2017

Bellevue Square by Michael Redhill

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When I was in Toronto, I met up with a listener to Tea or Books? – Debra – and, after a lovely dinner, we went book shopping. I told her I was on the lookout for Canadian authors writing about present-day Canada, and she had lots of great recommendations. Indeed, if I hadn’t already bought a lot of books in Vancouver, I’d probably have come home with a great deal more. One I couldn’t resist was Bellevue Square (2017) by Michael Redhill. (Sidenote: wouldn’t the cover be amazing if they hadn’t PRINTED on that sticker?) I now follow the cover designer, Jennifer Griffiths, on Instagram and really love her work.

The premise of Bellevue Square really appealed to me: Jean Mason discovers she has a doppelganger. She lives an ordinary life, working in a bookstore, husband and two sons, when regular visitors to the bookstore start to ask about the woman who looks exactly like her that they’ve seen in the neighbourhood. Indeed, they thought she was Jean.

Jean doesn’t see the woman herself, but becomes obsessed with discovering her. She even pays someone living in Bellevue Square Park to take photographs when they see this other woman, so she can keep track of her movements. (I believe Bellevue Square Park had an encampment of unhoused people in tents at the time of writing the novel.) She meets other people who know both women, such as someone in the food market selling pupusa. But then the people who know them both start dying.

If this sounds like I’ve given a lot away than, hoo boy, you’re in for a wild ride. I’m not going to say too much about the plot of Bellevue Square – but it’s certainly not the novel it seems going in. Indeed, it reinvents itself constantly. And the bit about people dying is revealed in a brilliant sentence on p.8:

I put the phone away and at that exact moment a woman I would later be accused of murdering walked into my shop. She wore a green dress embroidered with tiny mirrors and had warm, buttery skin.

Reading Bellevue Square felt a bit like watching the brilliant film The Father, which disorients the viewer over and over and over, giving a sense of what it is like to have dementia. Jean doesn’t have dementia, but the novel never leaves us on steady ground. Everything we think we know is repeatedly undermined, and even when you think the new piece of information has put you on more solid ground, the rug gets pulled from under you again.

What makes Redhill’s novel so masterful is that Bellevue Square feels so compelling and readable, even when you don’t have a clue what to believe. This sort of trickery could be irritating or confusing from another writer’s pen, but it is done so confidently that you always know you’re in safe hands. Wisely, he leans into clarity and simplicity in the prose – it often feels beautifully written, and is very sharp and funny in places, but he avoids anything overly elaborate. If the plot is a mystery to us, then let’s make sure the individual sentences aren’t. It also helps that the novel is anchored by Jean – her incisiveness, her determination, her wit, her occasional abrasiveness. She was a very compelling character.

I loved reading the novel – and it helped that I knew the streets that Jean was walking around from my visit last year. The moments of recognition were lovely.

I’m also fascinated by the cultural significance of doppelgangers. They come up time and again, from Dostoevsky’s The Double onwards (and probably before) – and every time people mention Shelley seeing his doppelganger shortly before he died. And, yes, it’s mentioned in Bellevue Square too. Readers seem captivated by the idea of encountering their doppelganger, and it is a phenomenon laden with eeriness and even menace. Reading a novel like Bellevue Square as an identical twin is quite an unusual experience. Because I have a doppelganger and have always had one – this spectre that is so eerie to most people is normal, everyday experience for me and for the other identical twins reading this book. So it’s interesting to see the experience from another side, used as the central plot point of a book. (I also think that most people, if they met their doppelganger, wouldn’t think it looked much like them. You know how photos never look like you-in-the-mirror? It’s like that having an identical twin.)

Let’s finish with a quote from early in the book that isn’t very relevant to the rest of the novel – but I love anything about arranging books:

But alphabetical is not the only order. I’m not a library, so I don’t have to go full-Dewey. A bookstore is a collection. It reflects someone’s taste. In the same way that curators decide what order you see the art in, I’m allowed to meddle with the browser’s logic, or even to please myself. Mix it up, see what happens. If you don’t like it, don’t shop here. January to June I alphabetize biographies by author. July to December: by subject.

