All

Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham

StuckinaBook All , , 12 Comments

If you click that ‘Cunningham’ tag above, you’ll see how much I love his writing. He is one of my favourite living writers, and I am getting unsettlingly close to having read everything he has published so far – one of the ones I hadn’t raced towards is 2005’s Specimen Days, and the reason is that it takes me very out of my comfort zones.

It’s a novel of three periods – much like Cunningham’s best-known book, The Hours, though in Specimen Days the periods do not interweave. Rather, there are about a hundred pages devoted to each – New York in the nineteenth-century, in a contemporary world still rocked by 9/11, and in a sci-fi future that I don’t remember the exact dates of. In each period are Simon, Catherine, and Lucas (or close variations on those names). They have different relationships in each section and, indeed, only two of them are alive in the first and second sections. It’s an intriguing and inventive premise – but did it work?

In the first period, Lucas is a young teenager starting work at a metalworks – taking over from his brother, Simon, who was killed in an accident with one of the machines. He has to go to earn money for his parents, but also wants to give some of it to Catherine – the woman who was going to marry Simon, and with whom Lucas has an uncertain relationship. Lucas is devoted; Catherine is a little unnerved, affectionate, troubled. It doesn’t help that Lucas can only communicate in Walt Whitman quotes, most of the time.

Walt Whitman is one of the most prominent connections between the sections. He actually appears as a character, briefly, in the first section – but, in each, there is a character who speaks chiefly in quotes from his poetry. In the first it is Lucas; in the second it is a child phoning in warnings about bombings (more on that soon); in the third it’s a robot. I was expecting more links and overlaps between the sections, but Cunningham doesn’t play overly with this conceit – so it’s Whitman’s words that form the threads between the worlds. Which would probably mean more to someone who had read some Whitman, which I have never done… I believe Leaves of Grass is still a text most high schoolers study in America, but Whitman is much less read here in the UK and I suspect I lost some of the significance that was intended.

Anyway, back to the 19th century. Historical fiction is a tricky genre for me, but I loved how Cunningham took us into Lucas’s world – with an accurate range of expression from an uneducated teenager in the midst of shocking grief. His job in the factory is simply putting metal plates into a machine to be stamped, and Cunningham manages to convey the almost dehumanising monotony of this in, paradoxically, a way that is captivating to read.

He began to see that the days at the works were so long, so entirely composed of the one act, performed over and over and over again, that they made of themselves a world within the world, and that those who lived in that world, all the men of the works, lived primarily there and paid brief visits to the other world, where they ate and rested and made ready to return again. The men of the works had relinquished their citizenship; they had immigrated to the works as his parents had immigrated to New York from County Kerry. Their former lives were dreams they had each night, from which they awakened each morning at the works.

Man, Cunningham is good.

My favourite of the three sections, unsurprisingly, was the central, contemporary section. Catherine is now Cat, who works as the receiver of calls to the police that might pose plausible threats. Most of the calls she gets are from mentally unwell people who pose no real threat – who think their TV is spying on them, or that they are psychic, and so forth.

If the caller suggests that somebody is making them do something, then she has to ‘red tag’ the call, and elevate it to a different team – because if somebody else is instructing them, whether that person is real or not, then the threat becomes much more credible. In the call she receives from a young boy, she doesn’t red-tag when he says ‘I wasn’t supposed to call’.

It may or may not have made a difference – but not long afterwards, a politician is murdered when a boy hugs him and detonates a bomb. They spend some time trying to work out a connection, but it may be more unsettling: random attacks. Then Cat begins to get mysterious phonecalls from another boy who claims to be ‘in the family’ with the first caller.

In this period, Simon is Cat’s rich, obnoxious boyfriend. I shan’t spoil who Lucas is, but it’s a great twist. Cunningham is so good at the dynamics among a group of people, and I was totally absorbed in this contemporary world. He doesn’t need high stakes to make a narrative compelling, but they added something a little unusual here – and the final words of this section will stay with me for a long time.

And then the third section… Reader, I tried. I really did. But I simply have a brain block when it comes to a world of robots and invading aliens and whatnot. I never really knew what was going on, who was human and who was programmed or what the aliens were up to, and I ended up skim-reading it. I don’t really have anything to say, except I’m sure the problem was with me rather than Cunningham.

So it was definitely a curate’s egg for me. I will try anything Cunningham writes, but even a prose stylist as beguilingly good as him couldn’t get me past my own prejudices – or, rather, my own stumbling blocks. If you share mine, then I still recommend you read the first two thirds of this novel. And if you don’t share mine, then you’ll doubtless find a lot to love right to the final page.

Cunningham hasn’t published a novel for seven years, so I feel like one MUST be around the corner somewhere. His most recent is the brilliant The Snow Queen, and I would love him to do another like that, using a smaller conceit and keeping things in the real, contemporary world. And hopefully soon?

