2020

The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams

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The Dictionary of Lost Words: Amazon.co.uk: Williams, Pip: 9780593160190: Books

I go to my village book group because I enjoy discussing books and getting to know people. I don’t particularly expect to enjoy the novels. It leans much more modern than my taste, and often towards the sort of historical fiction or issue-driven novel that are relatively well written and not (to me) at all interesting. They probably won’t be remembered in a decade’s time, and they’re often written in a very similar style.

Well, I’m more than happy to say that The Dictionary of Lost Words (2020) by Pip Williams is a pleasant exception to my rule. Yes, it’s historical fiction. Yes, it’s new(ish). And to be honest, yes, it probably isn’t going to enter any sort of canon – but I really enjoyed it. All 400+ pages of it, and we all know how I feel about books over 300 pages.

It helps that Williams is writing about a world I have known well. As the book opens, Esme is the daughter of a widowed man who works on the embryonic Oxford English Dictionary. He works under Dr James Murray, sorting slips of paper with quotations illustrating words. Each of these slips, stored in specially designed shelves in the Scriptorium, will contribute to evidence of how a word is used. Eventually, of course, every single word will be included in Murray’s ambitious OED.

The reason this is familiar to me is that I used to work for Oxford Dictionaries. I was in the marketing department, running a now-sadly-deleted blog about language, but we were all steeped in the lore of Murray and the origins of the dictionary. Williams has clearly researched all of this well, and I understand that one of my ex-colleagues was a consultant on the novel, making sure that it is a broadly accurate depiction of the early days of the dictionary.

But this is not a work of non-fiction, and so of course a lot is invented – not least Esme herself. As a young child, she is fascinated by what her dad is doing. The slips of paper have a special lure for her – and she can’t help but take one slip, for ‘bondmaid’, when it falls onto the floor. Bondmaid was, indeed, a word missing from the first edition of the OED. Williams’ suggested reason is fanciful, but I enjoyed the possibility.

It was a word, and it slipped off the end of the table. When it lands, I thought, I’ll rescue it, and hand it to Dr Murray myself.

I watched it. For a thousand moments I watched it ride some unseen current of air. I expect it to land on the unswept floor, but it didn’t. It glided like a bird, almost landing, then rose up to somersault as if bidden by a genie. I never imagined that it might land in my lap, that it could possibly travel so far. But it did.

[…]

I held the word up to the light. Black ink on white paper. Eight letters; the first, a butterfly B. I moved my mouth around the rest as Da had taught me: O for orange, N for naughty, D for dog, M for Murray, A for apple, I for ink, D for dog, again. I sounded them out in a whisper. The first part was easy: bond. The second part took a little longer, but then I remembered how the A and I went together. Maid.

As Esme grows older, the dictionary remains a mainstay in her life – but she is also interested in the words that are not included. Quotations in the early OED are disproportionately drawn from books by men – partly, of course, that books were disproportionately written by men. They also often represent upper- and middle-class authors. Esme – living as close to the servants as she does to her societal ‘equals’ – becomes interested in the words that are used by women and by working-class women in particular. She convinces a servant to accompany her through Oxford’s Covered Market, listening to the words of stallholders, noting down what they say on her own set of slips. While spoken sentences don’t ‘count’ for the OED, she stores them in her own treasure chest. She compiles her own dictionary of lost words.

I enjoyed all this dictionary stuff because I am fascinated by the creation of the dictionary – and by language, and by words. But Williams knows that not all her readers will find this sufficiently interesting – and The Dictionary of Lost Words incorporates a great deal more. Being set around the turn of the 20th century and following Esme as she grows older, we see all manner of contemporary issues – particularly the suffrage movement, and later the First World War. At times it does feel like Williams is ticking off the key contemporary topics – Esme is mistreated at boarding school, visits wounded soldiers, she goes to suffragist events, she is a lens for Stopes-esque sexual discovery etc. etc. It all works well, but I do wonder if a novel a hundred pages shorter with slightly less incident would have been even better.

