I've been rather quiet on the blogging front this last month, after such a cracking start to the year. Those of you who follow me on Twitter might have noticed I've been working on a chapter of my PhD ahead of an important deadline in April, and there is only so much writing I can bear each day. The thought of cracking open the laptop and starting a review in an evening is painful after long hours in front of the screen writing about archival value systems. And this particular chapter has been a traumatic one; it took me almost six weeks to realise that the reason it was so painful was that I was actually giving birth to twins. Turns out that what I thought was a single chapter is actually two. I spent yesterday splitting the 15,000 word behemoth in half and submitting the better two thirds to my supervisors. I feel much better for getting it out of my hands for a few days; until my supervision next Wednesday it's off the radar. Now for a long weekend off to recover.
Reading is going to play a large part. Reading and reviewing. I have a longish piece to write about They Are Trying to Break Your Heart, the debut novel by BBC correspondent David Savill set in the aftermath of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami. And a shorter one about Nalo Hopkinson's piquant short story collection Falling in Love with Hominids. On the reading front I'm 80 pages into Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho and am intent on luxuriating in that for much of the time, interspersed with catching up on some graphic novels. I have Nimona, the second volume of Rat Queens and the first volume of Lumberjanes on loan from the library. I'm also just about to start another Pushkin Press translation: Waking Lions by Israeli author Ayelet Gundar-Goshen. It's a realist contemporary story about a doctor who kills an immigrant man in a hit and run, only to find the man's widow on his door step the next day. It's going to act as counter balance to the magical historical romp of Sorcerer to the Crown.
At the beginning of the year I had a foolish ambition to write a little bit of something about everything I read in 2016. I didn't count on how much I'd be reading though, or on how intense my research would get. Still, there are a few things from my TBR and the library in the last four weeks that I want to at least mention.
- Under the Skin by Michel Faber (Canongate, 2000, my own paperback copy)
Holy wow, this book is not what I expected. At all. I have had it on my TBR for years and years, and after reading The Book of Strange New Things I decided to jump right in. (See also my NYR not to hoard authors anymore.) It's a stunning debut - mind-blowing, acutely observed and batshit crazy. It's almost impossible to describe it in a non-spoilery way, and to be honest I think it's fairest to let you in on a few of its secrets. Otherwise, like me, you'll be innocently reading along and suddenly, whoa, you'll think you fell asleep and started hallucinating. Under the Skin is about Issherley, a strange young woman who drives up and down the A9 north of Inverness looking for hitchhikers. It's the fit, healthy men she's after, the ones who have no family, few friends, lives that no one will miss. So far, so mysterious. But that's when the space llamas come into it. Yep. Space llamas. You have to read it to believe it. There is no way you could predict that Faber's second novel would be The Crimson Petal and the White. I mean, no way. I'll be so sorry if you doesn't write another book.
- The Inheritors by Williams Golding (Faber, 1955, my own paperback copy)
I love Golding, love, love, love. The Spire remains one of the most powerful books I've ever read. I picked up this novel about the devastation of a neanderthal family by the arrival of homo-sapiens in their territory from my TBR on a whim (and to over-satisfy the Read Harder challenge category for a novel set pre-1900). It's a disconcerting novel, Golding's second book, told from the non-human perspectives of the neanderthals in a way that obfuscates and complicates the action. Their consuming desires to eat, sleep, touch and vocalise dominate the narrative, often distracting from the drama of the story itself. The limits of the characters' capacity for problem-solving, language and interpretation in turn limit the range of expression Golding can use. Still, the novel achieves fine moments of emotional insight - at the death of the family elder, at the loss of a young child - that brought me to tears twice.
- A Place Called Winter by Patrick Gale (Tinder Press, 2015, my own paperback)
Another TBR read and my first novel by Patrick Gale. This was almost entirely redeemed for me by it's ending because, let's be honest, who didn't cry ugly tears at that letter and then happy tears in the final pages? Overall though I found it rather uneven and oddly paced, and the main character Harry difficult to get to grips with. In the first third of the novel we get acquainted with Harry's life in England - his dutiful marriage, his diffidence, his unlooked for love affair with another man - in a traditional barely noticeable prose. He's amorphous, unformed and unremarkable, showing no sign of the extraordinary strength of character he will show in the rest of the book. Though this makes sense in some ways, because Harry is a ghost in his own life before he comes to terms with who he really is, it sapped the energy out of the reading experience for me. The same could be said of the framing device, which felt overly contrived even at the outset.
