2020s

Kick the Latch by Kathryn Scanlan – #ABookADayInMay – Day 23

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At the end of Kick the Latch (2022) by Kathryn Scanlan, there is quite a curious note from the author. She writes:

Kick the Latch is based on interviews recorded in person and by phone in 2018, 2020, and 2021. With Sonia’s permission, I transcribed those recordings and used them to write this book, which is a work of fiction. My gratitude to Sonia – and to my mother, who introduced us – is profound.

I don’t remember reading any of the many reviews that circulated about this book a couple of years ago, but I’m sure they’d all have highlighted this curious mixture of fiction and non-fiction. If the main character is called Sonia, sharing her experiences in the first person, where does the real Sonia end and the fictional one begin?

The novel – if such it is – is told in many vignettes, or extremely short chapters. They are broadly in chronological order, from her early childhood through her career as a horse trainer, with a slightly unexpected addendum of life working in a prison at the end. But Kick the Latch is really a window on a world that most of us know nothing about: the visceral, often violent, all-encompassing world of horse trainers and jockeys. While the horse owners are at the peripheraries of the book, this not their stage. This is a clear-eyed, direct account of a world that Sonia loves, even while it treats her with apathetic brutality.

You get hit. I got kicked in the head. The horse was kicking at a fly and my head got in the way. Riders would go down. They’d get steel rods put up their spine. You were on top of the world or the bottom. You’d get hurt and be laid up with no money coming in, but there’d be other weeks where you made real good.

It’s a sport, you’re competitive – you want to be tops, you want to win, you want your name on the program, in the standings. A trainer’ll try to swipe an owner from another trainer. A jockey’ll say to another jockey – What the fuck are you doing, sniffing around my stable? Bad feelings, hard feelings, friction – nobody loves everybody. But if someone gets hurt, laid up, down on their luck, loses a loved one – even if their truck breaks down on the way to the next track – we’d work together to help. We’d have a big benefit.

Sonia’s voice is clear and unapologetic, and she skates along the surface of this dizzying world. Whether describing the dubious ways that jockeys keep their weight down, the muckier side of horse rearing, or her own rape and, later, domestic violence, she gives us the information in staccato summary. She seldom dwells on anything. It gives the book a break-neck pace.

Scanlan isn’t afraid to immerse us in the idiolect of horse training. We get some glossing, but I still felt rather at sea with paragraphs like this:

Dark Side had been ruled off for flipping in the gates. You can get a flipper reinstated, but it’s a lot of work. You have to get reapproved by the starter and you have to have eight clean breaks.

I’m none the wiser, to be honest, but I think it’s better to be thrown into this world than to have everything explained – or, goodness, footnotes.

And we are very much thrown into the world of the book. It is short, spiky, and totally consistent. Perhaps it is too visceral for my liking, and it certainly doesn’t have the elegance or intertextuality of other vignette-based books I’ve read like Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill or Blue Postcards by Douglas Bruton. But it is confidently, unflinchingly its own thing – and, on those terms, very much a success.

Catching Fire by Daniel Hahn – #ABookADayInMay – Day 18

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I knew I had to buy Catching Fire (2022) by Daniel Hahn as soon as I heard about it – and, boom, it’s not even three years since I bought it and I’ve read it! Such speed and agility. I don’t know why it took me so long, since I was pretty certain I would love it – and I definitely did.

Catching Fire is a subtitled ‘A Translation Diary’ and that’s exactly what it is. Hahn is a literary translator, and the book documents his process of translating Diamela Eltit’s Jamás el fuego nunca from Spanish into English. It would eventually appear as Never Did The Fire, though in the earlier sections of the translation diary it is called Never The Fire Ever. Catching Fire began life as a blog, and it retains the structure of a series of dated entries, responding to people’s comments and occasionally referring to real-world events. Because it was a blog, Hahn cautions (in his introduction) against reading it all in one go. Well, Hahn, I have not taken your guidance, and it didn’t stop me absolutely loving this book.