There are moral issues involved, too. Should parenting books be displayed chronologically by year of publication? I don’t want to screw someone’s kid up by suggesting outdate parenting advice is on par with the new thinking. Aesthetic issues: should I arrange art books by height to avoid cover bleaching? Ethical: do dieting books belong near books about anorexia? And should I move books about confidence into the business section? And what is Self-Help? Is it anything like Self Storage (which is only for things, it turns out.) In Self-Help, I have found it is helpful not to read the books at all.

A bunch of books I’ve read recently

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It’s that time again when I look at a big pile of books I’ve been intending to review, and don’t really have a full-post’s worth of things to say… so here they all are, in a round up. Hope you’re all reading something fun at the moment.

Because of Jane (1913) by J.E. Buckrose

I have a few books by the near-forgotten Buckrose and really like her writing. My hope is that one of them will elevate itself above the others and be good enough for the British Library Women Writers series – but it won’t be Because of Jane. As I’ve written previously, Buckrose is very good on puncturing egos and awkwardness and social manners. She is much more formulaic and less interesting when it comes to romance – and there is a lot of romance in Because of Jane. The central one is ‘spinster’ Beatrice who reluctantly lives with her brother and his wife and daughter, and who begins to fall for a local widower, Stephen Croft.

“They were married at a registrar’s office. That always seems to me a little like buying machine-made underclothing. Doesn’t it to you?”

“Yes – no – I don’t know,” said Beatrice.

“And so,” said Miss Thornleigh, pursuing her train of thought, “it didn’t last. It was never likely to last.”

“I cannot think that Mrs Stephen Croft died because she was married at the registrar’s,” objected Beatrice in common justice.

“Well, perhaps not,” conceded Miss Thornleigh. “But it was a bad start.”

That was one excerpt I enjoyed, but sadly Because of Jane doesn’t have that much in this tone – and a lot more in Jane’s voice. Jane is Beatrice’s seven-year-old niece and the sort of irritating novelistic child who says things with wide-eyed innocence that sum up what other are truly feeling. The book was fine, but rather worse than the other two Buckroses I’ve read.

The ABC of Cats (1960) by Beverley Nichols

Reading the Meow week was the reason I started The ABC of Cats, but I didn’t finish it. He goes through the alphabet, writing about a different aspect of cats for each letter (e.g. Y is Yawn). It’s all delightful, and Nichols does cats extremely well – he is expert on their behaviours, habits, wishes without every getting saccharine or fey. It’s one for cat lovers certainly, and enjoyable if only for his apparent belief that he has invented the cat flap.

Things I Didn’t Throw Out (2017) by Marcin Wicha

Translated from Polish by Marta Dziurosz, this is a non-fiction reflection on Marcin’s mother’s life through the books that she left behind. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they are mostly Polish books – Emma by Jane Austen is the only one I’ve read. The book is also a lens to look at post-war Poland and how the Communist regime affected those who lived there.

I think Wicha writes really well, in sparse, curious way. But I struggle to know what to write about this book except that it’s unusual and beguiling – and probably better if you have a good knowledge of this period in Polish history and literature already, which I do not.

The First To Die at the End (2022) by Adam Silvera

I thought Silvera’s young adult novel They Both Die at the End was a brilliant premise worked out really well – it’s a world where people get a phone call from DeathCast on the day they will die, but aren’t told precisely when or how. And now he’s written The First To Die at the End, a prequel set on the first night that DeathCast is launched.

As before, there are two teenage boys who meet for the first time that day and spend it together – waiting for death (though I won’t spoil whose). It does feel a little like a repeat of the same sort of thing, done a little less compelling and with some extraneous side characters taking up some of the 550 pages. But it’s still a brilliant idea, and Silvera writes very engagingly. I didn’t remember the original book well enough to get all the references or Easter eggs, though did appreciate the two boys from that book appearing here briefly as their younger selves.

