2010s

This House of Grief by Helen Garner

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This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial: Amazon.co.uk: Garner, Helen, Weinman, Sarah: 9780553387438: Books

I hadn’t heard of Robert Farquharson or Cindy Gambino, or their children Jai, Tyler, and Bailey, before I started Helen Garner’s This House of Grief (2014). I suspect the same wouldn’t be true of most Australians. They were at the centre of a tragedy that led to a trial, and a retrial, for murder. This much was clear from the outset: Robert Farquharson drove his three young children into a farm dam and all three drowned. He managed to get out of the car. But was it murder or was it a tragic accident, caused by Farquharson blacking out during a coughing fit?

The initial trial took place in 2007, and Garner was there throughout as a journalist – as she was at the second trial, in 2010. I listened to the audiobook, after hearing Garner’s non-fiction praised repeatedly on the Chat 10 Looks 3 podcast – I’d previously read her novel The Spare Room but hadn’t tried any of the non-fiction. And it is absolutely masterful.

This is the sort of case that would make a compelling newspaper article, or perhaps a podcast episode or hour-long documentary. In Garner’s hands, it becomes something much more granular. Since she is able to devote so much space to the trial, it feels like we are in the courtroom with her. The initial trial took seven weeks, so of course it isn’t in real time, but it sometimes feels that way. Periods of questioning are detailed so thoroughly – say, for instance, the doctor who is brought in to answer questions about whether or not Farquharson could black out from a coughing fit in something called ‘cough syncope’. We go back and forth, back and forth – an aggressive cross-examination, the attempts to discredit his medical credentials, the reactions from the jury. The actual evidence the doctor relates is a small part of Garner’s presentation of the scene. Her eyes are everywhere.

Garner notices things other people wouldn’t – and probably wouldn’t mention, if they did. How often a witness bites their lip, or the look on the face of a juror, or even how bored some people seem during the more technical sections of evidence – ‘the air in the court became a jelly of confusion and boredom’:

The judge took off his spectacles and violently rubbed his eyes. Journalists sucked lollies to stay awake. Jurors’ mouths went square with the effort to control their gaping yawns.

This certainly isn’t an objective book. One of many ways in which Garner’s writing reminds me of Janet Malcolm’s is that the writer is fully present in the reading experience. Garner relates how she takes the trial home with her, how she desperately wants to believe that Farquharson is innocent but is very unsure, and the mental exhaustion of going back and forth. She writes about camardarie (and the reverse) with other journalists, including being berated by some for her supposed light-heartedness.

Her detailed observation does slip into needless cruelty at times. I was startled by one moment – she bumps into a lawyer she used to know, and he says one line. In that time, she manages to say he is looking bad for his age, has lines on his face, is wearing an ill-fitting suit and hasn’t polished his shoes. It’s all so unnecessarily unkind. Like Janet Malcolm, she doesn’t have any sense of what is kind or unkind to say. She is merciless in the way she presents any of the people she sees. Even the grieving mother is described as having put on too much weight. She censors none of her thoughts.

That’s not to say she always highlights negative things. They are just more shocking, in a context where we might expect a certain generosity of empathy. She applauds a female witness whenever she outwits the unpleasant machismo of the cross-examiner, or describes ‘that little buzz of glamour peculiar to the Australian tradie’ when Cindy Gambino’s new husband takes to the stand. Indeed, he sparks one of the asides which make Garner herself such a dominant figure in the reporting:

But, having recently watched a bunch of blokes pour a concrete slab in my own backyard, I was equipped to imagine the effect of this sight on a young woman in Cindy Farquharson’s stifling situation. A concrete pour is a dramatic process. It demands skill, speed, strength, and the confident handling of machinery; and it is so intensely, symbolically masculine that every woman and boy in the vicinity is drawn to it in excited respect.

Somehow, the tragic deaths of the three boys do not get lost in the maelstrom and minutaie of the court proceedings. Garner manages to keep the emotion of their deaths central, without being maudlin, even while we are preoccupied with the minute-by-minute trial. And it is that clash of the absurdities – and some mundanities – of the legal system with the searing emotional pain of a grieving mother that makes this book so extraordinary. To the everyman, it feels ridiculous that this tragic event can become, for instance, hours and hours of analysing photographs of wheel marks, and disputing over whether or not the police officer’s yellow lines next to them are accurate. Garner is too subtle a writer to spell out this disparity. But it is key to what makes her analytical eye work so well.

And her writing can be beautiful, without being self-conscious. Sentences like this tread the tightrope of poeticism and journalism so well: “Judges are men who in the cool of the evening undo work that better men do in the heat of the day.” ([sic] to ‘men’, please!)

