2010s

Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

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My book group recently read Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh, from 2016 and shortlisted for the Booker prize that year. Let’s experiment with a review in bullet points. This doesn’t reflect the style of the book – it reflects how much time I want to spend writing this review.

  • Look at that cover. It’s not my usual fare, is it?
  • Beautiful writing of a psychological portrait of Eileen – an old lady looking back on her young days in an unhappy home, alcoholic dad, sister who has escaped with a marriage. Eileen works at a boys’ prison, lusts after one of the guards who works there, doesn’t really engage with anybody.
  • It is a nuanced portrayal of a dislikeable woman – but why was it in the crime section of the library?
  • (Maybe the only time that library shelving has constituted a major spoiler for me?)
  • Eventually, perhaps three-quarters of the way through this novel, the enigmatic and beguiling Rebecca Saint John appears. She is very Hitchcockian and not at all fleshed out.
  • (Isn’t Rebecca Saint John such a femme fatale name?)
  • Things start to get really silly…
  • Oh, a series of twists, increasingly dark, clearly wanting to be the next Girl on the Train…
  • Perhaps the cleverest thing about the book is the reveal about what’s happening on the cover.

Ultimately, I found that Moshfegh was a really clever and interesting writer, but Eileen is a silly and melodramatic novel. Or, rather, becomes one – perhaps because Moshfegh lacked confidence that a quiet and poignant portrayal of an eccentric woman would bring her a publishing deal or success. Which does seem to be the case – have a look at this interview in the Guardian. The most baffling statement in it is “Trying to protect its [the novel’s] reputation as a postmodern work of art would not only be arrogant, but pointless.” It would also not be remotely true?

Have you read Eileen? I certainly found it pacey and compelling, even when it wasn’t clear why I was being compelled, but ultimately it felt like fast food you regret the next day.

Dreaming of Rose by Sarah LeFanu

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I love looking behind the scenes at books, and I’m particularly fascinated by the process of biography – because it’s a type of book that I can’t get my head around attempting. How to capture a full life of many, many days in one volume? How to approach it when there are already two existing biographies of that subject? These are among the things that Sarah LeFanu discusses in Dreaming of Rose, a diary of her research and writing a biography of Rose Macaulay, from 1998 until she finished writing it in 2002. It was self-published in 2013 and has now been reissued by Handheld Press.

I’ve read two biographies of Macaulay – but not this one. Still, a lot of the names will be familiar to anybody who has read any of the biographies, and you don’t have to have read any of Macaulay’s output to find this interesting. Indeed, LeFanu writes a great deal more about Macaulay’s personal life in Dreaming of Rose than she does about her published output – perhaps because trying to track down connections with possible-affair Gerald O’Donovan was more captivating a chase than analysing her novels.

Reviews of books like this tend to replicate all the information found therein, but I shan’t make this a potted biography of Macaulay. There are more than enough places to find that. Instead, I’ll talk about what I liked and didn’t like about LeFanu’s book – the former easily outweighing the latter.

It’s always terribly interesting to see how writers deal with the problems of structure – speaking as someone who finds this the hardest part of writing anything, and the most satisfying to fall into place.

Terrible frustration with my chapter on the Great War. It creaks and plods and I don’t really know what I’m saying about Rose and the war; I’ve been stuck on it all autumn. Reading the descriptive selection on the war in Told By An Idiot I found myself getting annoyed with Rose for not being sharp like Virginia Woolf was sharp, for muddling and muddying it, for sitting on the fence, for saying: the war meant this for this person, that for that person. I found myself for the first time feeling actively hostile towards her.

I suspect I’m blaming Rose for my inability to get on with writing this chapter. I desperately need a clear space with no teaching. I’m doing a day school on women poets the weekend after this, and haven’t even begun to think about it. And then there’s all next term’s reading still to do. Meanwhile a librarian at the Harry Ransom Research Centre will send me a copy of the Rose Macaulay card catalogue, and Muriel Thomas has unearthed six ‘chatty’ letters from Rose that she ‘can’t recollect proffering’ to Jane Emery [a previous biographer], which she’s going to photocopy and send.

For what it’s worth, LeFanu had a much better time with Harry Ransom than I did a decade or so later, where they wouldn’t send me even a photo of two pages from the only existing copy in the world of a journal I really needed for my DPhil. Still shocked at how unhelpful they were!

Of course, LeFanu wasn’t only preoccupied with her Macaulay biography during this period. She doesn’t write a great deal about her personal life, but there are intriguing aspects of other parts of her professional life – particularly when she is writing radio plays, one about Macaulay and one about Dorothy L Sayers. The back and forth with BBC editors sounds extremely painful. And I could have read a whole diary-worth about her brief experience at the helm of Radio 4’s A Good Read, and suspecting (correctly) that she is about to be fired.

This is one of many times when LeFanu has to consider her finances – and the precarious state of these is very illuminating about the process of writing. Grants become vitally important, as do other opportunities for work which are distracting but pay the bills.