In Esme, Williams has created a sympathetic, intelligent, rounded character that it’s a pleasure to spend time with – particularly for any likeminded reader who shares her fascination with words. Some of Williams’ attempts to de-patriarchy the dictionary are far from treading new ground – I mean, I did an undergraduate thesis on the same topic – but there’s no denying that turning it into an engaging novel is likely to reach a much wider audience. There aren’t really any villains here either (bar one sniffy lexicographer who doesn’t want Esme near the Scriptorium) and it’s a refreshingly sincere, well-researched and often heart-rending look at a fascinating time in history.

What I Read At Christmas

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Happy Christmas! I hope you had a lovely time – hopefully better than last year. I went to my parents’ house, as did my brother, so it felt like a lovely family Christmas. Very relaxed, if you don’t count the fiendish board games and quizzes. And plenty of reading, of course. In fact, the two books I finished have rather beautifully pairing covers.

A Snowfall of Silver by Laura Wood

A Snowfall of Silver by Laura Wood | WaterstonesLast year, on the recommendation of Sarra Manning on Instagram, I bought Laura Wood’s A Snowfall of Silver – and I was saving it for a special occasion, because it felt like it would be the perfect book to read at Christmas. And, goodness me, it was.

Wood’s novel was published last year, but is set in 1931. The briefest synopsis sold me: 18-year-old Freya runs away from Cornwall to London, because she is desperate to become an actor. Her sister Lou lives there – probably with her boyfriend Robert, Freya suspects, though outwardly he lives elsewhere. And so Freya turns up on her doorstep, having taken the train and feeling very dramatic about the whole thing. As Lou points out, she could equally have arranged to stay with their parents’ permission, but to Freya’s mind that wouldn’t have set the tone.

On the train, she meets a tall young man called Kit – he is reading a book, has broad shoulders and freckles, and it is instantly obvious to the reader that they are destined to be together. He also works with a theatrical company, though not as an actor, and is able to get Freya introduced to the director – who is a bit past his heyday, but is still deeply famous in Freya’s corner of Cornwall.

One thing leads to another and Freya goes off on a six-week tour, as an assistant to the woman in charge of costumes. The attractive, volatile cast, the grande dame, the wide-eyed ingenue – all the puzzle pieces are in place for a rollicking, delightful journey.

It’s published as young adult fiction, but I think any adult would find it great fun too. We might not fall for the central love story with quite as much naïve joy, not least because Kit is never fully fleshed-out and is more a place for a younger reader to superimpose their own fantasy, but it’s still a really lovely book. My main quibble was that Lou and Robert seemed too fun to get so few pages – so I was pleased to discover that Wood has written an earlier book where they are the main characters. I suppose it spoils that they end up together, but in this sort of book that is never in doubt.

Infused by Henrietta Lovell

Infused: Adventures in Tea: Amazon.co.uk: Lovell, Henrietta: 9780571324392: BooksThe other book I started and finished was Infused by Henrietta Lovell, published in 2019 – a non-fiction book with the subtitle ‘Adventures in Tea’, given to me for my birthday by my friend Lorna.

Lovell is the owner of Rare Teas, a tea brand that sells leaf tea and which I have now ordered a little pile from. In Infused, Lovell takes us all over the world with her as she goes in search of the finest teas – and her ways of describing the adventures, the tastes, and the quiet but passionate joy of sampling nuances between different infusions is all very, very infectious. The humble teabag is dismissed throughout Infused, including some industry secrets on why even the fancy brands aren’t giving you great stuff – and while I doubt I’ll become a leaf tea drinker exclusively, I do want to try some Rare Tea and see how differently I can experience my favourite drink.

But even if you hate tea, there is a lot to enjoy in the way Lovell writes, and the way she approaches the adventures she’s experienced – from crafting a tea for the RAF to exploring Malawi to climbing mountainsides in search of the rarest teas. While she is clearly an expert, she writes with a fervour that is accessible – and admits her own incapability when it comes to certain aspects, like hand-rolling tea leaves.

Choose good tea, tea sourced directly from a farmer rather than faceless brokers. The knock-on effect of that choice will be manifold. You’ll be supporting communities around the world, people trying to work their way out of poverty into a sustainable future. You’ll help maintain great skills and keep craftmanship from disappearing under mechanisation. You might even force the giant conglomerates to change the way they do things.

