April was a thesis-heavy month, with most of my reading and writing energy going into preparation for my upgrade from provisional PhD status to confirmed we-think-you’ll-really-get-a-doctorate status. At York the process is quite formal, involving submission of a complete thesis chapter and a mini viva with a panel of academics from other departments. To cut a long story short: I was quite stressed and panicked about it; there was much frenzied drafting and redrafting of my chapter up to the last minute; but in the end I passed and ‘confirmed’ fine. Phew.
It slowed my leisure reading down a bit and my blogging down a lot, but I can’t complain: the excellent year continues. I read six and a half novels (including Annie Proulx’s new book Barkskins, a behemoth weighing in at 736 pages), two graphic novels and a non-fiction book in April. It was up and down in terms of quality: I read both the best book of the year so far – Sarah Moss’s Signs for Lost Children – and the worst – Pierce Brown’s Red Rising. At first I thought I would be able to round up the lot in one post, but quickly realised that wasn’t going to work out; I thought I didn't have lot to say about each one, but the words do mount up. So here followeth the first of a two part overview. The only book I won’t be writing about is Barkskins, which isn’t out until June and needs a full review.
After Me Comes the Flood by Sarah Perry (Serpents Tail, 2014)
This has been sitting on my shelves ever since it came out in paperback and I was finally prompted to pick it up by the arrival of an ARC of Perry’s new novel, The Essex Serpent (which also comes out in June – June is going to be a mad crazy month for new releases). I hate to read a new book by a writer who is already languishing on my TBR, especially if the book I have is a debut. I admit to some trepidation at the beginning. I know you shouldn’t trust Goodreads but this book has taken a beating of one and two star reviews there that put its average rating around 2.5. I’m here to tell you that rating is WRONGHEADED and MISLEADING.
There is a heatwave. As the novel opens England is entering its second month of utterly clear skies and people are retreating into the darkness of their homes or out of the cities. John Cole, our narrator, is amongst them. He closes up his London bookshop and sets out to drive to his brother’s house on the Norfolk coast. He imagines playing with his two nephews in the sea; sitting around his brother’s kitchen table. But without a map he quickly gets lost. Dazed, confused and dehydrated he abandons his car in a wood and stumbles into the grounds of a dilapidated country house, planning to ask them for a drink and directions. Instead he is met by Clare, a childlike young woman who greets him by name, welcomes him and shows him to a room. She has been expecting him all day.
So begins John’s weeklong stay with Clare and her adopted family of misfits: an evangelical minister who has lost his faith, a mercurial pianist who can’t face the outside world, an auditor who has left everything behind for love and a young man obsessed with the possibility that the reservoir dam that borders the grounds of the house will collapse and drown them all. While the weather holds the house and its inhabitants seem suspended between real and imagined worlds, John is increasingly seduced by the idea that he belongs there with them.
After Me Comes the Flood is a study in the uncanny, spinning a narrative that is grounded in reality – named places, named people, back stories – but shot through with otherness. While there are plausible and realistic readings for each character and their actions, they exist equally on the level of parable, allegory and dream. It seems possible that John has wandered into purgatory, or dreamscape, or a community of people recovering from mental illness. Perhaps he has died, or had a nervous breakdown. Perhaps he is a self-important fantasist. Perry admits and allows all of these interpretations.
The book is a sort of puzzle box that you need to turn around and around in your hands to appreciate. It isn’t a page-turner by any measure of the imagination, and it’s distinctly odd in parts, but it’s gloriously written and teeth-sinkingly devious. If you don’t mind the unanswered questions and the fever-dream intensity, then I think you will like it a great deal.
Saga, Vol. 4 by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples (Image Comics, 2014)
I have developed a naughty counterproductive habit of reading Saga when my brain is half asleep. I devoured Volume 4 in a Travelodge in Dundee after a 4 ½ hour train journey and a 10 hour day at work. You could argue I didn’t give it the attention it deserves but since I’ll probably come back and read it all again one day when the story is finished I forgive myself. Hazel’s family saga continues into her toddler years here, at a time when her mum is working on an intergalactic soap opera and getting into drugs and her dad is feeling increasingly lonely and isolated as a stay-at-home parent. Although this volume introduced yet more characters and was packed with frenetic action it felt rather like treading water. The action was diffused across the widening cast and themes of conflict, class warfare and identity politics so that the tightness of the storytelling in the earlier volumes was lost. It’s starting to look like this story could go on forever with diminishing returns.
Red Rising by Pierce Brown (Hodder, 2014)
No. I set Red Rising aside at just under halfway, my first DNF (did-not-finish) of 2016. I was intrigued by the concept of Brown’s caste-bound universe, and the dynamics of privilege and service that maintained it, but was almost instantly turned off by the half-baked plot and characters.
Our protagonist Darrow is a Red, a Helldiver on a mining crew deep under the surface of Mars. At 16 he is already married and over half way through his life. Like all the other Reds he believes that his brutal and brief existence is a noble sacrifice in service of the good of civilisation. Earth is dying and the fuel he mines is necessary to terraform Mars and save humanity. When he finds out that this is a lie perpetuated by the Golds – society's privileged elites – to keep him and his kind in servitude he is justifiably angry. When his wife is executed for a futile act of resistance he swears revenge and, barely escaping with his own life, joins a guerrilla army intent on revolution. He is given a special mission: infiltrate the Golds from within, become one of them and then tear them down.
Sounds exciting right? Instead I found it dogged, wearisome and predictable. It wears its influences very boldly: an odd mixture of Harry Potter and the Hunger Games with some scenes almost ripped directly from the page. But it is even more violent and brutal than the latter. By the mid-point it had devolved into a riot of violence and unkindness that wore me out. I’m not squeamish but there is a limit to how much humiliation, torture and rape I can stomach. The problem was not that these things happen in the book but that these things *were* the book. Without them *nothing* would be happening. A group of teenagers would be sitting around in a forest staring at one another.
The Gunslinger (The Dark Tower, I) by Stephen King (Hodder, 2012, originally 1982)
The joint power of Teresa and Jenny from Shelf Love and Idris Elba convinced me that I should embark on the long epic journey to Stephen King’s Dark Tower. Esther’s mum is a big fan too and lent me her old paperbacks. This first slim volume was so not what I expected: it’s verbose, episodic, philosophical. It wouldn’t be out of place shelved next to After Me Comes the Flood in the ‘weird and fractured’ section of the library. It begins with that first iconic line - “The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed.” – and from there on in crackles with creative energy.
Roland Deschain is the last gunslinger, a son of lost Gilead, on a mission to confront the man in black and reach the Dark Tower. His quest is of epic and biblical proportion, stretching deep into his past, and bound up with magical forces that the reader can’t yet begin to understand from the text in front of them. We get snippets of Roland’s childhood and of his more recent past, told in flashback to people he meets on his journey, as well as clues as to the nature of his world. It seems like it might be a far future America, parched by drought and politically unstable. The occasional glimpse of our contemporary world is confirmed by the appearance of Jake, a young boy from New York who finds himself in the middle of Roland’s path. The man in black has stolen him from his own place and time – a boy on his way to school, walking down a busy street – and thrust him into a cosmic conflict, forcing Roland to chose between his growing affection for Jake and his obsession with the Tower.
The Gunslinger was both a satisfying and dissatisfying experience. On the one hand it’s obtuse, portentous and frustrating as hell – what on earth is happening?! – but on the other it’s intriguing and poetic, and the dialogue is classic King. I think if I was reading it without knowing about all the books to come I would be utterly baffled; with the next three sitting on my shelves I can reconcile myself to the mystery for now.
~~Victoria~~