Adventures in reading
This morning, the shortlist for this year’s Orange Award for New Writers was announced; and, since it includes one of my favourite books from last year, I thought I’d blog the nominees. The full list is:
Jane Borodale, The Book of Fires
Irene Sabatini, The Boy Next Door
Evie Wyld, After the Fire, a Still Small Voice
I loved Evie Wyld’s book, so I’m very pleased to see it shortlisted — and I’ll be interested to discover how the other two titles compare. Congratulations to all three nominees!
The Spider Truces is one of those wonderful novels that captures within its pages something of the essence of live as lived. It’s the story of Ellis O’Rourke, who grows up in rural Kent in the 1980s, living with his older sister Chrissie, father Denny, and great-aunt Mafi. Ellis doesn’t remember his late mother, but Denny doesn’t want to talk about her. Connolly follows Ellis through his teens and beyond, with a keen eye for the rhythms of family life and growing up.
For one thing, Connolly’s characterisation is superb. Here, for instance, is Chrissie feeling the urge to rebel after her mother’s death:
…a defiance in a girl with no previous inclination to defy, an instinct to push blindly towards whatever the new boundaries might be. The tools with which she pushed were not unique to her. Cigarettes and attitude. Harmless boys and dangerous girlfriends. Things that did not truly interest her but appeared to be what she ought to show interest in, because the previous things were those of a girl’s life, and she couldn’t pretend to herself that she was a girl any more. (22)
And here, in a couple of short sentences, is an insightful observation of the young Ellis when a local farmer suggests to Denny that the boy visit: ‘Nevertheless, [Ellis] wanted to go to the farm. He wanted it so much he was willing to say so.’ (78)
The Spider Truces rings true on a structural level, too; the movement from scene to scene sometimes feels oblique or elliptical, so that, although the telling is mostly linear, it can seem not to be – which, I think, is how life often feels. There’s a particularly striking moment when Ellis decides to leave home; his decision isn’t much foreshadowed – it just happens. And yet, this doesn’t feel awkward, but natural, because it grows out of what has already occurred; and there’s a sense that, in the circumstances, even such a life-changing decision might be made rather abruptly.
Tom Connolly’s first novel is simply a great portrait of life. An interview with the author at the back of the book reveals that he is working on two more novels; I very much look forward to reading them.
Link
Myriad Editions
I didn’t get as much time to read in March as I’d hoped, and so read relatively few books last month, but the pick of the bunch was And This is True, Emily Mackie‘s debut novel about a son trying to come to terms with his changing relationship with his father, and about the treacherousness of memory.
Other highlights from March were Suzanne Bugler‘s fine character study, This Perfect World; Alex Preston‘s tale of the financial world, This Bleeding City; and Alastair Reynolds‘s sf adventure, Terminal World. And Simon Kurt Unsworth‘s ‘The Knitted Child’ was a simply beautiful short story.
The shortlist of the 2010 Clarke Award (for the best science fiction novel published in the UK in 2009) has been announced. The six nominees are:
Gwyneth Jones, Spirit
China Miéville, The City & the City
Adam Roberts, Yellow Blue Tibia
Kim Stanley Robinson, Galileo’s Dream
Marcel Theroux, Far North
Chris Wooding, Retribution Falls
This is an interesting mix of books. I plan to read and review the entire shortlist (I’ve read three already; reviews are linked above, as will the others be), so I’ll have more to say as time goes on, but here’s an initial reaction:
The book I’m most pleased to see on there is Yellow Blue Tibia. It has met with mixed reactions, but I found it a stunning read. The City & the City is a novel which has generated much debate, and is very much open to interpretation (perhaps more so than any of Miéville’s previous works); I like it, but I don’t think it quite works. I didn’t like Galileo’s Dream as much, but I know there’s more to it than I was able to see.
As for the three books I’ve not read: I had a feeling that Spirit might make the shortlist, as I’ve heard some very good things about it. I don’t know much about the other two titles: I’ve read one of Chris Wooding’s previous books , and thought it good (albeit not great), but I’ve not read Marcel Theroux at all.
Overall, from what I know of these six books, I would say this a nicely varied list — varied in terms of settings, types of sf, and approaches, and in the mixture of well-known and lesser-known names. I look forward to reading the complete shortlist, and finding out who will win.
UPDATE, 26th Apr: Round-up post
Second UPDATE, 29th Apr: The winner
Matthew Quick’s The Silver Linings Play Book is the final choice for the current series of The TV Book Club. The last time I opted to read one of their choices, I made a good call, with Liz Jensen’s excellent The Rapture; this time, however, it wasn’t such a good call.
We meet Pat Peoples just as he’s about to be released from a psychiatric unit (the ‘bad place’, as he calls it) to move back in with his family. Pat believes his life is a movie directed by God, and that every cloud must have its silver lining. He’s lost track of time in the hospital, and can’t even remember why he was admitted – but Pat looks forward to the end of ‘apart time’, when he’ll finally be able to go back to his wife, Nikki. In the meantime, Pat finds himself gaining the attention of Tiffany, a friend’s sister; he tries to ward her off, but perhaps he should be doing the opposite.