I didn’t think I’d find a non-fiction writer as curiously brilliant as Janet Malcolm – but I think Helen Garner is in the same league. If you’re looking for reportage or dry facts or even a kind, considerate piece about a tragedy – this isn’t the place for you. But if you’re looking for something sharp, odd, poetic and haunting – This House of Grief is a masterpiece.

Road Ends by Mary Lawson

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Reader, I am distraught. I have read all the Mary Lawson novels there are to read – which, admittedly, is only four. Given that there are usually long gaps between them, it will probably be a while before I get another in my hands – but I can always reread. And I’m sure I’ll be rereading Road Ends (2013) several times. Unsurprisingly, it’s simply brilliant.

I bought it in a sale at Vancouver Public Library and read it on the plane between Vancouver and Toronto – what a great book for a plane ride, as it totally captivated me for the full four hours.

Like all of Lawson’s novels, the action of Road Ends takes place in northern Ontario – near the fictional town of Struan, and by a tiny community called Road Ends. She takes us further afield than other of her novels, as I’ll get to in a bit. But it starts in the middle of nowhere in 1967 – a short chapter where two young men Simon and Tom (Simon Thomas! me!) are witnesses to a tragedy at a cliff edge – Tom’s best friend Rob takes his own life.

He listened as their voices faded into the rumble of the falls. He was thinking about the lynx. The way it had looked at him, acknowledging his existence, then passing out of his life like smoke. . . It was the first thing–the only thing–that had managed, if only for a moment, to displace from his mind the image of the child. He had carried that image with him for a year now, and it had been a weight so great that sometimes he could hardly stand.

Until this moment the fear that it would accompany him to the end, enter eternity with him, had left him paralyzed, but the lynx had freed him to act. He thought it was possible that if he focused on the big cat, if by a great effort of will he managed to hold it in the forefront of his mind, it might stay with him long enough to be the last thing he saw, and its silence the last thing he heard above the thunder of the falls.

Oh Mary Lawson, what an extraordinary writer you are. Just absolutely stunning. And she leaves us with the mystery of why Rob has done this – who is the child mentioned? What has left Rob unable to escape from this memory?

We don’t get quick answers. Instead, we look at three people in some other timelines – in Megan in 1966 (a year before that opening chapter), and Edward and Tom in 1969 (two years after that climactic event). They are all members of the same large, dysfunctional family. Edward is the father – Tom and Megan are two of his children who are recent adults, while he has various other children right down to an ill-advised newborn. His wife Emily has retreated into caring for this baby, totally abandoning all her other children and seemingly losing her grip on reality.

At the heart of this family is a toxic assumption that only a woman can look after the young children. In 1969, with Emily incapacitated by all-consuming obsession with a baby, nobody is caring for the other young children. There is no food in the house, no clean clothes, and no structure or even conversation. None of the men quite express that it isn’t a man’s job, but it is the underlying belief – and Lawson is too subtle a writer to rail against this patriarchal nonsense in the narrative. She simply shows us how attitudes in rural 1960s Ontario are destroying a family.

Things are no better among the adults – Tom and Edward barely speak. Edward is a bank manager preoccupied with his mother’s diaries and his own tragic, violent past – desperately trying not to turn into his father, and missing that he is becoming a terrible parent in a different way. His is the only one of the three voices we hear in the first person – while he is emotionally unavailable to everyone, we do get access to his stumbling attempts to understand himself and his history, and how he has ended up where he is.

Just for the record, I did not want any of this. A home and a family, a job in the bank. It was the very last thing I wanted. I am not blaming Emily. I did blame her for a long time but I see now that she lost as much as I did. She proposed to me rather than the other way around, but she is not to blame for the fact that I said yes.

That phrase they use in a court of law – “The balance of his mind was disturbed” – sums it up very well. I married Emily while the balance of my mind was disturbed.

His son Tom, meanwhile, is in deep grief for Rob and has isolated himself from the world. He is a talented scientist, but has decided to stick to snow ploughing, where he needn’t interact with anyone. Lawson showed in Crow Lake that she is exceptionally good at families who are close-knit (even when they are stubborn and intractable) – she is equally good at families who dislike and distrust one another.

Fans of A Town Called Solace will remember one of the main characters beginning to thaw and get to know the community. While he is a newcomer to town, I also loved seeing Tom’s own thawing. He knows the place inside out, but not all the people – and it is a talkative young woman and her long-suffering brother who begin to bring him back to life. Spoilers: readers of Crow Lake will already know these two – it was such a delight for me to realise who they were, and encounter them a few years after the events of Lawson’s first novel.

