A Spool of Blue Thread

Anne Tyler’s back doing what Anne Tylers do best: being a nicer, better, more experienced, less pointlessly antagonistic version of Jonathan Franzen. In A Spool of Blue Thread, she brings us another example of what I call the “family epic”: a novel tracing the history of a family – in this case, the Whitshank family, from the Depression up to the present day. Because it’s Tyler, these events take place in Baltimore.

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The Night Watch

Beginning in 1947, this novel traces the lives of four interconnected Londoners back through time into the Blitz. I’m a complete tragic for anything set in this time and place, so it’s no surprise that I ripped through it quite happily.  As an example of Waters’s work, it’s relatively typical, though certainly not her best (probably The Little Stranger or Fingersmith, though I can’t claim to have read them all). The reverse chronological is the perfect mechanism for this particular plot, and it makes me wonder which she decided on first, format or content; I like to imagine her coming up with the story and then, in a flash of 2am inspiration, realising how much more effective it could be if the flux, so to speak, were reversed.

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The Little Stranger

I wanted to reward myself, after several weeks of battling the narrative tributaries of Zia Haider Rahman, with a proper story, properly told. Boy, do I need to be careful what I wish for.

I was reading an online discussion recently about Sarah Waters, in which it was observed that her novels’ resistance of conventional genre boundaries made it impossible to predict how they would end. I had this in mind while navigating the Little Stranger, and I think it’s a pertinent comment. The novel has elements of pure joyful gothicism*, complete with a possible ghost; however, it also encompasses the psychological thriller, as well as the more mundane arena of mid-century drawing-room romance, all with the occasionally-glimpsed feminist undercurrent which has to be expected from Waters. Continue reading The Little Stranger

J

Like every non-World War II new release, this novel is set in a futuristic dystopia. An unnamed nation (presumably Britain; there are a lot of unnamed things in this book) has become a repressive totalitarian regime following events known only as “What happened, if it happened”. Obviously these events are not openly discussed, but the chronology gradually emerges: unrest in the Middle East as catalyst, escalated by social media, and culminating in the large-scale massacre of an unnamed race of people (apparently Jewish, but we don’t really know for sure until very late in the book).

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To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

In the second of two American shortlisters for this year’s Booker Prize, Paul O’Rourke is a dentist, atheist, and Red Sox fan. His atheism is, however, constantly overpowered by his desire to belong to some kind of community, and he habitually dates women from large religious families (WHICH religion doesn’t particularly matter) into which he attempts to insert himself. Then, one day, a patient drops hints about a displaced race of people from Biblical times, the Ulm (Ulms? Ulmites? I don’t quite know). Shortly thereafter, someone begins impersonating Paul in various online locations, posting streams of jargon and obscure ancient texts about the Ulm…ians.

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How to be Both

Both: male and female; dead and alive; watched and watcher. This is a gentle, lyrical novel featuring two central characters, a Renaissance painter and a grief-stricken English teenager. They occupy their own narrative strands, which, though separate, are interconnected, and which can be read in an order chosen by the reader (I lack imagination, so I just started at the beginning).

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Fingersmith

In 19th century England, a rogue enlists the help of a petty thief (the fingersmith of the title) to seduce a young woman of means. It’s hard to say much more without spoilers, because the plot twists itself into something completely new several times before getting to its conclusion. Story is definitely king here (or rather, I suppose, queen). Not that the prose isn’t pretty good: tight but lyrical, with descriptive passages that avoid slowing down the momentum. But the writing is there as a vehicle for the plot, not the other way around. The result is a suspenseful and engaging page-turner which I personally enjoyed immensely. Probably the greatest compliment I can pay it is that when I read it at the gym, I was taken completely by surprise at the machine timing out.