This is a call to arms, comrades.

And there is no hardship in this calling. In choosing to drink good tea, we might change the world and give ourselves the greatest pleasure.

Others on the go…

I got about halfway through Stella Gibbons’ Enbury Heath, a delightful novel about three siblings inheriting a legacy and buying a small cottage together. I also started Ian Hamilton’s The Keepers of the Flame, about the history of literary estates and biography through major figures of literature, from Donne to Plath. All my Christmas reads have turned out to be good in one way or another, and were carefully chosen. And, of course, there were a pile among my Christmas presents…

The Butterfly Lampshade by Aimee Bender

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The Butterfly Lampshade by Aimee BenderMy dear friend Lorna got me The Butterfly Lampshade (2020) for my birthday last year, after the bookseller in Kramer Books, Washington DC, told her it was similar to our beloved Marilynne Robinson. Having finished it, I am not sure that is true – but the novel is nevertheless excellent, and I can sort of see where he/she was coming from…

The novel is about Francie – looking back on her childhood as someone in her late 20s. Her mother has had repeated psychotic episodes, and the last of these means she cannot care for Francie anymore. On that particular night, Francie is eight and has started staying with a babysitter as she prepares to travel to Los Angeles to stay with an aunt and uncle and their new child. In the midst of an episode, Francie’s mum has told her that there is a bug inside her.

But it turned out that my mother was right about the bug. She was several days too early, and mine had not been crawling, but there would end up being a bug in me after all, just a few days after she checked into the hospital, my fated bug, a butterfly I’d found at the babysitter’s apartment, floating like a red and gold leaf so prettily on the top of a tall glass of water. I did not have any other way to hold on to it, and I could not possibly leave it in the babysitter’s apartment, and the only contained handy was myself. Time was short. I drank it down because I had to.

This butterfly exactly matches the one on the titular lampshade – and this is the first of three instances of something emerging from its background. Though Francie never sees the moment at which the thing emerges from 2D to 3D, and nobody else ever sees the aftermath. There is the butterfly from the pattern of butterflies on a lampshade, the beetle from the picture of a beetle, and roses that have fallen out of a curtain patterned with roses. As the narrator looking back, Francie often lists these three events together as a sort of mantra – the lampshade, beetle, and roses are an iterative pattern long before we hear about the second and third events in detail. Initially, indeed, I thought I’d somehow missed these events being described. That’s just one of the ways that Bender’s narrative disconcerts the reader. She doesn’t give us all the information, or let us settle in one spot for too long.

In the present, Francie makes her living by buying objects at garage sales, cleaning them up, and selling them online. It sounds like one of those careers that people only have in sitcoms, but that sort of suits the uneasy relationship with reality that The Butterfly Lampshade has. The novel is not going to come out on either side of the ‘is this really happening?’ debate, when it comes to butterflies, beetles, and roses. It feels like that is somehow the least interesting question to ask. Instead, it asks questions like why does Francie fixate on it so much, or what does it mean about her relationship with her mother.

Francie is still in touch with her mother – mostly by phone, but sometimes in person. Her aunt and cousin have become more like mother and sister – just another way in which truth and fiction are intertwining entities. The same thing comes through in Bender’s writing, casually laden with metaphors and other imagery. I love this idea of ‘bumped around our sentences’ here:

It was awkward without my aunt there; we bumped around our sentences as if we’d just met, and when my mother asked again about the flight I told her every detail I could think of, hanging on to the tiny pieces of information like they were stepping-stones between us, which they were, including telling her my drink choice, and information about my seat companion, and how long I had waited for the bus (twenty minutes) while she listened with her large and hungry eyes.

For a novel with a fantastic premise, The Butterfly Lampshade is not really interested in plot. It is a slow-paced, thoughtful, and moving examination of family relationships and mental illness – as well as how memory does or doesn’t work, and how we form our own senses of identity.

In fact, the more I describe it, the more I can see what the bookseller was saying. While the writing style is nothing like Robinson’s, it suits similar reading moods – where you want something to read slowly and almost meditatively, to explore the depths and details of human relationships. It was a very good book – and I can sense that it would be even better a second time around.