Two Japanese books about cats #ReadingTheMeow

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Japan truly seems to love a book about a cat, and I am here for it. Two of the other books I’ve read for the #ReadingTheMeow themed week are short Japanese novels with ‘cat’ in the title – though arguably the cats are not the main characters in either of them. (Except in the way that any mention of a cat automatically makes it the main character.)

If Cats Disappeared From the World by Genki Kawamura

I was sent this as a review copy when it was translated into English in 2018, by Eric Selland – having originally been published in Japanese in 2012. And what an intriguing title! The concept is equally interesting. The unnamed (I think) narrator has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. His life is quite narrow – his mother has died, he is estranged from his father and recently broken up from a woman he loves. The only creature in his life is a little cat called Cabbage. Reeling from this news, the narrator is visited by the Devil, who appears as his doppelgänger and informs him that he only has one day to live. But…

“There is something we could do…”

“Do? What do you mean?”

“Well, you could call it a kind of magic. But it might increase your life span.”

“Really?”

“On one condition: you’ll have to accept this one fundamental law of the universe.”

“And what is?”

“In order to gain something you have to lose something.”

“So what do I have to do exactly?”

“It’s easy… I’ll just ask you to perform a simple exchange.”

“Exchange?”

“Sure… All you have to do is remove one thing from the world, and in return, you get one more day of life.”

At first, he thinks he can simply get rid of things that don’t matter – the dust from the top of his bookcase, for instance. But he quickly learns that the devil is the one who makes suggestions, and he simply has to agree whether or not to take the bargain offered.

The first one, which he accepts, is phones.

I was a bit disappointed by this book, if I’m honest. My favourite bits were when (rather inexplicably) the cat starts speaking – there’s a lot of humour in the fact that he picked up language from period dramas and speaks very formally. But I don’t think Kawamura makes much of his premise. All the phones in the world disappear overnight, and the only problem highlighted is that the narrator finds it tricky to meet up with someone. Surely if phones stopped existing, businesses around the world would collapse, the economy would nosedive, all sorts of extraordinary things would happen. In Kawamura’s hands, it’s just as though the narrator is the only one to suffer an inconvenience – even though it is spelled out that it’s universal.

Towards the end, If Cats Disappeared From the World does take on the Alchemist-school of being basically a novelised fridge magnet. At one point, someone even says ‘Being alive doesn’t matter all that much on its own. How you live is more important.’

This could have been a really quirky, dark, strange little book – but it sort of ended up more like a Facebook inspirational quote. A shame.

 

The Cat Who Saved Books by Sosuke Natsukawa

The other one is The Cat Who Saved Books (2017), translated by Louise Heal Kawai in 2021 and given to me by my friend Lorna last year. Cats! Books! What a combo. And it’s set in a delightful old bookshop, run by a boy called Rintaro since his grandfather’s death. One day a talking cat gets him to go on various quests that mysteriously appear in the back of the shop, which expands out into unknown worlds…

There are various semi-nemeses to defeat, including this guy whose views on rereading hit a bit too close to home for me:

“The world is full of books, you agree? It’s impossible to count the number of books that have been, and are still being, written. To find the time to read the same books over again – well, it’s just inconceivable.”

And his views on book hoarding enrage Rintaro…

“But that’s how I’ve elevated my status – by collecting all these books. The more books you have, the more powerful you are. That’s how I got to where I am.”

“And is that why you’ve imprisoned them? To show them off as if their power belongs entirely to you?” Rintaro asked.

“What are you talking about?”

“You think you’re so impressive – you built this ridiculous, pretentious showroom just so that everyone can see how many books you’ve read.”

I don’t think I have masses to say about this book. It’s basically a fun little quest-narrative which some enjoyable observations about readers and reading along the way, but felt very like a young adult book. It rattled along but didn’t leave all that much of an impression on me, if I’m honest.

Fingers crossed I can manage one more book for Reading the Meow before the week ends on Sunday…

The Forensic Records Society by Magnus Mills #ABookADayInMay No.14

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The Forensic Records Society: Amazon.co.uk: 9781408878378: Books

I love Magnus Mills and have been reading him for years, and have a few on the shelves that I thought would be likely to come up in my May reading. The Forensic Records Society (2017) was a gift last year from my friend Mel, who also introduced me to Mills’ writing in the first place.

