2010s

Screwtop Thompson by Magnus Mills (25 Books in 25 Days #9)

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I’d identified a few very short books for when my days are super busy – and Screwtop Thompson (2010) by Magnus Mills was on that list. I had plans at lunch and after work, so these 110pp (with very big font) were just right to squeeze in around the edges – though I hadn’t remembered that they were short stories. Indeed, I didn’t realise this until I got to the end of the first one, and the second on seemed so different. (Incidentally, this collection was published in 2010, but is largely made up of stories previously published in other collections – another thing I didn’t realise.)

This is the fourth book I’ve read by Mills, I think, and I really appreciate his strange style of storytelling. The same tone of the full-length novels is here – and the same curious slant on the world. My favourite story in the collection is ‘The Comforter’ – an architect meets an archdeacon outside a cathedral, and they go in to look at laborious plans that the archdeacon doesn’t really understand. The archdeacon clearly finds it all very dull – and learns that he was agreed to come to these meetings everyday, forever. Is it a parallel for purgatory? Is something sinister going on, or is it not? It’s so lightly, cleverly handled.

In other stories, something mundane takes on significance just because it’s focused on – a sheet of plastic caught on a railway fence, for instance. Elsewhere, a hotel guest spends Christmas somewhere where he always seems to just miss the other guests. The title story is about a toy that arrives at Christmas with no head. There are a few duds in the collection, where the story doesn’t quite land, or (conversely) goes a little too far – but I’ll concentrate on the successes.

Each story is a different world, but they are somehow also the same world. And that’s because the narrator – while not always the same person – performs the same role. Each story is in the first person, and the ‘I’ of each one reacts the same way to the strangenesses he encounters. He (let’s assume he) is always surprised and a little unsettled, but doesn’t question anything too much. The surreal worlds in which this narrator finds himself do not offer any answers – and the narrator seems to expect it from the outset. He may be confused, but he is accepting. The exception, actually, is ‘The Comforter’ – where the narrator seems to be in on whatever mystery the reader doesn’t understand.

And the reader takes on this role, whether or not the narrator is in the know. None of the stories have neat conclusions, and none have twist endings. We are left as unsure as when we began – often disoriented, with a sense that, if we knew just that little bit more, we would be facing a true horror. What analogy is ‘The Comforter’ setting up?  But, as he just shies away from this, Mills has got a reputation as a comic writer. I find his stories much closer to horror than to comedy – the deadpan way in which they’re delivered is chilling, but it’s a very fine line between this sort of chill and laughter.

The book is slight, the sentences are deceivingly simple, and it’s so brilliantly handled that Mills makes this much more than the sum of its parts.

The Making of Us by Sheridan Voysey

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A couple of years ago I read Resurrection Year by Sheridan Voysey – a very moving and thoughtful account of the ten years he and his wife spent from first trying to have a child to recognising that it would probably not happen, biologically or otherwise. It is about their faith in God, and what He taught them through this time – though without sugarcoating anything. Well, now I’ve read the sort-of-sequel, The Making of Us (2019), that Sheridan kindly gave me.

As I mentioned last time, Sheridan and I go to the same church, and know each other a little. We know each other rather better now than we did in 2017, when I read his first book, and so it is correspondingly stranger to write a review of a book he has written – particularly a memoir. But let’s plough on! (Btw, he also challenged people at church to wear yellow in a photo with the book – hence the picture.)

If Resurrection Year took a broad focus, The Making of Us looks at a much shorter time frame: a handful of days. It looks at the time that Sheridan and his friend DJ spend walking along the northeast coast of England, following the path that the monk Cuthbert had trod hundreds of years earlier. It was a hundred-mile pilgrimage. It starts on Lindisfarne, and they timed their conclusion in Durham to coincide with a display of the Lindisfarne Gospels.