Even the very best translators will acknowledge this: essentially, theoretically, translation is impossible. It’s one of the paradoxes inherent in literary translation, I think. it’s easier to do it, or at least to do it well, once you’ve understood that in theory it cannot be done.

So Hahn writes in his introduction, before going on to explain exactly how he does it. I like his own description of translation: ‘Translation is like copying a work of art in a different medium. We’re art forgers attempting to reproduce an oil painting using only pencils, but so skilfully you won’t be able to tell the difference.’

Like most readers, perhaps, when I read a work in translation, I’m not trying too hard to see the original text behind the text I’m reading. Indeed, I tend to sort of pretend it doesn’t exist. Trying to balance the book I can’t access without the translator’s help into my reception of the book I am reading feels too fraught with challenge. It’s that suspension of disbelief (or something like that) that makes reading a translation possible. And perhaps the translator’s job is to make that possible.

I don’t read any languages other than English, with the possible exception of a very easy children’s book in French, so I already marvel at anybody who could speak more than one language – let alone have the skill to do what Hahn does. My appreciation of translators was already pretty sky-high, but after reading Catching Fire, it has stratospheric.

His process starts by doing a quick translation of everything. It is speedy and unapologetically shoddy. Hahn courageously shares examples of this initial parse through, and it is littered with ‘this/that’ options, words still in Spanish because he can’t think for that moment how best to translate in context, and sentences that, if complete, are ugly. It is, I suppose, the sort of translation that AI is trying to convince us is sufficient – and it shows exactly why it isn’t, especially for literary fiction.

After this, he goes through and looks at many words to check their precise meaning – and, since Eltit is Chilean, this also includes checking for different uses that are specific to Chile. Future drafts are about getting the nuance exactly right, trying to capture what is in the original even when English doesn’t accommodate an easy transfer.

The bulk of Catching Fire are about these nuances. I loved it, and it didn’t matter at all that I don’t speak Spanish. Hahn explains very well for the monoglot. How to capture the way that Eltit lists adjectives after a noun? How to translate words which tell you the gender of the speaker in Spanish, but don’t in English? What to do about allusions that refract across the novel when the same reaching-out moments don’t make sense in English?

One of my favourites of these was a character complaining of pain in his wrist – muñeca – which Hahn at first translates unquestioningly as ‘wrist’. It is only in the ensuing dialogue does it become clear that muñeca’s other meaning (‘doll’) is also significant. How on earth do you retain this in translation? (I may have missed the answer, or he didn’t tell us.)

I mentioned very early in this diary that ambuity can be the hardest thing to translate. I think some people imagine ambiguity as a kind of vagueness, but to my mind you might better consider it exactly the opposite, as an extreme sort of precision, and that’s what makes it hard.

If that sort of thing appeals to you, then Catching Fire is rammed full of them. It reminded me a lot of Kate Briggs’ This Little Art, though they are tonally and structurally very different – both equally fascinating about translation.

It also helps that Hahn is great company for the ride. Perhaps because we are similar ages, I appreciated his humour and his character shines through as someone intellectually curious while also being a good hang. I also appreciated his evident patience with the number of non-translators who were clearly giving their thoughts in the comments – perhaps he liked getting these, though I suspect I would have found it hard to deal with quite so many non-experts sharing their thoughts on my job. Maybe Hahn is just a better person than me.

Well, it’s ridiculous that I waited so long to read this when I knew I’d fall for it completely. Now I wish every book in translation came with exactly this sort of companion book. I have to confess that nothing in it made me want to read Eltit’s novel, which doesn’t sound like my cup of tea at all, but that is beside the point. Catching Fire is a total triumph, and it feels like a privilege to have had this window into the translator’s world.

On the Calculation of Volume (vol.3) by Solvej Balle – #ABookADayInMay – Day 16

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Ladies and gentlemen, this is personal growth. I’m actually reading a series without gaps of years between the books! I wrote about the second volume in Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume series only a few weeks ago, and now I’ve finished the third (translated from Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell). As you might expect, this review will contain pretty significant spoilers for the first two books, though I’ll try not to give too many twists and turns away from the third.