British Library Women Writers #9: Mamma by Diana Tutton

StuckinaBook All , , , 12 Comments

Two new British Library Women Writers titles are out YESTERDAY in the UK – Sally on the Rocks by Winifred Boggs and The Love Child by Edith Olivier, which are both up there among my favourites in the series so far. I was going to do one of my posts about them, but realised that I’d never actually done BLWW number 9, Mamma (1956) by Diana Tutton. (You can see my posts on all the series at the blww tag.)

I first read Mamma in the Bodleian, after loving the extraordinary Guard Your Daughters but not being able to track down her other books. Older copies of Mamma do turn up now and then, but obviously this new edition is available to everyone easily!

When I read Mamma, I was a bit taken aback at first. Guard Your Daughters had been an instant favourite – almost from the first page. It was lively and funny and chaotic. Mamma is a much quieter book – it’s about Joanna, whose daughter Libby moves in with her to save money. She brings along her new husband Stephen, whom Joanna doesn’t know. He is much older than Libby – indeed, he is only a few years younger than Joanna. And gradually Steven and Joanna develop feelings for one another…

It sounds very sensational, whenever you try to describe it, but it really isn’t. It is such a gentle, thoughtful, and unsensational book – just looking at what might happen in this situation, between three decent people who don’t want to hurt each other.

When it came to writing my afterword, I ended up writing about sex – I always seem to veer into this for the series, and I’m worried that people will be alarmed. But the levels of discretion writers did or didn’t have about sex does seem to shift so much in the period – in fact, there’s a novel I’m hoping we’ll do next year that is very interesting on the topic, writing much less discreetly than you’d imagine for the era…

In Mamma, it’s all tied up with psychology and changing norms – particularly around celibacy before marriage.

“I don’t see,” said Elizabeth, smiling, “how anyone at all young can live without sex and not get warped.”

Steven’s feelings changed abruptly. Of all the tactless remarks! But Joanna answered peacefully: “Quite a lot do.”

“Well, they all get a bit peculiar.”

“I don’t think that’s altogether true.”

“Janet says it comes out in all sorts of funny little ways.”

“Well, good Lord, we’ve all heard that one,” said Steven impatiently. “But it’s by no means universal.”

“Even if it’s not visible,” calmly continued Elizabeth, “it’s still there. In fact if you can’t see if it’s probably worse.”

“Darling,” said Joanna, looking, as Steven gratefully noticed, not hurt, but amused, “we’ve all heard that, too.”

“Often,” added Steven.

“Oh, all right!” said Elizabeth, not at all offended. “But all the same, Janet says – ”

“A course in so-called psychology,” said Steven nastily, “doesn’t guarantee a profound knowledge of human nature.”

I’ve been interested to see some people preferring this novel to Guard Your Daughters – I still think that’s Tutton’s masterpiece, and one of my all-time favourite novels, but Mamma is such a different type of novel that they don’t really compare. Now we just need to decide if there is an appetite for her third and final novel, about brother/sister incest…

White Spines by Nicholas Royle

StuckinaBook All , , 24 Comments

About a minute after reading Susan’s review of White Spines by Nicholas Royle, I had ordered my copy – directly from the publisher Salt, which perhaps explains why it came with a surprise author signature on the title page.

It is exactly the sort of book I like: a book about reading, about buying books, and a love for literature that is more idiosyncratic than a slavish devotion to Lists of Great Works. The ‘white spines’ of the title are those that Picador used from the 1970s to the 1990s. If I’m honest, they’re exactly the sort of books my eye flashes past in a charity shop. It’s an era of literature that I know very little about and, except for a few stand-out names, I am pretty poorly read for those decades.

Royle does love some of the writers he buys from this period, but he buys books without necessarily ever anticipating reading them. He is a completist: he wants all of the titles. He wants the anomalies, from when some of the books had black or patterned spines. He wants a ‘shadow collection’, where he duplicates books already on his shelves of white spines. And his buying goes in tangents – an admiration for a cover artist will lead to him buying everything he can with the same artist on the cover, for instance. Almost anything can form the basis of a collection, and you get the sense of Royle’s – surely enormous? – house being a melting pot of different fascinations, grouped in overlapping collections.

Despite not sharing Royle’s particular tastes, and seldom buying books unless I have at least vague intentions of reading them, I loved reading about his bookish adventures. Next to going on a book buying spree, I enjoy experiencing them vicariously – and a lot of White Spines is about his book shopping. Sometimes far afield, sometimes in bookshops or charity shops that are regular haunts. He seldom comes away empty handed, and manages to convey both the excitement and the curiosity of the perennial haunted of bookshops. Here’s a trip to The Bookshop Experience in Southend… which I just kept writing out, because I enjoyed the journey we go on as he scans across the shelves.