Along the way, Sheridan and DJ discuss all manner of things about how to cope when life doesn’t go as planned. It follows on from the themes of Resurrection Year, but also looks at how Sheridan has had to rebuild a career on the other side of the world, after being successful in radio in Australia. They discuss where God is in these moments, and the enormity of His love.

The finest of earthly love we’ve felt is but a twig next to his Jupiter-size affection. A single leaf to a rustling forest. A mere microbe to a mountain. A faint candle to a galaxy’s worth of suns. And until I dwell in this – dwell in a love that reaches beyond all measure, stretching higher and deeper and wider than I can imagine – until I rest in this reality and let this love define me, I will forever seek my worth in lesser things.

What Sheridan is so good at is using the specifics of his life to guide anybody reading the book, drawing general lessons from individual events. The conversations he includes with DJ are doubtless highly edited for the structure of The Making of Us, though they feel their most authentic when discussing the trials of the walk itself – the blisters, the map-reading, the accommodation. I love the idea of putting this pilgrimage alongside the metaphorical journey towards understanding an identity in Christ, particularly when this identity isn’t playing out as hoped or expected.

There’s a lot in here for the practising Christian, including useful Bible references to support what Sheridan says, but I think anybody would find this memoir moving and of value – and I’m not just saying that because I know I’ll be seeing Sheridan soon!

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

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I knew Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine (2017) by Gail Honeyman had been successful, but I’d no idea how successful until the book stats came out last year. This was a runaway bestseller, getting hundreds of thousands more purchases than the next novel in the list – at least according to the list I read. When my book group chose to do it, I was a little dubious. Other mammoth bestsellers of recent years have definitely been low on quality – i.e. The Da Vinci Code. Well, I was happy to be proved wrong. This is a case where I think the hype was pretty justified.

In case you’re one of those others who’ve yet to read it – the novel is from the perspective of Eleanor Oliphant, who works in finance administration and lives alone. She isn’t very at ease socially, largely because she doesn’t understand the ways that people choose to spend their time. She has very little popular culture knowledge, and tends to speak as a mix between an eighteenth-century novel and a computer manual. (Her dialogue – never using abbreviations; overly elaborate sentences – never quite made sense to me as a concept, but we’ll leave that be.)

It’s also clear that she is not completely fine.

Gradually we piece together that something traumatic happened to her as a child, and it has continued to affect the way she engages with other people. She also longs for a way out of the loneliness she experiences. It was an interesting coincidence that the epigraph was from Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City, which I’m reading at the moment. Living alone definitely doesn’t have to mean loneliness, but Eleanor feels isolated from the rest of humanity. And her attempts to cross this divide are usually frustrated by her inability to understand social codes – and often not particularly liking the range of options in front of her.

This changes when she sees a handsome young singer. She realises she is in love, and destined to be with him. He will be the solution to her problems.

Honeyman takes us on a compelling journey with Eleanor, as she tries to orchestrate ways to get closer to the singer. At the same time, she has made her first friend – Raymond, a colleague who can see past her off-putting traits. At the same time, we continue to learn more about her past. Honeyman gives us enough info to guess and make assumptions, and little enough that we’re desperate to get more answers. It’s really impressively judged. So often, this sort of bread-crumb-dropping is just annoying, whereas Honeyman knows exactly how much info to give, and when. And even when I thought I’d worked it out, I hadn’t.

It’s a relatively long book, but very compelling – I raced through it in a couple of days. As mentioned, I’m not sure all the verbal tics quite made sense, but I did like that Eleanor is an anomaly but not repellent. Plenty of people in the book think she’s being funny when she’s really just answering their questions differently from how they anticipated. Her colleagues find her hard to talk to, but warm to her when she tries different approaches.

Oh, and there is the most wonderful CAT!

For a debut novel, it’s very impressive. I’m intrigued to see what comes next – and what the film will be like. It’s good to be a part of the zeitgeist sometimes!