As a quick reminder, if you’re new to this series – Tara is stuck in a timeloop. It is endlessly 18 November. She has lived through several years of this now, and no longer truly believes that 19 November is possibly on the horizon. The first book was about finding peace and space in this timeloop; the second was about claustrophobia and exploration. And the third… well, the second book ended with a big reveal. And this is a major spoiler for the first two books. The big twist is… it turns out Tara is not alone in her timeloop! Another person has been living the same circular existence as her, for the same length of time. His name is Henry Dale.

There are several long entries in this volume, explaining how they first encountered each other in a lecture theatre – where, even before they knew for certain that the other was an anomaly in the loop, they recognised something distinct about each other. Even though they are strangers, this shared strangeness is, of course, soemthing that brings them together intimately.

The thought of our meeting makes me smile now, and it occurs to me how long I’ve lived without this mutual recognition, the little mental jolt, a faint quiver in the brain as you recognize someone who recognizes you back. A sensation that had been absent for so long it came as a surprise: a peculiar new feeling which launched us into an odd little dance.

I am back in the apartment on Wiesenweg, alone now that we’ve parted ways, but still astonished that it’s possible for two people to share a common history in the midst of the eighteenth of November, a very brief history, but a history all the same, of meetings and goodbyes and reunions and plans to meet again.

It is surprisingly plain sailing for a long time. They live through dozens and dozens of days together – moving around, eating and talking and sharing their experiences. Henry has a young son in America, and has spent many of his days there – each day, doing an impromptu visit to his ex-wife and asking to spend the afternoon with his son. (As a reminder, they always start a day wherever they ended the previous one, so travel is possible.) Tara has spent years honing her own philosophy and approach to the extraordinary world she has found herself in, and it is understandably confronting to have to accommodate someone else’s. A blessing, but also a jolt to the rhythm she has established.

A world had opened up, and it was not all to the good; we were in some strange way bound together. There was a promise of more conversations, but not only that. There is something alarming about the thought of being bound to a random person. There is the certainty of having gained a travel companion, but also the sense of having been assigned some of the responsibilities for their baggage.

Because there are so many volumes, Balle can be spacious in how she describes this world. There is time for tangents – about Romans and their obsession with grain, about historians and ‘female history’ and a dispute about whether such a thing exists separately from man’s. For a long while, the two separate – Tara goes back to her husband, and has less success with him than she did in the first book. And she continues to age. She is years older than when the story started, while the world remains the same, over and over. I imagine that will become increasingly a plot point. How can she continue to visit Thomas when, in his eyes, his wife will have aged significantly overnight?

I shan’t say more about what happens in this volume, but the world has certainly opened up more than I anticipated at the outset. I never really worried that Balle would run out of steam, because she writes so beautifully and engagingly about the utterly mundane and thus could never exhaust her material. But I love the direction the series is heading in, and the distinctive nature she manages to give each book – even while the same day repeats itself time and again. I think the first book remains my favourite of the three, but they are all triumphs, and I’m excited to get onto the third.

With or Without Angels by Douglas Bruton – #ABookADayInMay – Day 5

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Cover of With or Without Angels showing details from Giandomenico Tiepolo's Il Mondo Nuovo

You probably know about Douglas Bruton by now. Even if you’ve missed that I love Blue Postcards and Hope Never Knew Horizon, there are many other book bloggers who also love him – and, indeed, Madame Bibi has already reviewed one of his books in her own Novella A Day In May project.

I’m continuing my Bruton journey with With Or Without Angels (2023). Like the other works I’ve read by him, it responds to and is inspired by specific artworks. In this case, The New World by Alan Smith – which, in turn, is a response to Giandomenico Tiepolo’s Il Mondo Nuovo (‘The New World’). I have to confess that I had never heard of either artist or their work, but (miraculous for a paperback!) they are printed in the book itself – so I didn’t need to have a Google tab open.

Smith’s The New World is a series of 11 photograph collages, starting with a selfie of Smith and his wife in the Tate Modern. They appear in the subsequent images, but so do elements of Tiepolo’s work, other landscapes, and a floating cloth that may or may not be intended to represent an angel. Tiepolo’s piece, on the other hand, is subversive in its own way: a portrait of a series of people, almost all of whom have their back to us.