As well as LeFanu’s travels all over the place to speak to people who’d known Macaulay, or might have some of her letters somewhere – and, of course, the correspondence with people reluctant to speak to LeFanu – I enjoyed the insights into the process of publishing. I wish she’d kept the diary going until after publication, because I’d have loved to read about her reaction to reviews, PR etc. But things like this, from towards the end of the diary, were great:

I think finishing a book is more like getting a divorce than like sending a child out into the world; and least of all like giving birth. Endless niggling details have to be discussed backwards and forwards, letters of supplication written to Random House, saying no I can’t afford such and such an amount for quoting just three lines of Virginia Woolf, and letters of protestation to the Wren at what they want to charge for reproducing some of the Macaulay family photos. Where are the feelings of pride, or relief? I’m filled with anxiety and frustration, tied by a hundred tiny ties to the book I want to cast off.

I’ll close with the short list of things I felt weren’t so successful in Dreaming of Rose. The addendum on some letters being released from their embargo was interesting but didn’t balance well with the rest of the book – it felt like a heavy weight on the end of the diary structure. Nobody wants to hear anybody’s dreams and, title notwithstanding, it wasn’t interesting to read about LeFanu’s dreams. Then there is a wearyingly familiar disdain for people of faith, which isn’t particularly helpful in a biographer of somebody who had faith.

Those are minor gripes about a book that was engrossing and very enjoyable, even without having read LeFanu’s biography. It hasn’t left me particularly feeling the need to read a third biography of Macaulay, and I think Constance Babington-Smith’s is probably the one that appeals most to me, because I always prefer one written by somebody who knew the subject (even if it less likely to be ruthlessly open, or that impossibility, ‘objective’). But even if you’ve never read a word of Macaulay’s writing and don’t have much interest in her life, I think Dreaming of Rose would appeal for that rare opportunity to glimpse behind the curtain at the life of a biographer.

Notes to Self by Emilie Pine

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One of the flourishing genres that I like is the personal essay. I love it when they’re funny (Casey Wilson’s The Wreckage of My Presence is one of the best things I’ve read this year), but I also enjoy them when they’re more poignant. And lordy me, Notes to Self (2018) by Emilie Pine certainly isn’t a laugh a minute – but it is very, very good.

I think I saw a few people reading it on Instagram last year, and added it to my Christmas list – many thanks Mum and Dad for buying it for me. It’s a collection of six essays which are more or less all about trauma, of one sort or another. The first is about her father – an alcoholic who won’t admit the severity of his problem, and who has escaped his family in Ireland to live a chaotic life on Corfu. Pine flies out when she hears that he is desperately ill.

They call him ‘the Corpse’. He’s attached to machines that monitor his heart and other major organs. He has two IV lines, though the nurses struggle to find a vein that will take them as he has lost so much blood. He is barely awake most of the time. We’re oblivious to his nickname until a Greek visitor lets us in on the joke. Typically, as with most things concerning Dad, it’s both funny and not funny. Nobody, not even the nurses, thinks he’s going to live through this. And yet – he refuses to die.

Like all the essays in the collection, this one – ‘Notes on Intemperance’ (which, fittingly, I misread as ‘Notes on Impermanence’) – is a beautiful, steady unravelling of a topic. Pine’s writing is so steady. Even when she is discussing deeply emotional topics, she takes her time to unwrap them, layer by layer. By the time she has exposed the heart of the issue, whether that be her father’s alcoholism or her parents’ separation or rape and sexual assault, it is the logical conclusion of a series of keenly observed steps. And it is all the more striking because of that.

Pine writes plainly and without many literary flourishes. It means, when the occasional metaphor or imagery comes, it is extremely powerful. She waits until there is exactly the right one to illuminate the moment, and it jolts the reader in the way that really good imagery should. Sometimes it is isn’t even a metaphor, really, just a powerful combination of words. I noted down this excerpt from an essay on trying to have children, as an example of writing which comes together so neatly and effectively:

Maybe if I were more easy-going. More placid. More, well, more maternal, all cuddly and warm. Maybe if I were completely different, if I could swap out every cell, and gene, and chromosome in my body, maybe then this would work. In the early hours of the morning, unable to find sleep, I realise that what I’m trying to be cured of is being me.

That essay, ‘From the Baby Years’, is perhaps the best in the collection in my opinion. She manages to convey the sustained periods of hope and disappointment, as well as a miscarriage and other friends and relatives experiencing trauma related to childbirth. Pine never wallows in despair, but recognises it as the fundamental part of human experience that it so often is. Indeed, it’s impressive that a book this weighted with grief and trauma doesn’t feel heavy – even when it is heartbreaking or infuriating. And I think that’s because of the careful simplicity with which Pine writes the essays.

All in all, a brilliant book – not for every mood, but it is an oddly beautiful experience to share these pages with someone as vulnerable and honest and profound as Emilie Pine.

