I'm going to resist the temptation to comment on the benighted and depressing farce that constitutes British politics/economics/public life - you can follow me on Twitter for that.
The big news is that I've finished my marking! In reality, this means that I still have to negotiate the complexities of our newly-secure and thus unusable VLE and inevitably discover a load of hidden essays at the last minute, but I'm going to enjoy a day or two of denial. It helps that the standard has been really high: the kids emerged from lockdown with amazing enthusiasm and have produced hugely impressive work. I've also done a couple of events for the city's literature festival - a conversation with Paul Mason on his new book How To Stop Fascism and a conversation between four crime writers (Holly Seddon, Mark Edwards, Sharon Dempsey and Brian McGilloway) on genre, craft and literary snobbery). All good fun, but between those and the thrill of the Six Nations, I was too exhausted to attend anything for fun, which was a shame.
I did manage to sneak in a bit of reading. Top of the list was the English translation/adaptation of Manon Steffan Ros's hit post-apocalypse YA novel Llyfr Glas Nebo which follows in the tradition of Meg Rosoff's How We Live Now. The original book is beautiful, written in an idiosyncratic version of the North Welsh dialect, swapping voices between the Welsh of a mother whose Welsh was always present but tentative, and a boy whose Welsh is largely learned from books in the absence of any kind of community. Even for a learner like me it was hugely effective. One aspect that really worked was the novel's concern with other literature (much like Alison Bechdel's Fun Home): the isolated family learn their world through looted books. Rowenna largely sticks to middlebrow English literature and Welsh novels for teenagers and learners, while her son races through the Bible and a huge number of Welsh-language novels and poetry collections. The English translation, The Blue Book of Nebo (by the author) is moving and hugely successful but the literary landscape is different: the reader can't be expected to pick up on the significance of the Welsh texts referred to (even starting with the book's title. Some of the names have been changed too, perhaps to make reading easier for people unfamiliar with Welsh names, therefore substituting one set of cultural echoes for another. The boy, Siôn, becomes Dylan while his short-lived sister Dwynwen is now Mona, for example.
Anyway, read it: it's short because it doesn't need to be long; it's an intense exploration of mother-child relationships, and it's beautifully written in either language.
Unlike, I'm sad to say, the other collapse novel I read this week: Kim Stanley Robinson's cli-fi doorstop The Ministry for the Future whose cover blazons the claim 'Obama's Favourite Book of 2021'. I am a KSR fan, having enjoyed many of his previous novels and sharing his clear and heartfelt fear that nationalism and capitalism are determined to resist doing the necessary to avoid environmental disaster. This novel just didn't work for me. It alternates between following the Irish head of the UN environmental body of the title as she tries to avert disaster, the voices of multiple protagonists (farmers, victims of climate change, eco-terrorists etc.) and mini-chapters taking different discursive forms explaining the science, economics politics and so on. It puts the case for optimism without convincingly justifying it (though I liked the idea of home-made Semtex-bearing drones being employed to make private jet use suicidal), and the wide sweep made it hard to sustain the traditional person-centred novel form. It's a (much-needed) novel of ideas really, like Cory Doctorow's badly-written but fascinating work. KSR is a much better writer than Doctorow, but this novel just felt too clunky despite its good intentions and scientific accuracy. Still worth reading, but a bit of an effort.
I'm off to my godmother's funeral early next week and have some external examine work to do, so research and reading might take a bit of a back seat, but no doubt more marking will rise from the depths like a misanthropic shark…
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