Bruton’s novella is told through the perspective of Smith, and his creation of the artwork – along with a young woman called Olivia, or Livvy, who has the expertise to do the digital manipulation and photoshopping required to create his collages.

Livvy is taking notes.

“It’s like something mathematical. Like showing my working out, my thinking.”

He has pritned out a picture of an empty space, a pillared courtyard. There is a well in the centre of the picture and maybe it was the reason he took the picture in the first place. He wonders if that can be removed.

Livvy looks up and nods.

“And sky – I want there to be sky, so the upper floor should be removed and something like a wind-lifted carrier bag falling down on the square. Maybe a sheet.”

“Like an angel,” she said.

“I’m not sure,” he said.

“No?”

“Yes. That is to say, like an angel but also not. I am not sure that today I believe in angels.”

Smith also learns, during the narrative, that the symptoms he has been experiencing are more serious than he hoped. Along the way, With Or Without Angels becomes a subtle treatise on the broadest imaginable topics – living, loving, creating – as well as an examination of the tiniest moments.

As it’s Bruton, it’s all done with humanity and beauty. Having said that, I have to admit that the artworks are not ones I particularly respond to myself – and something about reading the fictionalised account of such a recent artist feels curiously more uncanny than reading the same thing of artists many, many decades earlier. So this won’t race to the top of my Bruton list, but any Bruton is a good Bruton and it was a fun way to spend Day 5.

Only About Love by Debbi Voisey – #ABookADayInMay – Day 4

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A quick one from me, because I’m back home late after driving home from Hay-on-Wye (haul to be revealed at some point, possibly after May), via an afternoon at Hidcote National Trust and Chipping Camden, and then straight to Devil Wears Prada 2 (good for nostalgia’s sake, if very patchy). Somewhere along the way, I managed to finish Only About Love (2021) by Debbi Voisey.

After loving Douglas Bruton’s Blue Postcards, I decided to buy up a whole bunch of other Fairlight Moderns. They’re such lovely little editions, and a really interesting range of titles. Admittedly, I read another one that I didn’t like (and decided not to write about) but Only About Love was more of a success.

It tells the story of Frank – in many ways, an ordinary sort of man. He lives in a normal house, has a job that is neither exciting nor particularly the opposite, and marries a nice woman and has nice children. Along the way, he has at least one affair – which is sadly also not that out of the ordinary. But the style in which it is told is where the unusual element comes in. Voisey has taken this everyman’s life and told it in fragments and vignettes – out of chronological order – from Frank’s perspective and from the perspective of his wife and children, and occasionally objective lists and bullet points. Since these are not framed with an explanation, the reader has to quickly catch up with who is telling their story, and where we are in Frank’s life history. It means Only About Love is an endless chain of mild disorientations, always having to establish and re-establish our surroundings – but it comes together in a very coherent whole.

The disorientation also puts us a little in Frank’s place – because the crux of the novella is his diagnosis, decline and eventual death with dementia. An acknowledgement from Voisey suggests she has first-hand experience of this from her father, and that is perhaps why this plot is told with such observation, kindness and charity. Illness does not exonerate Frank of his misdeeds, but nor should it overshadow the everyday nobleness that was also part of his character. (Incidentally, once you know that dementia is central to the story, I think it makes Sam Kalda’s illustration on the cover feel very poignant.)

The title comes from a section late in the novella, from the perspective of Frank’s daughter as she tends to him in the late stages of dementia. I’ll finish by quoting this vignette in full:

When you shave him, he moves his mouth and face around like he’s chewing an invisible sweet. He offers up his neck with absolute trust; you glide the blade down beneath his chin and over his Asam’s apple. It’s massive, like he’s swallowed a rock.

You hear the rasp of his stubble and it’s almost like the noise is coming from you, because there’s sandpaper inside you. Your stomach is made of it. Your heart is made of it. Your throat. Your insides have been transformed into a million tiny pieces of rock.

He can no longer speak, but words are unnecessary. Life is now simply in its cruelty; he once cared for you and now you’re caring for him.