So, where is Megan? She has been de facto mother to her younger brothers – but, as we see in the 1966 timeline, she has boldly decided to move to London. Not London, Ontario, but London, England. Despite never having been to a city before, she needs to escape her family and home and moves to stay with an old friend – only, when she gets there, she discovers the friend no longer lives at the address she has. She doesn’t even live in the country.

Megan is taken in by the houseshare nonetheless – she could scarcely be more naïve in some ways, but in other ways has lived a far fuller life than any of her new friends. The capabilities she has had to learn set her off on an unexpected career – and she begins to emerge from the shadow of her family. Over her years in London, she grows to find her group of people – including the handsome man across the corridor, whom she becomes infatuated with. But that, of course, is not a smooth journey. (Lawson moved to England around the same period and age as Megan, and I’d be interested to know how much autobiography seeps in here.)

Wow, what a novel – what characters. Because they are spread out, and there is so much sadness at the heart of the book, I don’t think it will call me back quite as often as Crow Lake. But, like all Lawson’s novels, it is a masterpiece. Her ability to balance brilliant writing, detailed characters who feel absolutely real, and compelling, page-turning prose sets her apart from almost every living writer I’ve read.

So, c’mon Mary Lawson, I need another novel before too long. Please!

All Roads Lead To Austen by Amy Elizabeth Smart

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I can’t remember where I first heard about All Roads Lead To Austen (2012) by Amy Elizabeth Smart – but it certainly ended up on my wishlist at some point, and my parents kindly gave it to me for Christmas a couple of years ago. What a treat it is. In the apparently unending world of books about Jane Austen, I will always have time for unusual memoirs relating to her books – and this one, in which Smith tours various Latin American countries teaching Austen’s novels, is exactly the sort of hook that reels me in.

What is it about Jane Austen that makes us talk about the characters as if they’re real people? People we recognise in our own lives, two centuries after Austen created them? When my first development leave from the university rolled around, I decided it was time for me to try my own Austen project, just like my students do. Something creative, something fun. So I got to wondering: the special connection that people feel with Austen’s world, this Austen magic – would it happen with people in another country, reading Austen in translation?

And that is exactly the project that Smith undertakes. She is an academic at an American university, so she is approaching the task with a great deal of knowledge – not simply the amateur’s enthusiasm. But along the way she will be mixing the two with the people she meets: some are people studying from a literary background, while others are juggling reading the book with three jobs or full-time childcare. Smith’s book assumes we are already familiar with the plots of all of Austen’s novels – but are ready to question our assumptions about them, and how believable we think the characters and plots could possibly be today.

In the course of Smith’s travels, she goes to Guatemala, Mexico, Ecuador, Chile, Paraguay, and Argentina. Since she is travelling on her own, this does mean we have to get used to a new cast of characters ever time she lands in a new country. She does a very good job at making us feel familiar with the most important people in each location, and I didn’t find that I was confusing the different groups of readers.

While Smith is an academic, this is a book for anyone – and I appreciated that as much time was given to logistics and personal hopes as we get in the actual discussions and reflections on Austen’s novels. That might mean panicking that nobody is going to join the group, or being frustrated that someone dominant has decided they’re going to read a different book altogether, or how to manage her own expectations when the local cultural norm is to accept every invitation even if you have no intention of going. Smith manages to maintain a clear respect for each different culture she visits, never suggesting the American way is superior, while also conveying how comfortable she does or doesn’t feel in each place.

Sometimes she is literally uncomfortable – along the way, Smith has a number of health incidents that are also documented (including her unfortunate experiences with some of the healthcare professionals along the way – and much better experiences with others).

But fear not – we are not short-changed when it comes to Austen chat. Many of the groups of readers want to talk about the characters (and some have only seen an adaptation), whereas other groups are more interested in literary technique. Smith records all the conversations, so is able to reproduce them. Here’s a little bit from Ecuador:

“I like him just the way he is,” Meli insisted, unintentionally echoing Darcy’s literary descendant Mark Darcy of Bridget Jones fame. “I like him from the first moment.”

“But not that Bingley, ugh!” Leti grimaced at the thought of Jane’s gentle suitor.

“He’s a big nothing,” Fernanda agreed.

Wow! I’d never heard Bingley so maligned. I was reminded of the harshness of the women’s judgements in Guatemala on men perceived to be weak.

“The one that’s really the worst,” offered Meli, “is that cousin, Collins.”

Leti rolled her eyes and groaned. “All of his pontificating, his tackiness! Horrrrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiible!“

A colourful list of insults followed. Collins is un tarado (a cretin), un blando (a coward), un fofo (a wimp) – in short, ridículo.

It’s all great fun to read. And in each country, Smith asks whether they think the events of the novels could happen today – and gets an intriguing range of answers. She also asks for any early women writers in each country, often getting told household names who aren’t well-known outside of the country in question. I certainly came away with a wide range of possible books to try.

