2000s

Molly Fox’s Birthday by Deirdre Madden

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I’ll be honest, I could happily have gone my whole life without visiting Bradford. With apologies to anybody who lives there, it’s not exactly on a ‘must see’ tourist list of the UK. But it did have the nearest football team to our holiday cottage when my brother and I recently stayed in Yorkshire, and apparently going and seeing twenty-two men try to get a sphere from one place to another place is a vital part of a holiday. Naturally I wouldn’t dream of going to a football match, so that left me with a couple of hours to kill in Bradford.

I did pop into the beautiful (but not especially well-stocked) Waterstones, but most of my time was spent with a book in Caffe Nero – specifically the novel Molly Fox’s Birthday (2008) by Deirdre Madden. It was published in 2008, I bought it in 2009 – and finally, after ten years sitting on my shelves, I read it! And it’s a great argument against those people who suggest you should get rid of books that have been on your shelves unread for years – because it’s one of the best novels I’ve read this year.

The action of the ‘present day’ is pretty sparse. The narrator – unnamed, I only now realise – has borrowed the Dublin home of her friend Molly Fox, and spends the day reminiscing and trying to get on with her new play. For she is a successful playwright, who came to fame after turning an awkward moment as a housekeeper into a narrative about class and friendship. Only her most recent play has not been such a success, and she is starting to doubt herself. Molly Fox, on the other hand, is recognised as one of the foremost stage actors of her generation. Their mutual friend Andrew, an art historian who is doing well on television, completes something of a love triangle, albeit one that has settled into some sort of quiet inaction. And he turns up at the house during the day – which is, of course, Molly Fox’s birthday. Though she doesn’t like to celebrate it.

About the most eventful thing that happens in the present day is the narrator breaking a drug, but the whole novel shifts back and forth in time through memory and reflection. We see Andrew and the narrator meeting as undergraduates at Trinity College, Dublin – and her shock when the Andrew she meets again in England has reinvented himself, changing accent and appearance to distance himself from his upbringing. We see Molly and the narrator first meeting, when Molly acts in a play the narrator has written – and the narrator proceeds to fall in love with the other person in the play. Touches of their friendship over the year build together into a natural, organic sense of their relationship – without saying too much, there is an enormous depth here. We sense the narrator’s love of Molly, mingled with jealousy, uncertainty, protectiveness. The attempts at objectivity that can only be subjective.

When the public fails to recognise her in her daily life it is not just because they see her face only infrequently on the cinema or television screen. It is because she has a knack of not allowing herself to be recognised when she doesn’t want to be. I have no idea how she does this, I find it difficult even to describe. It is a kind of geisha containment, a shutteredness, a withdrawal and negation. It is as if she is capable of sensing when people are on the point of knowing who she is and she sends them a subliminal denial. I know what you’re thinking but you’re wrong. It isn’t me. I’m somebody else. Don’t even bother to ask. And they almost never do. What gives her away every time is her voice. So often have I seen her most banal utterances, requests for drinks or directions, have a remarkable effect on people. ‘A woman with such a voice is born perhaps once in a hundred years,’ one critic remarked. ‘If heaven really exists,’ wrote another ‘as a place of sublime perfection, then surely everyone in it speaks like Molly Fox.’

What I most enjoyed, I think, is the way Madden writes about the theatre – how the plays develop from the perspective of the writer, but also the atmosphere of backstage life, and how the creative process of writing and the public process of reception can clash. I do wonder whether many playwrights are permitted as much intrusion and control as the narrator gets, and it is slightly coincidental that almost every important figure in the narrator’s life becomes publicly notable, but we can forgive those things.

And Madden’s extraordinary strength is captivating the reader through writing about people and their shifting feelings about one another. The writerly voice is careful never to judge anyone, even when the narrator does – if that makes sense. There are no heroes and villains, but fully-formed and complex people. What’s particularly impressive is that this extends to Molly Fox – because she is an enigma even to her friend, and we see her in such fragments. Through the eyes of the narrator, through Andrew’s eyes to an extent, and from the perspective of the avid fan who turns up at the door, disappointed to meet the narrator instead of her hero – though thank goodness she did, as she came bearing a peacock feather, which Molly Fox has a deep-set superstition about.

