I loved this book the first time I read it, but on the re-read I was less impressed. It made me realize I guess that it actually functions very much like a thriller/detective story, and thus once you know what the mystery is, it is much less interesting. I also found it extremely depressing that SPOILER ALERT the clones don’t even consider fighting against their destiny – to have their organs slowly harvested. Why is that? What is the message? That we all are so deeply trapped in our worldview we can’t ever throw it off for any reason? I don’t know, maybe that’s true, but damn.
Tag: fiction
THE STRANGER AT THE WEDDING by AE Gauntlett
I thought it would be fun to read a kind of more-ish thriller while on the beach. I kind of got where it was going, it was sort of GONE GIRLy, but it wasn’t for me. But I finished it anyway, because the sun was hot and the beer was cold.
TOWELHEAD by Alicia Erian
I was really impressed by this one. It’s a coming-of-age story which, despite the title, is far more about sex than about race. A woman decides her boyfriend is too interested in her 13 year old daughter. Rather than dump the boyfriend, she sends the girl to live across the country with her ex-husband. There, she gets very into masturbating and then SPOILER ALERT is raped by the 37 year old man next door.
What makes it successful is that nothing here is black-and-white. For example, the father, despite he sometimes hits the girl, is somehow not portrayed as a monster. The girl thinks she has a crush on the man next door, even after the assault. It sounds bleak, and it is, but it is also not. You’d think this girl is a victim (because she is), but somehow, triumphantly, despite these very bad things that happen to her, she retains agency and energy. I don’t quite know how to describe it, somehow it was a fundamentally hopeful book. I guess you’d have to read it.
DOGGERLAND by Ben Smith
Here is an eerie story of the near-future. Two men live on a decaying wind farm, trying to keep it going with limited supplies. They are only very irregularly sent food from wherever the mainland is, and that food is all canned. The younger man in particular does not seem to have ever eaten any food that was not canned. It’s unclear what exactly is going on in the wider world, but whatever it is, it’s not good. Probably the most striking part of this book for me was the evocation of the ocean itself, which is empty of fish but full of garbage. It’s the logical and even likely conclusion of the current direction we’re in, and I just hope I don’t live to see it. Try this:
“The boy sat in the galley and unpicked the last tangle of plastic from his line. He’d gone out to check on it, to pass some time, and found a huge shoal of bags that had drifted in overnight – a dark mass, silent and heavy, hanging in the fields as if they were waiting for something.”
One of the men is constantly ‘fishing,’ but not for fish (there aren’t any) but we guess for signs of the cities now submerged. I didn’t quite get into the plot, which was mostly focused on the younger man, who had apparently been forced to come to the wind farm when his father ran away. A lot went on about how he found out his father didn’t really abandon him, and how the older man is a beloved father figure in any case, and etc etc. Various versions of daddy issues in other words. But I didn’t really care, the setting was so frightening and fully realized.
NEVER SAW ME COMING by Tanya Smith
I read this book in a single day on the beach. It’s my favourite kind of reading, when your own life stays at a respectful distance. This is the jaw-dropping true story of a young black woman in 1970s Minnesota who figures out how to defraud banks, stealing multiple millions of dollars before she is finally caught.
This is pretty much all SPOILER ALERT. Get this: she is in HIGH SCHOOL when she figures out how to move money between banks using the phone. Then, even more impressively, she manages to con a bank into giving her a computer terminal, convinces their IT department to set it up, and then is able to move money around in the bank’s own systems. Reminder: it is the 1970s! She is 17! She is running a sophisticated electronic fraud from her parents’ attic!
Then she starts to do things that are more like what a 17 year old would do, that is, fall for the wrong guy, and give him all the money, so he can ‘invest for their future.’ She hardly sees a penny of her own crime. She moves to LA, and then to Atlanta, repeating this pattern with two other men. In her late 20s she is caught, but the police in Minneapolis tell her they don’t believe a ‘Negro’ could possibly be running a scheme of this complexity. Eventually they are able to see past their own prejudice far enough to get a conviction, and she is given a 13 year sentence, which is far in excess of guidance for white collar crimes.
She escapes jail twice, once returning to one of these men who chains her up and beats her, forcing her to carry on the scams. She gives birth in jail twice, only seeing these children on the day of their birth (I had no idea the prison system was this cruel). She then manages to argue her own legal case for a reduction of sentence, finally getting out. And this all before she is 40!
SHEEP’S CLOTHING by Celia Dale
This book absolutely shivers with a detailed understanding of lower middle class London life. Try this, the first paragraph:
“Two women stood outside in the shadow of the overhang from the walkway above, for Mrs Davies lived on the ground floor of a block of council flats; a mixed blessing, for although it meant she had no stairs to cope with and need never worry whether the lift had been put out of order yet again, she was a sitting target for hit-and-run bell-ringers, letterbox rattlers, window-bangers and dog dirt. And worse. So far she had been lucky, but she knew better than not to keep her door on the chain.”
It’s banging. I saw this writer described as ‘Austen but with murder,’ and this is a better description than any I can come up with. It’s very clean, contained, comic writing, but just that it includes a lot of crime.