Smith is such a likeable narrator and has clear affection and respect for everyone she meets. There is even a little romance along the way for Smith, which lends the book something unexpected and rather delightful to follow. I thoroughly enjoyed my time with this Janeite – an unusual and fun idea for a book carried out beautifully. Jane would have enjoyed it, and you can’t give a greater compliment than that.

In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

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Sorry I’ve been quiet recently – I got Covid, and while it wasn’t a bad bout of it, I have been quite low on energy since and have spent my evenings watching TV rather than blogging.

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado | Waterstones

But I’m back with a review of an audiobook I listened to – and one of the best books I’ve read this year. Published in 2019, I’m rather late to the party – so perhaps you already know In The Dream House, a memoir by Carmen Maria Machado. But ‘memoir’ doesn’t do justice to the innovation that Machado brings to this patchwork world – quite unlike anything I’ve read before, though the nearest comparison I can think of is another unusual and brilliant memoir I’ve read this year, Joan Givner’s The Self-Portrait of a Literary Biographer, which follows a slightly similar fragmented style.

At the heart of In the Dream House is an abusive relationship had years earlier with a woman whom Machado calls solely ‘the woman in the dream house’. Queer abusive relationships are, as Machado explores, hardly ever written about – indeed, barely even recognised as possible by many people. Particularly when both partners are women, it goes beyond all the stereotypes of abusive relationships that people are familiar with from screen and page. It is all the more alienating.

The bare bones of her story are these: that she met a woman who was in an open relationship with another woman, and became another partner. Eventually, they decide to become exclusive – and it is Machado’s first relationship with a woman. They have deep intimacy and some wonderful experiences. But The Woman in the Dream House has a dark side that erupts now and then. The abuse is seldom physical – but there is constant controlling, and anger that is unpredictable and unappeasable. The Woman in the Dream House accuses Machado of sleeping with any man or woman she mentions. She screams the most appalling abuse at her and then claims not to remember. Some of the most chilling moments are when the anger comes with a terrifying calmness – like her whispering that Machado is the most selfish, terrible person she’s ever met when she makes an innocuous comment, or when she refuses to let Machado share the driving on a long car journey even when The Woman is so tired that Machado fears they will crash. The Woman deliberately drives dangerously fast when she sees Machado is scared.

Abusers do not need to be, and rarely are, cackling maniacs. They just need to want something and not care how they get it.

Machado shows us the silencing terror at the heart of this sort of abusive relationship so brilliantly. It is not the sort of memoir that lingers on horrible details, but it does make you feel breathless with fear nonetheless. Because the relationship seems so inescapable. To outsiders, there is little to suspect. The Woman is usually on good behaviour with others – and has, of course, used the usual ploy of separating Machado from her friends and her safety network.

Machado could have written a straight-forward memoir of this time and it would have been very compelling. But what makes In The Dream House even more brilliant is the unconventional way in which she tells us – as I hinted at in that comparison with Givner’s book. Each chapter is titled ‘Dream House as’ something – a dizzying array of things, from the simple (‘Dream House as Confession’, ‘Dream House as Romance Novel’) to the more unexpected (‘Dream House as Hypochondria’, ‘Dream House as Thanks, Obama’). Many of them are genres or literary styles – though the chapters are not told in these styles, necessarily. The title is often very loose, but frames a new bit of the puzzle. Machado shares memories or stories out of chronology – and many of the chapters are reflections on literature or philosophy or history that weave in and out of personal recollection. A lot is about queer history and reception. For instance…

I think a lot about queer villains, the problem and pleasure and audacity of them. I know I should have a very specific political response to them. I know, for example, I should be offended by Disney’s line-up of vain, effete ne’er-do-wells (Scar, Jafar), sinister drag queens (Ursula, Cruella de Vil), and constipated, man-hating power dykes (Lady Tremaine, Maleficent). I should be furious at Downton Abbey’s scheming gay butler and Girlfriend’s controlling, lunatic lesbian, and I should be indignant about Rebecca and Strangers on a Train and Laura and The Terror and All About Eve, and every other classic and contemporary foppish, conniving, sissy, cruel, humorless, depraved, evil, insane homosexual on the large and small screen. And yet, while I recognize the problem intellectually—the system of coding, the way villainy and queerness became a kind of shorthand for each other—I cannot help but love these fictional queer villains. I love them for all of their aesthetic lushness and theatrical glee, their fabulousness, their ruthlessness, their power. They’re always by far the most interesting characters on the screen. After all, they live in a world that hates them. They’ve adapted; they’ve learned to conceal themselves. They’ve survived.

