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We Love This Book reviews: Andrew Lovett & David and Hilary Crystal

26th September 2013 / / 1 Comment

Here are my two latest reviews from We Love This Book:

Andrew Lovett, Everlasting Lane (2013)

When his father dies, young Peter Lambert finds himself with a new life before he has had much chance to make sense of the old one.

Peter’s mother (now insisting that she’s going to be his Aunt Kat) whisks him away to an old cottage on Everlasting Lane in the village of Amberley. Kat tells him that this is his grandmother’s cottage, and that he has lived here before; Peter doesn’t remember that, but the house does seem strangely familiar. And Peter would very much like to know what’s in one particular room which is hidden away behind heavy drapes.

Andrew Lovett’s debut is partly a tale of growing up in the 1970s, and he populates Everlasting Lane with some memorable secondary characters who come into Peter’s life. These include his new teacher, Mr Gale, who comes up with his own insulting nicknames for his pupils (‘Lambchop’ in Peter’s case), and generally treats them shabbily – until a cricket match goes wrong. Most of all, there’s Anna-Marie Liddell, the pretty girl next door who is only a year older than Peter, but likes to act as though she’s far superior. She and Peter become something like friends; their relationship has a thread of uncertainty that’s very well realised.

The mystery of Peter’s new circumstances adds an extra dimension to the novel, a sombre undercurrent stemming from suggestions of tragedy in his family’s past. This turns Everlasting Lane into a dark riff on Famous Five-style tales of children solving mysteries. I’m not sure that the full force of the novel’s adult issues always emerges from Peter’s viewpoint as a child; but there is a clear and poignant sense that he is trapped in his own story. Everlasting Lane is an interesting coming-of-age tale which never quite settles into the shape you might expect.

Links
Original review
The publisher, Galley Beggar Press

David and Hilary Crystal, Wordsmiths & Warriors (2013)

In Wordsmiths and Warriors, linguist David Crystal and his partner Hilary take us on a historical tour of Britain to show us how – and, more importantly, where – the English language was shaped.

Each chapter of Wordsmiths and Warriors focuses on a particular place of significance in the development of the English language in Britain – from the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons at Pegwell Bay in Kent in the fifth century, through to Randolph Quirk’s Survey of English Usage, inaugurated at University College London in 1959. The book is a mixture of a historical accounts, anecdotes and illustrations from the Crystals’ own road trip. There are even directions to each site if you want to make your own visit.

There’s a lot of interesting material in here, whether you are unfamiliar with the history of English or, like me, studied it at one time then headed in a different direction (for those with greater knowledge, I’m less sure; this feels like a general-interest book). Amongst many other topics, the Crystals’ survey takes in the Paston letters; Robert Burns and the development of Scots; the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; Dylan Thomas’s contribution to Welsh English; and Roget’s Thesaurus.

The book is arranged chronologically rather than geographically, which (perhaps inevitably) reduces the sense of a journey. But the history is the main thread, and it is fascinating to view that history through its places, gaining a vivid sense of how the story of English in Britain moves (broadly speaking) from battlefields, castles and ecclesiastical establishments to scholarly halls and writers’ rooms. It remains a dynamic story, wherever it takes place, and the Crystals capture that dynamism superbly in Wordsmiths and Warriors.

Links
Original review
The publisher, Oxford University Press

BBC National Short Story Award 2013 shortlist

22nd September 2013 / / 1 Comment

The shortlist for this year’s BBC National Short Story Award has been announced:

  • ‘Barmouth’ by Lisa Blower
  • ‘We Are Watching Something Terrible Happen’ by Lavinia Greenlaw
  • ‘Mrs Fox’ by Sarah Hall
  • ‘Notes from the House Spirits’ by Lucy Wood
  • ‘Prepositions’ by Lionel Shriver

I’ve been following this award for the past few years, and it always throws light o some interesting stories. This is the first time, however, that I’ve already been familiar with one of the stories in advance. I loved Lucy Wood’s collection Diving Belles (which I reviewed for Strange Horizons here), and ‘Notes from the House Spirits’ was one of my favourite stories in that book. So that’s who I’m rooting for, though I expect there is some stiff competition in that list.

The winner of this year’s Award will be announced on Tuesday 8 October. In the meantime, there is an anthology of the stories available, and there will also be podcasts of story readings from BBC Radio 4 going up this week.