As soon as I enter the Bookshop Experience, I know I’m in luck. I’m immediately taking the books off shelves. Paul Bowles – two Abacus collections, A Thousand Days for Mokhtar and Call at Corazon, in the same series, with excellent photographic covers, as two titles I already have. Calvino’s The Literature Machine, in the Brothers Quai (sic) series of covers from Picador (a separate series is credited to the Brothers Quay). And then – increasing heartbeat – I spot an early Sceptre paperback of Siri Hustvedt’s first novel, The Blindfold.

I love The Blindfold. My edition is later and features a woman’s midriff in a crop top that has always felt wrong to me. I like this earlier, uncredited cover with its blindfold, its disembodied eyes, Chrysler Building and 109th Street sign. Next, a King Penguin edition of BS Johnson’s best-known novel, Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, that, as with The Blindfold, I hadn’t even known existed. Finally, I can’t quite believe it, but, yes, there, under K, a copy of the white-spined Picador edition of Kafka’s The Trial, which I have only seen once before, in the home of writers David Gaffney and Sarah-Clare Conlon.

When I saw it at the Gaffney-Conlon residence, I was tempted to become a book thief. The Trial exists in many editions, from different publishers, with different covers. This Picador cover, by Steven Singer, has the distinction of having previously been, to me at least, invisible. Normally, if there’s a Picador I know I want, I don’t order it, as previously discussed. In the case of The Trial, however, I weakened. Having seen it in the wild, having even handled it, I couldn’t resist and did go online and did order, off eBay, what appeared to be the same edition. When it arrived it was a Picador Classics edition. The same translation, by Douglas Scott and Chris Waller, but in the black spine of Picador Classics, with a cover illustration by Peter Till. The search for the white-spined edition would continue, but my lesson learnt, only in the real world.

If this sort of thing is your jam, then this is the book for you.

There is a lot else of interest here, including Royle’s own writing career and his experience of sending stories to small magazines, his interviews with people connected to Picador and other publishing ventures, and an entertaining tangent into authors with the same names. He has reason to find this interesting: there is another Nicholas Royle, and they even both appeared in a collection I read about writing. The other Royle wrote a novel called Quilt that I found impenetrable and a book called The Uncanny that was rather too self-indulgent to be useful as the critical text I was hoping it would be for my DPhil. Safe to say, I prefer this Nicholas Royle.

Personally, I seldom care what edition a book is, and the only books I’ll get simply for the series they’re in are Persephone Books and Slightly Foxed Editions. But Royle still conveys much of what most of us will recognise in ourselves: someone who is not simply an occasional reader, but someone for whom books mean an enormous amount. We love reading them, but we also love being around them, choosing them, collecting them, and hunting them down. Royle is a witty, friendly writer, and it was a delight to go on this voyage with him.

1976 Club: one month to go!

StuckinaBook All 30 Comments

For those who like reminders – here is your reminder that the 1976 Club is only a month away! Karen and I will be asking everyone to read and review books published across the world in 1976.

I’ve been looking through my possibles – not all that many, and fewer when I checked them and realised a couple were mis-dated in my LibraryThing catalogue. But I have two or three books up my sleeve, and I look forward to seeing what everyone else picks.

Have you chosen yours yet? If you need inspiration, having a look on Wikipedia and GoodReads might help.

The Painful Truth by Monty Lyman

StuckinaBook All , , 3 Comments

As I probably said when I wrote about The Remarkable Life of the Skin, I would probably never read popular science if it weren’t written by Oliver Sacks – or by one of my friends. And it would be my loss, because if I didn’t read my friend Monty’s books then I’d have missed out on a lot – and I found The Painful Truth even more fascinating and engaging than his previous book.

As the subtitle says, this is about ‘the new science of why we hurt and how we can heal’ – but it’s also how everything we think we know about pain is wrong. Or, rather, everything I thought I knew; I shan’t tar all of you with the same brush of my colossal ignorance when it comes to science. I’d also blithely assumed pain was largely connected with nerve and tissue damage. Of course, I knew other factors could be at play – pain always hurts more when you don’t know what’s wrong and you’re really anxious – but I hadn’t realised quite how big a role expectation and comprehension play in how much pain we feel. (While being ‘all in your mind’ doesn’t, of course, make pain any less real.)

Vision is not a measure of light and colour: it is designed to make meaningful sense of objects in the outside world. Pain is very similar: it is not a measure of damage or danger but is instead the brain’s unconscious opinion on whether our body is damaged or at risk.