At first, when I saw that In the Dream House had this fragmented, multidisciplinary approach, I was a bit nervous. The words of the prologue didn’t encourage me – it felt a bit overwritten, a bit self-consciously literary. But that impression disappeared quickly. Machado takes an experimental, innovative approach and makes it as compelling as a thriller. She finds the perfect balance between literary writing and searingly honest storytelling. And it is a fine balance, extremely difficult to achieve with the assured success that Machado shows.

I was wary about going into In the Dream House for various reasons – would I find it too scary, would I find it too opaquely written – but I am so glad I gave it a chance. It’s an extraordinary book, and one of the best memoirs I’ve ever read.

Artful by Ali Smith #ABookADayInMay No.27

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I haven’t read any Ali Smith before, and I got sent Artful as a review copy when it was published in 2012 – and I decided on a whim this morning that it would be today’s book. And what a strange book it is.

It is based on four lectures that Ali Smith apparently gave at Oxford University (and since I was still a post-graduate student at Oxford in 2012, presumably I could have found my way to attending them) – On Time, On Form, On Edge, and One Offer and On Reflection. But this is not a collection of those essays. Or, rather, it is not just a collection of those essays. It hovers somewhere between fiction and non-fiction – and opens with a woman who is mourning their partner. It has been a year and a day since they left (originally I thought they’d just gone – but it becomes clear that they have died). (By the way, I’m writing ‘they’ because I’m not sure if we know if it’s a man or a woman – though I may have just inadvertently glided past pronouns.)

The narrator goes into the study. “I looked at your books, I took one of your books off a shelf at random – my study, my desk, my books now.” And the book is Oliver Twist. The title Artful suddenly takes on a new dimension when we realise it can refer to the Artful Dodger. And the narrator decides to re-read the book for the first time since university.

And then… the partner has come back. Or have they?

You were standing in the doorway. You coughed. The cough was you in a way that couldn’t not be you.

You were covered in dust and what looked like bits of rubble. Your clothes were smudged, matted, torn. You were wearing that black waistcoat with the white stitching that went out of fashion in 1995, the one we gave to Oxfam. Your skin was smudged. Your hair was streaked with dust and grit. You looked bruised. You shook yourself slightly there on the landing and little bits of grit and rubble fell off you, I watched some of it fall down the stairs behind you.

I’m late, you said.

And somehow all of this morphs into the essays. In the world of the book, the content of the essays has been written by the dead partner – and the narrator is reading them, occasionally (but not as often as you might think) responding to and commenting on them.

The essays themselves are much more what you’d expect. Well, at least what you’d expect if you’ve been to a lot of literature lectures – they are the sort of reflections on literature that tread the line between general and specific, and take in a wide world of books from across languages and centuries. There’s far too much content to even give an idea of it, really, and I did enjoy Smith’s way of moving from idea to idea, encompassing so much. At times it does become little more than a series of quotations with a word or two of commentary, often linking to the previous and next quotations only tangentially. There were certainly times where I wish she’d lingered more on one thought, fully exploring it before going onto another.

I think ‘On Time’ was my favourite of the four sections, perhaps simply because it was the first. And here’s a section of it:

The difference between the short story form and the novel form is to do, not with length, but with time. The short story will always be about brevity, ‘“The shortness of life! The shortness of life!”’ (as one of Mansfield’s characters in her story At the Bay can’t help but exclaim). Because of this, the short story can do anything it likes with notions of time; it moves and works spatially regardless of whether it adheres to chronology or conventional plot. It is an elastic form; it can be as imagistic and achronological as it likes and it will still hold its form. In this it emphasizes the momentousness of the moment. At the same time it deals in, and doesn’t compromise on, the purely momentary nature of everything, both timeless and transient.

The story can be partial, can be a piece of something and still hold its own, still be whole. The novel, on the other hand, is bound to and helplessly interested in society and social hierarchy, social worlds; and society is always attached to, in debt to, made by and revealed by the trappings of its time.

Maybe a book with as many ideas in it as Artful shouldn’t really be read in a day, and I should have spent more time with each thought, rather than moving onto the next. There’s also the undeniable fact that I have read huge amounts of literary theory and literary criticism in my time, and most of it is not very engaging. Smith’s is certainly a cut above the majority, but perhaps I have reached my lifetime quotient of what I find interesting in this genre? Well, I did find a lot of Artful interesting, but often with a sort of jaded “Yes, I see; I’ve read this sort of idea before. I’ve heard an undergraduate talk about it earnestly at a seminar. I’ve witnessed the novel form be dissected in clever ways over and over.” (I do recognise that I am writing this on a book blog, but there is a big difference between a reader’s book reviews and a work of literary criticism, and often I think the main difference is the point behind them.)

