Tag: UK

THE SHOOTING PARTY by Isabel Colegate

Historical fiction is kind of rare, and this is a wonderful example of it. It tells about a 1913 shooting party, and is really remarkable in just 181 pages in creating a complex series of relationships and characters.

It’s difficult to summarize it, despite it being so short, because it’s a masterclass in density of feeling and incident. As in real life, not much is happening, but beneath is a heaving mass of emotions.

Most interesting I found was the way in which the book functioned as a meditation on the pre-War world. These people had so much inherited wealth they could do whatever they wanted with their time, and they chose to spend it killing things. Is interesting to think if automation/AI ever ends work for all of us, what we will do with the time.

Also, just FYI, the Criterion notes about Colegate that she “may well be the greatest living English novelist, and yet many readers have never heard of her.” Truly, ladies, the playing field is not level.

THE VET’S DAUGHTER by Barbara Comyns

A mysterious little gothic novel about an abusive father and levitation. The arc of the story did not really work for me, so I won’t go into it, but the joy is in the world. Let me quote extensively from the first page, where the main character, a young woman, meets a strange old man on the street:

. . . I saw he was a poor broken-down sort of creature. If he had been a horse, he would have most likely worn kneecaps. We came to a great red railway arch that crossed the road like a heavy rainbow; and near this arch there was a vet’s house with a lamp outside. I said, “You must excuse me,” and left this poor man among the privet hedges. I entered the house. . . . In the brown hall my mother was standing; and she looked at me with her sad eyes half -covered by their heavy lids, but did not speak. She just stood there. Her bones were small and her shoulders sloped; her teeth were not straight either; so, if she had been a dog, my father would have destroyed her.

What a wonderful writer she is! I am totally inspired by her biography too. Unlike many other writers, this is not because of the number of books she wrote, or the contributions to literary salons, or the generally impressive CV, and etc, but because she was poor (in the introduction she tells us what the flat she is living in costs to rent, I LOVE this) and married the wrong people and had tons of jobs and lived in multiple countries and wanted to be a painter not a writer. I just find it inspirationally and wonderfully messy.

A GLASS OF BLESSINGS by Barbara Pym

This is my fourth novel of Pym’s, and some say it is her best. It was I am afraid too subtle for me. It tells the story of a fairly contented married woman, who half-considers an affair. It turns out that the guy she considers is actually gay. Or at least that is what I think might be being implied.

It was kind of a funny book. Here is the woman, sitting in a beautiful house in a bombed out area:

It made me sad to think of the decay and shabbiness all around, and the streamlined blocks of new flats springing up on the bombed sites, although I supposed it was a good thing that children should now be running about and playing in the square gardens, their shouts and laughter drowned by the noise of the machinery that was building hideous new homes for them

And yet it was also kind of sad. Here she is wondering about her proposed lover’s ‘roommate’ who she had been told is his ‘colleague.’ She starts to wonder in what sense he is a colleague.

I remembered with a pang Piers saying that we were all, in a sense, colleagues in the grim business of getting through life

I have enjoyed all Pym’s other books, and think she is a wonderful writer, so this book worries me. I feel like there is something profound in it, but I seem to have missed it.

SINS OF MY FATHER by Lily Dunn

Here is a memoir by someone whose father joined a cult. It is a lot less interesting than it sounds. I am often surprised by how little the circumstances of someone’s life seem to affect how involving their memoir is. This one I found quite dull. I feel bad to say so, because it was clearly deeply felt. Most troubling for the author was her father’s late descent into alcoholism. The degree of surprise and helplessness she feels was – I hate to say it – especially dull. Many people have done the hard miles on writing about being an addict, and loving an addict, and it’s not very easy to add anything to this, no matter how strongly you feel it.

Also annoying was some gentle name-dropping. This is always bad, but it’s particularly bad when you don’t even know who they are dropping. I find this to be a particular affliction of upper and upper-middle class British writing, and speaks to the narrow provincialism of that demographic. Antonia Fraser’s MUST YOU GO remains the high water mark of this kind of thing, and I highly recommend it if you want to LOL.