Lyman (it’s easier for me to write objectively about this book if I imagine the author as Lyman rather than Monty!) doesn’t stop at this rather profound re-education on what pain is, of course. The Painful Truth often returns to this fact, and to the idea that pain is there to help not hinder us, and spreads outwards from this starting point. It is so chockful of extremely interesting experiments and facts (for instance – an experiment where strong opioid pain relief was given, but only had significant effect when the patients were aware it was being given; when they were told it hadn’t yet started or had stopped, the pain relief didn’t work). Lyman must have done an astonishing amount of research, and this is the anecdote I keep telling people, about hypnosis:

Highly hypnotisable people are able to respond to questions by ‘automatic writing’, where one hand writes answers to questions without the subject’s awareness. In 1973, the renowned Stanford psychologist Ernest Hilgard tested this out on a young woman – le5t’s call her Lisa – by first asking her to rest her hand in ice-cold water. Unsurprisingly, she found this intensely painful. Lisa was then induced into a hypnotic state, and again her hand was placed into the ice water. This time she reported feeling no pain whatsoever, but while she was verbally describing how relaxed she felt, her own hand continued to automatically write, reporting that she was feeling agonising pain – the same pain she felt when she was not hypnotised.

Yes, I find this rather creepy. But also completely enthralling, and helping shift everything I thought I knew about pain. Elsewhere, Lyman is really interesting on the placebo effect. I think, colloquially, this perhaps dismisses things that are ‘only the placebo effect’ – whereas when it comes to pain, this could be a very powerful solution. And how does it work? I shan’t summarise a whole chapter into a paragraph, but I did find this quote really interesting:

This isn’t the placebo – an inert substance – doing the work; let’s give our brains the credit. It is our belief in the treatment that opens up the brain’s drug cabinet. The active ingredient is expectation. This is neatly seen in the hierarchy of fakery; not all placebos are created equal. Saline injections tend to have a greater pain-relieving effect than sugar pills, and it wouldn’t be surprising if fake surgery is significantly better than both of these. An expensive placebo is more effective than a cheap none. The more dramatic the intervention, the more meaning the patient attributes to the treatment.

It reminded me of a book I read about why people believe conspiracy theories – and it is partly because we can’t cope with the disparity between enormous effect and trivial cause. Nobody has conspiracy theories about assassinations that just missed, but people find it hard to think that an invent that changed the world could be caused by one person with a gun. In sort of the same way, if I’m understanding it properly, our brain expects big results from big actions. And since the brain is the one determining our level of pain, it can answer its own expectations.

This is only a taste of the wide variety of topics covered, each covering a range of Lyman’s own experiences, notable experiments, and a little bit of technical info (which I didn’t always fully understand, but it is far from overwhelming in the book). Among other things, Lyman writes about people who don’t experience pain at all, pain and PTSD, pain after amputation, and the ordeal faced by patients with chronic pain – particularly chronic pain where there doesn’t seem to be any diagnosable cause. What makes Lyman’s writing appeal to me so much is the same thing I love about Oliver Sacks’ books: the compassion. It does help that I know him and know what a lovely guy he is, but I think it would come across anyway. The people he writes about aren’t simply scientific curios, or even patients. They are people with complex lives who are often suffering deeply, or bewildered by the tests they have undergo, or frustrated by no solution being in sight. The only times Lyman is clearly frustrated himself is when writing about medical professionals who don’t have compassion, won’t try to find solutions, or underestimate the consequences of pain.

I was initially wary of telling friends with chronic pain that I was reading a book about pain. I am sure people who suffer in this way are sick of being recommended remedies, usually from people with far less expertise than them. But I think this book would be helpful. While Lyman is very keen to emphasise that The Painful Truth is not a self-help book, it does include some really useful things people who experience persistent pain can do – recognising that, though the responses he lists have a weight of research behind them, the medical profession is often very behind in treatment recommendations. I’ve experienced difficult-to-treat pain over two periods – intense and constant tension headaches one year, and severe RSI over several extended iterations – and I know how exhausting it is to keep going back for diagnosis or treatment when neither seem forthcoming – and that was only over short-term periods. I really hope a book like The Painful Truth can offer some help, even if it isn’t a self-help book. At the very least, Lyman recognises the severity of persistent pain and the impact it has on millions of people.

But whatever your experience with pain is or isn’t, The Painful Truth is an engrossing, well-written, and wide-ranging book. Even if you’d never normally pick up popular science, I think almost anybody would get a lot out of this. It’s always a relief when a friend’s book is genuinely excellent, but even better when they’re as brilliant as this book is. And Monty has my rapturous Instagram messages to prove that I’m saying the same thing in public and private!

Announcing 4 New British Library Women Writers Novels!

StuckinaBook All 28 Comments

Sometimes you see news about an exciting book coming out, and then you realise you have a year to wait. Well, not today friends – I’m going to tell you about the four new British Library Women Writers novels, and two of them are coming out this month! And the other two are coming out next month! Basically what I’m saying is, put your preorders in now and you won’t have long before you can be knee-deep in these books. [In the UK, that is… they’re next year in other countries, I think, though of course you can ship them elsewhere.]