Strange Horizons: new review and fund drive

18th September 2013 / / 0 Comments

Today I have a new review up at Strange Horizons, looking at The World of the End, the debut novel by Ofir Touché Gafla (translated from the Hebrew by Mitch Ginsburg).Gafla’s book is the story of one man’s journey through an unacceptably strange afterlife, searching his late wife, whom he thought would be there to meet him. As you’ll see from the review, I ended up feeling ambivalent towards The World of the End; it’s a lot of fun to read, but its disparate elements doesn’t quite seem to gel.

Strange Horizons is currently in the middle of its annual fund drive, so I’d like to take the opportunity to say a few words about why I value the site. In my view, SH is simply the number one place to go (online or off-) for writing about speculative fiction (I’m less familiar with the fictional content myself, but its reputation precedes it). There are two values at the heart of this: SH stands for serious, in-depth engagement with its subject matter; and it champions diversity of all kinds within the field. That’s what I want from commentary on speculative fiction (actually, make that commentary on any kind of fiction). With Strange Horizons, even if the subject of a particular piece doesn’t interest me personally, I can pretty much be sure that the writing will be engaged and engaging. To write for SH myself is always a pleasure and a privilege.

Strange Horizons is a non-profit operation which relies entirely on donations to keep going, hence the fund drive. If you already know and like SH, why not consider chipping in? If you’re unfamiliar with the site, I strongly recommend you check it out – you never know what may be of interest.

The Winter Witch: first chapter

17th September 2013 / / 0 Comments

This post is part of a blog tour for Paula Brackston‘s new novel, The Winter Witch. It is the story of Morgana Pritchard, a young woman in 19th century Wales who is the subject of rumours in her village. Morgana’s mother marries her off to a farmer named Cai Jenkins in the hope that she will be safer in a community where she is unknown – but it seems that  some people there already have some idea of Morgana’s secret.

The Winter Witch has a very down-to-earth approach to depicting  magic, which I particularly appreciated. By arrangement with the publisher, Corsair, I am hosting the opening sequence of the book; we join Morgana as she is about to marry Cai…

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Continue reading

Colm Tóibín, The Testament of Mary (2012)

15th September 2013 / / 1 Comment

I’ve decided that I want to read the whole Man Booker shortlist in advance of the winner being announced on 15 October. The list has seemed interesting to me all along, and the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’m inclined to engage with it. After all, it contains my favourite book of the year so far; I’m curious to find out more about what else the judges selected.

Anna of A Case for Books has set up a Booker shadowing group on Twitter, with which I’m planning to join in. We’ll be tackling the books in increasing order of length, which means starting with Colm Tóibín’s 101-page volume The Testament of Mary. Of all the titles shortlisted for this year’s Booker, the Tóibín is the one that interested me the least, one that I would never have chosen to read in the normal course of things. I have to say, though, that I was pleasantly surprised by it.

As its title suggests, The Testament of Mary is an account of Jesus’ adult life and death, narrated by his mother. As the book opens, Mary is living in exile, guarded by two of her son ‘s disciples, who want to record her story – or some version of it, at any rate:

I know that [one of the disciples] has written of things that neither he saw nor I saw. I know that he has also given shape to what I lived through and he witnessed, and that he has made sure that these words will matter, that they will be listened to. (p. 5)

The last part of that quotation is particularly telling: Mary’s story, as told by her, does not matter to her guardians or the growing movement they represent – partly because it is a woman’s account, partly because it does not fit the grander narrative they wish to create. While her son (Mary no longer feels able to use his name) is becoming a charismatic leader, she remains distanced from the fervour. Even when she witnesses the resurrection of Lazarus, Mary’s account evokes no sense of the miraculous; all of that is happening for other people, not her. Mary is the outside observer who can see that, beneath the spectacle, Lazarus is still sick and the revellers have moved on to new distractions; she is the mother who feels impossibly distanced from her son.

Tóibín presents this situation in a way that makes it transcend its immediate context. With social change, the world suddenly opens up (‘People, both men and women who had nothing, began to talk about Jerusalem as though it were across the valley instead of two or three days’ journey,’ p. 14), and Jesus decides to leave home after a series of earnest discussions with some acquaintances. This could be any son (or daughter, for that matter) heading out into the world having found a new ideology, and Mary’s concerns those of any mother watching her child leave and change.

