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BLANK CANVAS by Grace Murray

Here is book about lesbians at art school. I am not sure why this sounds dismissive. The beginning was kind of fun, where a young woman lies to her acquaintances, saying her father is dead. It’s not totally clear why she does this, but I guess for attention or sympathy. Then thing went downhill. It is fashionable in modern novels to have protagonists who are apathetic and directionless, and this is unfortunately one of these novels. I just can’t. I just don’t know why I should care about your life if you don’t.

Side bar, the author is 22. Deal with that how you can.

CALEDONIAN ROAD by Andrew O’Hagan

I liked the epigraph of this book, from RL Stevenson: “After a certain distance, every step we take in life we find the ice growing thinner below our feet, and all around us and behind us we see our contemporaries going through.”

I also liked the first sentence: “Tall and sharp at fifty-two, Campbell Flynn was a tinderbox in a Savile Row suit, a man who believed his childhood was so far behind him that all its threats had vanished.”

It sort of went dowhill after that, though I did managed about 400 pages. The idea of the book is cool, being a sort of state-of-the-nation, if the nation was North London. The main character is an author who married into the upper classes, though not unfortunately into money, who develops an unlikely friendship with a half-Ethopian student. And the word ‘unlikely’ here is kind of key. I liked the effort to show all London, from top to bottom, but I found half the characters unlikely (e.g., a poor student from an immigrant background goes to a cocktail bar ?!? has the author never been poor?), and the politics rather trite and poorly thought through. I guess the author is trying to say something about inequality, which is nice of him, but let’s do some research. For example, a news report is quoted as saying that ‘migrant children are doing worse than any other group in the UK,’ which is just factually untrue. I think it’s pretty well proven that the academic success of immigrants is why London has the beset school results in the country. ANYWAY.

EMMA by Jane Austen

I did this book for A-level, and so read it many times in adolesence. Perhaps as a result, I have not read it in about 30 years. What I am struck by on this reading is how completely wrong Emma is on every level. It is a much funnier novel than I recall, and much more damning of Emma. It is not nearly so good as some of her others, but obviously still head and shoulders above 90% of all other books GOD this lady was talented.

PIRANESI by Susanna Clark

This is a strange book and FYI this post will be chock-full of SPOILERS. It opens with a man living in a mysterious flooded mansion that is full of statues. It is so large that he has never found the end. There is only one other person who he sometime sees there, who he calls ‘the Other,’ and who sometimes brings him modern items (e.g., sneakers) but everything else he must forage for himself out of the tides that crash into the halls. There are also thirteen skeletons, in different parts of the House, and he has developed a strange religion involving caring for the skeletons and worshipping the statues. It sounds sad but actually he is rather happy, and has a full life engaging with the beauties of the House.

Eventually he is rescued by a police officer, and we find out that he is a journalist, who (in a past he has now forgotten) was trapped by the Other, an occultist, in this parallel universe. He goes back to the ‘real world,’ and – this is right at the end of the book – this is where I found it really rather lovely. You’d think he would be happy to be back in ‘reality,’ but he misses the beauties of the House, and he brings to our reality this same kind of simple delight in the beauty of what he sees. I think this book, while full of plot, is really a triumph of narrative voice, offering us a different, and frankly better, way of living in the world. A way of loving the streets and trash cans and commuters like they were marble statues.

WHAT WE CAN KNOW by Ian McEwan

On the one hand, I did not finish this book. I bailed about 200 pages in. On the other hand, I kind of enjoyed it. It tells the story of a professor of literature in 2130, whose specialist period is 1990 to 2030.

The first interesting part was how overwhelmed he is, and the whole academy is, by how much material our era left. The reality TV, the emails, the messaging, etc etc. Its wild how much more info we leave behind than people before the internet.

The second interesting part was the world. It is a globally warmed world, so the UK is just a series of islands, and they have very few species – just eight butterflies. Its not as if the professor does not know how good the past was, but it’s not as if he thinks he lives in a dystopia. And it made me wonder: we all know we live in a very reduced natural world; how strange we don’t think we live in a dystopia.

It’s also a post-nuclear war world, so there is very little global trade. They look back on our world as a world of wild and extravagant luxury. So perhaps we should think we live in a utopia. I don’t know.

The plot was kind of questionable, all about trying to find a lost poem, and at some point we switched back into our present with the poet, so maybe it was all going to make sense, but I can’t tell you as I gave up.

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?

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.

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.