Obviously I love all the books in this series, and all but the first two have been titles I’ve suggested for reprinting – including these four – but this batch is particularly special to me. There is one book here that I’m particularly excited to see people discovering. ANYWAY on with the announcement…

Sally on the Rocks by Winifred Boggs

This is the one I’m most thrilled about, I think – because it had disappeared almost completely before this edition, and deserves to be so much more widely known. You might remember I raved about it last year, and it ended up on my favourite books of 2020.

Sally is a delightful heroine, coming back to her childhood village with the prospect of marrying the local bank manager – but gets in a love triangle with a widow. The thing I love is that the women aren’t pitted against each other – they both agree that the bank manager is awful, but want the security that comes with a ring – and play fair to see who’ll win. It’s such a joyful, funny novel, but also one with a lot to say about the situation of women in the 1910s.

Which Way? by Theodora Benson

I had only been able to read this in the Bodleian Library before – it has hitherto been very hard to find, and is a wonderfully innovative novel – especially for its time, the 1930s. The heroine is invited to three different weekends away – and the novel is split into sections looking at what would have happened if she had taken those three different invitations. It’s cleverly and engagingly done.

A Pin To See The Peepshow by F. Tennyson Jesse

I know this novel has long been on people’s wishlists to be reprinted, and I was so happy when the clever people at the British Library managed to secure the rights. It’s a fictionalised version of the Thompson/Bywaters case – but you don’t need me to persuade you it’s brilliant, as coincidentally Lucy Scholes has just written a wonderful piece about it in the Paris Review.

The Love Child by Edith Olivier

If you’ve been reading StuckinaBook for a while, you’ve probably seen me mention this one – it was one of the first titles I suggested to the British Library, and I’m delighted that it’s now on the list. One of my favourite books, it was also one of the central texts for my DPhil – so you can imagine I had a lot to say in the afterword. In the novel, Agatha is a lonely spinster who accidentally conjures her imaginary childhood best friend Clarissa into life. What starts out a joyful bizarrity becomes something darker as a power struggle develops. It’s a super short novel, so we’ve also included excerpts from Olivier’s autobiography in the book.

So glad to tell you all about these now – which appeals the most??

Dry Season by Gabriela Babnik

StuckinaBook All , , , 0 Comment

I’m slipping into the final hours of Women in Translation Month with Dry Season (2015) by Gabriela Babnik – originally in Slovenian, and translated by Rawley Grau. It won the European Union Prize for Literature, and is the final of the EUPL books I requested when I was asked by them to review some current and previous winners. As usual, more info at the bottom of this post.

I chose this one largely because one of my close friends in Slovenian and I’ve always intended to try some literature from her homeland – though Babnik’s novel is actually set in Burkina Faso, where a 62-year-old Slovenian woman called Ana is being a tourist. Early in the novel, she meets a young man from Burkina Faso called Ismael – though ‘meets’ is perhaps the wrong word, since he first sees her as somebody he might be able to mug.

Their motivations aren’t clear at first. When Ismael rejects his partner in crime’s suggestion that he grabs Ana’s bright yellow bag, it initially looks like he has decided to play the long con. Ana initially seems like a bit of a fool – exposing herself to dangers on the streets of Burkina Faso, without taking any precautions over her possessions or potentially her life. She is there to escape something – perhaps simply to escape her humdrum life, though the more we learn about her background the more we realise that dark secrets linger there.

And dark secrets linger similarly in Ismael’s past – not least what happened to his young brother. The present day scenes of the novel are interspersed with both of them thinking back to the past – we are jolted to the unsavoury activities under a lone bridge, or inadequate parents, or long forgotten antagonisms resurfacing. As Dry Season continues, the reader realises that these two characters have a lot more in common than it first appears.

This is driven home by the fact that all the novel is told in the first person, but we are given no warning when we shift between Ana and Ismael. Often it takes a while for us to realise who is speaking, or which period we are in. Dividing lines blur and fade continually. This section was one of the most disconcerting, because it describes something graphic and we don’t know who the victim is (content warning of sexual assault):

It happened so fast I had no time to think. He lay down next to me, took off my trousers and, with an adult hand, touched my thighs. I froze; everything in me froze. If I had been awake and the man had approached me in broad daylight, I would have said it did not happen. But his hand travelled up to my most intimate part and there was no way that it did not happen.