Dear Reader by Cathy Rentzenbrink

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I will read any book about reading, as you might be aware if you’re a regular reader of Stuck in a Book. Some of them are among my all-time favourites, and some of them are a little more – if you will – by the book. But I’d heard wonderful things about Dear Reader by Cathy Rentzenbrink, published last year, given to me by my bro, and which I read on Christmas Day. It turned out to be the perfect Christmas book – and one of my favourite books about books that I’ve read for years.

As I lie there, surrounded by boxes, looking up at the half-filled shelves, at the books that have followed me from place to place, I find my answer. I will be my own doctor and prescribe the best medicine: a course of rereading. I will make piles of my most treasured books and read through them, taking comfort not only in each book itself but also in the reassuring knowledge that there are many more to come. Something shifts in my body. I feel better already, just at the thought of turning off my phone and spending my evenings curled up with a good book. This what I have always done. When the bite of real life is too brutal, I retreat into made-up worlds and tread well-worn paths. I don’t crave the new when I feel like this, but look for solace in the familiar. It is as though in re-encountering my most-loved fictional characters, I can also reconnect with my previous selves and come out feeling less fragmented. Reading built me and always has the power to put me back together again.

I didn’t mean to quote that much, but I couldn’t stop once I started. I’m not a big re-reader myself, but I definitely retreat to familiar genres and authors, if not particular books – and I love that final line, there.

Despite this intro, Dear Reader isn’t really about a series of re-reads. It’s more of a memoir of reading life – one that feels universal, while also obviously being specific to Rentzenbrink. And her life has been fully surrounded by books. We see her first forays into discovering narratives and characters, and realising the joy that they could bring – and when she was having difficult times at school, books were a refuge. Many chapters end with a series of recommendations for books relating to the period of her life in question, and they are great lists, recommended with the happy fervour of any enthusiastic reader. Some themes are enjoyably unusual – like the list of books about pubs, when her dad became a pub landlord when Rentzenbrink was sixteen.

But books aren’t just part of Rentzenbrink’s social life. She goes into working in bookselling – and it’s a fascinating look behind the curtain. She starts in the book department of Harrod’s, and it’s always fun to read behind-the-curtain experiences of working in customer service. There are certainly stories of silly requests and unreasonable members of the public, but there is also a warmth to Rentzenbrink’s writing. We all love Shaun Bythell’s biting memoirs of bookselling, but this is not that – Rentzenbrink is thrilled whenever she can engage with an interested reader, and her favourite thing is to recommend books. We can all empathise.

The book follows her bookselling journey as she takes on more responsibility at other shops – organising events, arranging displays, choosing books. She goes up and up, and has such fondness for her colleagues and her experiences. What survives throughout is her passion for reading and for encouraging others in their reading lives. She is not a pollyanna, and there are difficult stages to her life too – but this is still a delightful read. The subtitle of Dear Reader is ‘the comfort and joy of books’, and there are few books about books that are more comforting or joyful than this.

Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops by Shaun Bythell

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I imagine you’ve probably read Shaun Bythell’s very funny accounts of running a secondhand bookshop in Wigtown, Scotland – Diary of a Bookseller and Confessions of a Bookseller. I love them and I’m hoping they go on and on. While we wait for another diary, though, there is Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshop – published last year, probably with an eye on being a stocking filler. It’s 137 pages and a pocket-sized book, so only takes an hour or so to whip through – but it’s a delightful hour.

As the title suggests, Bythell divides up his usual clientele into seven categories – though each of these has several sub-sections. For example, here is the genus Expert, species Bore:

This type of person often considers him- or herself to be a polymath, and will inveterately share their thoughts with you on any subject you choose to mention, or accidentally mention, once you are aware of their proclivity. It is best to maintain complete silence in their presence, as the slightest thing can trigger a lengthy tirade on the most unexpected of subjects, although often you don’t discover that customers fall into this taxonomic category until it’s far, far too late. They are not averse to listening in on conversations between other customers and interjecting with their (often wildly offensive) opinions, and on many occasions I have had to apologise to innocent bystanders who – having been quietly discussing something – have subsequently been subject to an unsolicited (and possibly racist) rant from a complete stranger who happened to be within earshot.