The narrator (I think unnamed, though all the men’s names in this book are so bland as to be deliberately forgettable) is chatting one night with his friend James. They are listening to a record that they enjoy but is no longer in the limelight, and decide that probably nobody else in the world is listening to it – one thing leads to another, and they come to a decision about bringing together record-lovers. Or, at least, James has the idea:

“We could form a society for the express purpose of listening to records closely and in detail, forensically if you like, without any interruption or distraction. There would be regular gatherings, and membership would depend on some kind of test to make sure people are genuinely interested.”

“You mean a code of conduct?”

“Certainly,” said James. “We don’t want any charlatans.”

They decide to hold the inaugural meeting in the backroom of the pub. Landlord George, affable and largely unquestioning, is happy for them to hold it there rent-free for a trial period. The only rules of the Forensic Records Society are to turn up on time, bring three records (not LPs) and then listen to them in turn, without comment or judgement.

The group is small at first – and one man, in a long leather coat, is turned away because he arrives a few minutes late. James is firm on that front. The others listen to their records, not making comments or judgements, though one of the men (Chris) often quotes one of the lines from a song that seems to summarise it. Another (Mike) is fixated upon how long each record is, and considers three minutes the perfect length – almost as though it were a holy grail. Curiously, when they leave the room, more time has passed than the number of records played would allow for.

There are a few things that threaten this small group of like-minded men. One is James’s insistence on rules – and using the narrator as a lackey to enforce them, including shutting out the barmaid one evening. The other is the rival groups that start up.

The first is formed by that rejected man in the leather coat – a Confessional Records Society, where people go one at a time to play a record and make a confession. Most seem to leave in tears of joy, though the Forensic Records Society’s attempts to infiltrate don’t go to plan. But that’s not the final rival group that emerges in this ordinary pub, much to the delight of landlord George with his eye on the profit margin.

Along the way, Mills incorporates many names of records – most of which I hadn’t heard of, though there is a playlist you can use alongside. The first edition of The Forensic Records Society (pictured above) even came in the shape of a record, though my paperback is a little more plebian. The text suggests that there is a wide range of styles, artists, and eras featured, though looking through the playlist it definitely leans towards the taste of middle-aged men – which certainly fits the characters.

As so often with Mills, there is a lurking sense of menace throughout. He is so careful never to overstate anything, and it’s the reader who brings all that foreboding to the novel. It’s just about a bunch of blokes listening to records – on the surface. But you can’t help think that it’s about something else.

There are always analogies and parallels floating about when you’re reading Mills – is it all about the October Revolution, as one reviewer suggests? Or is it about religious schisms? Or cults? Mills is too clever to ever let you pin anything down. He is a master of short, sharp dialogue that doesn’t say much. But he simply invests the everyday with an uneasiness that makes each of his novels feel quite powerfully dark – unsettling in the best possible way.

It’s always a discomforting pleasure to spend time with Mills, and there is nobody like him.

History Is All You Left Me by Adam Silvera #ABookADayInMay No.11

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History Is All You Left Me: The much-loved hit from the author of No.1 bestselling blockbuster THEY BOTH DIE AT THE END! a book by Adam Silvera.

Today I finished the audiobook of History Is All You Left Me (2017) by Adam Silvera. I first came across his writing when I stumbled upon the title They Both Die At The End. It shows the power of a good title, because that made me read and race through the book – and, in fact, I’ve recently read its prequel too. I loved the premise and the inventive world he built. In History Is All You Left Me, though, we are in a very-much-entirely-real world.

Silvera writes young adult books, most (all?) with queer teenagers as their heroes. This book is no different – it is told by Griffin, a 17-year-old whose first love, Theo, has recently died. They were best friends for a long time before realising that they were (a) gay and bi respectively, and (b) very into each other.