The Unexpected Professor by John Carey

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My friends Lorna and Will gave me a copy of The Unexpected Professor by John Carey in 2014, the year it came out – fast forward seven years and its time has finally come. I took it away on holiday with me, and it was somehow the perfect read – such a wonderful book.

It’s an autobiography, I suppose, but the subtitle tells you what the main gist of The Unexpected Professor is about – ‘An Oxford life in books’. He does talk a bit about his childhood, and a bit more about his time in the army, but those are not the selling point of the book for me. I couldn’t wait to get to Oxford with him – and even though that doesn’t happen for about a hundred pages, please excuse me glossing over the first chunk of the book to get to the bit that I loved most. (I should say – he writes very well about school life and various experiences during national service in the army, including wondering whether he’d accidentally shot a fellow soldier during an ill-advised demonstration with a gun – an incident that clearly stayed with him vividly. But naturally Oxford and books won me over more.)

Carey goes to Oxford as an undergraduate in the ’50s – following his stint of national service, as was expected then. Despite studying English literature, his interview had involved Latin, Greek, and French – and the course he was set to study ended somewhere before the Victorian period. He would later be instrumental in extending the course to include Victorian and 20th-century literature, and making Old English optional – by the time I arrived as an undergraduate in 2004, we spent a term on ‘1900-present’, though very few people chose to do anything after mid-century. And Old English was technically optional, but nobody ever seemed to present me with the option not to.

Much of what I enjoyed about reading about Carey’s time as a student was comparing what it was like for me, fifty years later. Some of it hadn’t changed at all. He defines things like ‘collections’ – when you sit with the head of your college and he/she talks to you about your studies and your future – which is still exactly the same, subfusc and all. On the other hand, there were no male-only colleges by the time I was studying, and only one female-only college – which is now also mixed.

Carey was at St. John’s College, which is where one of my two closest friends at uni was, so I spent a lot of time there. She lived in a building that is described as a beautiful garden in The Unexpected Professor – for it didn’t exist at the time. He glosses over the ’50s and ’60s desecration of colleges, building hideous concrete blocks in almost all of the beautiful college settings.

What he doesn’t gloss over at all, thankfully, is reading and writing. While he doesn’t mention a female author in any depth under towards the end of the book, Carey does write insightfully and engagingly about many different authors – Milton, Wordsworth, Browning, Orwell. When they come up, he spends pages and pages analysing, exploring, talking about their shifting critical reception and the passages that most interest him. It would all be very self-indulgent if it weren’t also so enthralling for the reader. In these sections, autobiography fades away and literary criticism comes in – though in a style different from most books in that genre, which Carey openly derides. More on that shortly…

Carey seems to have lived a very charmed academic life in the next half century in Oxford. Time after time, he was given multiple job offers or funding pots. He even gets offered a job as a Fellow at Keble before he has finished his DPhil! I’m not sure if this is a sign of times changing or Carey’s particular talent, but it is unheard of now for an English academic to walk into a job – or even, for most of us, to get any funding. Carey misses out the years of scarcely-paid part-time work, scrabbling for any chance of a permanent gig. While he and his wife – their romance is dwelt on briefly but touchingly – aren’t exactly rich, they are certainly doing better than most of my academic contemporaries were at that stage. They also got to live on St John’s Street, one of the most lovely streets in Oxford – though apparently rather run-down at the time. His various academic posts and involvement with the English department are a fascinating overview of the changing ethos, and I found his genuine engagement with his students’ work, undergraduate and postgraduate, very admirable.

While teaching, Carey was also writing. Some of his best-received books were anthologies – the Faber Book of Reportage and the Faber Book of Science, the latter of which my father loves. To get his head around centuries and centuries of thought in these areas, and selecting innovative and compelling examples, sounds like a daunting task – but he makes it sound almost a pleasure. He also writes some literary criticism and other cultural texts, including the only one I’d previously read: The Intellectuals and the Masses. It is while compiling critical thought on Milton that Carey realises he thinks most literary criticism is drivel – not quite his word, but not far off.

I’m sure he’s right, but I am coming onto my only qualm about this book. He is very disparaging about his colleagues in the literary field, and not particularly gracious when they don’t like his work. I suppose that’s understandable – but it definitely became clear that when he is critical of someone, their book is bad; when someone is critical of his book, they are wrong – and probably histrionic. Sadly, this does become very sexist at one point – he writes of his former supervisor’s review of his book: ‘when I dipped into Helen’s Encounter review its bossy tone reminded me so forcibly of my mother’s shrill, bigoted denunciations of my teenage relationship with Heather that I never finished it’. Setting aside the fact that he definitely finished reading it, calling a woman’s review ‘bossy’ and ‘shrill’ is not a good look, and I wish his editor had spoken to him about it. Perhaps they did.

