Tag: fiction

DOOMSDAY BOOK by Connie Willis

Prepare yourself to hear that there is an author who has won more major SF awards than Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clark and Isaac Asimov COMBINED, despite having written fewer books than any of them.  Yep.  It’s this Connie Willis. I have never heard of her and will be amazed if you have.  In the introduction, they say that she has ‘one thing’ that makes her different from those other writers, and that one thing is her ‘ability to make you care,’ and I would say, yes, I hope so, because my assumption is that is the existence of a ‘vagina.’  However let us not get bogged down in all that.

This book raises the interesting question of what would happen to the careers of historians if time travel were invented. It tells of an ambitious young historian that volunteers to go back to what they consider one of the most dangerous centuries, the 14th.  And then boom, suddenly it’s a novel SPOILER ALERT of the black death.  It’s just a straight up story of what it must have been like to be there then.  Interestingly, they called it ‘the blue sickness.’  I had never considered how awful it must have been to go through the plague without even paracetamol or disinfectant.  It’s stomach churningly terrible.

The people in the future (which looks a lot like the 1950s) try and rescue the young historian, but they can’t get back into the past initially, and what I was struck by was how incredibly inefficient phoning people used to be.  They spend absolute ages waiting by the phone and taking messages and trying to catch people at home. It’s guess I had underestimated how much the group chat alone has improved human efficiency.

STARTER FOR TEN by David Nicholls

I really enjoyed this author’s new book, YOU ARE HERE, so thought I would give his first one a try.  He’s a skilled guy, but for me it was a bit meh.  This is partly I guess because he has grown as a writer, which is interesting to see.  This one, like YOU ARE HERE, is lightly comic, but it has much less heart. 

Perhaps also I was slightly put off by the subject matter, being an account of an awkward young man’s first year at university.  Not that this is not good subject matter, but let’s be real, it’s been done a lot.  Many authors historically have been men, and awkward men at that, so they’ve had a lot to tell us about that experience.  So the bar is high.  Side bar, I note I have also read many accounts of men losing their virginity to prostitutes. I have yet to read one by the prostitute. Any suggestions? 

THE FRIENDZONE by Abby Jimenez

Here is a genre romcom.  I just read a genre rocmcom by the same author two days ago, as I am on a long beach vacation, and what was weird was this: it was basically the same plot –  couple are blissfully in love, but girl has an illness that means she must break up with him instead of talking to him (?).  Like I appreciate that genre is genre, but damn, it was literally the same story.  However I was three beers in by this stage and the sun was hot.

LIFE’S TOO SHORT by Abby Jimenez

Here is a genre romcom I read on the beach in an afternoon.  It was a genre romcom, so what can I tell you?   Boy meets girl, it ends happily, this is what we are looking for in genre fiction. However, one interesting part was that the girl believes she has a terminal illness, and will likely be dead in two years. She therefore lives her life as fully as she can, always getting the good wine, always doing the trips, etc, and it really made me think how funny it is that because we have (maybe) fifty years instead of two, we think we should not get the good wine.  It’s not as if fifty years is so very long.

MARTIN DRESSLER by Steven Millhauser

Here is a Pulitzer-winning book that I despised.  This just goes to show how incredibly personal taste in fiction is, because it is not easy to win the Pulitzer, and objectively speaking I can see that this is good writing, but god, I just found it irritating. It has a lot of lists.  I don’t think there is any object in nineteenth century New York he does not list.  I guess this could be called dense world building. I found it annoying.  It tells about a young man who has a drive for success and gets rich off building hotels while mysteriously marrying a woman who is obviously unsuited to him.   I mean: why?  I could not get it.  I’d also whacked my head hard on a car door and was icing it for much of the reading so perhaps that came into it.

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.

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.