February 2021 Books

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I may not have read much this month but I did find two great contenders for top books of the year; so far I seem to be hitting my goal of quality over quantity! Long may it continue.

The Great

Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake

I started this way back in October and ended up taking a break from it because I knew it was going to require a bit of focus and concentration but I also felt it was going to be a work unlike anything else I've ever read. Although it took me a good while to get through this book (which might otherwise suggest I was struggling with it or didn't like it), I was right that if I could find a time to really immerse myself in its world I would delight in it.

Titus Groan is the first novel in the Gormenghast Trilogy, a series roughly contemporary with The Lord of the Rings, to which it is often compared (the latter obviously being better-known), though the two are wildly different. This is a fantasy that is not really a fantasy; at least in this first novel the supernatural elements are limited - I understand they get more obvious as the books go on. Instead, it depicts a weird and wonderful and sometimes horrifying world completely unlike anywhere I've ever encountered in a book. Its wickedly gothic, but also so much more than that.

This novel follows the first year of the title character's life. He is the latest Earl of Groan born into the vast, crumbling Gormenghast castle. Here the staff and the family are mired in centuries of tradition and ritual, but Titus' birth seems to be the catalyst for a series of drastic changes that upturn their lives. Titus being so young in this first book, it mostly focuses on his family and a selection of key servants as the years of inertia are undone.

It seems that Mervyn Peake was not just a writer but also a painter, and boy, can you tell. His writing style is completely unique and there are both jaw-droppingly beautiful passages in here, as well as sections that contain such vivid, stark imagery that it jumps off the page. His imagination knows no bounds in this novel; even though he is working within a gothic crumbling castle trope, there is so much here that will surprise and (hopefully) delight you. As I was reading I felt Peake's influence in the work of VanderMeer, Tim Burton or Neil Gaiman amongst many others. His characters are at once exaggerated but also full of depth and dimension. The environmental and architectural writing are second to none. At one point I noted that Peake's observation was so acute, not just for the aesthetics of place but also for body language and the aesthetics of the human that he might have made a good actor, too. And at times it's quite funny!

This book is epic in scope and design and it’s true, it doesn't move along at a galloping pace and will feel slow to some readers. I think all this worldbuilding is not only necessary but quite remarkable to read, but be warned it does take a little while to find your feet in this novel and you will need to be sat somewhere quiet where you can focus and allow it to wash over you. Needless to say, I'm very much looking forward to reading the remaining novels and seeing where Peake takes his world next.

Pew by Catherine Lacey

Here is another strange but quite wonderful little book, though it sits somewhere toward the opposite end of the scale. It is short and the writing is pared back and direct, but there is a lot packed into this. Sometimes I complain that a book might make a great study, but is not that enjoyable to read (ahem, Beyond Black), but this managed to achieve both. Reading the blurb - a person of indeterminate gender, race or age turns up in a small American town and begins to call into question everything the residents know about life - suggested to me a taut psychological drama (and that all might end up being revealed about this character). But actually, this book is very different from what I expected - and what an interesting surprise it turned out to be! But this I think is worth knowing before you go in as you may end up disappointed otherwise. Instead, I'd describe this novel as more of a modern fable, commenting on what drives American society today.

For starters, the novel is narrated by Pew, this 'amnesiac' character, and they do not give the reader any more information than they do the townspeople. Over the course of the novel, although Pew refuses to speak, various characters take the opportunity to confess to them, culminating in the strange festival of forgiveness at the end of the book. I don't want to spoil too much, but it is clear that Pew raises the question of how important the body is to being human, how important it is to 'identify' as something or with something, and what it might look like not to do that. Lacey is also definitely putting religion to task - is Pew an archangel? - and exposing the limits of human kindness and the depth of our cruelty, as well as perhaps looking at the ways modern American society is obsessed with confessing trauma and the widespread adoption of the talking cure. There are lots of strange and uncanny moments in here and the novel is full of depth. A modern classic that I would highly recommend that could be considered a real touchstone for modern American life, but also has things to say on a much wider scale, too.

The Disappointing

Greenwood by Michael Christie

I really wanted to love this intergenerational story that included trees as a main character but in the end, it was just okay, verging on disappointing. It follows the Greenwood family from the 1930s all the way through to 2038 when the climate crisis has made itself known in the most devastating of ways, wiping out most of the world's trees. Unfortunately for me, trees take too much of a backseat, brought in for the occasional metaphorical or pseudo-philosophical observation.

I found the novel to be overly romanticised, and compared to something like Jane Smiley's The Last Hundred Years Trilogy, the observational element was lacking, making it feel stilted and awkward a lot of the time. It simply didn't feel like Christie was writing how life was really lived, which I think an intergenerational story really needs for me to feel gripped by it. It ended up being more like a fairy-tale but without all the fun and magic of a fairy-tale. At times the writing felt somehow juvenile too, and it paled in comparison to Richard Powers' The Overstory (and I think at the time I thought that novel was also pulling at the heartstrings a little too obviously on occasion - well this one is much more clumsy in its attempts to do so!) Overall it seemed like the novel was written to wring certain emotions from the reader, rather than its actual substance, which I will admit is a pet peeve of mine. Plus the plot is convoluted and I didn't really warm to any of the characters either, and as I said - not enough trees! So, all in all, I don't think I'd recommend this one but lots of people do really love it and it might be right up your street. It just so happened that it combined a lot of the things that irritate me when I read.