Moments connected with the Northern Irish Troubles are perhaps tonally a little out of place, shattering the everyday surface of the rest of the novel and its eternal questions of friendship, love, loyalty, faith – but this is undoubtedly a beautiful, extraordinary novel. Any writing that conveys beauty and keeps you hooked, all without knowing quite what makes it so good, is writing worth hunting out. I’ve since bought another Madden novel, and I’m excited to find out more.

Have you read any Madden novels? What would you recommend?

Sixpence House by Paul Collins

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Image result for sixpence house paul collinsOne of my favourite places in the world is Hay-on-Wye. Bibliophiles in the UK have probably been there, for it is a town of secondhand bookshops. Some are enormous, some are very niche, and the whole place is nestled in the beautiful Welsh/English border countryside. There’s that famous festival each year, but that doesn’t really hold a candle to the BOOKSHOPS.

I first went around 2003, I think, which is also when Paul Collins published his memoir Sixpence House. I’ve been ten or so times in the intervening years and I still love it, but each time there are fewer bookshops and more non-bookshops. Reading Sixpence House reminds me of its heyday, when there were 40+ bookshops and you couldn’t visit them all in a day.

I’ve seen plenty come and go over the years, with many seeming to last less than a year. I suppose the internet is the culprit, though it gives with one hand and takes with the other, as far as book-lovers are concerned. But it is still a glorious place – and that’s what brought Collins and his wife there in the early 2000s.

They’d been before, but now wanted to move there for good – or at least for a period. Neither of them are particularly drawn towards concrete, long-term plans. In a manner that wouldn’t feel possible were it not true, Collins manages to get a job at Richard Booth’s bookshop ‘sorting American books’, simply by loitering around and being American.

It’s a joy to read Collins’s love of books. He often goes on delightfully bookish tangents related to novels and memoirs he picks up in this job, or stray thoughts leading to other books. I didn’t expect to find two mentions of relatively obscure novels I wrote about in my DPhil – Elinor Wylie’s The Venetian Glass Nephew and David Garnett’s A Man in the Zoo – but they are among the miscellany of titles Collins is reminded of. You get the sense that living in Hay allows you to live in this tapestry of literature past and present – even if most of the booksellers are interlopers, and most of the locals have more down-to-earth jobs. As Collins puts it, the locals are book movers and the foreigners are booksellers.

They start house hunting. The title of the book rather gives away which house they’ll ultimately decide is their ideal home, flooded basement and all, so the reader isn’t super surprised when various other viewings end up in disappointment. But surprise isn’t the point of Sixpence House; it’s about watching a book lover discover his ideal homeland – and then discover that not all that glisters is gold. Not that there’s a dark underbelly to Hay – simply that life doesn’t always work out quite the way one hopes, particularly if you are trying to bring together many disparate threads.

One of those threads is leaving America. Collins has a British passport, but he is American through and through – and this book is clearly aimed at Americans. Occasionally that made it a bit off-putting to read for this Englishman. I don’t need to be introduced to things from my culture like Countdown with the breathless incredulity Collins relays them. I don’t need to be told that our roads are too narrow, our bedrooms too small, and our teeth too bad. (Though I do always welcome an American marvelling at the wonders of the NHS!) On the flip side, he doesn’t explain American cultural references – what on earth is C-SPAN, for example? (I have Googled it now). On yet another flip side, he mentions Lord Archer in a way that assumes the reader knows everything about him – did that news really get across the Atlantic?

As a memoir, it naturally doesn’t have the central narrative-non-fiction of Collins’ excellent book about William Shakespeare that I read earlier in the year, and I suppose Sixpence House is almost entirely a memoir that also looks a little at the life and recent history of a place. It’s nice to learn more about Richard Booth, particularly after his recent death, and there is an engaging ongoing thread of Collins editing his first book about notable losers, but there is a slight caginess – cageyness? – to the storytelling that makes you wonder if Collins felt entirely comfortable about writing a memoir. And it’s also unclear exactly why they decide to leave, in the end, while in the midst of looking to buy houses. He can draw the parameters wherever he wants, naturally, but I was left with quite a few questions.

Despite that, this is a really enjoyable book. As I say, I think it’s primarily targeted at Americans – but it is also special to those of us who know and love Hay. So if you’re an American who loves Hay but has also not picked up too many details about life in the UK, then you might just be the ideal reader for Sixpence House!