Dry Season is an intriguing mix of tones. On the one hand, the haziness and rejection of solid boundaries feels almost fairy-talesque, and there are moments of magical realism that seem to link to Burkina Faso folk tales. On the other hand, the whole novel feels quite sordid. Sex permeates the book, and both characters often think the phrase ‘he put it in me’ or ‘I put it in her’ as the sole description of the act, usually sans affection. Dirt – literal dirt – recurs, as the infant Ismael used to eat handfuls of it. Nothing is sanitised here, and when I finally landed on the word ‘sordid’, it did tie together a lot of the novel for me. It was an interesting, rather than a pleasant, read. I should add, I felt pretty uncomfortable about the racism in the novel – often from the perspective of characters, or received by Ismael, but I’m not sure there’s any excuse in 2015 for a white author to be using the n-word in her writing. Perhaps it doesn’t carry the same weight in whatever the Slovenian word is.

Ana and Ismael are intriguing characters, well-drawn with many layers, and Dry Season is an ambitious and complex novel. Not a cosy read by any means, but an accomplished one.

The Gap of Time by Jeanette Winterson

StuckinaBook All , , 8 Comments

My book group does a Secret Santa every year at our Christmas meal. Everybody wraps a book and puts it in a bag, and you pick one out. They’re not chosen specially for you, but I’ve come away with some great things in the past – notably, it introduced me to David Sedaris. It has also introduced me, now, to Jeanette Winterson – three years ago I got The Gap of Time (2015), which is a retelling of one of my favourite Shakespeare plays, The Winter’s Tale. Or a ‘cover version’, in the parlance of this edition – with a handy synopsis of the play at the beginning, for those who aren’t familiar with it.

It starts with a short section where an unnamed narrator witnesses a man being pulled from a car and beaten to death. Yikes! And then he and his son see something at the nearby hospital, where his wife had died.

And that’s when I see it. The light.

The BabyHatch is lit up.

Somehow, I get a sense this is all connected – the BMW, the junky car, the dead man, the baby.

Because there is a baby.

I walk towards the hatch and my body’s in slow motion. The child’s asleep, sucking its thumb. No one has come yet. Why has no one come yet?

I realise without realising that I’ve got the tyre lever in my hand. I move without moving to prise open the hatch. It is easy. I lift out the baby and she’s as light as a star.

Then we zoom back a little while to discover how the baby got there, and the plot does indeed closely follow The Winter’s Tale, albeit modernised in various ways. Leontes is Leo, a hedge fun manager who is rich and ruthless and rather too emotional to think about his actions properly. Hermione is MiMi, a French singer who is beautiful and fairly famous – and, as the novel opens, pregnant with the baby we will later see in the BabyHatch. Polixenes is Xeno, a video game designer – who is working on a game called The Gap of Time, in one of the few strands of the novel that I didn’t think was particularly successful.

As with Shakespeare’s play, Leo manages to convince himself that MiMi and Xeno are having an affair – and, indeed, that the baby is Xeno’s. Winterson convincingly makes him as impervious to reason as Shakespeare manages with Leontes – he has the same passions that cannot be calmed, and the same power that can turn those passions into deadly action. Interestingly, in a twist on the original that works very well and almost beguilingly, Xeno is rather lovelorn over one of the couple – but it isn’t MiMi. He is sexually very fluid, but it’s Leo who has his heart.

One thing leads to another, and Leo’s self-destructiveness sees the baby left at a hospital – but adopted by our narrator from that opening section. The second section of the novel sees Perdita retain her name from the play, though some elements of the plot have been changed since Shakespeare’s reliance on flimsy disguise and near-incest don’t translate quite as well to the twenty-first century.

I really loved this novel. Having not read any of her fiction before, I’d rather got the impression that it would be bitter and spiky and earnest. The Gap of Time certainly isn’t – there is a lovely playfulness and elegance to it, where she is having fun with the task of updating Shakespeare but also borrowing his ability to make sentences both amusing and profound.

You never feel the weight of the Bard looking over her shoulder – with the exception of when she echoes some of Shakespeare’s more idiotic comedy; the stuff that was thrown into the originals to delight the people stood in the cheapest spots.

‘[…]he found that Thebes was being terrorISed, TErrorised, terrORised – like having the Mafia come to stay – by this creature called the Sphinx.’

‘Sphinx? Isn’t that underwear?’

‘Spanx is underwear. The Sphinx was a woman – you the type: part monster, part Marilyn Monroe.’

It’s a good impersonation of the bits of Shakespeare’s plays that I tend to glaze over for – and just as glazable-overable here.

I think the first half and the final section, when we are back with Leo et al, were the most successful – I got less out of the middle bit, where we are introduced to a new and bigger cast, none of whom are quite as well defined or as interesting. But overall, her updating is both clever and engaging. The main mark of its achievement is that I would recommend The Gap of Time even to people who’d never read or heard a word of The Winter’s Tale – and it has certainly made me keen to read more by Winterson, if she is on this form elsewhere.