- A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James (Oneworld, 2015, my own paperback copy)
In four words? Extraordinary, exhausting and devastatingly violent. I read this for a book group I was roped in to facilitating at work and thank goodness I encountered it in that context, otherwise I fear I wouldn't have finished it. That would have been a terrible shame because (and you know this already, what with all the prize wins) A Brief History rewards effort. Told in a polphony of voices, from street kids and gang leaders, to CIA agents and unemployed receptionists, this imagining of Jamaica in the 1970s and 1980s, is rich in language, character and politics. It's tough though, really tough, and not just because of the patois (I found reading that aloud really helped me get into the rhythm). There is hardly a single act of kindness or hope in it. The world it describes is imploding, both on the international stage and on the ground in Kingston and everyone is numb, or ruined, or traumatised, or in the business of making people numb, ruined or traumatised. But the most challenging aspect of the book for me was casual and repeated violence against women, barely one of whom has a name or a story of her own. The book's sole female point-of-view character spends most of her time on the run from violence, trying to make herself invisible. I was both sad and relieved when I finished it.
- All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders (Titan Books, 2016, my own Kindle copy)
Science and fantasy collide in this giddy excitable story about friends Patricia - a witch - and Laurence - a physicist - saving the world from climate change and imminent destruction. It's a weird one this, and I wish I'd written about it at the time because I feel like I had interesting things to say then. But the passing of time has erased a lot of it from my mind. My abiding positive feelings are: it was a lot of fun; I liked the beginning of the book, about Patricia and Laurence's childhood friendship, best; and I loved how, despite being massive geeks, both main characters still had crazy fantastic sex. My abiding negative feelings are: there was about three bookloads of imagination crammed into this one novel and I wish some of them had more space to breath (like Patricia's magical education; Laurence's creepy corporate employer); the ending came whomping out of no where to save the day and felt rather unearned, given the extremity of the climate scenario; and the tree riddle was pretty feeble.
Saga, Vols. 2 & 3 by Brian Vaughan & Fiona Staples (Image, 2013/14, borrowed from the library)
Don't quiz me on these. I read both too quickly and greedily and didn't adequately take them in. It was late at night with Volume 2, and I seem to recall I'd had quite a lot of wine AND it was late at night with Volume 3. I get it sufficiently to gamble on with the story once Volume 4 finally turns up at the library (why did this one have a disproportionate number of holds on?) I'll definitely have to revisit them before I write anything about this series as a whole. Everything I loved about the first volume is still lovable here though, especially Hazel's wry omnipotence. More than ever I enjoy the layering of the narrative 'voices': the art, Hazel's framing monologue, the character's direct speech and their indirect asides.
- Arsenic for Tea by Robin Stevens (Puffin, 2015, borrowed from the library)
The Wells and Wong Detective Society have their second outing, this time to solve a murder committed in the middle of Daisy Wells' 14th birthday tea. Amidst the cream buns and scones a dodgy antique dealer visiting the ancestral home has been poisoned with arsenic, and her brother, father and uncle are all prime suspects. Cue much detecting! Daisy and Hazel, with the help and hindrance of two visiting school friends, hide behind curtains and in trunks, interrogate the servants and reenact the crime scene with a doll's house. I didn't think it had quite the spark of Murder Most Unladylike - I badly missed the school setting - but it was a lovely insight into Daisy's relationships with her parents, as well as an opportunity dig a bit deeper into the issues of class that emerged in the first book. Next up First Class Murder.
Feet in Chains by Kate Roberts (translated from Welsh by Katie Gramich, Parthian Books, 1977, my own Kindle copy)
Last one! This was another TBR impulse read, from my Kindle hoard this time. It's an understated, forthright family saga set in the Welsh valleys, about the lives of Jane and Ifan, and the lives of their children, spanning from the 1870s to the 1920s. It's about nature and work and socialism and education and love and change, and how dramatic everyday lives are without you really noticing it. It reminded me powerfully of another Welsh novel I read last year: The Life of Rebecca Jones by Angharad Price, a recent novel that must surely have been inspired by Roberts' classic of the 1930s. The translation is bold, the prose is unadorned, the emotions barely visible but huge nevertheless.
Gah! That turned into a longer post than I ever intended. If you've stuck with me to the end, I thank you. Have you read any of these?
~~Victoria~~