It’s a small quibble in a book I otherwise totally loved and relished reading. I might have suggested cutting off the beginning and making this entirely a book about Oxford and books, but also recognise that is because I love those things myself. Part of my pleasure was in thinking of the streets and remembering my time as an undergraduate and postgraduate at Oxford – but I think The Unexpected Professor would delight you even if you’ve never stepped foot in Oxford. Because we all, after all, love books.

Things That Fall From the Sky by Selja Ahava – EUPL

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The team behind the European Prize for Literature (EUPL) got in touch to ask if I’d highlight some of the winners of the prize over the past few years, and I was really interested in exploring the list of winners from across Europe. Even better, I got to choose which ones I covered – and one of the first that caught my eye was Things That Fall From the Sky by Finnish writer Selja Ahava. It was published in 2015 and was one of the winners of the EUPL in 2016 – I should note that the prize judges all books in their original language, though I am reading the edition translated by Emily and Fleur Jeremiah. It’s original title is Taivaalta Tippuvat Asiat, which Google translate tells me means much the same thing.

I’ll explain a bit more about the EUPL at the bottom of this post – but, first, my thoughts on Things That Fall From the Sky. Well, my instinctive choice worked because this is a really brilliant novel. Here’s the opening:

“What’s on your mind back there?” Dad asks, glancing in the rear-view mirror.

Our eyes meet.

“Nothing,” I reply.

We turn off at the petrol station. You go right here for Extra Great Manor, left for Sawdust House. These days we mostly turn right.

Adults are always asking what children are thinking. But they’d be worried if they got a straight answer. If you’re three and it’s a windy day, it’s not a good idea to stare at the horizon and say, ‘I’m just wondering where wind comes from.’ You’re better off claiming you’re pretending to be a helicopter. And when you’re five, don’t ask too many questions about death or fossils, because grown-ups don’t want to think about dying, or characters in fairy tales getting old, or how Jesus died on the cross. When I was little, I thought Mum’s grandma was a fossil, because she died a long time ago. But these days I know you can get fossils with ferns, snails or dinosaurs in them, but not grandma ones. Or human ones, for that matter.

Saara narrates the first section of the novel. She is a young girl whose mother has died – as we learn, through a freak accident. A block of ice fell from the sky, crashed through their roof, and crushed Saara’s mother. It sounds like a fate one might find in a fairy tale, but it has had a real and disastrous effect on Saara’s life – and she is scrabbling to make sure she remembers what her mother was like. Her chapters often end with a simple description – what her mother’s fingernails looked like, or her morning routine, or how she liked to garden. Saara is making an inventory of recollections.

Saara has been compared to the little girl in Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book, and I think they have more in common than being Finnish. She sees the world with a vivid child’s eye – which has clear vision, but also has yet to form rigid expectations of reality. The details she picks up are a little surreal, like the sawdust that fills their home from all the building work, but she is matter-of-fact too. Ahava has captured a wonderful voice, and it’s that commitment to her voice that lets the reader accommodate the strangeness of the premise.

Saara’s mum isn’t the only woman in the family who has had something very unusual happen to her – Saara’s aunt has won millions on the lottery. This is a far happier piece of chance, of course, but its impact is no less confusing for the people involved. In the middle section, the aunt – Annu – writes to a Scottish man who has been struck by lightning four times, finding a kindred spirit in anyone who has experienced the statistically very improbable. These letters also reminded me of Tove Jansson, in Letters to Klara, and they are a delight that also has significant philosophical undertones.

The final section is narrated by Saara’s new step-mother, some time later. I think she is perhaps the least compelling of the three women who accompany us through the three sections, though this may be because she is the last. She has her own very unusual circumstances, but I won’t spoil them.

At the heart of Things That Fall From The Sky is how people deal with the bizarre – how their worldview can expand to give room for the extraordinary. And the prose and characters that Ahava has created seem both dreamlike and vividly real – I don’t really understand how that combination is achieved, but it is done with astonishing consistency and assurance. I loved spending time in this world, and the way Ahava balances genuine pathos with a fairytalesque surreality is truly wonderful. I was certainly moved by the novel.

I’ve got a couple other EUPL winners to read, and if they’re all as good as Ahava’s novel then I’m very excited for what I have ahead of me.

The European Prize for Literature (EUPL) is an annual prize that awards emerging authors from across 41 countries in Europe – see the video above for a bit about how it works.

A Jane Austen Education by William Deresiewicz

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It’s a truth universally acknowledged that Janeites will read anything about Jane Austen – and it’s also a truth universally acknowledged that this opening ‘bit’ is wildly overused. Sorry about that. Anyway, I can’t remember exactly where I heard about A Jane Austen Education (2011) by William Deresiewicz, but I was delighted when my friend Malie got it for my birthday last year. It seemed like the right sort of book for all this *gestures at world* – and I was sucked in straight away by this opening paragraph:

I was twenty-six, and about as dumb, in all human things, as any twenty-six-year-old has a right to be, when I met the woman who would change my life. That she’d been dead for a couple of hundred years made not the slightest difference whatsoever. Her name was Jane Austen, and she would teach me everything I know about everything that matters.