Bythell is always wonderful at spearing people who have no self-awareness about how difficult they make life for others – though he breaks his curmudgeonly persona every now and then to talk about kinds of people who are very welcome in the shop. He treads the line between wittily grumpy and mean with expertise, never falling on the wrong side of it – but these moments of appreciation are still like the sun bursting through clouds.

Naturally, as a frequenter of bookshops, I read nervously – trying to identify myself. The nearest I came was the posh old lady from the city, with whom I have little in common except for her taste: ‘She would never dream of taking the dog for a walk, and her interests, when she comes into the bookshop and wafts dreamily around, are a light touch of Bloomsbury (particularly Virginia Woolf) with a smattering of the Mitford sisters.’ Ouch!

I will read anything Bythell writes about bookshops and, though this isn’t a proper instalment in the series, it’s enough to keep us going for a while. If it wasn’t in your stocking at Christmas, then treat yourself to a copy to make January a bit more fun.

A moving memoir of racism, poverty, and abuse

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I recently finished a memoir, read by the author as an audiobook. It was a really striking portrayal of growing up as a mixed-race child in America in the ’70s, with violence, poverty, and uncertainty.

The narrator was the youngest of three, and can barely remember a time when her parents were together. Their relationship was volatile, and they had divorced by the time she could remember – leaving her with some resentment of her older brother and sister, who had got to experience something close to a happy family. In turn, they resented the narrator – not least because of her paler skin. Though they had the same parents, the narrator was lighter skinned than her siblings – and could often ‘pass’ as white, or perhaps thought to be Latino. This meant she dodged some of the racism that her siblings experienced – though certainly got her fair share too.

She recounts one of the first times that she remembers her race being an issue – taking a white schoolfriend to visit her Black dad. The schoolfriend had only known the narrator’s white mother before – and when the door to the apartment building was opened by a Black man, started crying and screaming and refused to go in. The narrator, a young girl at the time, was confused and hurt – not least by seeing the hurt on her father’s face.

Sometimes the pain she faced came from within the family too. There are extraordinary, vividly written scenes where she relates her sister – whose life had somehow derailed so that she was addicted to drugs and was selling her body – trying to pimp her out when she was only fourteen. Luckily someone the narrator knew happened to stumble across the scene, saving her from who knows what. And her brother became increasingly violent, so that the narrator never felt safe at home. Sometimes her mother would have to call the police, and the narrator would have the terror of a Black brother being at the mercy of cops. All she dreamed of was a time of safety and love at Christmas, a day that seemed more than any other to mark the difference between her family and a perfect one. It never came.

Perhaps a third or a half of the autobiography consists of this examination of childhood. It is revealing, painful and so well written. You long for her to get somewhere safe where she can begin to live properly. And her career does start to take off with incredible speed – her hard work and some luck making her more successful than she could imagine. She charts every moment that led there, so it’s hard to remember she is only in her late teens when it all begins to fall into place – albeit against the backdrop of the legacy of that childhood.

But things don’t fall into a happy ever after. She finds herself in a controlling marriage – richer than she ever imagined, but without any freedom. Her husband won’t let her see anyone or decide her own time. There are cameras in every room of the house. She is followed by security wherever she goes. Her husband is never physically abusive, but she is subjected to emotional and control abuse for years.

She does manage to get out, and the second half of the autobiography is much more about her career. After this, you probably do need to have an active interest in her work, otherwise the details are not very captivating – but the first half of the book is an extraordinary insight, whether or not you care about her career. And the problem is that this will probably be largely overlooked by people who’ll see the name of the author and decide the book isn’t for them. Which is why I’ve waited until the final line of this review to tell you that the autobiography is The Meaning of Mariah Carey by Mariah Carey.

Jack by Marilynne Robinson

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The publication of a new novel by Marilynne Robinson is always an event. She is one of the few authors whose output I eagerly await, and I had Jack preordered – it arrived a couple of weeks before the official publication date, and I couldn’t resist jumping right in. It’s the fourth of the Gilead series, though technically you can read them in any order. Chronologically, it comes before Home.

