Author: sarahwp

FINGERSMITH by Sarah Waters

This book has an elaborate and unlikely plot involving petty theft, pornography, and the madhouse.  It is set in the Victorian era, and must have taken an absolute mountain of research, because it is extraordinarily rich in detail.  The author really knows a lot about London life of the period, which is fun. There is plenty on dog-skin coats, and public hangings, and as a bonus a potty which has a huge eye painted on the inside, and writing that says: WASH ME OUT AND KEEP ME CLEAN/ AND I’LL NOT TELL OF WHAT I’VE SEEN.  Gross!

Some of it was charming, as when a petty thief goes outside of London.  She has never left the city before, and is completely underwhelmed by the countryside.  She describes looking out of the windows of the stately home where she is staying and seeing only horrible scenes of ‘fields and trees’.

This same thief, who is quite sane, SPOILER ALERT is taken to the madhouse.  This part was really horrifying.  It was truly a prison you could not escape. It made me think a lot about Britney Spears, and Vivian Eliot, and Gertrude Beasley, and I’ll just say it again, thank god for feminism.

WORRY by Alexandra Tanner

I thought I was going to like this book.  Despite selling well in the US, it’s kind of hard to get in the UK – only being sold through Blackwell’s – so I went to some effort to get it.  It tells about a girl whose sister comes to live with her in her tiny New York apartment.  It’s very GenZ, with lots of anxiety and self-harm and talking about the internet. 

It had lots of lines like this: “There’s never been a reality in which I could be a serious thinker, a serious writer.  I’m a Floridian.  I’m a consumer.”

When I started to write this, I thought I had quite liked this book, but now as I try and think what to say, I wonder if I did like it.  I actually can’t remember a single other thing about it.  It’s already mixed up for me with all the other books I know where women talk about anxiety and self-harm and the internet.  Honestly, we need to work on our sh*t.

THREE CAME HOME by Agnes Keith

This was a memoir about a woman and her toddler who spent three years in a Japanese prison camp in Borneo in WWII.  As you can imagine, it was not too good a time.

The part that really blew my mind was that everyone knew the Japanese were coming, and she had multiple opportunities to get out (e.g., the wonderfully poetic ‘last boat to Singapore’).  She declined because she did not want to leave her husband.  DAMN. 

She is extremely, extremely hungry, so much so that she has to avoid watching her son eat so she will not steal from him.  When she is finally freed, she is so malnourished her sight is affected, and she cannot read.  She only cries twice: once, when they are interned, and then once again, when the Australian army drop flyers on the camp to say that Japan has surrendered.  This was already rumoured, and so the Japanese prison guards had suddenly been treating them very well, including inviting them to a – get this – farwell banquet?!?  This reminded me of COLD CREMATORIUM, another story about someone who made it to the last day of the war in a camp, and lived to see the prison guards start to worry about consequences.

The reason they had already heard about the surrender was that the British soldiers had managed to create a radio.  It took them one month to make the radio, but three months to make the tools to make it. It is completely from scratch from various bits of waste metal, and one elderly civilian’s hearing aids.  GodDAMN people in the 1940s knew how to do things!  It ran on a hand cranked generator, and the strongest man was given extra food so he could crank it.

I think the most horrifying part was the section where the womens’ camp is moved on, and they believe the men, who are left behind, will be executed.   The wives and husbands are allowed to speak to each other across a ditch.  She thinks this is the last time she will ever see her husband.  When the Australians finally arrive, and she is given paper to write home, she writes this:

“We are all alive.  George thin, but well.  The day we have lived for has come at last.  There are no words to tell you what this means to us.  I have no words to say what I feel.  Peace and freedom at last. Thank god.”

Imagine the state you have to be in, that the first thing you right is, ‘We are all alive.”  It was the first news her family had had of her since the beginning of the war. 

AS I WALKED OUT ONE MIDSUMMER MORNING by Laurie Lee

Here is a classic memoir of being a young man.  It’s 1932, and Laurie sets out from his rural home to walk to London, bidding farwell to his (I assume exaggeratedly) elderly mother.  First he walks to Southampton, as he has never seen the sea.  Try this charming description of the seaside shops: “tatooists, ear-piercers, bump-readers, fortune-tellers, whelk-bars, and pudding boilers.”