It’s rare to find a man writing a non-academic book about Austen, and Deresiewicz certainly owns up to some masculine prejudice at the outset. He was a graduate student at an American university, doing a six-year PhD programme. Apparently specialising comes quite late in the day in American PhDs, so the first years were spent covering a lot of literary ground – and that included reading Jane Austen. Deresiewicz was much more concerned with the big men of American fiction, and didn’t want to bother with the quiet manners that he perceived he’d find in Austen. Starting with Emma.

At first, he hates it. He hates Emma’s poor decision making and small world. Still more, he hates the boring Miss Bates and the interminable Mr Woodhouse. But he gradually realised that they were meant to be boring and interminable – and a whole lot more than that too, of course. It is the famous Box Hill scene that finally changed this mind.

And that was when I finally understood what Austen had been up to all along. Emma’s cruelty, which I was so quick to criticise, was nothing, I saw, but the mirror image of my own. The boredom and contempt that the book aroused were not signs of Austen’s ineptitude; they were the exact responses she wanted me to have. She had incited them, in order to expose them. By creating a heroine who felt exactly as I did, and who behaved precisely as I would have in her situation, she was showing me my own ugly face. I couldn’t deplore Emma’s disdain for Miss Bates, or her boredom with the whole commonplace Highbury world, without simultaneously condemning my own.

This passage does also reveal one of the few issues I had with A Jane Austen Education – that Deresiewicz leans a little too heavily on the idea of discovering ‘the’ point that Austen was trying to make, rather than landing on one particular interpretation. His moments of revelation are nuanced and intriguing – like Northanger Abbey helping him realise he should ask better questions, or Mansfield Park making him a better listener – but I wish he had more openly recognised that there is no singular conclusion that can come from any novel. As a PhD in literature, he surely knows this full well.

Through the book, each of Austen’s novels gets a chapter – his reading of the book going alongside his own life, including failed relationships (romantic and otherwise), stalled academic work, and a difficult engagement with his father who wanted a different career path for his son. I love books that interweave the personal and the interpretive. This has become increasingly the way that creative non-fiction is written, and I think it has enriched the genre no end; A Jane Austen Education is perhaps most similar to Nell Stevens’ wonderful Mrs Gaskell and Me, though without a particularly biographical slant to his writing. I would have welcomed even more autobiography, but he is excellent at intertwining literary criticism and self revelation. I’d love to know more suggestions in this genre.

Over the course of the book, Deresiewicz goes from an Austen sceptic to regarding her as his favourite author – and the reader, who probably started far further down that spectrum, can forgive him his early hesitancy. I loved seeing his unusual perspectives on the novel, learning about him, and marvelling again at the way that Austen speaks across the centuries in a way that very few other authors have managed or are likely to manage. And, like all of Austen’s heroines, Deresiewicz’s journey through A Jane Austen Education isn’t in learning more about literature or the people around him – it’s a journey to better understand himself, and start changing where he needs to change.

The Snow Queen by Michael Cunningham

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One of the most important things about a holiday, I’m sure we can all agree, is choosing which books to bring. If I’m going on holiday by car, I bring wildly too many – because then I can have some choices while I’m away. I took eleven books for my recent week away, and the eleventh of those, thrown into the suitcase at the last minute, was The Snow Queen (2014) by Michael Cunningham. And thank goodness I did, because it ended up being exactly what I wanted to read first – and it’s absolutely brilliant.

We start just before the 2004 US General Election, where various characters are sure that George W. Bush won’t get re-elected because he is ‘the worst President in US history’. Wry laugh. Barrett Meeks has just broken up with his rather-younger boyfriend, who told him by text that they had both seen this coming – Barrett had not – when he sees something extraordinary in the New York sky:

The miniature groundscape at his feet struck him, rather suddenly, as too wintery and prosaic to bear. He lifted his heavy head and looked up.

There it was. A pale aqua light, translucent, a swatch of veil, star-high, no, lower than the stars, but high, higher than a spaceship hovering above the treetops. It may or may not have been slowly unfurling, densest at its centre, trailing off at its edges into lacy spurs and spirals.

Barrett thought that it must be a freakish southerly appearance of the aurora borealis, not exactly a common sight over Central Park, but as he stood – a pedestrian in coat and scarf, saddened and disappointed but still regular as regular, standing on a stretch of lamp-lit ice – as he looked up at the light, as he thought it was probably all over the news – as he wondered whether to stand where he was, privately surprised, or go running after someone else for corroboration – there were other people, the dark cutouts of them, right there, arrayed across the Great Lawn…

In his uncertainty, his immobility, standing solid in Timberlands, it came to him. He believed – he knew – that as surely as he was looking up at the light, the light was looking back down at him…

This moment of inexplicable encounter happens early in the novel, but it is quite possible to imagine the novel existing without it. Its principle impact is to make Barrett look more closely at life, and try to work out how he was the only person to see this light – and what it could mean, and why he was chosen to see it. But, around him, the novel’s other characters continue their complex, anxious, vibrant, and ordinary lives. Few authors show the complexity of the ordinary, and the banality of the extraordinary, as well as Cunningham does.