Each touch of your fingers on his skin reminds him that love still exists. You want all his waking thoughts from now on to be only about love.

Finders, Keepers by Nicholas Royle – #ABookADayInMay – Day 2

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As soon as I started reading Kaggsy’s review of Finders, Keepers (2026) by Nicholas Royle, I headed to the Salt website and ordered myself a copy. I think it was probably Karen who also alerted me to his first two books in this series – White Spines and Shadow Lines – and he is, as the The Telegraph puff quote on the cover says, ‘fast becoming the bibliophile’s  bibliophile’.

White Spines was about Royle’s love for Picador books from the 70s-90s, and his hunting to add more to his collection. Shadow Lines had less of a central focus, and went hither and thither in bookish topics – though the title refers to the line visible in the top of a book when it has an ‘inclusion’, i.e. something that a previous reader has left behind, be it a postcard, letter, newspaper cutting or something more unusual.

Finders, Keepers was going to be called Library Fines at one point, so that all three titles would rhyme, but he opted for something less censorious – if perhaps not especially relevant to the contents of the book. The subtitle, ‘The Secret Life of Second-hand Books’, is closer to the mark. It very much continues the themes of the previous book, and I was happy to return to them – Royle is still returning books to addresses written in them, phoning the phone numbers he discovers, and buying books because of the things that previous owners have slipped inside them. Occasionally, he buys books because he wants to read them.

Actually, that’s doing him an injustice. It does seem that he reads widely and with curiosity, and he might be prompted to pick something up because of an eccentric project, but he will usually try the book too – even if he often ends up dismissing them in a whimsically curt way. (He also dismisses bus journeys, people on mobile phones, and an Alpha sign outside a church – that, given his otherwise curious approach to life, I would encourage him to revisit with a more open mind.)

There are as many ways to collect books as there are books to collect.

I was going to type out a long excerpt – starting with that line, then going on to the genesis of his project of collecting ‘doubles’ (i.e. two books with the same title) and how he and the other author called Nicholas Royle are another kind of double. But I love it as an independent thought. And it is the throughline of everything Royle writes in these bibliographic memoirs.

Some book collectors choose their prey based on first editions, fine bindings, and the condition. To me, it is so much more interesting to collect books for the many and various reasons that Royle buys them. As well as the ‘inclusions’ urge, he has sections describing returning library books to libraries (quite a lot of people seem to give their library books to the charity shop?), buying books because they have Christmas messages in them, building a collection of books whose titles start with London, and the aforementioned ‘doubles’ project.

At times, I did find myself thinking ‘Why don’t you just buy books because you want to read them?’ – and I continue to marvel about where he fits all these purchases (particularly since, when I said something similar about the previous book, Royle himself assured me that he lived in a modest home). But, you know what, when I got the section on buying books because there were maps included or sketched in them, then going to the place in the map and reading the book, I was totally won over. That’s charming. That’s the eccentricity of the committed bibliophile that I can get behind. There are, indeed, as many ways of collecting books as there are books to collect.

As long as Royle keeps writing this sort of book, I’ll keep reading them. Our tastes scarcely overlap – though, amusingly, he did read Assembly by Natasha Brown in one day, which I did yesterday. I don’t think I’m likely to listen to any of his specific recommendations, and I doubt he’d want to hear mine. But I still love reading witty, friendly writing from a fellow reader who loves hunting for, buying, and amassing books as much as I do. Another extremely readable gem. The bibliophile’s bibliophile, indeed.

Assembly by Natasha Brown – #ABookADayInMay Day 1

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Assembly by Natasha Brown

A Book A Day In May is back! Inspired by Madame Bibi, it’s my annual attempt to finish a book a day through the month of May – though I already know the final few days won’t really be possible, but let’s start anyway.

Usually, I try to do this challenge entirely spontaneously. This year, I decided to pull lots of potential titles off my shelves and pile them up on the dining table. I think there are about 70 books there now, so I have plenty of choice and still a lot of scope for surprise, but slightly less manic pulling titles off shelves.