It tells the story of a two female con artists. But don’t think these are fun, glamorous cons. It’s a sad little scheme aimed to bilking old ladies out of whatever cash they have after pension day and any few bits of their mother’s good jewellery they might have been able to hang on to.
It’s an interesting one, because I found it comic and miniature while reading it, but it has grown in my mind since, getting bigger and sadder over time.
LIVES OF GIRLS AND WOMEN by Alice Munro
I had always felt mildly guilty about never reading Munro, being a Nobel laureate and all, but she is a short story writer and that is just not my medium. She died recently and I finally decided to give her a go, choosing this book which is apparently her ‘only novel.’ In fact it is loosely connected short stories. Whatever. Really she is a wonderful writer.
Try this, from page 1, about a frog hunt:
“Old frogs knew enough to stay out of our way, but we did not want them; it was the slim young green ones, the juicy adolescents, that we were after, cool and slimy; we squished them tenderly in our hands, then plopped them in a honey pail and put the lid on.”
Or her description of soldier’s khaki uniforms “which had an aura of anonymous brutality, like the smell of burning,” or this, a description of her mother:
“My mother had not let anything go. Inside that self we knew, which might at time appear blurred a bit, or sidetracked, she kept her younger selves strenuous and hopeful; scenes from the past were liable to pop up any time, like lantern slides, against the cluttered fabric of the present.”
A wonderful, depressingly and forbiddingly wonderful, writer.
ENEMY WOMEN by Paulette Jiles
I’m really at a loss on what to read next so I am going back through the New York Times Notable Books of the last twenty years. Right now I’m in 2003, which brings me this story of the American civil war, ENEMY WOMEN.
I feel like I know a lot about the combatant experience of the civil war (in this blog alone in the last couple of years THE MARCH by EL Doctorow, and MARCH by Geraldine Brooks). This though tells the civilian story, and in particular a female civilian. It is pretty hair-raising stuff, as the protagonist Adair struggles to walk across Missouri accompanied only by her incurable TB.
Bit of a side bar, but I had often heard of the huge flocks of passenger pigeons that used to exist in America, and this book contains a lovely imagining of them, perhaps the first I have ever read (If you have never heard of this, get googling, it is really bad. Flocks were so large it would take them three DAYS to fly past a single spot, with as many as 300 MILLION each hour. It is mind-blowing we managed to exterminate them in under 50 years). Anyway, here it is:
All around her their droppings cracked on the leaves on the ground, and once she heard a limb breaking from the weight of a hundred doves who had fluttered down to crowd onto it. It was a storm of doves, the sunlight became dim was it would dim in an eclipse and she rode hard to get away from them. She rode ten miles at a trot before they were clear of them. She and the horses both walked into a wide pool of water in a stream and washed themselves clean.
ORDINARY HUMAN FAILINGS by Megan Nolan
I enjoyed this author’s first book, ACTS OF DESPERATION, and read an interview with her where she denigrated it, saying this one – ORDINARY HUMAN FAILINGS – was in her opinion much better. I am amazed. ACTS OF DESPERATION was grippingly grim, but had a enjoyably comic energy and a general direction towards sanity. ORDINARY HUMAN FAILINGS on the other hand is just grim. Like, so grim it starts to feel kind of ridiculous. It’s about child murder (beloved topic of UK cultural life), so obviously I did not expect it to be cheerful, but wow: every single person in it is a venal and depressing failure. I mean all of them. From the damaged mother, to her brother, the tragic alcoholic, to the money-grubbing journalist who writes about them – they are all victims or perpetrators. The only person who actually tries to do something positive is the gran, but don’t worry, there is a long explanation of how she only does this because she was not loved enough as a child. I mean, okay. I just had to quit it.
THE MINISTRY OF TIME by Kaliane Bradley
This is SUCH a fun book. It tells the story of a government program that manages to bring a handful of people from the past (specifically 16th, 17th, 18th centuries) into the present day. SPOILER ALERT, it is mostly a kind of rom-com about the relationship between a Victorian polar explorer and his present day minder, a government employee. All time travel books run the risk of getting into but-what-if-I-killed-my-grandfather territory, and I won’t say this book doesn’t get there. But who cares when it is so fun. Try this:
“He was introduced to the washing machine, the gas cooker, the radio, the vacuum clear.
‘Here are your maids,’ he said.
‘You’re not wrong.’
‘Where are the thousand-league boots?’
‘We don’t have those yet.’
‘Invisibility cloak? Sun-resistant wings of Icarus?’
‘Likewise.’
He smiled. ‘You have enslaved the power of lightning,’ he said, ‘and you’ve used it to avoid the tedium of hiring help.’
‘Well,’ I said, and I launched into a pre-planned speech about class mobility and domestic labour . . . and by the end I’d moved into the same tremulous liquid register I used to use for pleading with my parents for a curfew extension.
When I was finished, all he said was, ‘A dramatic fall in employment following the ‘First’ World War?’
‘Ah.’
‘Maybe you can explain that to me tomorrow.'”
That gives you a good sense. It’s a deeply thought though culture-clash story and I really enjoyed it. I don’t believe it would really be possible for a Victorian man to have a happy relationship with a contemporary woman, but there you go, that is just because I am a miserable feminist killjoy and takes nothing away from the story.