Dancing With Mrs Dalloway by Celia Blue Johnson

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I always wonder at the wisdom of including specific books/authors/characters in the titles of books about books. In case you’re thinking “Simon, surely that doesn’t happen very often”, I can think of a few other examples – Tolstoy and the Purple Chair by Nina Sankovitch, Dear Farenheit 451 by Annie Spence, Nabokov’s Butterfly by Rick Gekoksi. I have actually read all of those, and particularly loved Sankovitch’s book, but I did have to get over the barrier that I’m not particularly interested in Tolstoy. As it turns out, he only gets a brief mention – the book is really about reading a book a day for a year, to process grief. Anybody who read it because they love Tolstoy would probably be disappointed.

Why do people keep doing these titles? I don’t know. But Celia Blue Johnson’s book Dancing With Mrs Dalloway (2011) is another example – the subtitle, ‘stories of the inspiration behind great works of literature’, is a far more accurate representation of what’s in the book. Mrs Dalloway is just one of the 50 books that Johnson discusses, in short chapters that look at the genesis of the works in question.

It’s a fascinating premise for a collection, and there has obviously been an awful lot of research – or at least an awful lot of opening an author’s biography and paraphrasing a section from it. She has divided them into fairly meaningless categories (“in the telling”, “catch me if you can”, etc.), but basically it’s a random order. They range significantly, from authors who fictionalised people they knew to those who ‘saw’ the story in a dream. The prosaic truth is that most authors just have an idea and then slog away at it, but Johnson does an excellent job at making the book really interesting, even from the less promising accounts. I think it’s probably because the sections are short – we don’t have time to get bored.

The selection of books is a good range of classics, and a who’s who of books I should probably have already read (I’ve only read 20 of the 50). It maybe leans a little towards American literature, but there is a good international showing – I suspect nobody would feel short-changed about what’s included. And if any of the tid-bits particularly catch your eye, then there are further reading suggestions at the end. Basically, what’s not to like?

 

All The Lives We Ever Lived by Katharine Smyth

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Do you ever read a book that is so perfect for you that you wonder if anybody else will want to read it? While away in Cornwall, I read my review copy of Katharine Smyth’s memoir All The Lives We Ever Lived (2019) – the subtitle of which is ‘Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf’. I’ve used the word ‘memoir’, but it covers more categories than that – biography, philosophy, literary criticism – and it is extraordinarily good. But it does, perhaps, require a love of a Virginia Woolf and a familiarity with To The Lighthouse.

Luckily I have both those things. I’ve read To The Lighthouse three times (far fewer times than Smyth has read it, I should add) and believe it to be one of the greatest books ever written – and quite a few of the books to which I would give that accolade are by Woolf. To me, she is easily the best writer of the 20th century. To Smyth, she is that and more. The solace she is seeking (in that subtitle) relates to the death of her father – a man she idolised – and she uses To The Lighthouse to better understand the role of a parent, and the impact of filial love, and any manner of other things that she draws out of Woolf’s writing.

Much of this book is a portrait of her father. One of the impressive things Smyth achieves is conveying how deeply she loved this man who was evidently, openly flawed. For much of her life, he was an alcoholic – and her descriptions of his glassy-eyed appearances at dinners, his mood swings, his melancholy are vivid and uncomfortable. Despite a few stays in rehab facilities, he refused to go to AA meetings; Smyth’s parents had multiple times where they announced their separation, but stayed together. Smyth not only draws unlikely parallels between this troubled man and the almost saint-like Mrs Ramsay of To The Lighthouse, but makes the reader believe them. She is also keen to point out that her mother is not akin to the frustrating, unthinking cruel Mr Ramsay – but we see the dual portraits: this suffering, patient mother, and the mother that Smyth could not love in the way she loved her father.

People sometimes ask me if I’m angry with my father. When I say I’m not, they think I’m lying to myself. I don’t think I am. When I look back on his worst acts, I can remember my wrath and hatred, certainly – so violent, so complete, so inexorable, I thought at times that I could barely stand to be in my own skin. But I can also remember the way in which, within a week or two, such vehemence had faded to nothing; how that brutish stranger was again and again vanquished by that other, most gentle and lovable being: my father. And the truth us that neither memory – neither the loathing nor the absolution – feels especially familiar now. They feel like stories attached to someone else.