Jack is the first of the series not to take place at all in the town of Gilead, though it certainly haunts the entire novel. Jack is the wayward son of Reverend Robert Boughton, one of several sons and daughters but the only one who turned away from the family completely. As this novel opens, we see him living in a small town far away, occasionally visited by his kindly brother Teddy, but more often collecting the money that Teddy leaves for him at a previous address. He is too proud and damaged to return home, even for his mother’s funeral. But he is also hopeful of improvement – of his fortunes improving, of improving himself, of finding someone who believes he is worth the effort. But he also reviles those opportunities. Jack is in a constant war with himself. We see him in Gilead as the casually cruel neighbour’s son of John Ames’s memory; in Home as the prodigal son who has been quietened by life, but cannot help resisting a reunion. In Jack, we see the man between those stages.

After a few pages, showing Jack and a young African-American woman called Della, whom he has offended in a manner that isn’t immediately clear, the scene shifts to a cemetery – and then we enter an extraordinary section of the novel. Jack and Della are both spending the night locked in there. This is habitual for Jack, and an accident for Della. For dozens of pages, Robinson shows us their conversation in real time. It reminded me a lot of Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, which are among my favourite films. They talk about nothing and everything, revealing as much in their silences as their replies. Neither opens their hearts – both have difficulties with trust.

She took a deep breath. ”I’m not going to get into this with you, Mr Boughton.”

Why did he persist? She was reconsidering, taking her purse and her bouquet into her lap. Could that be what he wanted her to do? It wouldn’t be self-defeat, precisely, because at best there would be only these few hours, tense and probationary, and then whatever he might want to rescue from them afterward for the purposes of memory. That other time, when the old offense was fresh, she had seemed to regret it for his sake as much as her own. He had seen kindness weary before. It could still surprise him a little.

He nodded and stood up. ”You’d rather I left you alone. I’ll do that. I’ll be in shouting distance. In case you need me.”

”No,” she said. ”If we could just talk a little.”

”Like two polite strangers who happen to be spending a night in a cemetery.”

”Yes, that’s right.”

”Okay.” So he sat down again. ”Well,” he said, ”what brings you here this evening, Miss Miles?”

”Pure foolishness, That’s all it was.” And she shook her head.

[…]

She said, ”I owe you an apology. I haven’t been polite.”

”True enough,” he said. ”So.”

”So?”

”So, pay up.”

She laughed. ”Please accept my apology.”

”Consider it done. Now,” he said, ”you accept mine.”

She shrugged. ”I don’t really want to do that.”

”Fair’s fair, isn’t it?”

”No, it isn’t, not all the time. Besides, I promised myself I wouldn’t.”

There’s a danger, when one starts quoting Robinson, that one will never stop. In that ‘[…]’, I cut out quite a bit, but I wanted to show how she uses dialogue – that sounds so inconsequential, but builds up the relationship of characters so well. In all her novels, I think she might be best at people disagreeing but never quite coming to the point. Every argument – and Jack and Home are full of conversations that are almost arguments – has two people afraid to speak all they are thinking, awkwardly hovering around truths, trying to work out exactly how much of themselves they can reveal. It’s all so masterly.

Jack is a romance, of sorts – the most cautious and often melancholy romance you can imagine. Because, of course, the barriers here are not just the hurts and mistrusts of Della and Jack, but the fact that they are from different races at a time where a marriage between them would be illegal in many US states and make them likely victims of discrimination in all of them. Interestingly, back home in Iowa there would have been no law against their union. Where Jack and Della now are, their fledgling relationship is illegal. And Della’s family are keen that she is not hurt – as well as believing ideologically that African-Americans should marry African-Americans. Della’s hard life becomes still harder, and Robinson is excellent at showing her gradual, reluctant, and often poorly rewarded affection for Jack – even while Jack and his emotions remain centre stage.

It’s hard to think of many things that Robinson doesn’t do excellently. Perhaps structure is one – or the signposting of structure, at least. The narrative leaps back and forth a bit, particularly around their first date, and it was sometimes a little confusing to remember where we were. But, without the achronology, that scene in the cemetery would have lost its power.

