of those themes, as well as exploring the rather toxic friendship between Alison and Colette (how often is that done in fiction!?) as the latter becomes increasingly abusive and controlling. Of course, the two ideas link together, also. At the same time, Mantel brings to life a dim and dingy England in her depiction of the psychic circuit around the outside of the M25, in a very viscerally real but also often quite funny way. This novel is often described as a dark comedy.

So on the one hand this novel seems to drag, as there is not a lot of plot over the course of its four hundred pages, and it also feels deeply unpleasant a lot of the time. Alison is haunted by her difficult past and the repulsive characters that inhabited it, and in real-time Colette is meanspirited and uncomfortable to read, especially in the way she picks on Alison for her weight over and over again (be warned there are a lot of fatphobic comments in here - I think they're there mostly to show Colette's verbal abuse but even so they are unpleasant to read). On the other hand, this novel is very unique in its approach to childhood trauma and also to writing about the spirit world. And like I said it brings dingy England to life in a way I've never seen done before. It does so without all the bells and whistles of other novels, and I do think that makes this novel an interesting read, and possibly an interesting study, too. But did I enjoy it? Not really. I enjoyed the first half but then it begins to get increasingly unpleasant and slow. But that doesn't mean it wasn't doing what it was supposed to. A tricky one, and I hope my review will either spark a bit of intrigue in you or allow you to skip this one of Mantel's works.

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

My first re-read of the year! Re-reading is definitely something I want to do more often, both of those books I read a long time ago and loved but now barely remember, as well as those I just know I will enjoy time and again. I used to be against re-reading because there are just so many books out there and I felt I didn't want to waste time on something I had already read but when I thought about how I approach other art that I love that suddenly seemed like a real waste. I re-watch TV and movies that I love all the time, so why not books? Surely re-reading books would be even more rewarding because there is so much more to be found in each book than there would be in a two-hour movie. Plus I read so many books I'm unsure about, it's nice to throw in one you know you'll like every once in a while, especially when reading is such a time-consuming hobby.

Anyway, back to the point at hand. In the case of The Master and Margarita, this was a book I read a long, long time ago (I'd say at least twelve years ago) and loved at the time and wanted to return to to see how it held up. Naturally, this is always a bit of a risky move, not least because I was young when I first read this and I have matured as a reader a lot. I'll likely mature as a reader a lot over the next twelve years, too, but at least I'm an adult now with a couple literature degrees behind me! And I probably did find it a bit less enjoyable this time around, though I still think it’s a little work of genius - just one with all its seams showing.

Where to begin with this chaotic book? In short, the Devil comes to Moscow during the Stalinist regime and wreaks havoc, exposing all the internal contradictions of the regime and its casual cruelty. At the same time interwoven with the main narrative which jumps from scene to scene and character to character is a rather affecting narrative about Pontius Pilate around the time of Jesus' crucifixion (yes, you read that right). It does sort of tie in with the themes of the novel and some of the eventual plotline but it certainly feels a little unusual!

There's lots to like about this novel; as a work of satire it is impeccable, and it is inventive and fun and ridiculous and a bit disturbing all at once. It sends up the super atheistic attitude of communist Russia by adding in fantasy and religion and the charismatic Devil and his cronies. Nonetheless, I think it was perhaps a little too chaotic for what I wanted at the time of reading. This novel had a pretty fraught publication history (obviously, because writing satire of the Stalinist regime was not strictly a safe thing to do at the time…) and it shows. Like I said before, all the seams are showing here, and perhaps it might have eventually become a slightly smoother and more polished piece had its history been a bit different. But then again, that's all part of the wonder of this book, it's just also worth knowing going into it. I can't think what I must have thought of it when I first read it (my lasting impression I think was 'mad and amazing'), but I would very much like to interview little me to find out.

The Meh

Faust: Part One by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe trans. by David Luke

Look, I'm very sorry to say I just didn't enjoy this. And I'm very willing to believe that has everything to do with translating this canon piece of German writing into English (even though I suspect that the translator David Luke did do a fairly good job of translating it and also making it as 'artistic' in style as possible having read the introduction to the Oxford World's Classics edition). It was written over many periods of Goethe's life and in my view, it shows. It's all over the place and feels disjointed. I kept waiting for Mephistopheles to really up the ante… and then it doesn't really happen (cue trip to the pub, underage girl and strange witch party). I hate to do this (but I'm going to do it anyway!) my reading of this really paled in comparison to the best of Shakespeare in terms of both plot and character - and he was writing much earlier! I suspect that some of the enjoyment of this play might come from the linguistic achievement and the analysis of its themes, and that a lot of this is lost in translation, so my concluding suggestion is that you don't try to read this in English as it simply won't be the same. I got hints of it in some of Faust's early speeches but couldn't fully appreciate this aspect. I read this to try and illuminate my reading of The Master and Margarita and I certainly didn't find that it added anything to my reading. I would be interested in reading Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus though (I think I might have even read excerpts of it before) because the original legend does intrigue me and I think it's an interesting concept.