Smyth weaves together the various strands of All The Lives We Ever Lived beautifully, with extremely good judgement. Any time that I wondered why we hadn’t heard from To The Lighthouse for a while, it appeared in the next paragraph. The links she draws between the novel and her experiences are always thoughtful and illuminating, and never feel forced. It’s impact on her life and how she frames her understanding of life is so great that it is natural to take it as a guidebook to the intense experiences of loving and grieving. (Incidentally, having never grieved for anybody close to me, I am always reading books about grief as something of a tourist – fascinated but without truly understanding. I imagine this book would feel very different to somebody who has lost someone.)

I remember when I first started reading Virginia Woolf – Mrs Dalloway, mostly on the school bus. It was a revelation. Language had previously been something that sat around in piles, being clumped together to form books that were buildings of meaning – some architecturally elegant, some more workmanlike, but always simple enough constructions. And now this; now Woolf. She seems to disregard everything that language has previously had to do, and find new, beautiful, extraordinary ways of using it. Unlike other authors I had read, she was not finding words to match her meaning, but giving language new meaning, new vitality, through her ways of using it.

Her writing has not affected how I relate to the world in quite the way it did for Smyth, but I certainly share her admiration for Woolf’s astonishing ability. If I didn’t, or if I had not read To The Lighthouse, I do wonder what I’d have made of All The Lives We Ever Lived. I can’t answer that question. I know that reading this has made me want to pick up To The Lighthouse for the fourth time, and perhaps it would inspire Woolf newbies to do the same.

I’m still not sure why this book was published. Smyth hasn’t written any others, and its audience must be relatively niche. But I’m so, so glad it was. It is beautifully written, movingly thoughtful, and something I feel sure I will return to. Woolf fans – rush to it. For those who aren’t – I hope you find as much to value as I did.

Becoming by Michelle Obama

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I think it’s fair to say that my reading isn’t the most zeitgeisty. I usually only read a small handful of books published in the year I’m reading them, increasingly new non-fiction. But when I had audiobook credit towards the end of last year, I decided to spend it on one of the year’s bestsellers – Michelle Obama’s autobiography, Becoming (2018). All 19 hours of it.

Those 19 hours were read by Obama herself – which was one of the reasons I was keen to get it, as I love her voice. And, yes, she reads very well; I’d certainly recommend this way of experiencing the book.

The book takes us from Obama’s earliest memories through to leaving the White House and the inauguration of Donald Trump – and the most amazing thing about it is her astonishing powers of recall. Steadily, step by step, she takes us through every stage of her life – seeming to remember vividly what she experienced and thought at each part. She gives the same rigorous attention to (say) watching her father suffer with MS, or her path to getting into law school, as she does the minutiae of her husband’s rise to the White House. It is all-engrossing, and throughout she reflects with wisdom, thoughtfulness, and clear-sightedness about her own journey – and how this has been influenced by being a black woman.

Clear-sightedness is, indeed, the hallmark of Obama’s writing. My favourite parts of the book were probably her view of the first election campaign – as Obama fought first for the Democratic nomination and then for the presidency. While obviously wanting her husband to win, and believing he would be the best choice for the job, she has no illusions about the downsides of campaigning and the way opponents and the press manipulate everything. She says at the beginning and end of the book that she is not a political person and has seen nothing over the past ten years to change her mind – no, she isn’t going to run for president – and my heart ached with sympathy for somebody thrust into this position she would not have chosen. With her blessing, of course, but not with joy.

Anybody interested in how politics works in America will find the campaign trail section extremely interesting, and I can’t imagine anybody else has written about it from quite her perspective (or, frankly, with her humanity and wisdom). The same is true for life as First Lady – from how she wanted to use the role for the nation’s good to how she tried to ensure that her daughters’ lives were as normal as humanly possible.