The real star of the book is Robinson’s writing. It’s the sort of novel to read slowly, savouring her impossibly good writing. So often, I would have to pause, having read an observation so perfect, or a trait so strikingly described, that it deserved a moment or two of reflection. Here’s one bit I highlighted:

There were times in his youth when his imagination of destruction were so powerful that the deed itself seemed as bad as done. So he did it. It was as if the force of the idea were strong enough that his collaboration in it was trivial.

Jack has been described as a novel about grace – and ‘grace’ is, indeed, the final word of the book. Robinson is a wise theologian, and certainly the idea of grace is threaded throughout. Jack is a man who cannot believe he deserves anything – and, indeed, the doctrine of grace shows us that good things can be given irrespective of deserving. The gift of Della’s love, the prospective reunion with his family, even the idea of a job and home – these are undeserved gifts of grace that Jack finds difficult to receive. But it is true that to understand all is to forgive all. The Jack we see in earlier Gilead novels becomes, in Jack, so rich and full and deep a portrait that one cannot help but empathise with him, failings and all.

To put it simply, this is an extraordinary and wonderful novel. Even more extraordinary is the fact that Robinson doesn’t revise – she just writes out the novel, first time. What a gift. I hope she never stops adding to the Gilead world. Jack is a strong contender for my favourite of the series – and if she can give this much depth to each character, I can’t see why the small canvas need ever be completely filled.

Inferno by Catherine Cho

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I’ll be honest, I first came across Catherine Cho while looking for literary agents to send my novel to. That hasn’t come to anything, but it did mean that I came across her memoir Inferno – and I was so intrigued that I bought it, and I read it within a couple days of it arriving. (NB I ought it directly from Bloomsbury, which seemed like a good way to support an independent bookshop at this time.)

Inferno is one of those zeitgeisty books – a memoir of extraordinary things happening to ordinary people. And I love them. Cho’s is about post-partum psychosis – not an easy topic, but Cho writes about it so stunningly.

According to Korean tradition, after a baby is born, mother and baby do not leave the house for the first twenty-one days. There are long cords of peppers and charcoal hung in the doorway to ward away guests and evil spirits. At the end of the twenty-one days, a prayer is given over white rice cakes. After 100 days, there is a large celebration, a celebration of survival, with pyramids of fruit and lengths of thread for long life.

[…]

My son was two months old when we embarked from London on an extended trip across the US. I had come up with a plan to use our shared parental leave to do a cross-country tour of family and friends and introduce them to our son. I didn’t see why we had to pay attention to Korean traditions – or superstitions, as I thought of them. As Korean Americans born and raised in the US, my husband and I had never paid much attention to the rules, and I had always thought our families didn’t either. Except that suddenly, with the birth of a baby, the rules seemed to matter.

We had avoided any evil spirits from California to Virginia, but perhaps we’d just been running away from them, because they found us at last at my in-laws’ house in New Jersey. My son was eight days shy of his 100-day celebration when I started to see devils in his eyes.

That’s the opening of Inferno – minus a paragraph I cut for space – and I think you’ll agree it’s pretty striking. But one of the many great things about this memoir is that it isn’t sensationalist. If you’ve ever come across post-partum psychosis, it’s probably from the shrieking headlines of tabloids. Or potentially from EastEnders. Cho’s experience was every bit as shocking as those scare stories – but she contextualises it in the reality of life before this illness struck her and her family.

Structurally, Inferno moves between two periods. The days that she spent involuntarily sectioned – and the life that led to that point. In between is woven folklore and history from Korea, moving elegantly from beliefs that have been passed through many generations to the reality of Cho’s life, finding unexpected connections or juxtapositions. It means that the hours where psychosis first hit are kept until towards the end of the book – by the time we read her description of the initial experience and the days she spent in hospital afterwards, we know Cho and her history with a sort of intimacy. It means that, when we read about Cho seeing devil eyes in her son Cato’s eyes, it is not simply the shock of a psychotic episode – it is the shock of seeing a friend at her darkest moment.

