Books, books, books

Around November, I declare a ban on any new/borrowed books and try and finish all the books I’ve started that year. Slow-going, this year, as I was for some reason unable to read for much of October and November, and lots of the unread pile is non-fiction. Anyway, some highlights of the year, below. Another post to follow on what’s on the Christmas list.

A book that lingered in mind long after I’d finished it was Laline Paull’s fascinating The Ice (The Bees is still one of my favourite books of the last decade, and I pressed copies of it into two more people’s hands this year.) The Ice is set in the very near future, about the friendship between two men who each want to save the last bit of the Arctic. The chapters begin with excerpts from the memoirs and letters of others who have been obsessed with Arctic exploration, drawing out the historic roots of our drive both to explore and exploit.

Recently I listened to a LRB Cafe event podcast with China Mieville from about 2014. He mentioned something about “…extruded-literary fiction product which is about the calm, chapter by chapter decoding of a never very mysterious metaphor to clarify what life is a bit like, and the book ends with a ‘yes, that’s so true’, that is very wise’.” We all pretty much know what that is, when we see it. I can’t be the only one hungry for novels about politics, money, the environment, the movement of people and surveillance capitalism. Laline Paull’s The Ice grapples with several of these, and the world of work, which is quite rarely found in fiction, and the deals individuals make with themselves and the world they find themselves in, and whether we have any business holding onto hope.

But, speaking of extruded literary product, I also loved Rachel Cusk’s Transit and Outline, which takes the whole ‘will this middle class marriage survive?’ epic and does something pleasingly unpleasant with it. These books – not quite novel, not quite memoir – prompted discussion a few years ago about the female confessional and collateral damage. I resisted for a while, but became so immersed I had to re-read them to keep the spell going. Now I keep finding quotes from her printed out on scraps of paper around the house. I must have made them at a weird point in the untidy decay / deep clean cycle in my office. From the reviews, I thought she would be floaty and self-rationalising, but my one-line book journal take on Transit was “V.G. Nicely cruel about writers”.

Edmund Gordon’s The Invention of Angela Carter, which two of my siblings rightly surmised I would like for Christmas – there came a point during this read when I regretted it. I considered dropping it as I had Hermione Lee’s life of Willa Cather, when I realised that Pioneers came from Cather’s white nativist yearnings, and this knowledge threatened to re-arrange her novels in my mind. Gordon’s description of Carter’s prolonged adolescence kept reminding me of my own. But narcissism soon gave way to the sense of a woman grabbing and re-working a most interesting life. It is a wonderful biography and made me return to a couple of Carter’s books.

Another writer biography this year was Claire Tomalin’s Katherine Mansfield, a short and perfect look at a thoroughly dislikeable and deeply admirable woman and author.

Daniel Deronda nearly did for me. Two months. His mother, on the other hand, could have carried a 700-page novel on her little finger while dancing across a melting ice crust.

Ian Pears’ Arcadia was a fantastic and thoroughly satisfying time-travel/multiverse yarn, though the last 100 or so pages felt a bit too dense with plot. Ali Shaw’s The Trees, a post-apocalypse set in the UK and Ireland where trees have taken over, was also interesting and enjoyable all the way through.

Pankaj Mishra’s Age of Anger was scary and compelling – and slightly eerie as I’ve been using similar imagery and material on the idea of the ‘global civil war’ in lectures for a few years – but after promising not to be all about Rousseau, a huge chunk of it was indeed all about Rousseau. (your bag, Chris) And it was just so overwhelmingly, suffocatingly all about men.

I read Brian Moore (first cousin, twice removed, or is it the other way around?) – The Mangan Inheritance – and oh my goodness, the sexual politics were repulsive. I know it’s of its time, etc. etc. but even before the horrifying reveal, the relationship at the heart of it is so dubious. Then again, if it wasn’t, I suppose the book wouldn’t be about anything at all. But still. Ugh.

Mary Gaitskill’s Two Girls, One Fat One Thin and Veronica were wholly immersive and I can’t, for the purposes of a quick year’s review, articulate what it was like to live with and, in a small way, in these books for weeks. My book journal just says ‘awe-inspiring’. I need to re-read them, but it will not be soon – think ‘awe’ in all senses of the word.

Re-reads this year included The Third Policeman (the footnotes are surprisingly funny when you’re not charging through them to get back to the story), and some Iain Banks. I miss him being around.

Late-to-the-party reads this year included Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, as good and deliciously Victorian as everyone says, and, oh my God, Kevin Barry’s Beatlebone… Why did no one tell me about it?!

Beatlebone is kind of sui generis, but the dialogue – both internal and external – is among the best and funniest I’ve ever read. I am probably the last human alive who didn’t know about Beatlebone, but this stood to me, as I had No Idea who it was about, till the very end, and so experienced it as a late 1950s kind of book, not a Swinging Sixties one, which felt in retrospect to have been much more authentic. And oh gods he is so funny and right about small Irish towns.

Despite starting the year wishing away the days till George Saunders’ novel came out, I still haven’t bought it. Something ornery happens when I really want to read something, but it’s doing so well it’s endlessly in hardback. Maybe next year, or perhaps in our library which seems to have escaped imminent closure for another financial year, anyway.

Marian Keyes’ The Break was everything I’d hoped for, funny, contemporary and with Keyes’ gimlet eye for hypocrisy and self-deceit leavened by deep and warm humanity. OK, maybe a little longer than it strictly needed to be, but everyone I know who read this basically cleared two days for it and treated it as both a holiday and a gift. A couple of years ago I asked the head of her publishing house why Keyes is “chick lit”. He said it was just the big thing when she came on the scene, so she got categorised as that. Anyone who reads SF is bored out of their minds by the debate about categories and the snobbery they generate just as night follows day, but it still annoys me that people look down on Keyes. Then again, all who love her love her and fundamentally don’t care.

I should trawl the house for orphan book piles, because there were more. But on the whole it wasn’t a brilliant year’s reading. I feel very cognitively overwhelmed by the volume of information I need to keep in my head, what with work, writing and research. Brains really do have capacity limits, or at least anxiety triggers for added volume.

But the poorish year’s reading is also partly down to the kind of year it has been. I wanted Naomi Alderman’s The Power to be nastier and much more vengeful than it was, and finished The Underground Railroad horribly convinced that a country built on original sin cannot but crumble as it currently is. Christodora made me think that if we had a new AIDS crisis now, the sufferers would simply be walled up behind barbed wire while everyone else amused themselves on youtube or kicking the shit out of immigrants/Muslims/insert slightly less feared group.

Just when the need to dream up alternatives to reality is most acute, it seems harder than ever to escape the psychotic daily (hourly) news cycle. The more we need this imagination thing, the less we seem able to access it.