For instance, Barrett;s sister-in-law Beth is seriously ill with cancer. Her possible death laces every word spoken in the house, where Barrett moves ‘temporarily’ to recover from his break-up. But, in the midst of this, Barrett’s brother Tyler is preoccupied with trying to write a song for his upcoming wedding to Beth. He is a singer-songwriter who has always been the talented one – but possibly not talented enough to ‘make it’, after years of trying, or to avoid falling into cliche when he tries to express himself in song to Beth.

Various other friends form part of the core cast, and we go between the minds of all of them – mostly Barrett and Tyler, but Cunningham elegantly takes the third-person narrative into different people’s perspectives, often for fleeting moments, while maintaining a cohesion and fluidity to the novel. He is so good at the moments that synecdochically represent whole lives. And he is equally good at showing, through narrative and dialogue, the precise degree of love and trust between two characters. Barrett and Tyler are closer than any two brothers I’ve seen in fiction, and Cunningham enables the reader to feel this almost viscerally.

I was a bit worried when I saw, in the blurb, that Barrett would start going to church. Christianity is seldom written about well by people who aren’t Christians. But Cunningham resists a dramatic conversion or a fall from faith – rather, it is one of the ways that Barrett’s life opens up, without ever developing beyond a sense of cautious wonder. The mysterious light sends him on a new path, even if it doesn’t reveal a new destination.

Mostly, I just love reading Cunningham’s prose. There is something about the way he forms communities of characters, and something in the elegant simplicity of his writing, that makes reading one of his novels feel like having  cold, refreshing water pouring through your hands on a hot day. The Hours remains my favourite of the four or five I’ve read, but this is a close competitor. I think there’s a danger that his novels are underrated because they give such an effect of simplicity – of things happening to ordinary people, and then the novel concluding. But to do that well, and even with a sense almost of transcendence, is surely one of the highest possible achievements of the novel.

Appointment in Arezzo by Alan Taylor

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I love Muriel Spark’s strange, unpredictable, funny novels – and she seems like a fascinating person, too. So I was intrigued by Alan Taylor’s Appointment in Arezzo (2017) and delighted when my friend Phoebe gave it to me for my birthday last year.

I had an appointment with Muriel Spark in Arezzo, the Tuscan town where Vasari, fabled for his Lives of the Renaissance artists, was born and bred. Mrs Spark’s fax was brief and business-like. “My friend Penelope Jardine and I will come to Arezzo. I suggest we have dinner at the Continentale Hotel (not far from the station) and we can talk then. Daytimes very hot.

Taylor met Spark thus in 1990 to interview her in his capacity as a journalist. But from then on, until her death in 2006, Taylor was friends with Spark and her friend Penelope Jardine (and it doesn’t seem all that likely that ‘friend’ was a euphemism for something else). Appointment in Arezzo is an account of that friendship and his visits to their beautiful Italian home, as well as a sort of patchwork biography of other parts of her life. It isn’t an out-and-out biography, but he address parts of her life in organic tangents – her shortlived married, her estrangement from her son, the difficulties she experienced with an ex-friend who became the model for the ‘pisser of copy’ in A Far Cry From Kensington, and more. In fact, her relationship with her estranged son gets extensive covering, including lengthy quotes from letters. If anything dominates, it is this.

Because of this loose structure, he is able to explore avenues in a casual way. It feels a bit like a long conversation with one of her friends, rather than anything more formal. We are as likely to hear about their reaction to a burglary as we are about Spark’s writing technique. A menu is described with the same interest as her publishing history. Curiously, Taylor is pretty poor at telling anecdotes about Spark for which he is present – one about her time in America becomes a string of ‘then this happened, then this happened’ – but much better at relaying stories that he has heard from her. Or telling his own stories, of seeing the beauties of Tuscany. Spark is often called a Scottish novelist, but she set more novels in Italy than in Scotland, and spent many years of her life there. Taylor sees how crucial that environment is to the novelist she was in this period.

I really enjoyed anything in Appointment in Arezzo that showed the personal relationship Taylor had with Swift, because I am always more interested in a subjective portrait of a novelist than some attempt to rise above subjectivity – but I also loved when we can see what Spark thinks about her own writing:

I wanted to know what she saw as her achievement, her legacy, “I have realised myself,” she replied. “I have expressed something I brought into the world with me. I have liberated the novel in many ways, shown how anything whatever can be narrated, any experience set down, including sheer damn cheek. I think I have opened doors and windows in the mind, and challenged fears – especially the most inhibiting fears about what a novel should be.

