The more work I have, the more books I read for pleasure. This doesn't alleviate any stress or help me sleep any better, but I'm not particularly inclined to do anything about it. What I must do is shelve the recently-read pile as it's currently a health-and-safety issue.
Patricia Lockwood, Nobody Is Talking About This. I like her poetry, her cat tweets, and found her memoir Priestdaddy compelling, hilarious and horrifying. I struggled with Nobody a little though, despite being nearly as 'extremely online' as she is. At heart it's quite an old-fashioned moral tale (not that there's anything wrong with this). The protagonist, whose life closely shadows the author's, finds that being extremely online is exciting, confusing, shallow, overly-judgmental, random and disorienting, damaging her ability to establish stable or deep relationships with people IRL. Then the birth and death of her disabled niece teaches her that genuine and altruistic emotional connections are still available, and the child's brief existence gives her a sense of perspective with regards to the Twittersphere (sorry, 'the portal'). Some of it is really funny, some is moving, but I couldn't decide whether the tone was deliberately shallow and mawkish to represent the supposed discursive effect of being always online, or whether it's sincerely artless. I'm also torn between reading this as an autobiographical work and therefore respecting the author's grief and loss, and reading it as fiction in which case it's another dead-baby-for-instant-pathos piece. I know this makes me sound very callous indeed but didn't we agree after John Green that children+terminal disease = sales/awards is a cynical ploy (see also Wilde's response to the death of Little Nell, who despite being fictional is buried not far from here)? If we're meant to read Nobody as a work of fiction, the 'message' is that a child's death proves that social media are ephemeral in comparison. Well, a) we should be able to work that out anyway and b) while social media posts may individually be insubstantial, the collective whole has had a profound effect on emotion, human interaction, politics, violence and any number of areas of human behaviour. Finally: what about those of us who don't have even healthy children available to remind us of what's valuable? Are we condemned to a life of sterile frivolity? Seems a bit essentialist…
Next book down is Connie Willis's Crosstalk, a romantic speculative fiction comedy which also expresses concern with the emotional impact of excessive social media. Our heroine works in a Silicon Valley phone company which is developing the future of communication: emotional and eventually conversational telepathy. The point of the novel is that our thoughts and feelings are much less coherent and pleasant than what we choose to convey, and that unfiltered access even to one's lovers' thoughts might be a Bad Idea. Absolutely fine, totally agree. But. But but but but but. The mechanism by which we arrive at this revelation is that genuine telepathy is a gift retained only by the pure Irish: those who haven't interbred with all and sundry. Obviously the idea of unadulterated peoples is historical and scientific nonsense that shouldn't be entertained even in a light-hearted rom-com. Then there's the literary effect: terrible. Our heroine is Bridget because of course it is (today is Lá Fhéile Bride btw) and of course she has red hair. She is Irish-American and her entire family are garrulous, Catholic, interfering, speak in the worst cod-Irish nonsense ('ould sod, 'children'), eat soda bread and potatoes all day and Bridget is constantly called Briddey which never happens. Bridey maybe, Bríd definitely but not Briddey. I think most of Connie Willis's novels are absolutely wonderful but this one just didn't work. Maybe, as an African-American author, her dreadful version of Irishness is a satirical comment on white authors' embarrassing representations of African-Americans, but maybe it's just bad, bad writing.
Underneath Crosstalk is volume 2 of Ngaio Marsh's 1930s-40s Inspector Alleyn novels - I'm buying one volume every few months until I've worked my way through them. Alleyn himself, sidekick Sergeant Fox and Watson journalist Nigel Bathgate aren't that interesting - identikit gentleman policeman, working-class subordinate and slumming hack, but the plots are compelling and darker than many of her peers. Marsh also has a gift for brief, piercing description and metaphor which makes me pause and admire. The settings may sometimes be the country house but even when it is, she does something different with it, and she ranges further and wider than most, though theatres seem to be her favourite venue for murder. There's also a sense that she moves with the times more readily than some of the more formulaic detective writers: her crimes emerge from the depths of damaged groups and societies responding to war, hardship or simply change.