First up is Natasha Brown’s widely reviewed and critically lauded debut, Assembly (2021). It’s quite bold for a debut novelist to write something 100-pages-long – such a short book usually doesn’t do well, but there is also a confidence in the spare way that she has approached such a zeitgeisty topic. For, in Assembly, Brown tackles one black woman’s experience of often-subtle racism in a world where unspoken privilege is everything.

The unnamed narrator has, on the face of it, a lot of success. She is a high-flyer in finance, earning significant sums of money at a young age. Her boyfriend is clearly considering proposing, and comes from generational wealth. Her friends are confident and kind.

But… there are colleagues who intimate – or outright state – that she is only getting promotions because of her race. Her potential mother-in-law clearly considers her son to be having a temporary dalliance outside his race and class (“I was unsurprised to learn the titles and heritage properties were all on the father’s side. There was an uncertainty beneath the mother’s hostility that I almost identified with”). And – almost as an afterthought, in the novella’s priorities – she has cancer that she is curiously reluctant to treat.

Even her choice of career is not a neutral, but a response to her background:

Banks — I understood what they were. Ruthless, efficient money-machines with a byproduct of social mobility. Really, what other industry would have offered me the same chance? Unlike my boyfriend, I didn’t have the prerequisite connections or money to venture into politics. The financial industry was the only viable route upwards. I’d traded in my life for a sliver of middle-class comfort. For a future. My parents and grandparents had no such opportunities: I felt I couldn’t waste mine.

The plot of the novella, such as it is, is a trip to a party celebrating her boyfriend’s parents’ wedding anniversary. But it is really a book exploring a web of microaggressions, assumptions, glass ceilings, and the daily obstacles that a black woman encounters in a professional and social environment in the UK. Particularly when class is also thrown into the mix. Brown writes it with eloquence and elegance, and in such a spare way that nothing feels heavy-handed. Even the introduction of cancer, which could have felt like a needless, A-Little-Life-style pile-on of misery, is done with a lightness that somehow brings everything together. I found the narrator’s experience more impactful to read than a more openly furious polemic could have achieved.

What I found harder to get to grips with were the more experimental approaches. There are some formally experimental sections that didn’t add much – a couple of pages with the positive and negative associations of ‘white’ and ‘black’ respectively, which felt a bit like a high school paper – and the opening has several disjointed scenes that are quite disorienting and unclear. Perhaps that was the point, but I think it could have worked better just to tell the narrator’s story without these stray paragraphs from other scenes. I still don’t know who the people are in some of them.

Overall, I thought it was a good and engaging book, though would be more hesitant than some to announce Brown as a major new voice in fiction. But perhaps that’s because I tend to judge these things from the distance of 70 years or more. When the dust has settled, it’ll be interesting to see if this is considered a modern masterpiece, or a good book on an eternal, important topic that was dominating headlines more than usual.

On the Calculation of Volume (vol.2) by Solvej Balle

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cover of On the Calculation of Volume vol.2 showing a falling vase of yellow flowers

Back in January, I raved about the first volume of Solvej Balle’s seven-part On the Calculation of Volume, translated from Danish by Barbara J. Haveland. Uncharacteristically, it has only taken me a handful of months to read the second – and I have the third and fourth on my tbr piles, so watch this space.

If you’re catching up, the series is about Tara Selter, a dealer in antiquarian books with her husband Thomas, who is stuck in a timeloop. Every day is the eighteenth of November. Every day, everyone else is doing the same thing – with a twist on the usual conceit, in that Tara starts the day wherever she ended the previous one. She is stuck in time, but not in space. And she can keep some things that she has near her – but the food she eats one day has disappeared from the world by its next iteration, so she is in danger of wiping out restaurants’ stock. The mechanics aren’t the main thing, but Balle has clearly thought about them.

If the first book had a curious optimism, with Tara finding space and peace in a trope that is usually about power battles and struggles, then the optimism has ebbed a little by the second one. She spends some time with her parents towards the beginning of the novel (like Thomas in the first, they believe her account without any doubts, which goes to show what a trustworthy person Tara is) but, besides this, is largely alone. Or, rather, separated from people she knows. She is always surrounded by people, but they do not think about her and her predicament.

