June + July 2021 Books

You all know the drill by now, so let’s dive straight in, as there are some good ones to discuss this time around…

Great

Perdido Street Station by China Miéville

I wasn't sure what to expect from this book; I didn't read much of the blurb and only knew Miéville's name as one that was regularly grouped with the likes of Jeff VanderMeer for being a 'Weird' author. Judging by a quick skim of the reviews I wasn't sure that it would be for me as many people commented on (or complained about) the verbose prose - not typically my cup of tea. I suppose I thought it might be a bit pretentious. But I ended up loving it so much I went out (or rather went online) and bought nearly all of Miéville's other work. The Weird is clearly my thing.

This novel is certainly weird, but also thoughtful and so vividly imagined that you can see the city of New Crobuzon laid out before you. Perhaps most strikingly to me, though, was that it was a lot of fun! I read so little these days which delights in its world quite like this book does, and that made it a real pleasure to read. That isn't to say that this book doesn't get quite dark in places - it certainly does - or that it doesn't have strong philosophical and ideological foundations - which it also does - but that it still seems to revel in the sheer joy of invention which underpins the best fantasy writing.

What is it about, then? We follow a small group of characters as they seek to protect themselves and their city from a terrifying group of creatures - the slake moths. And it isn't as cheesy as that one liner there from me makes it out to be; instead it is gritty, following various plotlines through their twists and turns over the course of its 800 pages. Miéville's imagination is on impressive display here, as he populates his city with all kinds of peoples and ways of being (peoples and ways of being are also kind of my thing - they're what I wrote my Master's dissertation on after all). He successfully integrates lots of interesting philosophical and scientific ideas; his idea of a 'crisis engine' is very successful as one of the foundational concepts of the novel - that 'things are in crisis just as a part of being'.

Then there's that prose. This one will split the crowd I think. Inspired by the likes of H. P. Lovecraft (without the white supremacist overtones…), Miéville's writing here is deliberately over the top. And in the wake of Titus Groan earlier this year, I see the likes of Mervyn Peake's writing echoed in this book, also. In this very interesting interview with Miéville (thank you alumni access), he says the following:

If you look at the way critics describe Lovecraft, for example, they often say he's purple, overwritten, overblown, verbose, but it's unputdownable. There's something about that kind of hallucinatorily intense purple prose which completely breaches all rules of "good writing" but is somehow utterly compulsive and affecting. That pulp aesthetic of language is something very tenuous, which all too easily simply becomes shit, but is fascinating where it works. Though I also love much more minimalist writers, it's that lush approach that I'm drawn to in terms of my own writing, for good and bad.

For me, his 'pulp aesthetic' absolutely works. It is heavily stylized and dripping in excess, but it creates that hallucinatory vision/version of its world for you, in a way that I haven't experienced in a long time.

A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel

Stepping into another of Mantel's historical novels felt very much like returning to an old friend. This novel follows three men - Camille Desmoulins, Georges Danton and Maximilien Robespierre - as they foment a revolution and then quickly become ensnared in an ever-changing and increasingly dangerous regime.

All of the magic of Mantel's prose is here, particularly the way she can somehow conjure her subjects - long dead - into life. That ability to animate the written word is something that she and Miéville share, but they achieve it in such vastly different ways and are otherwise at different ends of the spectrum. With Mantel it's much sparer, with description used only when it serves her ends for a particular scene. There is much more emphasis on the dialogue, on what is left unsaid. It feels dramatic somehow, like watching a play rather than reading a novel. I love how she sparks these characters into life but still maintains a shroud of ambiguity; she does it beautifully with the figure of Cromwell and she does it here too, particularly with Danton. And there are moments of poignancy, of pause, which will make you want to get out the highlighter and ask yourself how on earth she does it.

But it is clear this is a much earlier work than her Cromwell trilogy. It is less taut and feels a little more baggy and loose. Its focus is less, being that it revolves around three characters rather than one. But this messiness just makes it a different kind of work, and once you find its rhythm it is still incredibly enjoyable. I have to say I did study the French Revolution at A-Level and had to dig around in my memory to get to grips with some of the parts of this book - a little background knowledge certainly does not go amiss here as it rollicks through the years. But overall if you can find the time for this tome, I think it's well worth it.