Things are even more complicated than that, though, as Theo and Griffin weren’t dating when Theo died – he was, in fact, away at college and dating a guy called Jackson. The book jumps between ‘history’, i.e. the times when Theo was alive and the journey through their relationship, and the present day. In the present day, Griffin is reluctantly getting to know Jackson. He is very protective over his own grief, and doesn’t feel that Jackson has a right to feel the loss as deeply – though gradually his opinion changes.

There are a few twists along the way, and some things that aren’t twists but just aren’t revealed at first – such as the way in which Theo died – so I shan’t mention them yet.

The other major element of the novel to mention is that Griffin has OCD. I don’t know enough about it to comment in depth, but it did seem like he had compulsions rather than obsessions. He hates odd numbers (except seven), and has to be on the left-hand side when he’s walking with someone. But I don’t remember mention of obtrusive thoughts and worries, or fears for what will happen if these compulsions aren’t obeyed. Again, I am far from an expert, and I appreciated that it was part of Griffin’s character rather his whole character, but some pieces felt a bit lightly touched on to me.

So, there are some heavy themes in the book – and I think, for a teenage audience, they are dealt with well. Griffin is deeply immature, so his reactions and responses are unsurprisingly emotionally immature. He struggles to understand that anybody but himself can be affected, and even before Theo’s death he can only really see his own perspective. I wasn’t sure if this was all intended to be an accurate portrayal of a teenager or if Silvera’s audience are likely to be on Griffin’s side in everything. Perhaps both. (The audiobook is read well by Tom Picasso, though it wasn’t always very easy to tell the difference between the main cast of teenage boys.)

I thought it was a good book, but perhaps I am a bit too old to read it. The brilliant concept of They Both Die At The End elevated that YA book into something that would appeal to me. Without that, this one was enjoyable but not a stand-out for me. For teenagers, I suspect it’ll be a much bigger hit.

Appointment in Arezzo by Alan Taylor

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I love Muriel Spark’s strange, unpredictable, funny novels – and she seems like a fascinating person, too. So I was intrigued by Alan Taylor’s Appointment in Arezzo (2017) and delighted when my friend Phoebe gave it to me for my birthday last year.

I had an appointment with Muriel Spark in Arezzo, the Tuscan town where Vasari, fabled for his Lives of the Renaissance artists, was born and bred. Mrs Spark’s fax was brief and business-like. “My friend Penelope Jardine and I will come to Arezzo. I suggest we have dinner at the Continentale Hotel (not far from the station) and we can talk then. Daytimes very hot.

Taylor met Spark thus in 1990 to interview her in his capacity as a journalist. But from then on, until her death in 2006, Taylor was friends with Spark and her friend Penelope Jardine (and it doesn’t seem all that likely that ‘friend’ was a euphemism for something else). Appointment in Arezzo is an account of that friendship and his visits to their beautiful Italian home, as well as a sort of patchwork biography of other parts of her life. It isn’t an out-and-out biography, but he address parts of her life in organic tangents – her shortlived married, her estrangement from her son, the difficulties she experienced with an ex-friend who became the model for the ‘pisser of copy’ in A Far Cry From Kensington, and more. In fact, her relationship with her estranged son gets extensive covering, including lengthy quotes from letters. If anything dominates, it is this.

Because of this loose structure, he is able to explore avenues in a casual way. It feels a bit like a long conversation with one of her friends, rather than anything more formal. We are as likely to hear about their reaction to a burglary as we are about Spark’s writing technique. A menu is described with the same interest as her publishing history. Curiously, Taylor is pretty poor at telling anecdotes about Spark for which he is present – one about her time in America becomes a string of ‘then this happened, then this happened’ – but much better at relaying stories that he has heard from her. Or telling his own stories, of seeing the beauties of Tuscany. Spark is often called a Scottish novelist, but she set more novels in Italy than in Scotland, and spent many years of her life there. Taylor sees how crucial that environment is to the novelist she was in this period.

I really enjoyed anything in Appointment in Arezzo that showed the personal relationship Taylor had with Swift, because I am always more interested in a subjective portrait of a novelist than some attempt to rise above subjectivity – but I also loved when we can see what Spark thinks about her own writing:

I wanted to know what she saw as her achievement, her legacy, “I have realised myself,” she replied. “I have expressed something I brought into the world with me. I have liberated the novel in many ways, shown how anything whatever can be narrated, any experience set down, including sheer damn cheek. I think I have opened doors and windows in the mind, and challenged fears – especially the most inhibiting fears about what a novel should be.