I am surrounded by people in motion. Suddenly they are all walking in the same direction. I look around me and, sure enough, there is a metro station and that is where they are headed. There are lines of people pointing towards the way down. I am outside of the lines. If I get too close to their lines I am in the way. I am a foreign body, an error. I am Tara Selter, lost in the eighteenth of November. Not lost and forsaken, just lost. I have simply fallen out of the world. I have not been hurt in the fall, I got up and brushed a little grit off my knee, that is all.

Having passed a full year of 18 Novembers, Tara is feeling the claustrophobia of her experience. She lives in a hotel for a long time – asking for a room that hasn’t been slept in for a while, with the excuse that she is allergic to cleaning supplies, so that she doesn’t wake up in bed with somebody else the next morning. Even a fire alarm doesn’t rock her from her feelings of stasis.

A few days ago I would have jumped to my feet, scenting change, but I just sat there with my half-eaten sandwich and did nothing and the sandwich is still lying here on the table next to me, not because it was left in haste due to an evacuation, but because it is a bit dry round the edges. I no longer believe in variation, I don’t look for differences and not even a fire alarm can alter my expectations of a day that comes round again and again.

Since she cannot experience variety in time, she decides to go hunting for variety in weather. A lot of this volume is about Tara travelling in pursuit of spring, summer, autumn and winter on this eternal 18 November. For some reason, she never considers travelling to the southern hemisphere or, indeed, outside of Europe, where she could find these seasons more authentically. Perhaps it’s to do with allowances on her passport, or shorter journey times. If you are willing to swallow the idea that she can find springlike weather in a November London day, then you can enjoy her travels. More than the actual climates she finds, it is about her longing and her purpose. When a strange twist of fate has stopped her achieving any of the normal things that give people the reason to keep going, she has found a different reason.

Now I cannot get enough of winter. It is not enough that it resembles winter as I know it. I cannot content myself with snow that doesn’t last, a light sprinkling. I am searching for the heart of winter, consummate winter, concentrated winter. I travel through mountains, I move upwards, northwards and along narrow roads where the snow has already settled as if it means to stay. I gaze at the landscape and write names in my notebook. Place after place. Name after name. I make a note of streets and restaurants. I write the addresses of empty houses and recipes for winter dishes in my book.

Overall, book two sees Tara trying to assess her role in the world a bit more than in book one. It goes through a longer time period – two years of November eighteenths, compared to one – but there is perhaps less plot. The biggest story point is when somebody steals her bag. She struggles through the tedium and self-analysis into something approaching peace – a peace that seemed to come more naturally in the first book, and is more hard-won in this one.

And it continues to be a beautiful reading experience. Balle’s writing is gentle, rhythmic, unshowy and mesmerising.

#754
I don’t know how one can grow used to a situation like this, but that is what is happening. Perhaps it is the case that you can accept a lot as long as you are spared most of life’s worries. If you are not in danger. If it is a life with no drama, with no poverty or diseaee or natural disasters. I am safe, I have nothing to fear, none of the things one has learned to fear: the calamities and catastrophes of real life – loss, betrayal and crime.

My disasters are little ones and my accidents are fleeting: a minor burn, a twisted ankle, a car crash averted by a braking system. The greatest crime I have experienced is the theft of my bag, a crime perpetuated by a football fan on a rattly bike. The only things I have lost, apart from the passage of time, are a bundle of euros, an olive-green, cloth-bound notebook and two sets of keys. I have what I need. I don’t starve. I can buy whatever I want. I can go back to Thomas and slip into his pattern. He is still alive. I am sure that he is still there, in his house in Clarion. In his pattern, I have suffered no loss, I have not been betrayed, rejected, forsaken. Nothing has happened that one might fear. Nothing fearful.

I could read many more books of writing this striking – and thank goodness I get the chance two. Volume 2 ends on something that is quite shocking, given the lack of twists and turns so far – and I can’t wait to see how this new information is explored in the third volume.

