Reading any Margaret Atwood for the first time is a joy and a delight. Despite my status as a confirmed sci-fi tragic, I have to say that my favourites of Atwoods are her novels that are grounded in realism; I often feel that’s where she really sinks her teeth in. After all, though The Handmaid’s Tale makes its point via the tried-and-true ad absurdum route, and is an important book for all high school-age males to read, it’s sometimes easy to dismiss as an extreme and distant fantasy.
Anyone who followed the Morning News’s Tournament of Books this year (which I assume – possibly naively – includes everyone I know) may recall Nicole Cliffe’s judging round, in which she wrote, of Emily St. John Mandel’s novel Station Eleven, the following:
“Station Eleven turned out to be the fiction equivalent of the 121st episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which Kamala, played by the luminous Famke Janssen, is an empathic metamorph designed to adapt herself to become the perfect mate for an important diplomat. She winds up adapting to Picard, instead — it’s a great episode, you should watch it. And in this metaphor I am Picard, and Station Eleven is Kamala. It would be impossible for a book to be better suited for me. It is unfair that I have been placed in a position to evaluate its merits at all.”
On an Army base codenamed Hotel Echo, in what used to be England, a class full of children is strapped into wheelchairs so tightly that only their eyes can move. They’re young, around ten, but the lessons they learn include Greek myths, calculus, and European history. Melanie, our heroine, is top of the class and has no trouble remembering her lessons. But, she asks her teacher, does the stated population of 1,036,900 include Birmingham’s suburbs, or just the central metropolitan area? “Who cares?” he replies. “It’s irrelevant. The population of Birmingham is zero.”
This book is…what, exactly? It’s not a novel; it’s not poetry; it’s not a short fiction collection. On paper, it’s an assortment of anecdotes, short dialogues, quotations, and other miscellania, given headings and ordered into an alphabetical index. The letter “B” includes “Body”, “Boredom”, “Bowles, Jane”, and “Breakfast”. “F” has “Feminaissance”, “Fetish”, “Fireworks”, “Flu Shot”, and “Forty”. Yet out of these details emerges a beautifully-crafted picture of the life of the book’s central (and unnamed) character. Even though all we ever get is glimpses, we understand he career, her marriage, her struggle with mental illness, her affair, and her experience of motherhood. It’s also fascinating to experience how this book manages to make clear the extent to which life exists beyond the accumulation of details; it’s possible a understand a lot from a little, but impossible to understand all despite any amount of information.
I don’t know whether many of us will be familiar with the central conceit of this novel: it was a bestseller, but in the early 90s when I wasn’t paying attention to trends in literature. I knew of it somehow, and was saving it because it’s pretty much all my guilty-pleasure genres in one: historical fiction detective story, set in parallel universe. In short, it’s an alternative 1964 in which Germany has won WWII and most of Europe is under the rule of Adolf Hitler, who is about to celebrate his 75th birthday.
There must be something in the water around here, because for the second time in a couple of weeks I have a coming-of-age novel starring a protagonist named Katherine. I have to confess that while it seems like this one might be a beloved modern classic, I had never heard of either the author or the novel until First Tuesday Book Club (which is what I persist in calling it despite the name change*) announced it for the March show.
A Vietnam-era coming-of-age novel set in a fictional Long Island town during the summer after Katie, its 18-year-old protagonist and first-person narrator, finishes high school.
This is a new debut novel, and it’s probably the best one I’ve read since “The Shock of the Fall” by Nathan Filer. Continue reading If I Knew You Were Going to Be This Beautiful I Never Would Have Let You Go
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
Oh man, I don’t know what to say about this one. I loved, could not put down, the first (according to my Kindle) 87% of it. It ticks all my geek boxes: a serious and well-written piece of literature that touches on significant world issues but also has fantastical/magical elements, mystery and enigmatic prophecies. To be honest, it’s pretty surprising to me that a non-post colonial book with this much magic in it would be longlisted for the Booker, all things considered. And as a little bonus gift for me, we first meet the main/most frequently-recurring character as a punk-loving runaway teen in the 1980s named Holly. I mean, come on! To misquote Friends, this book could have been called “Be Your Own Wind-Keeper, Holly”! Continue reading The Bone Clocks
In World War II, Richard Flanagan’s father was held by the Japanese as a POW, in the group of around 1000 POWs led by Weary Dunlop. This book, his latest, is a tribute to his father’s wartime experiences. Continue reading The Narrow Road to the Deep North