Madame Verona Comes Down the Hill by Dimitri Verhulst

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Earlier in the year, I experimented with different book recommendation websites – you can read my exploits here. My favourite was Which Book, and I had great fun playing with the different sliders to determine what sort of book would match my mood. The results aren’t the usual fare, and they include a lot of translated fiction. I definitely recommend having a go.

I don’t remember which sliders I used to get the result of Madame Verona Comes Down the Hill (2006) by Dimitri Verhulst, though I’m pretty sure ‘short’ was among them. This novella is only 145 pages and there’s with a big font. Definitely up my street! I think it might also be the first Dutch novel I’ve ever read – with thanks to the translator, David Comer. [A commenter has told me that it’s actually translated from Flemish – be more precise, publisher!]

Madame Verona lives in an isolated house on top of a hill, on the outskirts of a small village. ‘As far as anyone knew, it had always been inhabited by outsiders, people from elsewhere, who came here with a romantic view of isolation and paid for it later with large chunks of their mind.’ But there is no sense that Madame V has particularly suffered from her isolation, even though her husband has been dead for more than twenty years. She has the gift of dogs loving her, as the first chapter dwells upon. They have been a constant, and a dog is accompanying her as she comes down the hill.

In terms of plot in the ‘present day’ section of the novella, the title pretty much sums it up. Snow is thick on the ground, and Madame Verona has slowly made her way down the steep hill. And she knows that she won’t make it back to the top. She is too old and too tired. She has, in essence, come down the hill to die.

We flit to and from this present day, but the novella is really a mixture of memories and reflections – sometimes clearly Madame Verona’s thoughts, and sometimes a broader and more philosophical narrator’s voice. These aspects go together well. We see the specifics of the village and of Madame Verona’s marriage – and we hear more general considerations of time and community and particularly age. Here’s a rather lovely passage I noted down:

Silence is often more intense after its return. When a tree accepts its defeat, creaks and capsizes, all life flies up and off. There’s crowing and cawing, branches crack, it rains feathers and down, rabbits flee to their underground shelters. All things considered, the titan’s contact with the actual ground is quiet; people generally expect it to be louder. It’s mainly the rest of the forest that kicks up a fuss and makes a racket. And once the creatures have assessed the damage, silence comes back. Eyes and leaves turn to the light that has never shone so brightly here. A place has come free, the struggle can begin, because the space will be occupied, by something or someone. It’s like that for trees, it’s like that for people.

I might have appreciated a little more about Madame Verona in the present day, because it is a bit sparse there, but this is a very enjoyable little book. It has aspects of melancholy, but Verhulst’s thoughtful exploration of little facets of life mean it doesn’t feel bleak – helped by the beautiful descriptions of the landscape. There is a lovely tone to it that comes through the translation. That translation can be a little clunky (‘She wasn’t brave enough to go downstairs herself. And what if she did, and found herself eye to eye with a person of bad will, how would that lead to a better outcome?’) but that is the exception rather than the rule.

Thanks, Which Book, my first read based on your recommendations certainly went well!

A Time to Dance, A Time to Die by John Waller

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I don’t remember where I first found out about the dancing epidemic of 1518, but I know that I’ve read the Wikipedia page for it several times over the years. And finally I decided I should follow the notes at the bottom of the page, and get a copy of A Time to Dance, A Time to Die (2008) by John Waller. He’s written another book about the phenomenon, or possibly the same book under a different title – I can certainly see why it would fascinate a researcher.

In short, in 1518 France a woman started manically dancing. She seemed to be in something of a trance, and without much knowledge of what was going on. Gradually other people in her community started dancing too. Eventually dozens – possibly hundreds and thousands; accounts differ – of people were dancing alongside her. They danced for days, and many died of exhaustion. Why did it happen?

Waller does a great job of putting it in the context of other similar events from the medieval period. In different places across Europe, contagious dancing would spring up – not that often, and sometimes only with a handful of people, but 1518 certainly wasn’t an isolated incident.

One of the reasons that 1518’s dance epidemic turned out to be so protracted and have so many casualties is that physicians and religious figures actually encouraged the dancing. They believed that the dance was a curse from St Vitus (connected now with the medical condition known as St Vitus’s dance – apparently without reference to the 1518 event). And they suggested that the only way to placate St Vitus was to voluntarily dance. A bit of a Catch 22, no?

