Stuck in a Book

I went a bit quiet on here, but I *did* continue reading a novella a day, and I have now completed my Novellas in November challenge! Here are the final five days and what I read – except where I am being annoyingly cagey… Because I’m covering a few days, I’m going to be even briefer than usual on these, but do ask if you’d like any more info on them.

Friday: The Swallowed Man by Edward Carey

I love Carey’s writing, and was delighted to see he garnered a bit wider attention when Little came out a year or two ago. The Swallowed Man is a much shorter work, answering the question: what would happen if you combined Jonah and Pinocchio?

There’s not a dry spot in all this house. The walls are damp, the ceiling drips, the floor is moisture-laden. How careful I must be to protect this book from the encroaching wet. How often I have slipped – this is dangerous: I am not a young man – on this floor. The air here is thin and foul. It is rancid. Sometimes a new wave of stench comes in and affronts me. Sometimes the stink is but a whisper; at others it is a roar. But it is always a shade of stink.

It’s all written from the point of view of a carpenter who has created Pinocchio – and the Pinocchio here is very much the one you’re familiar with. He is created from wood then comes alive, and his nose grows when he lies. But he also disappears and, when trying to find him, the narrator finds (instead) himself being swallowed by a particularly large whale. It’s not the first time the whale has swallowed something inappropriate: inside, he finds a full ship. And, on that ship, he discovers a captain’s log – which is what we are reading, as he reminisces about life before the swallowing and wonders when he will run out of the candles keeping his strange sphere lit and warm.

Carey is also unusual and interesting, and remains so here. I think it was wise to keep this story to novella length – it’s so strange a premise that it shouldn’t outstay its welcome. As it is, I found it marvellous in every sense of the word. He brings plenty of pathos to this world, and nobody but Carey could have written The Swallowed Man. Not least because it incorporates many of his characterful, distinctive illustrations.

Saturday: mystery book! 

And here is where I’m cagey again – because it’s another British Library Women Writers re-read. Which I shan’t mention here, but if you can find a copy of the latest catalogue then all is revealed!

Sunday: Naturally Supernatural by Wendy Mann

I’m doing a six-month course at church, learning about and from the Holy Spirit – and this book was given to us to accompany the course. It’s full of testimonies of God’s work in everyday life, and I found it encouraging, inspiring, and challenging.

Monday: The Hothouse by the East River by Muriel Spark

This isn’t one of Spark’s novellas that I hear a lot about – maybe because, even by her standards, it’s one of her weirdest. It’s set in New York of the 1970s, with Elsa and Paul the main characters – but it reaches much further back and into other places. Paul (originally from Montenegro) and Elsa (from the UK) met during the Second World War when they were working for British Intelligence. Which involved working alongside German prisoners of war – including a Helmut Kiel. He was believed to have died shortly after the war, and was unearthed as a double agent during it. But then Elsa sees him in a shoe shop in New York…

Even more bizarrely, Elsa has a distinctive characteristic: her shadow falls the wrong way.

He cannot remember exactly what day it was that, on returning to the flat at seven in the evening — or six… if he could remember the season of the year…

In the evening — he cannot exactly remember the day, the time of day, perhaps it was spring, or winter, perhaps it was five, six o’clock…

He is standing in the middle of the room. She is sitting by the window, staring out over the East River. The late sunlight from the opposite window touches her shoulders and hair, it casts the shadow of palm leaves across the carpet, over her arm. The chair she sits in casts a shadow before her.

There is another shadow, hers. It falls behind her. Behind her, and cast by what light? She is casting a shadow in the wrong direction. There’s no light shining upon her from the east window, it comes from the west window. What is she looking at?

Elsa spends much of her time looking out the window at the East River. But what is she really looking at? Why has her psychoanalyst, Garvin, moved in as their butler? And is Elsa living in reality or hallucination? The answer to these questions is weirder than you might imagine, and the best part of the novella is putting it all together at the end. Though, this being Spark, there is certainly no neat bow on it. The novella remains as ungraspable and odd as it starts, and I think maybe falls a little into the section of Spark’s writing that baffles me a little too much. It’s good, but it’s not her best by any means.

Tuesday: Trouble With Lichen by John Wyndham

I haven’t read any Wyndham before, but my reliable friends Paul and Kirsty gave it to me a couple of years ago with the promise that I’d enjoy it – despite it being science fiction. And they’re certainly right that Wyndham writes in a way that isn’t off-putting if sci-fi isn’t your comfort zone.

Diana is a brilliant girl who becomes a brilliant young woman – determined to pursue science, and particularly biochemistry. She is a mid-century woman who isn’t deterred by the pressure of mid-century values.

‘I’m not at all sure that I do want to raise a family,’ Diana told her. ‘There are so many families already.’

Mrs Brackley looked shocked.

‘But every woman wants a family, at heart,’ she said. ‘It’s only natural.’

‘Habitual,’ corrected Diana. ‘God knows what would happen to civilization if we did things just because they were natural.’

While working in a lab, she accidentally discovers that a certain variety of lichen is able to prolong life – and you can dose according to the level you want. Twice, three, or four times as long a life – or as slow a life, really, as it extends everything from the time it takes hair to grow, to how long cuts take to heal. Wyndham even makes a few cryptic references to the length of time between periods.

The story follows what happens when this secret gets out – and the life-prolonging lichen is really just a premise for a riff on capitalism, journalism, competition, and even a touch of a thriller. It was fun and interesting, if a little fragmented.

Finished!

So, there we go! I took a day off for my birthday, but otherwise read a novella a day. Well, four of them were over 200 pages so perhaps they don’t count, but none of them were more than 230 – so narrow the margins a bit and they’d have counted.

As when I’ve done my 25 Books in 25 Days, I’ve really enjoyed it – and found, again, that it’s relatively easy if I get up a bit earlier and spend less time scrolling social media. Usually an hour’s reading before work, an hour at lunch, and an hour after work were enough to finish a book.

And it has brought some of the best books I’ve read this year – I wouldn’t be surprised to find some of them on my end of the year list. I’ll just have to let them settle a bit, and hope this energetic reading schedule hasn’t blurred them in my mind.