It closes with her hopes for the future. She is refreshingly open about her disdain for Donald Trump (which dated back to his endangering her family’s lives through his ‘birther’ attacks, which led to a gunman attacking the White House) – like many of us in and out of America, she couldn’t believe that America had seen him for what he was and chosen him.

The book is certainly long and every anecdote is thorough and detailed, even when it adds only background detail. But it works – all the details come together to show you who Michelle Obama is. And the only mystery I leave with is that somebody so modest, selfless, and unbombastic came to be persuaded to write an autobiography at all. She suggests it is to show other young black women what they can achieve. Well, I’m very pleased she did – and I think the book will continue her good work.

Bleaker House by Nell Stevens

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As soon as I finished Mrs Gaskell & Me by Nell Stevens (my review here), I bought a copy of Bleaker House (2017) – going on rather a wild goose chase through London bookshops in order to do so. It had been on my probably-read-one-day list for a long time, and I thought I should hasten on that time – and it’s really good; excellent pre-Christmas reading.

I wrote in my review of Mrs Gaskell & Me that I much preferred the sections where Stevens was writing about her own life to those about Mrs Gaskell’s – and so I was pleased to see that Bleaker House is all about Stevens’ own writing exploits. Specifically, the fellowship generously given to all students on her writing masters in Boston, whereby they can spend up to three months anywhere in the world. Many of her fellow students are going to Europe or Asia. She decides to go to… Bleaker.

Bleaker is a tiny island (population: 2), part of the Falklands. Off the coast of Argentina, the islands are an overseas British territory (cf the Falklands War) and about as isolated as you can get. The name is a corruption of ‘breaker’, because of the waves that break there, but it does seem an accurate description of the conditions there. Especially in winter, which is when Stevens decides to go. After a sojourn at the slightly-larger Stanley, she stays in one of two otherwise empty guests houses on Bleaker. The farming couple who divide their time between this and another island are there for the beginning and end of her three months, but otherwise she is alone – with her novel.

The idea was to get away from the world so that she’ll have to write her novel – about a man named Ollie who ends up travelling to Bleaker to track down the father he thought had died years earlier. We know, from the outset, that Bleaker House is a work of non-fiction, not a novel – so what went wrong? (Or, perhaps, right?)

This is a challenging read for any of us who are not doing very well at finishing novel, but an extremely engaging and well-written account of failing to write a book. And, of course, about the unusual experience she has foisted upon herself – not least the lack of food she brought, and dealing without the internet. This section is from her stay on Stanley, not noticeably more modernised than Bleaker:

I will spend the next month in this guest house on the outskirts of the town, presided over by Mauru, the housekeeper. Since it is the middle of winter, Maura explains, there will probably be no other guests. The owner of the hotel, Jane, is away in England. For the next few weeks, then, it will just be Mauru and me.

I ask her about the Internet. “Is there Wi-Fi here?” I know, as I ask, that I sound needy, a little obsessed. I am a little obsessed.

She squints.

“Wi-Fi?” I repeat. “The Internet?”

Mauru looks troubled. “The Internet?” Jane would know, she says. She leads me into the hall, and points at a bulky machine squatting on a table by the door. She looks doubtful as she says, “Is that it?”

“No,” I say, “no, that’s a printer.”

“The Internet?” Mauru repeats, again. She shrugs. “I’m sure it’s around here somewhere. I’m just not sure where.”

In both her books, Stevens goes for an interesting patchwork technique – putting together different stages of her life in a way that works really well (and presumably takes a great deal of thought to avoid feeling odd). So we see the relationship she has recently left, and experiences from writing classes, all intersected with the feelings of isolation and uncertainty on the island. In amongst these, perhaps less successfully, are excerpts from the work in progress – and a couple of short stories that aren’t related. Her writing in these is good, though with a little less vitality than her autobiographical writing, but it’s hard to see quite how they cohere with the rest of the book. I suppose it would be a lot shorter without them – and I’d have complained if we didn’t get any evidence of the work she was there to do. All things considered, the balance isn’t too off.