Neither Spark nor Taylor explain whether those fears are in the mind of author or reader – or both – but it is a typically Sparkian half-revelation. And I think, in fact, Appointment in Arezzo is a tribute to Spark’s influence over those who know her. If Taylor’s writing style is not like Spark’s, then perhaps only she could have inspired this curious memoir – unusual, resisting traditional structures, affectionate but also disconcerting – and, like Spark’s great novels, somehow coming together in all its curiousness to make something as satisfying as it is odd.

The Desert and the Drum by Mbarek Ould Beyrouk

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I can now claim to have read all the novels from Mauritania that have been translated into English – because it is one: The Desert and the Drum by Mbarek Ould Beyrouk, originally published in French in 2015 and translated by Rachael McGill in 2018.

The novel is narrated by Rayhana, a young woman who is only recently an adult – she is on the run from her Bedouin tribe, though we don’t yet know why. Not only has she run from her community, she has stolen the ceremonial drum that is the most prized object belonging to her tribe – and she is heading across the desert to safety and a new life.

It was time to detach myself from the old ways: I was no longer from here. I was from nowhere, and I was going faraway. Straight ahead.

The Desert and the Drum takes place in several timelines – one shows her escape to a city, which is quite insignificant as cities go, but feels enormous and crowded to her. Alongside, we see her life in the tribe and the events that lead to her wanting to escape. I shan’t spoil any of them, but Beyrouk is very clever in the way he tells us things in increments that are just satisfying enough to keep the mystery going.

Rayhana only knows her tribe. Her father left years ago, but she is from one of the more important families of the community. Only desperation can take her from the safety of this communal lifestyle, and the confusion she faces in a city is done very well. That confusion leads quickly to distaste for the ways of life that are acceptable, and the way that city-dwellers have forgotten their past:

I began to feel disdain for the town and everyone in it. People seemed to have forgotten what they’d been only yesterday, what their fathers and their fathers’ fathers had been. They were content to no longer be nomadic, to no longer feel the sun on their heads. They were happy to eat new dishes made not with their own wheat or barley, or with the meat or milk of their own animals. They were proud of all that; they thought it meant they could look down on those of us who had stayed as we were, who hadn’t succumbed to the temptations of the new.

Meanwhile, change also came to the Bedouin tribe’s encampment a while earlier – what turned out to be workers on a government contract, drilling for resources.

Monsters of iron and steel appeared one day from nowhere. no one had warned us thy were coming. First we heard an enormous roar. Some people thought it was thunder, but the sky remained an unblemished blue. Others turned their eyes towards the mountains; the faraway summits stood steadfast and serene. The earth began to tremble beneath our feet. We listened, worried, and strained our eyes towards the horizon. In the distance, a cloud of ochre dust rose towards the sky. We remained immobile, gaping at this sight for which we had no name. When we realised the rumbling and the storm were coming towards us, panic spread like wildfire: people ran to hide behind dunes or collect livestock, men went to get their guns, women grabbed their children and ran inside tents. The tribal drum sounded to summon those who were away from the camp. We watched, stunned and powerless, as the terrible unknown thing approached.

I said at the beginning that this novel was ‘from Mauritania’ – it’s by a Mauritanian, about Mauritania, but I note in a comment from the translator on A Year of Reading the World that it was initially published in Tunisia. And the book certainly expects the reader to be unfamiliar with the mores of Bedouin people. It’s a difficult balance to strike: maintaining a first-person narrative of someone who has group up in her tribe and to whom customs obviously aren’t a surprise, while also making them accessible to the reader who knows nothing. Beyrouk finds this balance brilliantly, explaining from the inside – writing for the outsider, but without ever dropping the intimacy of Rayhana’s lived experience. This is particularly notable when he is writing about traditions surrounding weddings – Rayhana says what they are, but in sentences about how the individual acts are affecting her. They are gently introduced and explained, but in a way that would also make sense in the context of a conversation with somebody who knew them all already. It must have taken some doing, and it works very well. He finds the emotions of the moment, not an anthropological thesis.

That is true throughout. While the author is a man with far more education that Rayhana has at this time, there is a feeling of authenticity and immediacy throughout the novel. I certainly felt that I understood a great deal more about one way of life than I had before – and about clashing ways of life in a Mauritania where traditions and modernisation can collide, without either being ‘better’ than the other, just jarringly different to someone like Rayhana trying to make the leap between them.

I suppose the marker of an excellent translator is that you don’t notice their work, and I certainly never found the translation an obstacle to the excitement and insight of the novel. I really liked it, and I’m hoping that his other two novels might also get translated…

All Among the Barley by Melissa Harrison: EUPL Giveaway!

