May 2023 Books
May was defined reading-wise by a split between the great and the meh. I had been on such a good streak it was bound to come to an end at some point. But there were still some standout novels that will no doubt make it onto my end-of-year round-up, so who’s complaining?
The Great
Sula by Toni Morrison
Another punch-you-in-the-gut-rip-out-your-heart Morrison novel. I hadn’t originally planned to read the rest of her works this year and decided to do so pretty last minute, but now I am enormously pleased with myself that I did. She wrote such artful, masterful novels and I have no doubt that this little project of mine will be defining when it comes to reflecting on my reading year.
This novel follows two girls, Nel and Sula, living in the Bottom—a black neighbourhood on the outskirts of Medallion in the mid-West—throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Though they share a sensibility in their youth, as the women get older their differences set them on diverse paths. Nel settles down into family life while Sula leaves town and returns ten years later to much speculation and oftentimes revulsion at her alternative way of life, as she steps outside the boundaries of what was acceptable for a woman of her time.
One of the things I have noticed about Morrison’s work having read Paradise and Sula in close proximity is the genius of her plotting. Her writing style, too, is unmatched, and something I have always picked up on in previous readings; indeed it is something for which she is famous. It is poetic but not in a surfacy, florid, lyrical way, but in a deeply layered one that speaks to the sheer precision of Morrison’s process, each sentence crafted to service her themes and imagery. But it is the plotting that has really stood out to me recently. This novel is short, and yet within its few pages, we are introduced not just to our protagonists, but the whole town of Bottom. We are treated to mini-stories and what might appear to be tangents to the main plotline, but each of which ultimately ends up being a tributary in the grand flow of the novel’s driving force. We jump back and forth even within the chapters, drip-fed bits of information that will ultimately make up the whole. By revealing it piece by piece, the reader is able to build up a picture of Morrison’s world that is full of depth. Her writing is prismatic, each moment refracting through the whole framework to surprising and beautiful effect.
Another thing I have been appreciating in Morrison’s work is the use of the absurd and the grotesque, sometimes slipping into the otherworldly entirely. As a dedicated disciple of the Weird, I have enjoyed following this in her work and no doubt will continue to do so. Though it seems counterintuitive, it is by going beyond our expectations of realism that she somehow captures something very true to life. Very true to how it feels to be in a world and society that you don’t fit into, whose standards you cannot meet, whether it be because of your race, class or gender (and usually in Morrison’s work, a combination of the three).
To try and summarise too much more of Sula itself would be doing it a disservice. I only recommend that you go read it and experience the brilliance yourself! This book is definitely more immediately accessible than Paradise and some other Morrisons I’ve read, and in general I think it would be a good place to start with her work if you’re new to her. A final note, I actually listened to this read by the glorious author herself. I definitely recommend this as an experience, too, though I look forward to re-reading this one myself at some point.
Augustus by John Williams
After the runaway success of my reading of Stoner last year, I placed Williams firmly on my list of authors whose backlist I wanted to explore, and probably complete. It is often said that his novels are very different from one another not just in content but in style, and I certainly found that to be the case with Augustus. Where Stoner is a sensitive and quietly rendered portrait of an English professor working in Missouri in the early to mid-twentieth century, Augustus seeks to fictionally document the rise and rule of its titular Roman emperor through a series of letters. Whilst I think the delicate nature of Stoner suited me better as a reader, this is still a phenomenal novel that demonstrates Williams’ remarkable capabilities.
The letters are written from the perspectives of a wide range of characters and are so richly detailed that they bespeak a deep understanding of the source material and a lot of careful research. The style is quite formalised which I assume (not knowing much myself) comes from a fealty to the Roman style of writing. Sometimes I wished that I could get a closer, more intimate look at the emperor, but I think this is probably more telling about my own preferences in historical fiction than anything else. To me, the perfect historical fiction is Mantel’s, where you’re right up close to your protagonists, and immersed completely in the alien world of history. The use of the letters and the formality of the style distanced me somewhat from our subject, but I’ll tell you what, I did learn an awful lot of history.