Stevens is an honest, interesting writer – managing the difficult feat of extended introspection without isolating the reader. Who knows how many more books she can write before she runs out of writerly life experiences to document, but I’m hoping there’s a least a few more to come.

This Little Art by Kate Briggs

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I’m back from a week in Northern Ireland, and I have a pile of books I’ve been meaning to talk about. Some of those are books that I read whilst I was away, but the first one I want to talk about is one that I read shortly before. It’s This Little Art (2017) by Kate Briggs, which I bought in Libreria – an independent bookshop off Brick Lane. I’d seen a few book bloggers writing about it, and I couldn’t resist.

The book is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, a beautiful and very simple edition – very sleek and chic and all things like that. It’s all about translation. Briggs is herself a translator, having translated some of Roland Barthes’ seminar notes from French to English. Don’t stop reading this review quite yet. While that may seem like the most niche thing known to man, this book is extremely accessible, even to people like me whose French is extremely rusty. Well, ‘rusty’ makes it sound like I once knew French, which is not true – or ‘vrai’. Ithankyou.

The book takes the reader on a discursive, surprisingly pacy adventure through the different facets of translation and how understanding translation can help you understand your relationship with authors, writing, books, and even one’s own self respect. the title is a quotation from Helen Lowe Porter, who apparently translated Thomas Mann works for much of his career, which became her career. She was using those three words to deprecatingly refer to translation, and Briggs looks quite a lot at how Lowe-Porter’s life and reputation were shaped by the debates relating to translation. Some of the most interesting sections, for those interested in literary feuding and scandal, were when Briggs talks about a famous demolition of Lowe-Porter’s work that appeared in some literary journal or other. But Briggs puts this into a fine tapestry of other debates about translators, including discussions about her own suitability to take on the work that she has done.

‘Tapestry’ is perhaps a good word to describe this book. It has the unconventional format of many areas of white on the page. While some pages are full of paragraphs, others have only a few lines at the top; each thought is given only the space it needs, and there’s a generosity with margins and white space that is very unusual in modern publishing. This feels perhaps odd at first, but soon becomes the only way that one could write or read a book like this. It is almost dream-like, how one thought leads to another, whether about Briggs’ own life or about the philosophy of translation or about particular nuances of individual words in different languages. I can only imagine that Briggs did have to do the usual editing that any writer has to do, but it is hard to believe that this book ever existed in any other form than that which it currently does. Each word leads so perfectly to the next, each moment follows beautifully and logically from the one that came before, that it feels as though it has emerged whole and wonderful from her pen.

As such, it is also difficult to compartmentalise. To pull any individual thought out from this book feels like pulling a thread from that tapestry – it only works at its finest when seen in the whole. And please don’t think that this is an unduly academic or self-indulgent book. The back cover talks about it having the momentum of a novel, and I was very sceptical – but that is exactly what it has. There is wisdom without sacrificing humanity; philosophy without losing humour or groundedness. I have a feeling that Briggs could write something brilliant on any topic, but choosing one about which she is so evidently passionate means that we have a true gem unfurled before us. I’ll leave you with a quote – the entirety of p.146, in fact – but I do encourage anybody to get a copy. (And, in passing, I will apologise for any odd typos in this review – I have been largely dictating it, as my RSI is playing up, this time in both hands. Off to a physio to see if she can sort me out!)