The disciples minding and interviewing Mary are seeking to tell the story of Jesus as redeemer, Son of God. They’ll do that regardless of what Mary tells them.; her story is deemed unfit for the ages. But Tóibín’s novel suggests the importance of a more personal view, in a quietly powerful character study.

Elsewhere
Some other blogs on The Testament of Mary: A Case for Books; Dan Hartland; Booker Marks;
Colm Tóibín’s website

2013 Man Booker shortlist

10th September 2013 / / 3 Comments

This year’s shortlist for the Man Booker Prize has been announced:

  • We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo (Chatto and Windus)
  • The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton (Granta)
  • Harvest by Jim Crace (Picador)
  • The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri (Bloomsbury)
  • A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki (Canongate)
  • The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín (Penguin)

Of course, I’m delighted that The Luminaries has made it to the shortlist (click on the link above if you’d like to read more about why it is one of my favourite books of the year). More generally, I really like this as a shortlist: there are some interesting books, and it is properly diverse and international.

As to whether I’ll read the shortlist before the winner is announced on 15 October… I might have a go, actually; after all, I’ve read the longest one already, and most of the others are relatively short. I will update the above list with links to any reviews I write. In the meantime, congratulations to all the authors and publishers concerned.

Books in brief: early September

5th September 2013 / / 4 Comments

Here’s another round-up of some of the books I’ve read lately.

Christopher Priest, The Adjacent (2013)

If there’s one thing you can be sure of with a Christopher Priest novel (and that’s quite an ‘if’), it is that the spaces between what is told will be at least as important as the tale itself. That was certainly true of 2011’s The Islanders, whose gazetteer-like structure left readers with a set of pieces from which multiple narratives could be constructed.

The Adjacent begins with photographer Tibor Tarent returning to what is now the Islamic Republic of Great Britain from a war zone where his partner Melanie, a doctor, was caught in the blast from an adjacency weapon, a device which annihilates everything within its triangular field.  He has been summoned by the government, who are keen to learn what he knows of one Thijs Rietveld, the Dutch scientist who invented adjacency technology; Tarent insists he’s never heard of the man – though that assertion would seem to be contradicted by a later chapter. It transpires that an adjacency weapon has wiped out a large area of West London; so much for Rietveld’s certainty that his technology could never been used in aggression.

The novel returns to Tarent periodically, but also takes in the First and Second World Wars, and Priest’s own fictional world of the Dream Archipelago; in these times and places, we meet individuals who may be analogues of Tarent and Melanie (and perhaps other characters besides). We learn that adjacency technology works by shifting matter into an adjacent quantum universe – though it evidently does a lot more than that.

The characters of The Adjacent do not always feel fully rounded, which in turn has a detrimental effect on the power of the novel’s love story. But there is still much to enjoy here, in how Priest paints with realities that bleed into each other and fray at the edges. There’s a wonderful recurring image of flight as freedom, the Spitfire used not to make war, but to transcend it. This gives rise to a sequence towards novel’s end which is one of the most affecting passages of imaginative writing I have read in a long time. Priest casts the fantastic into shapes that no one else does, and The Adjacent is a fine demonstration.

Juan Pablo Villalobos, Quesadillas (2012)
Translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey, 2013

And Other Stories return to where they started with a second title from Juan Pablo Villalobos, author of the superb Down the Rabbit Hole. Quesadillas shares the earlier book’s wry wit and cutting absurdity. We meet Orestes, one of seven children (all named after characters from Greek mythology) living in the family home on a remote Mexican hill. Orestes would dearly love to escape, but his siblings seem to have better luck on that front than he does.

What makes the novel work so well for me is how the wider political and economic upheavals in the background are filtered through Orestes’ home life – so the quesadillas that his mother makes become more or less substantial as fortune allows; his household comes under pressure from the rich family who build a big house next door; and so on. As the pages turn, reality stretches further, until the family are literally defending their home. Add to this some sharp lines (‘Basically, all the rebels did was shout “Long live Christ the king!” and pray for time to go back to the beginning of the twentieth century’, p. 22) and you have a book that’s very much worth reading.