Don’t get me wrong: when The Silver Linings Play Book is at its best, it’s very good – but there’s something that stopped me getting along with it fully, and it took me a while to put my finger on exactly what that something was. It’s partly the somewhat-naive tone Quick uses for Pat’s narrative voice, which does create his character well – and is particularly effective when the calmness of that tone acts as a counterpoint (almost a mask) to Pat’s periodic outbursts, reminding us that he’s still in a fragile state – but gets annoying after a while. It’s also that the novel seems content to amble along for about half its length before really getting going. Most of all, perhaps, it’s that I just didn’t find the book as touching as it tries to be.
So, The Silver Linings Play Book is okay, and rather better than okay in places, but, overall, I found it unsatisfying.
Emily Mackie’s first novel takes us into the mind of Nevis Gow, which is not the most comfortable place to be. When we meet him, Nevis is fifteen and, for the past eleven years, has lived on the road with his father, Marshall, a teacher-turned-writer (Nevis’s mother – whom the boy doesn’t remember – left Marshall for another man). Now, their van has been involved in an accident, and it seems the pair’s travels are at an end. They’ve been staying on a farm in the Scottish Highlands with the Kerrs: Nigel, the farmer, who’s coping with the death of his wife, Caroline; Nigel’s son, Colin (nicknamed ‘Duckman’); Colin’s cousin, Ailsa; and her mother, Elspeth. Nevis has been struggling to adjust to this static existence, because he doesn’t like all these people muscling in on his relationship with Marshall; you see, over the years, Nevis has grown rather too close to his father – in fact, he’s in love with Marshall.
And This is True is a character study that gains its affect from the interplay of two themes. The first of these is the way in which Nevis’s psyche has been shaped his life so far. It’s not just that his feelings for his father lead Nevis to do things (like stealing kisses when Marshall is asleep) that seem normal to him but less so to us. It’s also that Nevis has grown to have certain expectations of how life is going to be, and he struggles to cope when those expectations aren’t met – and to notice everything that’s going on around him.
The second theme concerns memory and truth. The text of the novel is Nevis Gow’s attempt to sort out his memories of what happened on the farm, whilst being only too aware that a memory isn’t necessarily ‘what really happened’, and trying to follow his father’s advice on how to write a good story, even when he finds that life won’t quite fit that model. Nevis discovers that maybe not everything he remembers is accurate, which, I suppose, leaves him in a quandary – if his past is as uncertain as his present seems to be, what does that mean for Nevis’s future?
The best passages in And This is True are simply stunning, when Mackie lays bare the pressures that Nevis is under. But there’s hope in there, too – the hope of journeys continuing. It ends on just the right note; the end, that is, of a fine debut.
At the age of thirty-six, Laura Hamley lives the life of a stereotypical ‘yummy mummy’ — married to a successful lawyer, attractive children, yoga classes, paninis and air-kissing and dinner parties with friends. She has attained an aspirational dream of the times, but a phone call threatens to dredge up her past. The caller is Violet Partridge, whose daughter, Heddy, went to school with Laura. Heddy has been placed in a psychiatric institution, and Violet wants to get her released; perhaps Laura, being married to a lawyer, could help? There’s a very good reason, however, why Laura doesn’t want to get involved: she hated — and bullied — Heddy at school; but, try as she might, Laura can’t seem to extricate herself from the situation.
This Perfect World (Suzanne Bugler’s first adult novel, following two YA books) is a sharp character study. Bugler paints Laura as someone who’s only too aware of the artificiality of the world in which she lives (‘Do any of [her friends] have a skeleton rattling around in their cupboard? […] We meet, we chat, we think that we are the dearest of friends, but we all keep our cupboard doors firmly shut’ [41]), but clings on to it regardless, for fear of where she might be otherwise — the world she came from, as exemplified by Heddy and Violet Partridge.
I think Bugler spells out Laura’s view of her current life rather too much — it becomes clear enough in quite subtle ways, and we don’t really need (for example) Laura to reflect ruefully on her vow never to become like The Stepford Wives, because we’ve already understood the point. This is a collective problem, however; individually, Bugler’s observations are incisive and striking.
The author also establishes some effective parallels within her narrative. As far as Laura is concerned, Heddy Partridge is a blank screen on which to project her memories; she remembers what she did to her, but has never thought about Heddy as a person in her own right — what matters is that Heddy was, and is, the polar opposite of Laura. So, when Laura learns from Violet that Heddy has been cutting herself — like Laura did as a girl (because that’s what her friends did) — she has to consider the uncomfortable possibility that she’s closer to Heddy than she thought.
Bugler also skilfully portrays Laura’s adult social world — with its social conventions, and boundaries of speech and action that you don’t cross — as being every bit as mired in politics and snap judgements as was the playground. Laura’s discontent with her life bubbles under throughout, eventually bubbling over — and the result is a fine novel that stays in the mind afterwards.