We need translations. We do, of course we do. The world needs them. And translation is work undertaken in response – direct or indirect response – to that demand. But the nature of the work involved, the time that writing a translation takes, together with its lack of material support, its little pay and uneven appreciation, will inevitably narrow the pool of people actually capable of answering it. Translation is necessary, vital work. It is also deeply pleasurable and instructive and intensely time-consuming work. Approaching a kind of leisure activity, then, but one with its own precarious economy;its per-word fees (as if translating one word, one sequence of words, one book made of words, were ever equivalent to translating another); its occasional prizes. It is not my aim to celebrate these conditions, exactly; it’s rather to recognise them in order for there to be a chance of varying them. As well to point out – no doubt too fast – that even these conditions (these apparently ideal conditions? The lady translator translating what she loves, working from home, grateful for but not entirely reliant on what Helen Lowe-Porter calls the ‘dribble of money’, or otherwise secure enough to risk trying to make the various dribbles of money work) are complicated.

Mrs Gaskell & Me by Nell Stevens

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I love a book about reading, and I love a biography where the biographer’s experience is part of the story. And so I was really pleased when Picador sent me a review copy of Nell Stevens’ new book Mrs Gaskell & Me. I’d heard of her book Bleaker House but not read it yet – still, this sounded so up my street that I couldn’t resist starting it almost immediately, Century of Books be hanged.

The book is in two parallel timelines. In one timeline, Elizabeth Gaskell has written a controversial biography of her friend Charlotte Bronte, and is heading off to Rome at the time of publication. In the other timeline, Nell Stevens is writing her PhD thesis about Gaskell. Both of them have romantic entanglements of some variety – Gaskell is charmed by the, indeed, charming Charles Eliot Norton; Stevens gets up the courage to tell her friend Max that she’s in love with him, and they start a slightly complex, often long-distance relationship. The parallels are clearly brought to the fore, but they are there nonetheless.

I deliberately didn’t look up anything about Gaskell’s life, because I didn’t want to know how much was documented and how much Stevens imagined. Much like ‘Nell Stevens’ herself in this book, it is a fictionalised version – or, rather, a selective and edited version. Every biography or autobiography is that, naturally, but I suspect Stevens had to edit a little more than most to make parts cohere.

While she writes well about Gaskell’s adventures, and imaginatively makes us feel like we are watching these tense moments of her life, I have to admit that I was drawn a lot more to the sections about Stevens’ own life. Perhaps any dual narrative will inevitably lead us enjoying one more than the other – I do find, in a novel, that the balance is more easily struck with three. In the strand that follows Stevens’ life, she writes with striking vividness about her romance – sometimes awkward, sometimes secure, sometimes fraught – and juggling it alongside writing her PhD thesis. Normally I find fiction or non-fiction about romance a bit tedious (unless it’s a romcom movie, then I’m right in) – but Stevens manages to write about her emotional experiences without being too vague or claiming too much worldwide significance for them – the two pitfalls people often fall into. By contrast, when she writes about Gaskell’s emotional life, the guesswork shows through. It’s all quite plausible, but inevitably loses some of the vitality that makes her sections so engaging. (I did like what she wrote about the reception to Gaskell’s life of Charlotte Bronte, though – I hadn’t known it was such a scandal.)

And then there is all that she writes about the academic student life. Perhaps I enjoyed this mostly because it reminds me my own doctorate, and the highs and lows of academic research – dealing with expectations, wondering about the future, revelling in the highs when research unearths gems, and panicking because nothing seems to cohere. Though Stevens’ course had a lot of expectations – she seemed to have substantial work and a strong idea of where she was going almost immediately. I didn’t really know where my thesis was going for at least 18 months.

The main divider in whether or not you’ll enjoy this is: do you like the fourth wall broken? This is all meta – all about the author, and doing the research, and breaking that wall. I love it and, if anything, would have welcomed more. The Gaskell bits held my attention, but it was the “and me” that made me really love this book. And, indeed, I’d bought a copy of Bleaker House before I got to the end.

Any Ordinary Day by Leigh Sales

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As the year draws to a close, I seem to be drawn to more new books than usual – to the detriment of A Century of Books. One area in which I’m particularly allowing myself to go rogue is audiobooks. While I am ticking off some ACOB years with it, I’m also going earlier (thanks to the copyright-free restrictions of Librivox) and later (thanks to… my wish to read the books in question).

