Another month is here, and as usual I begin it with a list of forthcoming books that have caught my attention…
Marius Brill, How to Forget
This sounds fascinating: a professional magician longs to be able to forget certain events in his past — then learns of an experimental procedure that may allow him to do just that.
Joe Dunthorne, Wild Abandon
I heard Joe Dunthorne read from this novel, about the changing life on a commune and a boy convinced the world is about to end, at an event in March. I enjoyed that reading, and I look forward to finding out what the whole book is like.
Anna North, America Pacifica
This post-climatic-apocalypse novel comes with recommendations from Charles Yu and Jedediah Berry, which is good enough for me.
Adam Roberts, By Light Alone
Adam Roberts is fast becoming one of my favourite authors; his last two novels have been in my top five reads of their respective years. I wonder whether his latest — set in a future where humans have gained the ability to photosynthesise through their hair, and eating food has become a means of signifying one’s wealth — will do the same.
Sarah Salway, Tell Me Everything
Another reissue of a Sarah Salway novel by the Library of Lost Books? That’d go on my to-read list without my even having to read the blurb. But the premise of the book, a woman building (perhaps literally) a new life for herself by telling stories, also sounds intriguing.
Christopher Wakling, What I Did
This could be an interesting exploration of some social issues, as it explores the consequences of a passer-by seeing a father smack his child after the boy ran across a busy road.
I liked this book from the very first sentence: ‘Lol and Edna Pierce liked to keep their own company, which was just as well as their nearest neighbour lived nine miles away.’ That sentence establishes the wry, playful quality of Jackson’s writing; and the rest of the story, ‘The Pearce sisters’ – in which Lol and Edna finally gain some companions, albeit by taking some rather extreme measures – sets the cautionary, macabre tone of the collection as a whole (I was reminded of Roald Dahl and Dan Rhodes when reading these stories).
In 1976, a Cambridge mathematician named Spencer Little travels to the Lake District for the summer, intending to work on the proof that will secure him a fellowship. He takes a job on the farm of Hartley and Mary Dodds, and finds a friend in their ten-year-old daughter Alice. It takes a while for the locals to warm to Spencer, but they do when he rescues Alice from a fire. Even then, however, life doesn’t begin to run smoothly, because Spencer gets caught up in the tensions between Alice and her father; the secret he left behind in Cambridge still haunts him; and he gains a new secret to keep when he falls in love in Cumbria.
I’ve not read the first of Lelord’s ‘Hector’ books (Hector and the Search for Happiness), but I’d suggest on the basis of this second one that they’re an acquired taste. Lelord’s professional background is in psychiatry, which is also the career of his protagonist. Hector is pondering the nature of love when he attends a pharmaceutical conference with his girlfriend Clara, where he is sent on a mission to track down an old acquaintance, Professor Cormorant, who had been working on a love drug. On his travels, Hector – whose relationship with Clara is already under strain – meets a beautiful waitress named Vayla, and falls in love with her; but how much of that is real, and how much down to the drug that Cormorant persuaded them to test – and what difference does it actually make either way?
Here’s a good example of a book which didn’t sound instinctively like something I would enjoy, but which turned out to be well worth a read. The Afterparty tells the overlapping stories of four people over the course of one night: Hugo Marks, an actor whose birthday celebrations provide the backdrop to events; Mellody, his supermodel wife; Calvin Vance, the young pop star to whom Mellody takes a shine; and Michael Knight, a journalist who’s attending the party reluctantly after being given a colleague’s invitation. The actual text of the novel is framed as the work of one William Mendez, whose emails to a prospective agent, Valerie Morrell, alternate with the chapters. Mendez has plenty of ideas for aspects of his novel’s marketing (all of which have made it to the finished version), but is reluctant to reveal his identity; so Morrell calls on a columnist named Leo Benedictus to stand in for him…
Turning now to another fine debut, though one rather different in subject matter and approach. In Girl Reading, Katie Ward imagines the stories behind a number of portraits of girls and women reading; the portraits range in past time from Simone Martini’s Annunciation (1333) to a photograph on Flickr in 2008, and a concluding chapter set in 2060 provides context for the previous six. Ward has a distinctive writing style that creates a strong atmosphere for each of the time periods, and allows her to weave in details very subtly. I’ll single out her portrayal of Gwen – a girl in love with an artist in 1916, and who sees a rival for her affections in a visiting woman – as one of my favourite moments, but there are plenty more from which I could choose.
A journalist is contacted by an old school friend named Shaw, who wants to tell the story of Caroline. This Caroline is the donkey Shaw’s father first encountered on a family holiday and who soon filled a void in his life that he didn’t know existed. The father became devoted to Caroline: took her home, looked after her, taught her to play chess (she turned out to be rather good at it). It was a wonderful period in his life; but, of course, there was always the danger that it wouldn’t last.
Chris Beckett’s 2004 debut The Holy Machine is narrated by George Simling, a translator in the Balkan city-state of Illyria, a nation founded on the principles of rationalism after the rest of the world was taken over by religious extremists. George’s only company is his mother Ruth, a former scientist who has retreated from the world and now spends most of her time in the virtual reality of SenSpace. As a result, for all the material comforts in his life, George is missing true human contact (‘I spoke eight languages fluently, but I had no one to talk to and nothing to say’, p. 3).
By novel’s end, the principal characters have found a peace of sorts, and George might even have filled the gap he felt in his life. A search with a more concrete objective provides the impetus for Naomi Wood’s first novel, The Godless Boys. The Church gained political power over its alternate England in 1950, and a series of riots led to members of the Secular Movement being sent to ‘the Island’, where they and their children now live in isolation. The Malades, a gang of boys born and bred on the Island, have taken it upon themselves to root out any English spies or believers; they’ll attack the houses and persons of anyone they suspect.
Version 43 is a novel of vast, widescreen scope. It is constantly pulling back its focus to reveal a wider stage for its action. It is also full of incident and rarely pauses for breath. And yet… it seems rather less engaging than one might anticipate.
Speed of Dark is the story of Lou Arrendale, an autistic man working for a pharmaceutical company. Lou is part of a division staffed by autistic people, who were employed because they are also remarkably skilled in spotting patterns (Lou’s division works with data, but exactly what they do is neither explored much nor, for that matter, particularly relevant to the novel). Pattern is perhaps the greatest source of pleasure in Lou’s life, as his two main interests are also pattern-based: classical music and fencing, which he practises at a class every Wednesday night (Lou’s facility with fencing stems from his ability to recognise the patterns in his opponents’ moves). Lou harbours feelings for Marjory, another member of his fencing group, though he isn’t sure whether those feelings are reciprocated.
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