Sun City by Tove Jansson – #WITMonth

StuckinaBook All , , , 16 Comments

I bought Sun City by Tove Jansson in 2007, at which point there wasn’t that much of Jansson’s work available in English. This was one of two novels that had been translated in the ‘70s, and then she had languished – until Sort Of Books started their noble work of publishing translations by Thomas Teal. Teal was also the translator back in the day, and did Sun City – so I knew I was in good hands with him when I finally took this off the shelf. To be honest, I couldn’t quite cope with the idea of running out of Jansson things to read – but if not for Women in Translation month, then when?

The setting of Sun City sets it apart from Jansson’s other books, and perhaps helps explain why it was picked for translating into English first. Rather than her usual Finnish islands or towns, we are in St Petersburg, Florida – at an old people’s home called the Berkeley Arms. The residents are mostly American, and it’s a world away from where Jansson spent her life. (I’ve read two biographies of Jansson and I still can’t remember if she visited America, but I’m almost certain she wasn’t there for any extended period.)

While Sun City was only Jansson’s second novel, she was already 60 by the time it was published (1974) – not old, but also not looking at this retirement home through the callous eyes of youth. The newest resident is Elizabeth Morris, intelligent and reserved and a little unsure about her new community, and it looks at one point like she might be the protagonist – but this becomes very much an ensemble piece. Much of the ‘action’ takes place in the rocking chairs outside, which are strictly assigned to individual residents, in practice if not in theory (‘To move your rocking chair is an unforgivable insult in St Petersburg […] Only death could move the rocking chairs in St Petersburg’).

Mrs Elizabeth Morris of Great Island, Nebraska, seventy-seven years old, had the second rocking chair from the railing by the big magnolia. Next to the magnolia was Mr Thompson, who pretended to be deaf, and on the other side was Miss Peabody, who was very shy. So Mrs Morris could sit and think in peace. She had come to St Petersburg several weeks earlier, alone, with a sore throat, and once at the Berkeley Arms her voice disappeared completely. On a page from a notebook Mrs Morris had supplied information about her name, her condition, and some antique furniture that was to arrive later. Silence protected her from the reckless need to confide in other people that can be so dangerous at the end of a long, lonely journey.

If you’re familiar with Jansson’s writing, you’ll recognise her tone – certainly in sentences like that last one. I like that the long, lonely journey could either be the one that has brought her from Nebraska to Florida, or could simply describe her life. It feels like familiar Jansson territory in the writing, if not the setting.

Sun City continues in an episodic way. An estranged spouse of one of the residents turns up; a couple of residents die; there is a trip away from the Berkeley Arms. There is also drama among the people working there, particularly one in a relationship with an eccentric young man who believes Jesus will soon return and is waiting to be collected by a fringe Christian organisation.

A lot of Jansson’s writing is episodic. There’s certainly a discussion to be had about whether her most famous work for adults, The Summer Book, is a novel or a series of interlinking short stories. Sun City is definitely a novel, but what makes it feel a bit different from her other work, and perhaps a little less successful, is that the moments that happen are all a little overly dramatic. It feels like, in transferring her canvas to America, Jansson has taken on board the idea that everything in America is bigger: the events are bigger, the reactions are bigger, the potentials for change are bigger. I have to be honest, I missed the gentleness of her Scandinavian backdrop, where lives are no less full but somehow the stakes seem to be lower.

If this were my first novel by Jansson, I’ve no doubt I’d have wanted to read more. Her sentences are still beautiful and insightful, and the partnership with Teal is reliably great – but the good news for people looking to explore Jansson is that the best stuff is already in print, in translation. This is an enjoyable coda, but Jansson is at her finest on her Finnish island.

4 good books and 1 piece of fluff

StuckinaBook All , , , , 14 Comments

It’s one of those times where my pile of ‘to review’ books has got a bit teetering, so I’m going to write a little bit about five books I’ve read recently. And ‘recently’ goes back several months in some of these cases. They’re all books that I enjoyed to some extent, and some that were really brilliant – but, yes, one of them is a completely inconsequential piece of fluff.

One Apple Tasted by Josa Young

This was actually a gift from the author, for which many thanks. It takes places in three timelines – which start in1939, 1958, and 1982. We kick off in the most recent of these, where the excellently named Dora Jerusalem meets Guy Boleyn – a flirty, easy, charming man who bowls her over. Dora may not be flirty, easy, or charming but she is determined and scrupulous – and one of her scruples is about not having sex before marriage. And so Guy proposes to her…

The earlier periods are involving for their own reasons, but also gradually come together to show us the background to these two lives. I thought, at first, we’d be dashing between the three timelines – but they are mostly sequential, with sustained periods getting to know the characters in each section. One Apple Tasted reminded me quite a lot of Eva Rice’s writing, and that is certainly a good thing – I really enjoyed reading this.