Waller is working with fairly minimal historical documents, some of which contradict each other. There are frustrating gaps in what is available. So it’s understandable that the account he gives has those same gaps – and that he has to be a bit repetitive with what he can say. But it’s such an interesting and intriguing event that that doesn’t really matter. Better Waller’s approach than that he tried to make things up or assume too much.

The final chapter looks at other instances of mass hysteria, autosuggestion, and psychological ailments over time. This is the chapter I wish had been extended a bit – because he covers so much so quickly, and with many different cultures, histories, and manifestations amalgamated. And Waller is certainly not of the perspective that there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in his philosophy. I suppose I was not as willing as he was to rule out the involvement of God in some of these experiences. (Which is certainly not to say that I think St Vitus was cursing people – but I also believe not everything in this world can be explained without reference to God.)

I don’t know if I learned an enormous amount about 1518 that I hadn’t already garnered on Wikipedia, but Waller’s book benefits from much better contextualisation and some narrative storytelling spark. If the idea has caught your attention – maybe start on Wikipedia and see where it takes you?

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

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My book group chose The Blind Assassin (2000) by Margaret Atwood for our read this month, and initially I wasn’t going to read it. That was partly because it was SIX HUNDRED AND THIRTY-SEVEN PAGES and partly because I once owned it, and gave it away unread. I didn’t want to buy another copy. But then I was at my friend Nana-Yaa’s house, and mentioned it – she revealed that it was her favourite book, and pressed a copy into my hands. I guess I had to read it. (But it was still SIX HUNDRED AND THIRTY-SEVEN PAGES.)

The main character is Iris Chase, looking back across her long life – though there are various other layers to it. The opening line is brilliant; one of the best I’ve read: “Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.”

Laura is the author of a modern classic, called ‘The Blind Assassin’. It was only published after her death, and has grown in reputation, and Atwood puts large portions of the novel into her novel. Some chapters are modern Iris; some retrace her childhood and adulthood; some are excerpts from ‘The Blind Assassin’. To add to the complexity, ‘The Blind Assassin’ is about somebody creating the novel ‘The Blind Assassin’. Confused yet? Don’t worry, Atwood was an excellent handle on it all, and the reader is never baffled. She manages three different tones/voices well too – so the three layers of the novel feel distinct and confident. (The actual story-within-story-within-story is about a world where boys are blinded by making intricate carpets and then train as stealthy assassins; one is hired to kill a young woman who is to be sacrificed as part of a custom in this world.)

As Iris looks back on her life, we see the alienating and loveless marriage she enters to save her father’s business. We see how her relationship with her sister grows more and more strained, and there is a whole mystery around that.

Positives first: it’s very well written. Atwood has an unforced elegance here that was entirely lacking in The Handmaid’s Tale, to my mind. Some of the characters are wonderfully drawn – particularly Laura’s unkind sister-in-law. And I loved the way that the plot of ‘The Blind Assassin’ (level 2 of 3) explored the creative process of someone trying to balance of art and commerce, often very amusingly. All in all, I did like the book a lot.

But… it was SIX HUNDRED AND THIRTY-SEVEN PAGES. I couldn’t get that out of my mind, every time I picked it up. It sort of soured the reading experience for me, being so allergic to long books. And, like every book I’ve read that is over 600 pages (which is admittedly not many), it would have been better if it were a great deal shorter. I think The Blind Assassin, with its multiple layers, could perhaps have justified 400 pages. But so much of the background of Iris’s life could have been cut without losing anything. There is a lot of padding. And that length puts a lot of pressure on the end of a novel – and the various revelations in this one didn’t feel strong enough to support the weight of SIX HUNDRED AND THIRTY-SEVEN PAGES.

But you have to admire the confidence of Atwood, to call ‘The Blind Assassin’ a modern masterpiece and then write the book herself. At one point it is called Modernist, and it is definitely not Modernist. That was irksome.

So, I liked this. There’s a brilliant 400-page novel hidden in it somewhere. I suppose I should be grateful it’s not a terrible 800-page novel?

An Abundance of Katherines by John Green (25 Books in 25 Days #13)

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You know what #13 means? It means that 25 Books in 25 Days is officially half over already! It feels like it’s been doing super fast – and has, indeed, so far been pretty doable. And almost all of them have also qualified for Project Names – including today’s, An Abundance of Katherines (2006) by John Green.