Cho grew up in Kentucky, in a house that was oddly silent. Her father required silence, and had a section of the house to himself for this purpose. Cho describes his moments of anger, and the way she and her brother Teddy tried to manage them. If Inferno was nothing but the description of growing up, it would be a vivid and faintly unsettling memoir – Cho writes with an intense honesty about all the people in her life, to the extent that I sometimes wondered what it was like to sit around the table at Thanksgiving now. She and Teddy were ‘foxhole buddies’ – in it together.

Her first significant escape from the world she grew up in is to Hong Kong – spontaneously following Drew (I assume a pseudonym?). She and he had started dating not long before, and Cho was attracted because he ‘represented possibility. A dare against what was certain’. In one of the most shocking openings to a section, later in the book, Cho is naked on a Hong Kong balcony – having been forced there by Drew, who has been consistently, horrifyingly violent to her. She is living in a foreign country with an abusive partner, unsupported by his mother – who knows what he is like but insists he can change, and wants Cho to stay. It’s hard to read, and I think it’s included to show the difficult periods of Cho’s life – that left their residue of uncertainty, fear and darkness that threatened to reappear in moments of intense stress.

If Cho writes astonishingly about violence and fear, she is equally good at the arguably more difficult: writing about falling in love. Her descriptions of meeting James, and her understandable reluctance to follow another man across the world when he invites her to move to London, are beguiling and like a lungful of fresh air in contrast to the other oppressive relationships she has withstood. She is able to do that rare thing for anyone: show you why the person they love is so lovable.

I’m at risk of rewriting the whole memoir, so I won’t say more about these sections – except that Cho recreates brilliantly the nuance of each relationship she has – with relatives, in-laws, James. With the prospective baby, when she is pregnant.

And when she gets to the day her psychosis hit, her writing is truly extraordinary. She and James have been staying with his parents – talkative, anxious, kind but interfering parents. Cho needs to escape. They go to stay in a nearby hotel. And Cho can’t stop seeing devils eyes when she looks at her son Cato.

As she relates that night, and the days in an emergency ward, Cho manages to give an astonishingly vivid account of psychosis. That sounds like a paradox, and perhaps it is – but she manages to recreate the distorted logic of the time in such a way that we understand how she perceived the world – but also how those around her must have perceived the experience. The horror of her psychosis isn’t that she is uncertain about reality – it is the certainty she has. That she is in Hell. That she needs to restart the simulation. That the cameras are watching. That the nurses outside are really her brother. I recommend reading the excerpt published in the Guardian, which touches on various parts of this.

I haven’t talked much about the parallel narrative – of life while sectioned, not knowing how she is able to secure release, not knowing if she is back to normal yet or how she would know if she were. Not thinking much about Cato, and being numbed to any reflections about that. These sections are a compelling insight to the American heath system – but they are necessarily less vivid. Cho’s time there was slow and uncertain. These pages counterbalance the dimensions she gives to her life history and to the immediacy and drama of her illness – because they are the gradual re-emergence to life.

I think Cho could write an engaging and beautiful memoir about anything at all, having read Inferno. The fact that she has undergone all she has lived gives her rich material – but few people would be able to create the tapestry she does of experience, reflection, philosophy, and the weaving in of American and Korean cultures. However horribly unlucky Cho was to have post-partum psychosis, and the horrendous depression that followed, I ended up thinking that other sufferers of this mental illness had one sliver of luck in the hand they have been dealt: to have someone as eloquent, wise and thoughtful as Cho as some kind of spokesperson.

 

 

A Bite of the Apple by Lennie Goodings

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I’m over at Shiny New Books with a review of A Bite of the Apple – the new memoir by Lennie Goodings about Virago Books. It’s a fascinating and personal book – here’s the full review, and below is the opening of what I wrote.

There’s a certain variety of person who can always spot a bottle-green spine at a hundred paces, and has faced the agonising decision about whether to shelve their Virago Modern Classics together or in with the rest of their books. I, reader, am one such person (and they’re shelved together, for what it’s worth) – Virago Modern Classics has introduced me to any number of wonderful writers, and I have plenty left to read. And it’s chiefly the idea of finding out more about the VMCs that made me delighted when I heard that Lennie Goodings had written A Bite of the Apple.