And there were some brilliant effects used, as Williams sometimes spliced up the letters to produce an almost cinematic effect as we flipped between different perspectives. Furthermore—although Mantel does this in her own way—through the polyphony of his narrators, Williams demonstrates the difficulty of knowing historical figures, and the slipperiness of their real lived lives in the grand sweep of history. The novel was not without its more tender moments, either, and some of its female characters provided some of the most moving passages. All in all, a very accomplished, clever novel that is well worth reading.
Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton
The first novel since her much-loved The Luminaries, I was of course very keen to pick up Catton’s Birnam Wood. I was surprised to discover it was an eco-thriller, so far removed from the mysterious historical literature of her previous book. Also set in her native New Zealand, though this time in 2017, the novel follows a cast of characters brought together by an unusual set of circumstances; there’s the ‘guerrilla gardening group’ Birnam Wood led by the indomitable Mira Bunting, the American tech billionaire Robert Lemoine, the newly knighted Owen Darvish famed for his pest control business. Very much like Venomous Lumpsucker—also billed as an eco-thriller—this novel is satirical in style. Though less directly funny than the Beauman, this brilliantly takes the modern world to task, and I had to stop highlighting at one point because it just felt so deliciously and ridiculously accurate. I think the opening sections were my favourite, as Catton cinematically moves between her characters, beginning to trace out the web of connections between them. For some, this will feel too slow, for others the conversations about capitalism and politics too on-the-nose and didactic. But for me, it worked perfectly.
In the second half the thriller part of the plot really takes off, as events begin to spin out of everyone’s control. Whilst I enjoyed this and found it quite ‘fun’ despite the heavy political themes, I missed the exactitude of the first half. Nonetheless, this was a read I was always keen to get back to, and it was thoroughly enjoyable, as well as clever and interesting. The ending is a little controversial, but for those of you who have read it and want to know what I think, I liked it. It felt fitting with the novel’s Shakespearean undertones. Highly recommend.
Dawn by Octavia Butler
Our book club pick for May, and a very successful one at that. I was so pleased to have a reason to return to Butler’s writing and was once again so impressed that she managed to include so many huge, interesting ideas in such a readable, propulsive story.
Lilith wakes up in a grey room all alone and discovers that after an extinction-level war back on Earth, she and a small number of others have been rescued by an alien race called the Oankali. They want her to return to Earth and start a new life there, but she will be forced to mate with them and form a new race of human-Oankali hybrids. At first, this naturally horrifies her, but as time goes on she begins to form bonds with her captors and is tasked with awakening other humans to take with her. Through the interactions between the humans and the Oankali, Butler explores many themes, including gender (the Oankali have a third gender, who are called the ooloi), colonialism and the question of desire. It prompted so much interesting conversation during our book club and I think most of us are keen to get to the other novels in the series to see where it goes next.
The Good
The Trials of Koli by M. R. Carey
This is a tricky one for me to place. Whilst it wasn’t as unsuccessful as the books below, I still had a few qualms with it. It had enough redeeming qualities not to DNF (more on why I didn’t do that for the ‘Meh’ books in a moment), but it fell far short of its potential for me.
This is the second novel in a trilogy, and I read the first—The Book of Koli—way back in the distant past of 2021. They are set in a superfuture Britain where humans live in drastically reduced circumstances in small subsistence communities due to societal collapse that is at least partly due to climate change. Our narrator speaks a new kind of English dialect, the writing of which takes some readers a little while to get used to. I listened to this book, so I didn’t notice it so much this time. In general, I found the audio narration to be pretty good (though the accents didn’t necessarily match up across the two narrators… a very minor quibble) and I think I would definitely consider listening to the final book, too.
The thing is, I think my reaction to this novel is once again more about my particular tastes in speculative fiction than anything else. It reads a bit like young adult speculative fiction spruced up for adults, and so I can imagine there being a huge audience for a novel like this. It is readable, the characters are lovable and relatable, and the world is interesting. There are many good ideas explored here, like the man-eating animate trees that threaten the humans whenever the sun shines. There are some great passages, like when the character Spinner—Koli’s love interest who he leaves behind when he must flee from his home in the first book—talks about the nature of storytelling, and how it alters one’s voice. There are some great sentences, like “all of the tools that we pick up and use, eventually use us too”, an astute observation about our relationship with all our tools, but perhaps most meaningful to us modern readers, our tech.