I started watching John Green’s YouTube channel around 2008, and still watch it now and then – it’s called vlogbrothers, and he alternates videos with his brother Hank. This was my entry to Green, and then I read The Fault in Our Stars a couple of years after everybody else read it. Since then, I’ve bought a few of his books, but had yet to read any others. I decided to pick up An Abundance of Katherines because Rachel and I will be talking about YA fiction on the next episode of ‘Tea or Books?’ and I haven’t read a huge amount.

The main character of An Abundance of Katherines is Colin Singleton (not many Colins in fiction, so that was a plus!) who has dated 19 girls called Katherine. Not Kate, not Katie, but Katherine. And he’s only just leaving high school. As we subsequently learn, some of these ‘datings’ lasted rather less an hour, and started when his age was in single digits – but, to his mathematical mind, there must be some meaning to his having only dated Katherines. And to his heart, there has to be a reason that he is always the one who is dumped. He decides to put together a theorem to explain his relationships – and which will predict who will be dumper and who will be dumpee.

Meanwhile, he and his best friend Hassan head off on a road trip – deciding to stop in a small town which claims to have the burial place of Franz Ferdinand, and where he and Hassan can get jobs at a factory making the strings for tampons. Naturally there is also a gang of people their age that they can get involved with – including Lindsey, who captivates Colin.

There are quite a few boxes ticked along the way, and the novel is quite self-consciously quirky, but in an entirely enjoyable way. I rolled my eyes a bit at Colin’s thought process about how women don’t NEED to wear make up and he PREFERS them that way, but he is otherwise an engaging and sympathetic lead. Once a child prodigy, he is struggling to live up to that – and navigating his unpopularity and uncertainty about his future. Hassan is very funny, much more charismatic, but without a clue where his life is heading. Lindsey is entirely too much a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but it was 2006 and perhaps YA authors didn’t know better yet.

It definitely helped that I have an existing fondness for John Green, and I found this a page-turner, enjoying every moment, even while recognising that I’m not really the audience. Someone half my age would doubtless find a lot of solace in this sort of book – I didn’t learn any life lessons, but I had a ball reading it.

Proust’s Overcoat by Lorenza Foschini (25 Books in 25 Days: #5)

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I’m a sucker for any book that deals with the writer’s fascination with another writer, and I imagine that’s why I picked up Proust’s Overcoat in 2015. It was published in Italian in 2008, and translated into English by Eric Karpeles in 2010, and is (of course) about a Frenchman, so it has been round the geographic houses. And I read it on the train, on the way to meet up with a Canadian – specifically Clare from The Captive Reader.

In the case of Proust’s Overcoat, it is not Foschini who’s obsessed with Proust, though she is certainly beguiled by learning more about him. Rather, her tale is largely about Jacques Guérin and his obsession with Proust. Guérin was the inheritor and manager of a very successful perfume manufacturer, but his private life was spent in gathering what he could of Proust’s papers and possessions.

Foshcini winds together the outline of Proust’s life, chiefly looking at his relationship with his doctor brother Adrian, with the account of Guérin – who knew Adrian, and used this tentative connection to get access to what was left of Proust’s possession after A. Proust’s widow burned them. It could have made a much longer book, so it’s interesting that she chose to make it such a short one. I almost never want a short book to be longer, even when I’m not doing 25 Books in 25 Days, and I was happy for this one to be a snapshot – almost a curio. And threaded throughout is that fur-lined overcoat – from which Proust was apparently inseparable, summer or winter. Foschini’s book opens with her seeing it, and closes with mention of it in the discussion of Proust’s legacy.

That legacy is broad and interesting, and Foschini’s little book forms an intriguing, unusual, and oddly charming corner of it.

Dear Austen by Nina Bawden (25 Books in 25 Days #2)

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When I first picked this off the shelves at a lovely bookshop in Clevedon, I was thinking what you might be thinking – that Dear Austen (2005) is about Jane Austen. In fact, Austen was Bawden’s husband – who died in the Potter’s Bar railway accident in 2002. This short book takes the form of Bawden writing a letter to him, which is used as a device for explaining everything that happened in the aftermath of the crash. I suspect everybody in the UK will be familiar with it – to anybody not, I refer you to Wikipedia!