If I came to the ideas in Artful here for the first time, then I suspect I’d have been blown away. As it was, I did appreciate a lot but with a certain weariness. And I preferred the more fictional sections – the two characters she creates are very much enigmatic, but also intriguing and compelling. I enjoyed finding out more about them, even in the shadowy way they are revealed.

Did the merge of fiction and non-fiction work? I think so, more or less. It’s unusual and perhaps unnecessary, but does make Artful a more interesting and characterful book than it would otherwise be. Or perhaps just more artful?

The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka #ABookADayInMay No.19

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The Buddha in the Attic: Julie Otsuka: Amazon.co.uk: Otsuka, Julie: 9780241956489: Books

I think I picked up The Buddha in the Attic (2011) at a day that Penguin ran for book bloggers back in 2013 and it has survived numerous culls of my shelves since then on account of its brevity. It’s only 129 pages, I thought. It doesn’t take up much room on the shelf, and surely I’ll manage to read it one day. Ten years later, that day has come!

The Buddha in the Attic is a historical novel about a time between the World Wars where Japanese women would be shipped from Japan to America to meet with their husbands. Not people they had married back in Japan, but new husbands – Japanese men who had already emigrated; people they had exchanged letters and photographs with, each side selling their end of the bargain. The man would make promises about economic opportunities; the woman would talk about her capabilities and beauty. The photos, they learned, were often old or even of other people. The letters were written by other people, filled with lies.

In the first chapter we are aboard the boat, and the opening paragraph shows the technique that Otsuka uses that makes this novella so unusual and, to my mind, so successful.

On the boat we were mostly virgins. We had long black hair and flat wide feet and we were not very tall. Some of us had eaten nothing but rice gruel as young girls and had slightly bowed legs, and some of us were only fourteen years old and were still young girls ourselves. Some of us came from the city, and wore stylish city clothes, but many more of us came from the country and on the boat we wore the same old kimonos we’d been wearing for years-faded hand-me-downs from our sisters that had been patched and redyed many times. Some of us came from the mountains, and had never before seen the sea, except for in pictures, and some of us were the daughters of fishermen who had been around the sea all our lives. Perhaps we had lost a brother or father to the sea, or a fiancé, or perhaps someone we loved had jumped into the water one unhappy morning and simply swum away, and now it was time for us, too, to move on.

Throughout the book, the pronoun is always ‘we’. Even if the incidents are clearly individual and unique, the narrator will say either ‘we’, ‘some of us’, or, occasionally, ‘one of us’. There are sections that go through so many different scenarios with a lilting, poetic repetition.

Home was a cot in one of their bunkhouses at the Fair Ranch in Yolo. Home was a long tent beneath a leafy plum tree at Kettleman’s. Home was a wooden shanty in Camp No. 7 on the Barnhart Tract out in Lodi. Nothing but rows of onions as far as the eyes can see. Home was a bed of straw in John Lyman’s barn alongside his prize horses and cows. Home was a corner of the washhouse at Stockton’s Cannery Ranch. Home was a bunk in a rusty boxcar in Lompoc. Home was an old chicken coop in Willows that the Chinese had lived in before us.

And so on and so on. Otsuka’s aim is to give the reader a whole sweep of experience – a whole generation of these young Japanese women. They mostly suffer hardship, whether that be thankless jobs, violent husbands, racism from white Americans, or simply a sense of hopelessness. At no point does an individual emerge as the heroine – rather, the heroine is the whole group. It is an intriguingly collectivist point of view, where almost every novel is an exercise in individualism. What an ambitious undertaking and, to my mind, it works really well.

I had to reconsider what I expected from a fictional narrative. Almost nobody is named, and there is no arc of individual narrative, and so I had to embrace a structure made of infinite variety. And somehow it is still compelling. I’m not sure it would have worked over a much longer book, but at novella-length it is a real success.

Foster by Claire Keegan #ABookADayInMay No.16

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Foster by Claire Keegan | Waterstones

Today’s book is so short that it is almost a short story – 88 pages, or an hour and half as an audiobook (which is how I read it – indeed, since I listen to audiobooks fast, it was a little under an hour). So many people have raved about Foster (2010) in the past couple of years that I couldn’t help downloading it when it was on offer.

This is a thoroughly Irish novella, Irishness seeped through every sentence – whether that be depictions of the County Wexford countryside, the turns of phrase like ‘It was a cottage she lived in’, or the open casket at a funeral that takes place halfway through. It is 1981 and the unnamed narrator (another one!) is a young girl who has been deposited with John and Edna Kinsella. They live on a farm in County Wexford, and she has come from Country Carlow – not knowing exactly why she is there, or for how long, or indeed if she is ever going to go home. Her father leaves with a warning not to fall in the fire, and departs with no kinder word of affection. He has also forgotten to leave any of her clothes – but the Kinsellas have some that she can use, until they can buy her some more.