I’ve been listening to the Chat 10: Looks 3 podcast for a while, hosted by Annabel Crabb and Leigh Sales. Those names meant nothing to me and, indeed, it was a while before I realised they were famous outside of the podcast – which was recommended to me by an Australian colleague. And, indeed, Australians will probably recognise those names as journalists/presenters/newscasters/etc. Leigh Sales presents a flagship news programme, but in a recent episode of Chat 10: Looks 3 (which is always hilarious) she talked about finding time to write her new book – Any Ordinary Day (2018).

The book stems from the idea that life-changing moments happen out of nowhere – that people get up, get dressed, leave the house as they do on any other day. And then the extraordinary happens, potentially ending their lives. Sales first thought about this when she experienced a life-changing event herself: a uterine rupture, while pregnant with her second child. Thankfully she had gone to the hospital earlier, with unfamiliar pains – and thus was able to be rushed straight to surgery, and survived something that is usually fatal. In the midst of other dramatic or traumatic family events, it put her in mind of speaking to people who experience or witness the extraordinarily tragic.

That ‘witness’ is fascinating, but let’s start with the ‘experience’. She speaks to the man whose wife and two children were murdered in the Port Arthur Massacre; she speaks with a woman who was in the Lindt cafe siege and has MS – with someone who lost his first wife in an avalanche and his second to cancer; with a man who survived over a month stranded in a snowdrift; with someone whose husband was murdered by his schizophrenic son. There is a panoply of grief and tragedy here.

Many of the names are famous, particularly in Australia – and that is part of what makes her conversations with them so interesting. People are changed by these things happening to them, or to people they love. But they are also expected to remain in a stasis of grief. The Port Arthur widow related people asking “Oh, you’re over it, then?” if they saw him laughing in public – as though being over that sort of event were possible. The man lost in the snow has had to live with a curious urban myth about a Mars bar in his bag – perhaps this will mean something to Australian readers! – and tells Sales that people joke about that Mars bar to him at least once a week. Discovering the after effects of these extraordinary moments is saddening in a wide range of ways but so interesting.

And then there are the people who walk alongside the mourners, or work with them. Some of the most fascinating parts of Any Ordinary Day were when Sales interviewed people whose jobs are connected with people’s most tragic days – particularly the empathetic, wise woman who worked in a morgue and accompanied those who had to identify dead bodies. In a similar vein, she speaks with the police officers who have to inform people that their loved ones have died, and a priest who particularly helped one widow. The meeting of ordinary and extraordinary is so unusual, and Sales writes about it brilliantly. This is their livelihoods; the other people engaged in each day will never forget the encounter.

Along the way, Sales tries to find out answers – how people cope with these events; if they try to find any reason in them; what responses are most likely to lead to emotional recovery. I had never heard of post-traumatic growth, but apparently it’s much more likely than the much-more-talked-about PTSD.

Several of the people Sales meets are Christians, and (as a Christian myself) I found it really interesting to see how she responded to that, as somebody predisposed to scepticism. She is a little patronising to them at times, and conflates the idea of a sovereign God with “this was meant to be” – the problem of evil and suffering is, of course, endlessly complex – but I thought it was intriguing how often she came upon people of faith.

Having said that, her writing and interviewing is extremely sensitive and thoughtful. Being a big name in the Australian media has granted her access to many people who might not speak out otherwise, and she draws together the stories and threads extremely well. It is not trying to be sensational, nor answer all the big questions – but by introducing the questions (and, indeed, some less eternal questions – like the idea of media intrusion and journalistic integrity) she creates a very good book. My biggest take away was the extraordinary bravery of survivors, kindness and wisdom of those who have helped them, and troubling way that the media and public at large treat tragedies. No answers, perhaps, but definitely worth a read to explore the issues – and I can definitely recommend the audiobook, narrated by Sales herself.