“So this is to be a personal letter about the events as I see them, telling you what has happened since that bloody accident on 10 May 2002 to all those who loved you and to some of the other stupidly trusting passengers whose lives were ended or destroyed. A year after they killed you, the contractor who was supposed to maintain that stretch of railway track declared a profit of sixty-seven million pounds.”

This is no ordinary book about grief, if such a thing exists. There certainly is grief, but there is also anger and frustration – at the maintainers of the railway who wouldn’t take responsibility; at the government that decided a court case wasn’t in the public interest; at previous governments who had privatised the railways and thus let upkeep slip.

It’s a moving and personal book, held tightly together with Bawden’s authorial control, her eloquence, and her ability to analyse her changing emotions with wisdom and insight. Not the most cheerful of books, of course, but well worth reading.

Looking for Enid by Duncan McLaren

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I love books where the writer discusses how authors have shaped them, or where they find parallels between their lives and the books they’ve read. Lucy Mangan’s Bookworm was fab; Katharine Smyth’s All The Lives We Ever Lived is likely to be on my best books of 2019. So I’ve been quietly keen to read Duncan McLaren’s Looking for Enid (2007) ever since I bought it in 2011 – and Project Names finally elevated it to the top of the pile. Well, colour me disappointed. If you don’t like reading negative reviews, then stop reading now.

Enid Blyton (which other Enid could it be?) was one of the founding authors of my childhood. She was practically the founding author – I was obsessed with her, and read almost nothing else for a handful of years. So a book following her life, and relating the author’s own memories of reading Blyton, was really promising.

We do get some of that. As McLaren takes his friend/maybe more than friend Kate on travels around the country, we learn about Blyton’s marriages and how she behaved as a mother. We marvel at her prodigious output. Much of this is openly taken from Barbara Stoney’s biography, but that’s fine. It’s quite entertaining to see McLaren pop up at Blyton meet-ups, join internet forums, and hunt for Blyton books in charity shops. Much of the format of the book could have worked (with some notable exceptions that I’ll get to).

My main and overriding problem with Looking for Enid is that McLaren is not a very good writer. That doesn’t usually matter as much in non-fiction as it does in fiction, because the interest of the topic can support workmanlike prose, but McLaren’s sentences are flat and awkward. The tone aims at informal and just ends up sounding like notes for a draft. Here’s a representative paragraph:

Well, no, I shouldn’t read it aloud! The librarian would be sure to think I was taking the mickey. The tiny little knock comes from a fairy, of course, and the second and third verses tell how the fairy stays for a glass of milk but is the scared off by the crying of the baby. Charming. I wish I did have the guts to read it aloud. Or perhaps I should read aloud the first verse of the facing poem: ‘Lonely’. In this, the poet goes out into the garden, as lonely as can be, and finds a fairy sitting beneath a chestnut tree. Would that have been the chestnut tree at Elfin Cottage? Anyway, tears were rolling down the fairy’s cheeks because he was lonely too. So the poet played bat and ball with him and they had a lovely time together. Eventually the poet’s healthy appetite meant that she had to go in for tea. She walked indoors, conscious that the fairy at the bottom of the garden was much happier now that he had got a friend like her. Charming, once again!

I made it to the end of the book, but it really is mediocre. And that’s even before we talk about the more unusual additions that profit neither man nor beast. The most obvious is that he ends each chapter with lengthy sections in the style of the Five Find-Outer series, which are mercifully marked out with small pictures in the margin, so I could skip them after a bit. A similar technique sneaks more insidiously into the rest of the book, as he often imagines conversations between Enid and others – usually in the style of her characters’ exchanges – and will flit in and out of these. Then there are images reproduced from the books which he has labelled ‘This is her…’ where the ‘…’ is replaced with different names – such as Bets, George, Father. I didn’t have a clue what that was meant to achieve. Some of his conclusions are bizarrely wrongheaded – like the seemingly genuine belief that Theophilus Goon is an intentional anagram of ‘O Hugh spoilt one’…

He mentions along the way that Looking for Enid is intended to be about her relationships with the different men in her life, but that doesn’t feel an especially dominant theme. And when he gets prurient about Enid’s sex life (and wildly oversharing about his own), I despaired. I was going to quote some of it, but, honestly, why would I put you through that? Besides being present for his sexual self-revelations, Kate – presumably a real person – is only there to say “Oh, do go on” as he puts all sorts of ramblings about Enid into extremely unlikely long-form dialogue. I hope, for her sake, that their conversations didn’t quite go like that.