Fine

Miss Benson's Beetle by Rachel Joyce [audio]

I listened to this novel and at times was quite enjoying it and at others found it a little boring. It's about a woman called Miss Benson who is in search of the practically mythical golden beetle in 1950 and ends up going on a trip halfway around the world in search of it. She takes along with her a rather unlikely companion in the form of Enid Pretty - a chatterbox in a pink suit. It's supposed to be a heart-warming adventure about the friendship between these two women and what they discover about each other and themselves, and I suppose it is. But the pacing seems off and some of its ideas are a little dodgy - the villainous mentally unstable POW Mundick for one. The prose was solid with hints of real beauty, it was just the storyline I was less sure of. And don't get me started on the narrator's voice for Enid (other than that she was great).

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

This book was also fine, but not great. It follows four generations of Koreans living in Japan over the course of the twentieth century. One of the best things about it was learning about the relationship between Korea and Japan during this time, and the particular plight of living as a person of Korean descent in Japan.

The first third of the book that follows Sunja - one of the focal characters in the family - was really good; the pacing was right, the storyline was intriguing and I felt connected to the characters. But for some reason the novel then speeds up exponentially, offering slices of life here and there in a way that did not allow me to connect with the characters or the plot. Not to mention that some of the storylines were very unresolved by the end, and some of the most important characters' ends were barely touched on. I didn't mind the slightly detached style of it as that is not something that typically bothers me too much, but it did seem to exacerbate the pacing issue. Ultimately it just fell a little flat for me, and I had to push through the second half to finish it.

Flawed

Mary Toft; or, The Rabbit Queen by Dexter Palmer

From my brief research, it seems that historical novels are not necessarily Dexter Palmer's thing, or at least he hasn't committed himself to a genre as an author. This book feels to be like a bit of a failed foray into the genre, at least for this subject.

Palmer takes the real case of Mary Toft from the England of 1776 and brings it to life here. The thing is, he does so in such a way to take all the fascination out of it. In case you are unfamiliar with the story (as I was), Mary Toft appeared to give birth to rabbits, bamboozling her doctors and earning her a trip to London where her fraud was uncovered. Now to my mind, if you are going to do a fictionalisation of this, you are going to play up all the weird, fantastical elements of it, maybe add in a bit of actual magic, who knows. Use it as inspiration more than focus on its actual fraudulent nature. And Palmer does dabble in speculative fiction! But alas, it was not to be. Instead, he focuses on the group of male physicians (affording Mary a brief chapter from her point of view which has some… questionable sections in it i.e. using the ol' 'women are empty vessels' metaphors etc etc) and how they felt about the whole thing. No weirdness, no nothing. To say I was disappointed is an understatement.

There are other issues here, too. It feels clumsy, the prose feels too American to be able to accurately depict the little English town of Godalming, it overexplains its ideas repeatedly, hammering them over the head until they're no longer interesting. There are moments of occasional brilliance in the description, but in general, I felt Palmer to be out of his depth with this story. I was keen to read his novel Version Control based on the wonderful reviews but now I'm not so sure… though they are supposedly quite different.

Calypso by David Sedaris

David Sedaris has been on my Writers-To-Read list for quite some time, and I was sadly quite disappointed by this book (always stings a little more when I've picked it for book club as well!) It's a collection of essays that sort of centre around Sedaris' purchase of a holiday home in North Carolina, but he also contemplates the deaths of his sister and mother, his relationship to his father and his remaining family, and some of his own habits and foibles (an obsession with his Fitbit being one). Sedaris is supposedly a 'humorist', and these essays are presumably supposed to brim over with humour, warmth and human life. And occasionally they do, and occasionally they are lightly amusing (no laugh-out-loud moments for me though I'm afraid). But generally I was not bowled over by Sedaris' musings here; there was nothing particularly illuminating amongst them, and often he comes across as snobbish and mean-spirited. Of course, it's a matter of personal choice whether you find his literary treatment of his sister, their relationship and her tragic death for public consumption a bit icky (I do). I was expecting something ground-breaking, and I got something rather lukewarm. So I'm sorry to the Sedaris fans amongst you, but I guess he's just not for me! The cover is good though.

That’s all for now folks! See you next month ❤️