And yet, like with the first book, the story drags in parts. Our main narrator, Koli, is sometimes painfully naïve, and often quite corny in his observations (hence the young adult feels to this book). To sustain a less literary and more straightforward fantasy/sci-fi like this one, I think Carey needed a touch more plot and world-building. I want to see more of this world! And, of course, in general I do prefer something more daring and literary when it comes to my speculative fiction. I think this book had the potential to push there but doesn’t quite reach those heights. But as I say, there are enough good, solid ideas here to sustain me for one more book to finish out the story.
The Meh
They by Kay Dick
If this book had been longer, I would have (sadly) DNF’d it. As it was, it is so short that I decided to push on. First published in 1977 and then ‘rediscovered’ and republished last year, I wanted so much to like this one. Again, I listened to it, which I think helped me finish it as I wasn’t dedicating my precious sit-down reading time to it.
In the introduction to my edition, Carmen Maria Machado explains that this ‘sits somewhere between [a] story collection and fix-up novel’, the latter being ‘A novel composed of previously published short stories newly connected by the author; common in mid-century genre fiction and characterised (among other things) by the loose way they hang together, bound by common characters or world-building’. Its subtitle is ‘A Sequence of Unease’. This is important to know, I think, because otherwise this little volume would have made very little sense to me. The narrator does seem to be the same across the stories, and yet they don’t perfectly fit or overlap with one another. I absorbed them mostly as individual short stories, each supposedly building on the other.
And what are the stories about? They are about a mysterious group of anti-intellectuals who are referred to only as ‘they’. ‘They’ confiscate art and prevent art from being made. ‘They’ purge people’s memories of painful and difficult emotions, like grief. The stories are so detached, dreamlike and short that they don’t live long in the memory after reading, and in general pale in comparison to work that attempts to do something similar. We also get the same perspective again and again in the book, and I wanted at some point to see something new, maybe even a ‘them’ narrator. Dick did not write genre fiction or sci-fi with regularity, and this was a bit of a departure for her; I think it shows.
I think a line that might be worth pursuing in this book is the sense in which it describes a feeling of deep alienation from society. Dick was a queer author, and I think some parts of the book might perhaps speak to her experience of life as a woman who didn’t feel she fit into the standards and expectations that society set for her. Our narrator in these stories is—more often than not—a woman who lives alone with her dog, in a world where living alone and not as part of a family unit is considered subversive and becomes illegal. But whilst I understand what she was doing in this book (and there are some great sentences here and there), unfortunately, it didn’t quite live up to its potential.
A Dangerous Business by Jane Smiley
Now the only reason I didn’t DNF this book is because Smiley is another author whose work I would like to complete. Released late last year, this novel is about a prostitute working in Monterey in the mid-nineteenth century. When local women begin to be murdered, she decides to investigate with her best friend when the local authorities seemingly do nothing to resolve the cases. A pretty good concept, but a pretty odd execution. I’ve never read any Nancy Drew, but this novel is clearly inspired by literary figures like her, even based on description alone. The murder mystery element of this book, though, is seriously lacking. It’s bare bones at best. We spend much of our time with our protagonist, Eliza, as she goes about her daily life and treats with her customers. The sex work element of it is described in very sunny, quaint terms for the most part, which is another odd decision. It seems like Smiley was trying to make a point, here, but I wasn’t sure about its validity or whether it was a particularly nuanced take. The overwhelming theme seems to be that being a woman alone is ‘a dangerous business’, but the relentless positivity of the style undercut this. I honestly didn’t know what to make of it, what its point was or why Smiley felt compelled to write it. In general, this in no way lives up to her earlier novels, many of which are true masterpieces.
And that’s it for May! I will see you next month for June’s round-up.