Neither Spark nor Taylor explain whether those fears are in the mind of author or reader – or both – but it is a typically Sparkian half-revelation. And I think, in fact, Appointment in Arezzo is a tribute to Spark’s influence over those who know her. If Taylor’s writing style is not like Spark’s, then perhaps only she could have inspired this curious memoir – unusual, resisting traditional structures, affectionate but also disconcerting – and, like Spark’s great novels, somehow coming together in all its curiousness to make something as satisfying as it is odd.

Less by Andrew Sean Greer

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Quite a while ago I was asking Twitter what recommendations I could get for funny, well-written, modern fiction. All the modern fiction I read – which is admittedly not much – seems to be quite serious. So I wanted the twenty-first-century equivalent of all those twentieth-century writers who knew how to be funny AND turn their hand to prose.

One of the suggestions that came up more than once was Less (2017) by Andrew Sean Greer, which has the added distinction of having won the Pulitzer Prize. My friend Tom even lent me his copy – and, even better, it turned out to be a surprise entry for Project Names, where I’m reading lots of books with people’s names in the title. Because our main character is one Arthur Less. I never worked out if this was intended to sound like half-or-less, or if it would require a very particular English accent to get that from it.

As it satirised at one point in the novel, Less is a middle-class, middle-aged white man with sorrows. Though undoubtedly living a privileged existence, he is definitely on the unhappy side of things. His writing career is rather lacklustre (“too old to be fresh and too young to be rediscovered, one who never sits next to anyone on a plane who has heard of his books”), he is single, and as the novel opens he is (a) not recognised by the person organising a sci-fi event he is supposed to chair, and (b) receives a wedding invitation from an ex-boyfriend. In order to avoid the wedding and the unacknowledged feelings it would bring, Less decides to accept all the author engagements that he usually ignores. Wherever they are in the world.

As luck would have it, they all neatly line up and take him across the globe. But he is usually not wanted for his own work, but because – in his youth – he was the lover of a revered, older poet. That seems to have secured whatever reputation he does have.

Usually I find this sort of structure to a novel quite annoying – where it’s just a series of events, without a central momentum or the same set of characters to engage with. I don’t know how Greer makes it so compelling, but he certainly does. I thought Less was very good indeed – and, yes, very funny. Part of that humour came from more orchestrated humour, like Less’s belief that he speaks good German (cleverly rendered in an English translation); a lot is a gentle ongoing satire of the life of a very self-conscious, not very happy writer. Even where he is revered, he realises it is because his translator is an excellent writer. He is simply a mediocre man not quite able to accept that mediocrity – for who, after all, accepts their mediocrity.

And despite this, Less is not the butt of all the jokes by any means. The reader becomes very fond of him. I wouldn’t say I was desperate for a happy ending, but I certainly sympathised with him – Greer has the impressive gift of writing warmly about a character without writing dishonestly about him. I don’t know how much is a self-portrait, other than Greer is, like Less, also a gay writer nearing 50 who hadn’t previously had enormous success with his novels.

The things that happen in the different countries, and the transitory other characters who pop up, don’t feel as important as this central portrait. Indeed, I only finished the novel recently and I can’t remember much of the plot. But I do remember the commitment to a character and a lightly satirical style that must have been very difficult to pull off – and I can see why the Pulitzer Prize would want to reward this sort of assured writing.

 

 

They Both Die at the End by Adam Silvera (25 Books in 25 Days: #21)

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Apparently I’ve reached the age where I no longer remember what I’ve read. Today’s book was supposed to be The Listerdale Mystery by Agatha Christie – a collection of short stories. I kept thinking the stories were familiar. I realised I’d seen one as a play. And then I thought maybe some of them had been included in other collections. I was 60 pages in when I decided to look it up in my reading journal… and, yes, I read it in 2014. I even wrote a little bit about it. Sigh.