Keegan’s novella is a masterclass in what is not said. We don’t learn a huge amount about the home that she has left, except that it is busy, crowded and not a particularly kind place to live. The narrator is used to incident. There is no space for rest, for simply being. And even while the Kinsellas’ farm is being productively run, there is peace and there is calm.

And so the days pass. I keep waiting for something to happen, for the ease I feel to end – to wake in a wet bed, to make some blunder, some big gaffe, to break something – but each day follows on much like the one before.

There is a twist in the story, though it is one that simply deepens our understanding of character. It isn’t played to jar the reader; the plot is not as important as the people.

This is a beautiful little book, showing in not-many pages the richness of human kindness, the complex simplicity of country life, and the transformation that can take place when love is gently, generously shared.

People who got Stuck into this Book:

“Foster is a sublime novella, a masterclass in the ‘less-is-more’ school of writing – a poignant story, beautifully told.” – Jacqui Wine

“It is a very well written story, subtle and nuanced with a clear focus on the characters. I think I expected more from it, though.” – The Mookse and the Gripes

“Foster is as lyrical as poetry and has the depth of a full-length novel, yet it’s very brevity is what makes it so impressive.” – 746 Books

 

The Forensic Records Society by Magnus Mills #ABookADayInMay No.14

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The Forensic Records Society: Amazon.co.uk: 9781408878378: Books

I love Magnus Mills and have been reading him for years, and have a few on the shelves that I thought would be likely to come up in my May reading. The Forensic Records Society (2017) was a gift last year from my friend Mel, who also introduced me to Mills’ writing in the first place.

The narrator (I think unnamed, though all the men’s names in this book are so bland as to be deliberately forgettable) is chatting one night with his friend James. They are listening to a record that they enjoy but is no longer in the limelight, and decide that probably nobody else in the world is listening to it – one thing leads to another, and they come to a decision about bringing together record-lovers. Or, at least, James has the idea:

“We could form a society for the express purpose of listening to records closely and in detail, forensically if you like, without any interruption or distraction. There would be regular gatherings, and membership would depend on some kind of test to make sure people are genuinely interested.”

“You mean a code of conduct?”

“Certainly,” said James. “We don’t want any charlatans.”

They decide to hold the inaugural meeting in the backroom of the pub. Landlord George, affable and largely unquestioning, is happy for them to hold it there rent-free for a trial period. The only rules of the Forensic Records Society are to turn up on time, bring three records (not LPs) and then listen to them in turn, without comment or judgement.

The group is small at first – and one man, in a long leather coat, is turned away because he arrives a few minutes late. James is firm on that front. The others listen to their records, not making comments or judgements, though one of the men (Chris) often quotes one of the lines from a song that seems to summarise it. Another (Mike) is fixated upon how long each record is, and considers three minutes the perfect length – almost as though it were a holy grail. Curiously, when they leave the room, more time has passed than the number of records played would allow for.

There are a few things that threaten this small group of like-minded men. One is James’s insistence on rules – and using the narrator as a lackey to enforce them, including shutting out the barmaid one evening. The other is the rival groups that start up.

The first is formed by that rejected man in the leather coat – a Confessional Records Society, where people go one at a time to play a record and make a confession. Most seem to leave in tears of joy, though the Forensic Records Society’s attempts to infiltrate don’t go to plan. But that’s not the final rival group that emerges in this ordinary pub, much to the delight of landlord George with his eye on the profit margin.

Along the way, Mills incorporates many names of records – most of which I hadn’t heard of, though there is a playlist you can use alongside. The first edition of The Forensic Records Society (pictured above) even came in the shape of a record, though my paperback is a little more plebian. The text suggests that there is a wide range of styles, artists, and eras featured, though looking through the playlist it definitely leans towards the taste of middle-aged men – which certainly fits the characters.

As so often with Mills, there is a lurking sense of menace throughout. He is so careful never to overstate anything, and it’s the reader who brings all that foreboding to the novel. It’s just about a bunch of blokes listening to records – on the surface. But you can’t help think that it’s about something else.

There are always analogies and parallels floating about when you’re reading Mills – is it all about the October Revolution, as one reviewer suggests? Or is it about religious schisms? Or cults? Mills is too clever to ever let you pin anything down. He is a master of short, sharp dialogue that doesn’t say much. But he simply invests the everyday with an uneasiness that makes each of his novels feel quite powerfully dark – unsettling in the best possible way.

It’s always a discomforting pleasure to spend time with Mills, and there is nobody like him.