KLARA AND THE SUN by Kazuo Ishiguro

In this book we get to see a little too far behind the curtain. I have loved all three of Ishiguro’s other books, which broadly deal with the-one-that-got-away, in various guises. I would absolutely love to know what break-up he is working through because it must have been a real doozy. This book is a similar sort of story, but for me did not work nearly so well as the others. Perhaps I’m just too familiar with its tricks?

It is about an AF (artificial friend) who is bought to be a companion to a little girl. It is told through the AF’s AI powered understanding of the world. This was sort of interesting, but to my view has been done better. More effective was the little girl herself, and her friends. In this near-future, no one goes to school, so the children are forced to have ‘interaction meetings,’ where they learn to behave ‘normally.’ Clearly this is inspired by the pandemic, but I did enjoy it. I feel like we could all use a pretty stiff course of interaction meetings.

YOUNG MUNGO by Douglas Stuart

This author’s first book, the wonderful SHUGGIE BAIN, was all about being poor, gay, and Scottish, while also being a mummy’s boy when that mummy is an alcoholic. This book, YOUNG MUNGO covers the same ground. I often think that if, as they say, we all only have one story to tell, most of us have decided what that story is by the time we are sixteen. It’s interesting also that while the first was lightly fictionalized memoir, this one is clearly more of a novel – and you can tell – because in this one we have PLOT.

Fifteen year old Mungo is forced to go away on a fishing weekend with two strange men his mother meets at AA. They go to a loch which is “as near tae heaven as you can get on three buses.” Things get progressively more dangerous and creepy and eventually SPOILER it emerges they are recently released sex offendors, who end up assaulting Mungo. This is all intercut with flashbacks of the development of Mungo’s relationship with his first boyfriend, and the two stories intertwine, both escalating, one in a horrifying way (SPOILER Mungo kills them, but its not as soap opera as it sounds), and one in a very sweet way.

I just love the writing . . . three examples. Here his mother coming back from her boyfriend’s:

Every five days or so he would return her like an overdue library book, and she would reappear so dog-eared, so sodden with drink, that it looked like she had been dropped in the bath

And:

There was a rasp at the bottom of her breath now, a sandpapery sound that said it was too late to stop smoking.

And, on the eyes of a deer:

As dark and wet as two peeled plums

HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY by Richard Llewellyn

Here is a classic novel of the Industrial Revolution.  It is a coming-of-age story set in the early twentieth century in a small Welsh mining village.  It captures a prelapsarian time of community and honest work that from our current perspective seems wildly imaginary.  Some light Googling tells me it is kind of imaginary, as apparently this famously Welsh story was written by an Englishman with only tenuous links to Wales.  Still, it works. It really works.  It is a little dated today, but I can still see why it was a huge bestseller. 

Most effective for me is the creation of an entire community.  The story is written by an older man, re-creating his boyhood and early manhood.  It oozes loss.  Whether he was Welsh or not, he was clearly struggling to find a way to keep alive the people he has lost.  Here is the last paragraph, remembering his father who died in a mining accident:

Did my father die under the coal?  But, God in heaven, he is down there now, dancing in the street with Davy’s red jersey over his coat, and coming, in a moment, to smoke his pipe in the front room and pat my mother’s hand, and look, and O, the heat of his pride, at the picture of a Queen, to his eldest son, whose baton lifted voice in music fit for a Queen to hear. 

. . . For if he is dead, then I am dead, and we are dead, and all of a sense of mockery.

How green was my Valley, then, and the Valley of them that have gone. 

It was crushing.

However, side point, I do always find it difficult when people who live in communities totally dependent on one thing (coal, copper, whatever) act all surprised and betrayed when that one thing ends.  Like what did you think was going to happen?  How did you think this was a good idea? DIVERSIFY PEOPLE DIVERSIFY.

