Tag: UK

THE MAN OF PROPERTY by John Galsworthy

This is the first in a series of novels which is part of how Galsworthy won the Nobel.  I enjoyed it, but I am not sure if I will read the whole 1000 page saga which I am told is ‘three novels and two interludes,’ wtf is an interlude.  Anyway, this first novel tells about the unhappy marriage of Soames Forsyte and his wife Irene.  Forsyte comes from a robustly bourgeois background, while Irene is poor.  I have not googled it but I am 100% sure Galsworthy comes from a family with money, because he spends a lot of time banging on about how awful families with money are, how obsessed with property, etc

The couple have little in common and she SPOILER ALERT begins an emotional affair with her husband’s architect. She had already ‘locked her door’ to Soames, and eventually he becomes so enraged that he ‘asserted his rights and acted like a man’.  I was really impressed that a book written this early takes marital rape so seriously.  Irene is extremely distressed, and the architect is too, ending up killed in a carriage accident.  Soames meanwhile is upset too, but mostly because he can’t understand why Irene won’t just accept that she, just like their big house, is his property.

INTERMEZZO by Sally Rooney

I am a mega-fan of Rooney’s first book, CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS, which is one of the handful of books I have ever read twice in a row. I have been less of a fan of her other books, and especially of the last one BEAUTIFUL WORLD, WHERE ARE YOU? Much of what I enjoyed about the first one was the comic and contemporary spirit, and as we went along I felt we were getting more and more miserable. This one is a return to form. It tells the story a pair of brothers and their various romantic entanglements, and is exceedingly more-ish. I enjoyed it a lot, especially the journey of one character who has to slowly give up his implicit assumption that he is and can be ‘normal,’ which I found to be quite liberating.

My only issue with it was tbh a bit of a political one. In all Rooney’s books there is a strong perspective that anyone who works in any area of commerce is obviously some kind of sad, dead-eyed zombie in slave to our capitalist masters. Apparently the only acceptable professions are like lawyer, journalist, arts administrator. You can work as e.g., a barista, but only if you feel utterly polluted by it. I just find this bizarrely decadent. As if any of these delightful professions would exist without this economic model. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.

A CONSPIRACY OF PAPER by David Liss

This book sounded great: a historical fiction set among the coffee houses of eighteenth century London in the lead up to the bursting of the South Sea Bubble. Ooh obscure early stock market drama! Count me in.

It is that, but it is also a detective story. I am okay with a detective story but it needs to move quick. And this one moved kind of slow. So I enjoyed all the fun research, maybe there was a bit too much research – there was certainly an awful lot of exposition – but anyway: I had to quit at about 150 pages.

I don’t always record books I don’t finish, but I can just imagine that in 10 years I will be looking for something to read, and think: oh, this looks good! So, here’s something for me in 2034: Sarah, you did not like this book.

NEVER LET ME GO by Kazuo Ishiguro

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. 

THE DAIRIES OF MR LUCAS: NOTES FROM A LOST GAY LIFE edited by Hugo Greenhalgh

I just love an ordinary person’s diary.  This one is from a man who kept a diary from his 20s till his 80s, and is mostly extracted from his 40s (during the nineteen sixties).  They are mostly about sex, and especially about sex workers.  I have no idea if this is what all of the diaries are about, or if this is just this editor’s interest. 

The editor inserts himself into the story quite a lot.  He was a TV researcher when he first met Mr Lucas, looking for people who were willing to talk about their experience of rent boys.  He maintained a friendship with him for decades after that, in part because he wanted the diaries, and in part because he grew to like him; and indeed Mr Lucas gifted the dairies to him in his will. 

They are a charming/predatory picture of a certain slice of London life. It’s fun to hear places about places you know well .in a very different context.  Picadilly Circus was described as ‘the marketplace of the bugger boys’ by one judge, and it’s north railing was known as the ‘rack’ of the ‘meat market’.  Or, here’s Tower Hamlets:“’Victoria Park is a great haunt of inverts.  I must explore its possibilities,’ he writes in April 1949. . “

It was extremely sad to be reminded of how recently people’s lives were destroyed for being gay in the UK.  At one point, the actor Sir John Geilgud was found by police ‘cruising for sex in a public lavatory’.  They were worried his career was over, but Sybil Thorndike insisted he come on stage with her

“She grabbed him and whispered fiercely, ‘Come on, John darling, they won’t boo me,’ and led him firmly on to the stage.  To everybody’s astonishment and indescribable relief, the audience gave him a standing ovation.”

That’s quite some allyship!  Mr Lucas ended up living a bit of a lonely life, despite all the sex.  He lived for decades in a house about 10 minutes walk from mine, and I plan to go past it, to salute him.  It’s just amazing to think every house in London is packed with not just its current inhabitants stories but those of decades, sometimes centuries, before. 

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. 

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.

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.