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The European Prize for Literature (EUPL) is an annual prize that awards emerging authors from across 41 countries in Europe – and, because of lockdown making promotion of the prize more difficult, I’m one of the bloggers who has been asked to help raise awareness of the prize and of the UK winner – Melissa Harrison, with All Among the Barley. I’ll get onto that, but first here’s a quick video explaining what the prize is… (I’ll also be doing a giveaway – check out the bottom of the post for that.)

I’m all for prizes that raise awareness of authors we wouldn’t otherwise hear of, and my reading of non-British European writers is pretty lamentable. It’s even more lamentable when it comes to those writing now. And I’m afraid that hasn’t changed with the 2019 winner I’m writing about, because she’s British, but at least I can go and look at the others among the 13 winners awarded in 2019.

I had heard of All Among the Barley before I was sent it to review, but I think only because I’d been so drawn to that beautiful cover. The ploughed fields, the swallows (maybe; look, I don’t know anything about birds). I am in danger of being like the townies who wander through the setting of 1930s Suffolk, seeing only the idyllic and not noticing the hard work, the striving for modernity, and the real lives behind the thatched cottages – particularly during a year apparently famous for drought. Except I grew up in the countryside, so I know it can be beautiful and difficult simultaneously.

My name is Edith June Mather and I was born not long after the end of the Great War. My father, George Mather, had sixty acres of arable land known as Wych Farm; it is somewhere not far from here, I believe. Before him my grandfather Albert farmed the same fields, and his father before him, who ploughed with a team of oxen and sowed by hand. I would like to think that my brother Frank, or perhaps one of his sons, has the living of it now; but a lifetime has passed since I was last on its acres, and because of everything that happened I have been prevented from finding out.

This is the opening page – well, the opening after a quick preface – and it quickly immerses us in the world she lived in. That ‘I would like to think’ sentence gives the reader a sense of mystery, but we forget it (I forgot it) as we are swept into her world. Edie is a young 13-year-old, a little more innocent than the other children in the community, a little less prepared for the outside world. At the same time, she fully knows difficulties. Her father drinks too much. Her mother has to make up for his shortcomings. She sees poverty, vice, brokenness. But she also sees the beauty of the world around her – and Harrison is wonderful at natural descriptions, giving not just the aesthetics of the stunning countryside but also its practicalities.

In October, Wych Farm’s trees turned quickly and all at once, blazing into oranges and reds and burnished golds; with little wind to strip them the woods and spinneys lay on our land like treasure, the massy hedgerows filigreed with old-man’s-beard and enamelled with rosehips and black sloes. Along the winding course of the River Stound the alder carrs were studded with earthstars and chanterelles and dense with the rich, autumnal stink of rot; but crossing Long Piece towards The Lottens the sky opened into austere, equinoctial blue, where flocks of peewits wheeled and turned, flashing their broad wings black and white. At dawn, dew silvered the spiders’ silk strung between the grass blades in our pastures so that the horses left trails where they walked, like the wakes of slow vessels in still water. 

Into this world comes Constance FitzAllen. She shocks the locals by wearing trousers, and is there to document the old rural ways of life, and is keen to preserve it. I was initially reminded of Valentine Ackland, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s partner, who made similar investigations in similar trousers – but her resulting book, Country Conditions, was about the importance of good plumbing and hygiene in rural communities. Connie is much more concerned with setting rural life in amber – writing for a journal, but also lamenting any developments. Edie’s family don’t take kindly to this at first – they want machines that do the work faster; why would they roast food on an open fire if a modern oven is superior? – but they are won over by her charm and enthusiasm.

And Connie does come across as a delightful character. I was fully charmed by her. Which… well, I shan’t say more on that front.

Edie is certainly charmed by her, and sees her as a gateway into a new way of thinking – London, confidence, and adulthood. I find coming-of-age novels tricky sometimes, but I thought Harrison did a great job of showing the development of a teenage, torn between the dual wishes to enter adulthood and to remain in the safety of childhood.

And now the elephant in the room for anyone who knows my taste well: historical fiction. We know I’m not a fan. I have read so very many novels written in the 1930s that I did wonder why I’d need someone writing in the 2010s to tell me about that world. Sometimes it didn’t quite work – Harrison was very obviously writing from 80+ years’ distance, and the mores and morals of the 21st century seeped between the cracks of the world she was depicting. There was the implicit value system of a later day – but this was ok because Edie was also looking back, if not from 2019 then from many decades after the fact.

And there are twists and developments, which I shan’t spoil, that nobody writing in 1933 would have included.

All in all, I was impressed by Harrison’s writing style and descriptive abilities, fond of Edie, and startled by my own earlier reactions when more details of this world emerge…

* * Giveaway time! * *

EUPL are offering up a free copy – if you’d like one, please tell me your favourite rural novel (or novel with a rural setting) in the comments. I’ll pick a winner on Sunday 17 May 2020. It’s open anywhere in the world (though lockdown may mean it’s an ebook, depending who wins. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it!)

And head over to the European Prize for Literature site to learn more about them.