John Williams, Stoner (1965)

The Vintage Classics edition of this novel really seems to have taken off in the UK these last few months; I wasn’t too surprised to see that it was the next choice for one of my book groups. It chronicles the life of one William Stoner, who is born into a Missouri farming family, but ends up a professor of literature. After his death, Stoner is not much remembered, let alone celebrated; John Williams then explores the quiet dramas that make up such an ‘ordinary’ life.

I feel ambivalent towards Stoner, and think Scott Pack has it about right. The novel has some very good aspects: I especially like Williams’s evocation of the grit and graft of the farm; and the running theme of domestic and professional spaces being used as the battlegrounds for control in Stoner’s life. But Williams gives his female characters short shrift (to put it mildly); and, for me, there’s too little sense of friction – Stoner lets life sweep him along to such a degree that I find it working against the emotion and drama. There are a few times when Stoner’s strength of conviction does come to the fore, and they are some of the book’s most compelling moments; but I wish they weren’t so few and far between.

A.M. Homes, May We Be Forgiven (2012)

This was my other book group’s latest choice; I liked it better than Stoner, but still have my reservations. I didn’t know much about A.M. Homes’s work beforehand, but I was anticipating a darkly humorous twist on the Great American Novel, which is pretty much what I got. What I’m unsure about is whether May We Be Forgiven subverts the archetype enough for my liking.

At the start of the novel. George Silver causes a fatal road crash and later smashes a beside lamp over his wife Jane’s head, killing her. He’s then sent away to a psychiatric institution, which leaves his brother Harry having to move in to look after George’s and Jane’s children. Harry’s wife Claire leaves him because he was having an affair with Jane – and so Harry’s run of misfortune continues, to a sometimes-absurd degree. There are certainly parts of May We Be Forgiven which I found amusing, such as the late of blooming of Harry’s ninety-year-old mother, who suddenly gets into dancing and all kinds of other activities. It often seems as though Harry is surrounded by people who are in command of the stories of their own lives, and the novel reveals how he tries to take control of his.

Looking back, I can’t quite put my finger on the reason I didn’t enjoy May We Be Forgiven More. I do know that the book group discussion made me feel like reading it again, to see what I’d missed. Maybe the time will be right, another day.

Peter Mattei, The Deep Whatsis (2013)

The spine of this novel reads: ‘The Deep Whatsis by Peter Mattei is the bastard love-child of Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahniuk. Eric Nye is a character you’ll either love or hate. Probably hate.” Well, I feel somewhere in between the two extremes towards him, so there.

Eric Nye is an ad agency’s ‘Chief Idea Officer’, who takes delight in his job of weeding out people to be fired; seemingly can’t look at a woman without objectifying her; and is about to find out that the pretty young intern with whom he’s just had a one night stand is not going away any time soon. So far, so unpleasant; and Nye stays that way for much of the book – but there is a relentless rhythm to his narration that keeps one going.

The novel’s satire of advertising and corporate culture feels a little too over-familiar truly to bite; but, further in, Nye’s subjectivity is challenged – there are hints that he may have done things he cannot remember – and this is what really captured my interest. Nye’s view of the world is all to him, so when its integrity is called into question, that hits him more than talk of morals or ethics ever could. Nye doesn’t quite become a reformed character, but he does start to change his mind; and his narration becomes a little less self-assured as a result. He’s not quite likeable, but we do start to see the person he could be. I’m struck by Mattei’s skilled control of language in The Deep Whatsis, and I’d certainly look forward to reading more of his work.

Granta Best Young British Novelists 2013: Sarah Hall

29th August 2013 / / 1 Comment

Whenever I’ve read Sarah Hall’s work previously (see my posts on The Carhullan Army and ‘Butcher’s Perfume‘), I have always been struck by her use of landscape and strong sense of place. I see those qualities again in ‘The Reservation’, which is one of those extracts in the Granta anthology that really makes me feel excited about reading the full novel.

Hall’s protagonist is Rachel, who returns to Cumbria for the first time in six years, having been working on a reservation in Idaho. She is here for a new commission from a wealthy entrepreneur, but also to see her dying mother. There are suggestions of an interesting contrast to be explored between the different spaces of the Reservation and the entrepreneur’s estate; and the implication that the hospice where Rachel’s mother lives is a kind of reservation itself. I am suitably intrigued about Hall’s novel-to-come.