DID YOU HEAR MAMMY DIED by Seamas O’Reilly

Here is a memoir by a man with TEN SIBLINGS.  For added drama, he grew up in Ireland during the Troubles and he lost his mother when he was five.  You can see where the pitch for this book wrote itself.

It had some funny parts.  For example, the title  DID YOU HEAR MAMMY DIED?, refers to the question he kept asking people at his mother’s wake. He was too small to understand what it meant, and was rather enjoying being the bearer of important news.  He was bouncing on his bed when he told his aunt:

“‘If you want to see her, she’s in the dining room,’ I added helpfully, punctuating this sombre death notice with a commemorative belly flop”.

He also described one Irish village as so picturesque it was as if it had been ‘bitten by a radioactive postcard’ which I found hilarious.   This book has been something of a bestseller, and I can see why.  And yet somehow it did not quite work for me.  I am not sure how to explain.  I think it was because it lacked heart.  In some ways, this does not make much sense, as there is much here that is sincere.  He talks a lot about his grief for the mother he hardly remembers. He is still ashamed, strangely, of his behavior at the wake.  And yet still, I could not really enjoy it.  Perhaps it is just that bit too polished?   It’s was a bit like reading a few hundred pages of a dinner anecdote that has been told once too often. 

STOLEN FOCUS by Johann Hari

It is a lot harder to concentrate than it used to be.  For example, as a child I used to read for hours at a time, but now I almost never do. I wasn’t sure how widely shared this experience was, but I learn from this book it is very widely shared, and gain some ideas on what to do about it.  

There are some obvious culprits, like social media, and how more-ish our phone are generally. There are some less obvious ones too.  One is instant messaging: did you know the average American worker is interrupted on average every three minutes?  Once you learn to be interrupted, he argues, eventually you start interrupting yourself.  Another is the sheer volume of information we face, which means we feel we have to move quicker from thing to thing.  Apparently the time things trend on Twitter has reduced a lot just in the last five years.  Hari argues that this is why we aren’t pulling together as a society to ‘focus’ on climate change, like we did on the ozone layer, but this I think is a bit of a stretch. One very worrying point he raised was about how our constant need to be entertained means we almost never sit with an empty mind, and how damaging that is to our creativity.

The solutions are in part individual (set timers for apps, turn your phone to greyscale (I can attest, this one REALLY works)), and in part societal.  If social media was subscription, for example, it would be more about making us happy (e.g. helping us meet our real friends in real life) and less about making advertisers happy (i.e., keeping us on our screens). He may have had more solutions but I don’t know because I had to quit before the end. 

Clearly at journalism school you are taught that readers can’t relate to conceptual thinking, but rather need individual stories they can feel something about.   This book takes it to the extreme.  When representing certain ideas, even very obvious ones, he continually relates them to various dull stories about peoples’ personal lives (e.g., how my struggle with obesity inspired my ideas about how to swear off my phone).  Now that I right it down this seems kind of minor, but apparently it was enough to make me quit the book.

OF LOVE AND HUNGER by Julian MacLaren-Ross

In this book we learn all about being a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman.  It involves a surprising amount of day-drinking.  The author, Julian McLaren-Ross, was apparently a true bohemian, and had much experience as a door-to-door salesman, and also of day drinking.  This book captures a certain seedy life in the early twentieth century very well, all petty debts, horrible rooming houses, and trying to avoid buying your round.  It is structured around a love affair the salesman has with a colleague’s wife.  He is not that into it, at first, and then gets super, super, into it.  Then she goes off him.  It’s sad, as love affairs that peter out always are, not helped by all the debt.  It has a kind of uplifting side though, in that she encourages him to write, and to think about politics, and to generally better himself.  People roll their eyes about crushes, but I think they can sometimes be powerful engines for growth.  People are always joining the drama club to meet girls, or joining the gym so boys will look at them, and etc.  At least it keeps us going forward, even if it all blows up in the end.