I'm sure I've mentioned the other books in the pile before, so I won't bore you further other than to list them, and to mention Lindsay Clarke's The Chemical Wedding which I borrowed - I'd never heard of him or this 1987 Whitbread Prize-winning novel, but it's a fascinating cocktail of Cold War fear, Possession-style switching between present-day characters and mystical ancestors with a dash of magical realism. Absolutely entrancing.
Mary Gentle, Ash: magnificent feminist medieval fantasy with echoes of Byatt's Possession. Maybe 300 pages too long.
Tove Jansson's Art and Pictures: obviously wonderful.
Martin Pugh, Hurrah for the Blackshirts - good history of British fascism, the treason of the Nazi-loving aristocracy and of course the Daily Mail's role in promoting fascism, which it hasn't yet given up on.
Simon Ings, The Smoke - well-written SF with some pointed political ideas.
G Compton, Farewell Earth's Bliss: good old-fashioned SF.
Aphra Behn, Oroonoko and other works: one of the earliest novels, by a woman and addressing the slave trade. Pioneering and troubling.
Nina Allan, The Race: enjoyable speculative fiction set in a degraded, declining Britain. So not very speculative really.
Jo Walton, Lent: I'm a huge fan of Walton's work: she's interested in philosophy, knows her history and writes beautifully across a range of genres. This one shares territory with Adam Roberts' recent literary explorations of philosophical positions with monsters, though his thing is Kant and her's is neo-Platonism.
Michael Arlen, These Charming People: a collection of 1930s short stories by a nearly-forgotten author. The best ones remind me of Katherine Mansfield in tone and quality, but too many of them are slight or rely on a single point or gag.
Anita Brookner, Providence: reminded me why even though she writes pretty much the same novel every time, they're all worth reading. A single sentence of Brookner is worth a whole novel of other authors.
Anthony Buckeridge, Jennings at Large: a curiosity, a real time warp of a comic boarding-school novel, but charming throughout.
Ariosto, Orlando Furioso: utterly bonkers 16th-century epic but also thrilling and wonderful, even in prose translation. My favourite bit was when St John takes one of our heroes to the moon to retrieve Orlando's brain from the pile stored up there.
Thurber and White, Is Sex Necessary?: some good though dated gags but ultimately a little wearing. I don't think it will stand up to much re-reading.
Mantel, The Mirror and the Light: admirable for the scale, which gives her the space for the minutest subtle characterisation and implication. We all know what's going to happen - the art is in the way she depicts the sudden reversals experienced by and the self-deception practised by pretty much every character.
More, Bacon, Neville, Three Early Modern Utopias: Thomas More's is the most substantial and well-known, but Bacon and Neville's are fascinating too, though lacking More's mordant humour.
Lethem, The Arrest: post-modern SF humour. Good fun but I wondered in the end what it was for.
Tom Gauld, The Little Wooden Robot and the Log Princess: aimed at 5 year-olds so the plot is simple and affecting, and the illustration is as always beautiful.
Sally Vickers, Miss Garnet's Angel - a fine addition to the English-in-Venice and emotional-scales-falling-away-late-in-life subgenres
Chips Channon's diaries vol. 1: a monster. All-too-familiar tale in his own unapologetic, unreflective words of the dark heart of the ruling classes.
Ben Aaronovitch's False Value is the latest in his weird-police series, which I enjoy enormously though it's showing signs of wear. The same goes for Jasper Fforde's latest (not pictured), The Constant Rabbit - highly enjoyable and politically urgent, but it feels like the last gasp of the comic novel.
I reviewed Stevie Davies' The Party Wall and Angela Graham's A City Burning in Planet a few months ago. I liked Graham's book immediately but felt that Davies - one of my absolute favourite authors - had come a cropper trying genre fiction with The Party Wall. I feel the need to revise that somewhat: months later I'm still thinking about her central protagonist, the ultimate in toxic masculinity. I'm still not convinced by the plotting, but her description of banal male evil is genuinely haunting.
Uncle Tom's Cabin, Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, Dorian Grey and Moll Flanders were on a module I taught recently - all worth revisiting, obviously.
No comments:
Post a Comment