This is part of a series of posts on Granta 123: Best of Young British Novelists 4. Click here to read the rest.

Granta Best Young British Novelists 2013: Zadie Smith

18th August 2013 / / 1 Comment

So far, I’ve read two of Zadie Smith’s novels: On Beauty didn’t particularly engage me, but I found NW very good indeed; so I went into her Granta piece feeling unsure but hopeful.

‘Just Right’ (the title refers to the tale of Goldilocks) is described in Smith’s biographical note as ‘an excerpt from an unfinished novella’, though it works well enough as a complete piece. It takes us to 1970s New York, where young white boy Donovan Kendal is paired up for a school project with Cassie King, a black girl. As a result, Cassie is drawn into the orbit of the Kendals and their puppet theatre, but theirs is not a comfortable relationship. There’s an effective sense in the piece of emotions and events going on beyond Donovan’s understanding; but I can’t help wondering how events and themes might have carried forward into the rest of the novella. I guess I’ll never know.

This is part of a series of posts on Granta 123: Best of Young British Novelists 4. Click here to read the rest.

“You want to find one of us who chooses to be out here without a past, I’d bloody pay to see that”

11th August 2013 / / 12 Comments

Evie Wyld, All the Birds, Singing (2013)

As a way of setting out a novel’s stall, this opening sentence works rather well:

Another sheep, mangled and bled out, her innards not yet crusting and the vapours rising from her like a steamed pudding.

The novel this introduces will be unsentimental about the harsh realities of its protagonist’s life; and full of smells and other sensations, often unpleasant ones. But then there’s that image of the steamed pudding, a seemingly incongruous reference to home comforts; a suggestion, perhaps, that even this life of blood and death has its positive points for the individual who’s living it.

That individual is Jake Whyte, a woman whom we first meet living on an island somewhere off the British coast, with no company but her dog and flock of sheep. We then step into Jake’s past in Australia, where we find her working on a sheep station having clearly left somewhere in a hurry; when one of Jake’s colleagues threatens to reveal her secret unless she sleeps with him, she punches him hard enough to break his jaw – and that is the latest event we’ll see of Jake’s Australian life, because the rest of that narrative strand goes backwards chronologically.

As in her debut, After the Fire, a Still Small Voice, Evie Wyld works with two parallel narratives which remain separate but nevertheless reflect and illuminate each other – and not simply because (as in this case) they chronicle stages in the same character’s life. Wyld highlights the contrasts and similarities between the environments in which Jake finds herself: she’s looking after sheep in both, and doing so is (to an extent) a means for her to escape the past. But the sheep station is a very different place from the island: life in the former, with its workers arriving from all over, is transitory; the latter feels much more like Jake’s attempt to build a permanent life for herself. That impression is underlined by the use of different tenses: Jake’s narration on the island is in the past tense, while her flashbacks are in the present tense – so the chronological present feels more stable than what (for Jake) has already happened.

Mysteries power both narratives in All the Birds, Singing. The mystery of the flashbacks is, of course, how Jake got to where she ended, and the nature of the secrets in her past. Wyld constructs this very well indeed, revealing just enough information to maintain the tension (there’s more than one revelation to be had about Jake’s history), and allowing the past to bleed into the present in ways that enrich both.

On the island, the mystery is a matter of concern for Jake: something is killing her sheep – maybe a wild animal, maybe something more human. I think there’s a clear metaphor at play here: Jake’s flock is her protection, the stability of her life; anything that threatens the sheep is then threatening the equilibrium of her life. The story of this plot strand is, for me, the story of how Jake finds a place among the community of people on the island, rather than just living by herself. Jake befriends a man named Lloyd, which allows her to build a relationship from first principles, as it were; after we’ve seen Jake verbally outmanoeuvred in a few conversations with islanders early on, there’s a strong note of optimism to her thought about Lloyd: “He doesn’t know me.”

The ending of All the Birds, Singing (perhaps I should say ‘endings’ because of the two strands,  but I still think of the ending as a complete ‘unit’) takes a turn into an unexpected place, and for me it works perfectly – it shows how far Jake has come, balanced with a bitter note of irony. It puts the cap on another fine piece of work by Evie Wyld.

Elsewhere
Some other reviews of All the Birds, Singing: Savidge Reads; Fran Slater for Bookmunch; …but books are better.

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