I chiefly find it a shame that potential was so wasted. And it’s unlikely that anybody else will feel they can write anything similar anytime soon, because McLaren has taken this corner of the market. Frankly, don’t bother – seek out Barbara Stoney’s biography instead.

Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver

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Having surprised myself by how I loved Pigs in Heaven last year, I was keen to read more by Barbara Kingsolver. I wouldn’t have read Pigs in Heaven if it weren’t for A Century of Books, and I was glad to find it still on my shelf – as I’d got rid of a few Kingsolver novels when I moved house. Mostly because they’re usually chunksters, and take up too much room on my limited shelves. Well, I ended up kicking myself for that, didn’t I?

After asking around, I decided to give Prodigal Summer (2000) a go – and I also decided (shelf space still an issue) to listen to the audiobook, read by Kingsolver herself. I didn’t know a lot about it, except that it had multiple narratives. And that it was very many hours long.

Unlike many books with multiple narratives, these weren’t separate perspectives on the same central story. Rather, these are tales of three people living different lives in the same broad area in Virginia. It covers a single summer, transformative for each of them in different ways. They are:

  • Deanna, a woman who lives alone in the mountains, working as a park ranger, fascinated by predators. Her role is to protect the area, and she is very content without human intervention – which is, of course, exactly what she gets in the form of a passing young man…
  • Lusa (pronounced Luther) has recently moved to the area, living with her husband Cole and feeling ostracised by his extensive family. As the oldest brother, he has the most land – and Lusa is used to an urban life, where she was an entomologist.
  • Garnett, an old and widowed man whose remaining passion is cultivating chestnut trees to try to restore the lineage of the extinct American Chestnut. He has an ongoing enmity with his neighbour Nannie, who grows organic apples and hates pesticides.

It is a rich a complex novel. Each of the characters has enormous depth, including most of the many secondary characters, and Kingsolver unfolds this in a leisurely way over the course of the book. I particularly appreciated that Deanna is not a lonely spinster type, and that she loves the solitude – or, rather, the human solitude. One of my favourite moments in the book is the line that “solitude is a human presumption’, because of course she is always surrounded by any number of creatures, large and small.

Even characters who initially seem a little cartoonishly drawn, through the eyes of Lusa or Garnett, grow as Lusa and Garnett learn more about them – whether that be tragedies in Nannie’s past, or Lusa discovering more about her siblings-in-law, nephews, and nieces. I shan’t say the enormous moment that affects Lusa’s journey, but it happens very early on and sets the tone for all of her sections.

So, I loved almost anything which involved more than one (human!) character. Kingsolver is brilliant at the gradual evolving of human relationships (romantic or otherwise), and paces them wonderfully. What I didn’t love so much were scenes with only one person in – and there are a lot of them. Equally, some polemical scenes are rather overdone.

The reason for these introspective scenes is often because of biology. As you may have spotted, all three of the main characters are fascinated – even obsessed – by one element of nature. Lusa the entomologist, Garnett and his trees, Deanna and coyotes. If you are also interested in biology, then this might also fascinate you. I am profoundly uninterested in bugs, trees, or predators. Nothing in science has ever really captivated me, and biology was always bottom of the list. Kingsolver evidently shares these interests, and explores them at length, but I would have preferred more about the human interactions and less thinking about food chains or cross-pollination.

And there are some scenes where one character will elaborate to another why their biological perspective is wrong – the lack of subtlety here reminded me of Kingsolver’s lack of subtlety in The Poisonwood Bible, which had initially put me off reading anything more by her. Deanna, particularly, with her lectures on why you shouldn’t kill coyotes, really began to pall at times. It was narratively interesting to me.

On the other hand, what did work with an impressive subtlety was the interweaving of the narratives. It was very occasional, and didn’t lead to any enormous revelations or substantive changes in the direction the novel was heading, but we gradually learn about the connections between these seemingly distinct lives. It helped give greater reality to this world she’d created.

Ultimately, then, I don’t think this book is ‘for me’ in the way that Pigs in Heaven was. But I think it would be the perfect book for somebody interested in biology and novels with real human depth – and, despite its faults or elements that put me off, I’ll be thinking about those wonderfully realised characters for a long time.