So, I put that one aside (as each story was becoming rather disappointing, once I remembered the outcome) – and chose They Both Die at the End (2017) by Adam Silvera as today’s book. Which was sort of cheating, because I only had about 80 pages left to read – but needs must.

I bought They Both Die at the End after reading a review on Gilt and Dust that made it sound really intriguing, and I recommend heading there for a fuller review than I’m going to be able to give in my #25Booksin25Days haste. The brilliant title caught my attention, and the premise won me over. It’s set in a world that is identical to ours – except people receive a phone call on the day they will die, telling them that they have less than 24 hours to live. It might be a minute, it might be 23 hours and 59 minutes. They don’t know. (Has Silvera been reading Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori, I wonder? I am trying to persuade Rachel to let us compare these two books on ‘Tea or Books?’ – watch this space.)

As the novel opens, the two teenage boy protagonists are just receiving the phone call. One is shy, geeky Mateo, who is already sad because his father is in a coma. The other is Rufus, who grew up in a foster home and is now in a gang (albeit a generally amiable one – except when he’s pulverising his ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend, which he is doing when he gets the Death-Cast call). Silvera does a good job of making us like Rufus after this unpromising beginning.

The chapters alternate between Mateo and Rufus, with chapters thrown in from other viewpoints when necessary. They meet through the Last Friend app, and the novel tells of their growing friendship, all while waiting to find out when and how they will die. Like, as Silvera writes in his acknowledgements, a dark game of Jenga.

This is teenage fiction, and I partly read it in preparation for our latest ‘Tea or Books?’ episode on exactly that. So it’s very easy reading, and I expect it would appeal to the heartstrings of early teens far more than to this cynical 33 year old. But I still really enjoyed racing through it – mostly because of the extremely clever concept, which is sustained and explored with great ingenuity. If Silvera has other concepts up his sleeve this impressive, then I’ll probably find myself reading more of ’em.

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

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I knew Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine (2017) by Gail Honeyman had been successful, but I’d no idea how successful until the book stats came out last year. This was a runaway bestseller, getting hundreds of thousands more purchases than the next novel in the list – at least according to the list I read. When my book group chose to do it, I was a little dubious. Other mammoth bestsellers of recent years have definitely been low on quality – i.e. The Da Vinci Code. Well, I was happy to be proved wrong. This is a case where I think the hype was pretty justified.

In case you’re one of those others who’ve yet to read it – the novel is from the perspective of Eleanor Oliphant, who works in finance administration and lives alone. She isn’t very at ease socially, largely because she doesn’t understand the ways that people choose to spend their time. She has very little popular culture knowledge, and tends to speak as a mix between an eighteenth-century novel and a computer manual. (Her dialogue – never using abbreviations; overly elaborate sentences – never quite made sense to me as a concept, but we’ll leave that be.)

It’s also clear that she is not completely fine.

Gradually we piece together that something traumatic happened to her as a child, and it has continued to affect the way she engages with other people. She also longs for a way out of the loneliness she experiences. It was an interesting coincidence that the epigraph was from Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City, which I’m reading at the moment. Living alone definitely doesn’t have to mean loneliness, but Eleanor feels isolated from the rest of humanity. And her attempts to cross this divide are usually frustrated by her inability to understand social codes – and often not particularly liking the range of options in front of her.

This changes when she sees a handsome young singer. She realises she is in love, and destined to be with him. He will be the solution to her problems.

Honeyman takes us on a compelling journey with Eleanor, as she tries to orchestrate ways to get closer to the singer. At the same time, she has made her first friend – Raymond, a colleague who can see past her off-putting traits. At the same time, we continue to learn more about her past. Honeyman gives us enough info to guess and make assumptions, and little enough that we’re desperate to get more answers. It’s really impressively judged. So often, this sort of bread-crumb-dropping is just annoying, whereas Honeyman knows exactly how much info to give, and when. And even when I thought I’d worked it out, I hadn’t.