A young woman suffers a miscarriage, and her grandmother knits her a doll to replace the child she lost. It’s no ordinary gift, though, because the old woman has magic, and her doll is sentient — but it has no way to communicate.
This is such a beautiful story. For a start, Unsworth’s prose has the rhythm of classic storytelling — one imagines ‘The Knitted Child’ being great read aloud. The tale as a whole is a highly evocative portrait of grief, made perhaps all the more so because we see much of the story from the knitted child’s viewpoint; so, we experience not only the family’s heartbreak, but also the doll’s frustration and sadness at not being able to act — at not being able to be in reality the child that it wants to be in its mind.
‘The Knitted Child was the first of Simon Unsworth’s stories that I’d read; it will not be the last.
Links
Simon Kurt Unsworth’s blog
Index of my Black Static 15 posts
It never ceases to fascinate me how different people can have such different views of the same story. As an example, Des Lewis liked James Cooper’s ‘Eight Small Men’ very much, whilst Jonathan McCalmont didn’t. I’m somewhere in the mddle of those two views, though falling more on the negative side.
Cooper’s narrator is Victor Farnsworth, who is visiting his dying foster father, Aubrey Bunce. The bulk of the story takes place a quarter-century earlier, when Victor and his older brother Franklyn lived with Aubrey, and Aubrey’s wife Edith (whom the boys called ‘the Matron’) and son Edwin (nicknamed Roach). The Matron’s household rules are strict and her punishments draconian; Roach gets his share of the latter, and in turn bullies the Farnsworth brothers — until, after one incident, tragedy strikes.
The key issue I have with ‘Eight Small Men’ is that, to me, it doesn’t manage to evoke the emotions underlying its events at the deep level which is necessary for the greatest effect. When I read about the treatment meted out to the boys, I reacted with disgust, as one would expect — but the feeling of what that was really like to the characters involved didn’t radiate from the page. Similarly, Victor’s major psychological transformation is portrayed ‘at a distance’, so its affect is weaker than it might otherwise be.
I also haven’t yet come to a satisfactory interpretation of the tale’s supernatural overtones (to which the title refers, though I won’t dwell on that). An iffy start to this issue of Black Static, then, but there are still four stories to go.
Links
James Cooper’s website
Index of my Black Static 15 posts
This Bleeding City is one of those novels with which you can tell roughly where it’s heading more or less from the outset – not because of any clumsiness on the author’s part, but because the story is so archetypal: young man goes off to seek his fortune, and discovers that what he thought he wanted wasn’t necessarily so great after all. The context for this particular telling of that story is the City of London (where Alex Preston himself works) in the run-up to the recent financial crisis.
To fill in more specifics: whilst at university, Charlie Wales’s ambition is to work in the City; to truly become part of the smart set in whose circles he moves; to meet the expectations of Vero, the beautiful French girl whom he loves. On graduating, Charlie moves to London with Vero and another university friend, Henry; and eventually finds work at a hedge fund. But Charlie struggles with the demands of the job… and you may be able to guess much of the rest (though probably not all of it; the story isn’t quite as straight forward as you might anticipate).
When you know the broad trajectory of a novel – and the prologue of This Bleeding City shows explicitly that tragedy is on the horizon, so there’s no getting away from that knowledge – the telling has to carry even more of the weight; Preston does a pretty good job here, on the whole. Having said that, some aspects of his style can be difficult to warm to; for example, his dialogue can sound too much like speechifying:
‘[…]I’m sorry that I’m not planning a play for the Festival or writing reviews for a highbrow theatrical website, but we all made those choices, and it’s trite but true that it was a long chain of little decisions, a series of mistakes and ill-chosen priorities and… and we ended up here. We had so many ideals, so many dreams, and we ended up settling for money.’ (32)
I’m not generally keen on dialogue that draws attention to itself, as this does. But there is a way in which it works quite well, because it foregrounds the fictionality, emphasising that there’s a greater story behind the specific one being told here. And there’s narrative power in Preston’s writing nonetheless; it’s not so much that particular images or sentences stand out (though there is a description of a sunset which is striking, albeit less because of the words on the page than the way Preston depicts it as a rare moment in which the workers of the City can unite in taking their minds off their jobs), but that the text as a whole has the pull of good storytelling.
The main weakness of This Bleeding City, I’d say, is that the characterisation of Charlie doesn’t quite come together. He seems to me a very self-aware sort, who sees shortcomings in his chosen career path even early on (as an example, consider the passage of dialogue I quoted earlier, which is spoken by Charlie to Vero); he doesn’t strike me as the type who would carry on doing something for so long when he knew in his heart that it wasn’t right for him (or, if he is that type, it doesn’t come across strongly enough in the novel). And, since Charlie’s character is the fulcrum of the book, this can’t help but dent its success to an extent
So, This Bleeding City has its flaws – but it’s still a good read for all that, and one I’d recommend. I’ll be interested to see where Alex Preston goes next with his writing.
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