The Familiar Faces by David Garnett

Garnett was one of the main authors in my DPhil – or, rather, his first novel Lady Into Fox was one of my main novels. I dipped into bits of his autobiographies at the time, but have never actually read one of them – and I started here, with volume three. He has only just published that first novel as the autobiography opens, and I am far more interested in his life as a writer than in anything that came before.

I loved this book. Garnett is not always a very nice person, as I gleaned from Sarah Knights’ biography of him – and, yes, he is very callous in this book when hinting at his extramarital affairs, even while his wife is seriously ill with the cancer that would later kill her. But he is very good at detailed portraits of people he knew – and, as the title The Familiar Faces suggests, this is more about snapshots of his friends and acquaintances than about his own life. Among them are Dorothy Edwards, T.E. Lawrence and George Moore. He certainly gives the rough with the smooth, and these are never hagiographies. And heaven help anyone who crossed him and gets the bitchier side of his writing. Here he is on Hugh Walpole…

A year or two before Moore’s death I received one of the very few letters that Hugh Walpole ever wrote me. It was to say that ferreting about in the Charing Cross Road he had bought the inscribed copy of The Sailor’s Return which I had presented to George Moore and he was writing to ask if I would mind his keeping it, hinting that it had been unworthy of Moore to sell it. Walpole’s letter oozed malice. Quite obviously it was written to wound my vanity and to estrange me from the friend who had helped me to whom I had dedicated my story. It failed in its effect.

High Rising by Angela Thirkell

A while ago I decided to read through all of Thirkell’s novels in order. I’ve managed to read one in six months, so it’s going about as well as any structured reading project goes with me.

The novel is about Laura Morland, a writer of middling sorts of books, and her neighbourhood – specifically her neighbour George Knox, whose new secretary might be suspect, and his daughter Sibyl, who is looking for an engagement. And there’s her schoolboy son Tony, whom she seems largely to despise but in a way that I can fully recognise is warranted.

I thought this was a lot of fun. Laura is on the borderline between likeable and snobby/arrogant, but it’s a line that gives the novel some realism in the midst of its gossipy village plot. It’s very identifiably Thirkell from the off, and I fully intend to continue the project thought it may take the rest of my life.

Chedsy Place by Richmal Crompton

I blitzed through an enormous number of Richmal Crompton novels almost two decades ago, but still have quite a few on my shelves waiting to be read – sometimes I think I read all the best ones early on, but Chedsy Place was very fun. Chedsy Place is an ancestral mansion that the new inheritor can’t afford to live in – though he is certainly fond of it from his childhood days there. His enterprising wife decides they should temporarily open it up to paying guests – he is reluctant, but they go for it. We don’t see an awful lot of this husband and wife after that…

Crompton loves an enormous cast of characters, and I’m sure I was better at keeping them in my mind when I was a teenager than I can deal with now. Luckily they are listed somewhere, so I could make little notes alongside to remind me. And there are types to whom Crompton often returns – including the dominant/subordinate pair of women who are emotionally too involved with each other, who appear in almost all her novels under different names.

Added to this, there’s a psychic novelist, a lady with dementia, a lady who wears tweed and complains, a blind man who resents his wife, an ineffectual vicar, a couple who love crosswords, twin sisters looking for romance, a common woman with badly dyed hair, a woman who is described as ‘sloe-eyed’ almost every time she appears… and so on and so on. There are 29 main characters, and it is rather dizzying. Some of them are described with a casual unkindness that wouldn’t be published today, but in general I found the novel an engaging and fun maze of not particularly detailed characters having fairly high emotions and very low stakes – for the reader, at least.

Improper Prue by Winifred Boggs

And, finally, for the piece of fluff. Yes, even fluffier than Chedsy Place. Ever since reading the brilliant Sally on the Rocks, I’ve been hunting down other Winifred Boggs novels – and some of her titles are such a delight, like this one. And, indeed, Prue is a delight – she is everything you could want from a witty, flighty heroine. Her dialogue is a joy, never taking anybody particularly seriously and yet with an underlying decency – e.g. her closest friend is an older woman called Jane, largely ignored by the world and revitalised by Prue’s affections.

Then she heads off to a lengthy house party, peopled by any number of eligible and ineligible men. Everything gets a little gothic in its heightened emotions, and proposals abound – there’s even a murder. The whole thing is very silly – entertaining, but absolutely impossible to have any real emotional investment in what’s happening. Curiously, Sally on the Rocks is a very insightful and thoughtful look at women’s lives in the 1910s – while also being great fun – whereas the other novels I’ve read by her (including this one) have been gossamer light and not remotely thoughtful. So, still fun to read – leaving more or less nothing in the mind, and a smile on the face.