History Is All You Left Me by Adam Silvera #ABookADayInMay No.11

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History Is All You Left Me: The much-loved hit from the author of No.1 bestselling blockbuster THEY BOTH DIE AT THE END! a book by Adam Silvera.

Today I finished the audiobook of History Is All You Left Me (2017) by Adam Silvera. I first came across his writing when I stumbled upon the title They Both Die At The End. It shows the power of a good title, because that made me read and race through the book – and, in fact, I’ve recently read its prequel too. I loved the premise and the inventive world he built. In History Is All You Left Me, though, we are in a very-much-entirely-real world.

Silvera writes young adult books, most (all?) with queer teenagers as their heroes. This book is no different – it is told by Griffin, a 17-year-old whose first love, Theo, has recently died. They were best friends for a long time before realising that they were (a) gay and bi respectively, and (b) very into each other.

Things are even more complicated than that, though, as Theo and Griffin weren’t dating when Theo died – he was, in fact, away at college and dating a guy called Jackson. The book jumps between ‘history’, i.e. the times when Theo was alive and the journey through their relationship, and the present day. In the present day, Griffin is reluctantly getting to know Jackson. He is very protective over his own grief, and doesn’t feel that Jackson has a right to feel the loss as deeply – though gradually his opinion changes.

There are a few twists along the way, and some things that aren’t twists but just aren’t revealed at first – such as the way in which Theo died – so I shan’t mention them yet.

The other major element of the novel to mention is that Griffin has OCD. I don’t know enough about it to comment in depth, but it did seem like he had compulsions rather than obsessions. He hates odd numbers (except seven), and has to be on the left-hand side when he’s walking with someone. But I don’t remember mention of obtrusive thoughts and worries, or fears for what will happen if these compulsions aren’t obeyed. Again, I am far from an expert, and I appreciated that it was part of Griffin’s character rather his whole character, but some pieces felt a bit lightly touched on to me.

So, there are some heavy themes in the book – and I think, for a teenage audience, they are dealt with well. Griffin is deeply immature, so his reactions and responses are unsurprisingly emotionally immature. He struggles to understand that anybody but himself can be affected, and even before Theo’s death he can only really see his own perspective. I wasn’t sure if this was all intended to be an accurate portrayal of a teenager or if Silvera’s audience are likely to be on Griffin’s side in everything. Perhaps both. (The audiobook is read well by Tom Picasso, though it wasn’t always very easy to tell the difference between the main cast of teenage boys.)

I thought it was a good book, but perhaps I am a bit too old to read it. The brilliant concept of They Both Die At The End elevated that YA book into something that would appeal to me. Without that, this one was enjoyable but not a stand-out for me. For teenagers, I suspect it’ll be a much bigger hit.

This Census-Taker by China Miéville #ABookADayInMay No.4

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A boy ran down a hill path screaming. The boy was I. He held his hands up and out in front of him as if he’d dipped them in paint and was coming to make a picture, to press them down to paper, but all there was on him was dirt. There was no blood on his palms.

So opens This Census-Taker (2016) by China Miéville, a strange little novella set in an uncertain place and uncertain time. Those first couple of short sentences are representative of what the narrator does throughout – sometimes he is in the first person, sometimes the third person when he wants to distance himself from the memory, and sometimes even the second person. It’s all part of what makes This Census-Taker unsettling and unsure. You never know where you are, literally and metaphorically.

As he runs down the hill, he has a message to shout to people who live at the bottom of the hill. They are technically in the same town, but they are worlds apart. The people at the bottom of the hill think of those further up as savages living in some sort of wilderness, peopled by monsters. And the boy’s shout is unlikely to dispel that idea – “My mother killed my father!”

But as soon as he says this, he is unsure. Is that what he saw? Or did he see someone else being killed? Or was nobody killed at all? Nothing is clear or still.

The novella has a lot of moments of death. The boy’s father is given to killing – a stray dog, a goat, anything that gets him into the silent, taut rage that sometimes comes across his face. He throws the bodies into a seemingly bottomless pit in a cave. The boy believes that there are some humans in there too. But is he right?

The actual census taker of the title doesn’t turn up to take a census until p.110 of 138 pages, and it is a sort of climax that doesn’t do a lot to make things less ambiguous. The whole novella swirls in menace and mystery, and there’s never really a sense that anything will resolve.

I did find This Census-Taker compelling and interesting, though preferred the much-longer The City and the City, which has an equally strange premise though more resolution. In this novella, I thought Miéville was brilliant at moments of high tension, but that his sentences were a bit meandering and overwritten at other times. It’s certainly a successful exercise in creating an atmosphere, but I’m not sure exactly what else I’m meant to take from the book.