Category: fiction

This one is COMPLETELY SEARING and I can’t recommend it strongly enough. Steel yourself though. I read that the author is surprised people continually assume the book is autobiographical, and I can tell you right now it is because it is so specific and accurate one can only think it comes from someone’s real life.

It is about a woman’s relationship with her mother. She only sees her once a year, so the book is mostly a series of conversations, and it is the dialogue that is so achingly perfect. Here the mother is, welcoming a man she hopes to date:

“And would you like a drink?” my mother said, as Dave handed her his coat and smiled at us. “Or a … radish, or … You want it, we got it,” she said, in her Italian restaurant owner voice. “We gotta the radishes, we gotta the nuts!” she said.

The mother is horrifyingly closely observed, the kind of observation of someone else most people never do, and if they do it is only of close family members. Try this:

My mother loved rules. She loved rules and codes and fixed expectations. I want to say – as a dog loves an airborne sick. Here was unleashed purpose. Freedom, of a sort. Here too was the comfort of the crowd, and of joining in. Of not feeling alone and in the wrong.

I see that I somehow can’t describe this book. But take it from me: it’s chilling

Hilary Mantel is a magical writer. I mean, try this:

There were draughts, it was true, which followed each worshipper like a bad reputation, which dabbed at their ankles and climbed into their clothes, as cats do with people who do not like them

Bam! Two amazing ideas in a row, and about draughts. Then try this one, about the view of Catholics towards Protestants in a small town:

The Protestants were damned, of course, by reason of this culpable ignorance. They would roast in hell. A span of seventy years, to ride bicycles in the steep streets, to get married, to eat bread and dripping: then bronchitis, pneumonia, a broken hip: then the minister calls, and the florist does a wreath: then devils will tear their flesh with pincers.

What an accurate summary of a life. And then this:

But then again, taking the long view, and barring flood, fire, brain damage, the usual run of back luck, people do get what they want in life. The frightening thing is that life is fair; but what we need, as someone has already observed, is not justice but mercy

And yet, in a an abrupt left turn, let me say that I did not really like this book. It was about a new curate coming to a parish church who turns out to be the devil. The plot really fell apart, and the book sort of petered out. But the beginning was so strong it was worth it. “What we need is not justice but mercy” GAR!

Not quite as enjoyable as the first one, but still enjoyable. Read most of it in a single sleepless night.

I am really getting into this writer big time.  This book is apparently semi-autobiographical and if so: wow.  It tells about a family of sisters growing up in a crumbling mansion who are left pretty much to their own devices.  Try this story of how their parents got together:

. . .  he thought she looked very nice so he said ‘When you grow up I will marry you ask your Mother to teach you how to cook’ He bought her a goat and a white kitten to remember him by, but the goat burst and the kitten was run over by a train . .

The book is full of strange, fanciful stuff, a weird evocation of childhood, where you don’t know quite what is real and what is not.  And when you accept what is happening around you is normal:

Once when Beatrix was a baby he (their father) got so furious because of her crying her threw her down the stairs, fortunately a cook called Harriat caught her . . after that Harriat kept her in her bedroom at night so that he couldn’t hear her crying which was a good thing in case there hadn’t been anyone to catch her the next time, but Harriat had to leave soon after because her feet smelt.

I mean: ?!?  Comyns went on to have an inspirationally varied life: lived everywhere, worked multiple jobs (many of them bizarre), struggled with the rent, failed as a painter, succeeded as a writer.  What a woman, what an example to us all. 

Here is a novel about how you ought to love your co-workers. It tells the story of four older people, two men and two women, working in an office together. None have any close family, and all live alone. They spend all day together, do not have much use for holidays, and yet do not make much effort to get to know each other. They begin to retire, and are at a loss without work and each other. Okay, that’s not really true: it’s far more subtle and sad than that sentence suggests; but it’s more or less what happens.

It’s a remarkably good novel about many things, among them lost opportunities and what your life amounts to. Pym is an amazing writer, and it’s mind-blowing that this novel, written in 1977, just before her death, was her first to be published in 16 years. Her agent had rejected her last, and this had apparently silenced her for a couple of decades. She got her own back, getting a Booker nomination, so BOOM.