Pudding boilers!  Then he goes to London, where he has some pretty intense country-mouse style experiences, and then he is on to Spain, where he walks many miles through extraordinarily rural communities, busking to pay his way.  He is a fantastic writer.  Here he is, entering an inn:

“The narrow stairs dripped with greasy mysterious oils and had a feverish rotten smell.  They seemed specially designed to lead the visitor to some act of depressed or despairing madness.  I climbed them with a mixture of obstinancy and dread, the Borracho wheezing behind me.  Half-way up, in a recess, another small pale child sat carving a potato into the shape of a doll, and as we approached she turned, gave us a quick look of panic, and bit off its little head. “

And I can’t go to a seafood restaurant without thinking about: “The dead eyes of fish, each one an ocean sealed and sunless.”

He writes the memoir as a much older man, and there is an elegiac quality to the whole thing. Here he is describing the sensation of his body on these long walks:

“. . seems to glide in warm air, about a foot off the ground, smoothly obeying its intuitions.  . . It was the peak of the curve of the body’s total extravagance, before the accounts start coming in.”

God, the accounts. 

I have thought often of this book since reading it.  There is something about the freedom of this walk, with no goal, no time limit, no agenda, that is really a challenge to my current life.  Also the safety of being a young man – imagine, just sleeping in a field, and not thinking you’ll be raped and murdered! Horrifyingly though, my main reflection was mostly about how he did all this without a phone.  Apparently he often just used to lie down in the heat of the day, and watch the ants, for hours.  Imagine doing all this without even a podcast!  Truly I need to get off my phone.

At the end he does what apparently everyone young did if they were in Spain in the 1930s, i.e., naively enter the civil war.  This part was dumb.

YOU ARE HERE by David Nicholls

I really liked this one. I read the whole thing in 24 hours, not such a feat except in that same 24 hours I worked for 9 hours and went to a play for 3 hours (MOON FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN at the Almeida is amazing), and I assume also ate and slept and hopefully bathed.

Let’s quote extensively, as I like to do with books I like. It’s basically a rom-com, and starts with the main characters both lonely. Here’s the woman:

“She was not one of those girls who hired a nightclub for her birthday but she’d easily filled a room above a pub for her twenty-first, a long table in an Italian restaurant for her thirtieth. For her fortieth she thought she might go for a walk in the park with a friend or two, a once popular band obliged to play in ever smaller venues. Year by year, friends were lost to marriage and parenthood with partners she didn’t care for or who didn’t care for her, retreating to new, spacious lives in Hastings or Stevenage, Cardiff or York while she fought on in London. Others were lost to apathy or carelessness, friendship like a thank-you letter she kept meaning to write until too much time had passed and it became an embarrassment.”

And here, I’m sorry but this one’s just for Londoners, is a bit Euston train station: “a building whose exterior is somehow disguised – no lifelong Londoner can draw a picture of it – as is its function, the trains departing furtively from a back room.”

So true. I used to leave from that station once a week for about 6 months and I myself could not tell you what it looks like. And this one’s also specially relevant to Londoners, especially younger ones: “Her old age pension promised an income of two pounds twenty a week, and she furiously resented belonging to a generation whose future security depended on their parents’ death, so that only orphans could afford a holiday.”

I love the rage. And now here’s one not just for Londoners, but all British people: “The downpour sounded like a great, exasperated exhalation, as if even the rain was disappointed by all the rain”

Sadly, I’ve heard this particular rain myself.

I loved this one, strongly recommend.

THE MISSIONARY’S WIFE by Tim Jeal

Here is a story about a missionary’s wife. It’s set in the 1890s in Zimbabwe around the time of the first Chimurenga. I’ve read Tim Jeal’s work before – I love his biography of Stanley – but I was sort of torn about this one.

On the one hand, it is kind of stilted. Here is the wife, shortly after she gets married to the missionary, in her home town of Sarston in the UK: “Their lovemaking became for her not just the greatest pleasure in her life but a perfect expression of their real union.” M’kay.