It’s a relatively long book, but very compelling – I raced through it in a couple of days. As mentioned, I’m not sure all the verbal tics quite made sense, but I did like that Eleanor is an anomaly but not repellent. Plenty of people in the book think she’s being funny when she’s really just answering their questions differently from how they anticipated. Her colleagues find her hard to talk to, but warm to her when she tries different approaches.

Oh, and there is the most wonderful CAT!

For a debut novel, it’s very impressive. I’m intrigued to see what comes next – and what the film will be like. It’s good to be a part of the zeitgeist sometimes!

Bleaker House by Nell Stevens

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As soon as I finished Mrs Gaskell & Me by Nell Stevens (my review here), I bought a copy of Bleaker House (2017) – going on rather a wild goose chase through London bookshops in order to do so. It had been on my probably-read-one-day list for a long time, and I thought I should hasten on that time – and it’s really good; excellent pre-Christmas reading.

I wrote in my review of Mrs Gaskell & Me that I much preferred the sections where Stevens was writing about her own life to those about Mrs Gaskell’s – and so I was pleased to see that Bleaker House is all about Stevens’ own writing exploits. Specifically, the fellowship generously given to all students on her writing masters in Boston, whereby they can spend up to three months anywhere in the world. Many of her fellow students are going to Europe or Asia. She decides to go to… Bleaker.

Bleaker is a tiny island (population: 2), part of the Falklands. Off the coast of Argentina, the islands are an overseas British territory (cf the Falklands War) and about as isolated as you can get. The name is a corruption of ‘breaker’, because of the waves that break there, but it does seem an accurate description of the conditions there. Especially in winter, which is when Stevens decides to go. After a sojourn at the slightly-larger Stanley, she stays in one of two otherwise empty guests houses on Bleaker. The farming couple who divide their time between this and another island are there for the beginning and end of her three months, but otherwise she is alone – with her novel.

The idea was to get away from the world so that she’ll have to write her novel – about a man named Ollie who ends up travelling to Bleaker to track down the father he thought had died years earlier. We know, from the outset, that Bleaker House is a work of non-fiction, not a novel – so what went wrong? (Or, perhaps, right?)

This is a challenging read for any of us who are not doing very well at finishing novel, but an extremely engaging and well-written account of failing to write a book. And, of course, about the unusual experience she has foisted upon herself – not least the lack of food she brought, and dealing without the internet. This section is from her stay on Stanley, not noticeably more modernised than Bleaker:

I will spend the next month in this guest house on the outskirts of the town, presided over by Mauru, the housekeeper. Since it is the middle of winter, Maura explains, there will probably be no other guests. The owner of the hotel, Jane, is away in England. For the next few weeks, then, it will just be Mauru and me.

I ask her about the Internet. “Is there Wi-Fi here?” I know, as I ask, that I sound needy, a little obsessed. I am a little obsessed.

She squints.

“Wi-Fi?” I repeat. “The Internet?”

Mauru looks troubled. “The Internet?” Jane would know, she says. She leads me into the hall, and points at a bulky machine squatting on a table by the door. She looks doubtful as she says, “Is that it?”

“No,” I say, “no, that’s a printer.”

“The Internet?” Mauru repeats, again. She shrugs. “I’m sure it’s around here somewhere. I’m just not sure where.”

In both her books, Stevens goes for an interesting patchwork technique – putting together different stages of her life in a way that works really well (and presumably takes a great deal of thought to avoid feeling odd). So we see the relationship she has recently left, and experiences from writing classes, all intersected with the feelings of isolation and uncertainty on the island. In amongst these, perhaps less successfully, are excerpts from the work in progress – and a couple of short stories that aren’t related. Her writing in these is good, though with a little less vitality than her autobiographical writing, but it’s hard to see quite how they cohere with the rest of the book. I suppose it would be a lot shorter without them – and I’d have complained if we didn’t get any evidence of the work she was there to do. All things considered, the balance isn’t too off.

Stevens is an honest, interesting writer – managing the difficult feat of extended introspection without isolating the reader. Who knows how many more books she can write before she runs out of writerly life experiences to document, but I’m hoping there’s a least a few more to come.