On the other hand, it was full of interest. The wife’s mind is completely blown when she finds out that the locals allegedly rub bats’ dung into their labia to make them as long as bats’ wings. She tried to ‘imagine such things being mentioned in Sarston. People would faint at the very idea.’ I am doubtful this was ever the case, but I think it is super interesting to imagine what it must have been like for both sides of that wild first meeting of cultures.

Eventually it turns into an adventure story, and then unexpectedly a love story, and I enjoyed it in the end. It did make sad to think how little historical fiction there is, not just about Zimbabwe, but about Africa as a whole. So big thanks to Tim Jeal for adding to the small pile, ‘perfect expression of real unions’ aside.

I HOPE THIS FINDS YOU WELL by Natalie Sue

This book has a fun premise, asking what would happen if you suddenly got access to all your colleagues mails and slacks. WHAT POWER!

This basic idea could have gone in a lot of different directions. I thought it might be an unhinged story about revenge, which probably says a lot about me. But actually it was much sweeter. It was about a girl who is self-absorbed, and getting a chance to see how other people really feel helps her focus outside herself for the first time in many years.

It’s interesting because her self-absorption is sort of sympathetic, in that what she is really absorbed in is guilt about the death of a friend. But even so, what you get is that self absorption is self absorption, and whatever its cause, it makes you unhappy.

I WHO HAVE NEVER KNOWN MEN by Jacqueline Harpman

This book begins with a girl trapped in a cage with 39 women. The woman are not allowed to express feelings or to touch each other. It is unclear why they are there. They have vague memories of some kind of calamity (fire, screaming, running) but seem to have been drugged, as they cannot remember much of their lives before. It’s all very strange – they don’t even seem to be on a standard cycle – for example, food comes at odd hours for no reason, and the lights never change. Then one day SPOLIER ALERT an alarm goes off just as they are about to be fed, so the guards run away with the keys in the door, and so they are able to escape.

They emerge into an empty plain, and go searching. They SPOILER ALERT find multiple other bunkers, all with cages with 40 people in them, always gender segregated, always dead. AND GUYS THAT’S IT. They never learn any more about why they are there and what it all means. The other women all die as they are much older than the child; and then she spends many years alone.

It is just wild: imagine living your whole life not knowing why things are the way they are. Why are you there? Where even are you? What does it all mean? When she knows she is dying, she sets herself up sitting bold and unafraid. I was like, wow, imagine dealing with a life that is such a mystery. Then I thought, I guess I know someone else who has to do that, which is all of us.

The Introduction seemed to think this book was a lot about gender, but I did not get that at all. For me it was more about meaninglessness, which is pretty gender neutral. It was a very short book, but I find I keep thinking about it. It’s somehow flicked a switch in how I think about my own life, and the courage it takes to live it.

NAPLES ’44 by Norman Lewis

I feel like I spend half my time trying to dig up ideas of books to read. Someone gifted me a subscription to the London Review of Books, and it’s proving a goldmine of obscure ideas. This one is non-fiction, a journal of a British intelligence officer in Naples in 1944.

It’s a fascinating look at what it was like for civilians on the losing side. Guys, it was bad. Really bad. No one has anything to eat, to the point that a huge proportion of the female population is having to do sex work. It’s grim.

I don’t know who this author is, but the writing is banging. One small example – he casually describes a minor character has having “a face the colour of a newly unwrapped mummy.” Lol!

THE HEART’S INVISIBLE FURIES by John Byrne

This book is in the grand tradition of books that try to do a life end-to-end. It was engaging and I enjoyed it, skipping through 700+ pages in no time. But somehow it has not stayed with me hardly at all. God, writing is crazy. Readers are so difficult! If I was this author I would be like: WTF! WHAT DO YOU WANT WOMAN?!? And to be fair I guess I don’t know.

One thing I did take from this book was that Ireland was rough in the 1950s. This seems to be a trend of this year, because I got the same message loud and clear from LOVE AND SUMMER by William Trevor, from SMALL THINGS LIKE THIS by Claire Keegan, and etc. Ireland 1950s needs to up its PR budget