A new biography of A.A. Milne

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You may well know how much I love A.A. Milne. I wrote all about it back in 2014, and he is such an instrumental part of me establishing my literary taste and discovering what being a bibliophile and book-hunter looked like. And so I was excited to learn that Gyles Brandreth had written a new biography of Milne – and of Winnie-the-Pooh, so goes the subtitle. Called Somewhere, a Boy and a Bear, it is clearly intended to charm an audience more invested in Winnie-the-Pooh than Wurzel-Flummery or Chloe Marr. On whatever front, I was ready to be charmed – and Mum and Dad got me a copy for Christmas.

Brandreth has written a fair few books, but I’d say he is best known in the UK as a sort of cultural curio. He turns up on breakfast TV shows or Celebrity Gogglebox wearing jumpers with teddy bears on them, and says posh, eccentric, kindly things. You can easily imagine that he would love everything connected with the 100-acre wood with the same upper-class simplicity that he probably approaches toast and marmalade, or going to Lords. (He was a Conservative MP for five years, but we won’t hold that against him. It was probably inevitable.)

And so, what sort of book has he written? It is much more focused on Milne than I’d anticipated – it goes through his childhood, his unhappiness at school, his happiness at university, his dizzyingly early achievements as a sketch-writer, comic essayist and playwright. We tread the path through his wartime experience, his sudden and brief success as a detective novelist before the children’s books dominate – and then we wind down on his gradual fading from literary grandeur.

Winnie-the-Pooh et al certainly get plenty of the book, but less than I’d expected – and I was quite grateful about that. Brandreth hasn’t shunted the rest of Milne’s career to the sidelines to give the children’s books unparalleled attention. Rather, he considers them as part of Milne’s long and often-glittering literary reputation. The only exception to this is the way that he intersperses otherwise unrelated sections with quotes from the Pooh books, slightly awkwardly placed in boxes in the middle of the text.

As a Milne aficiando, there wasn’t anything new to me, but I still loved reading it. Brandreth writes with an ease and affection that is infectious. He has clearly read everything he could get his hands on, and it’s evident which works particularly chimed with him – he returns to Chloe Marr quite often, for instance. But… it really is just an affable rehash of Ann Thwaite’s magisterial biography A.A. Milne: His Life. I did wonder if that was why it has no formal referencing – because the source of almost everything he writes is almost certainly Thwaite’s book. It’s a bit of a pity that, 35 years later, there is nothing new to add – but that’s probably because of the sort of writer Brandreth is.

Brandreth is an enthusiast – he is not a researcher. The only new things he brings to the book say more about the world he lives in, because the novel material comes from friendship with Christopher (Robin) Milne. He doesn’t hide this, nor is he needlessly showy about it – he simply shares discussions and perspectives that Christopher Milne shared with him. This largely came when Brandreth was putting together a play, Now We Are Sixty, though it does sound like it flourished into a friendship rather than simply a fleeting professional relationship.

“We were so close,” Christopher told me, “until I left school and beyond, until after the war, really.” Father and son had sport, nature and mathematics in common. Alan delighted in his boy as once he had delighted in his brother.

One presumes that Brandreth is turning to old notes, rather than remembering conversations of many decades earlier.

This is not an insignificant contribution – it takes the book more into the territory of the friend-of-the-family memoir, which is a genre I greatly enjoy, even if Brandreth is certainly on the peripheraries. And it’s a good job that he brings his individual charm to the tone, because otherwise (besides the lack of new material) there are a few things that would otherwise make Somewhere, a Boy and a Bear feel a bit howlery. It seems rather rushed and repetitive – as one example, he is unable to mention Milne’s brother Barry without rehashing that Milne didn’t like Barry but did get on with Barry’s wife. It is probably repeated six or seven times. And then there are unforgivably bad sentences like this:

Boldly, for this feature, in June 1902, for the special May Week issue of The Granta, Alan wrote about the soon-to-be-crowned new king, Edward VII, who had succeeded his mother, Queen Victoria, on her death in January 1901.

How fast do you have to be rushing a book out to let that comma-strewn monstrosity get through? He also has a habit of this sort of chatty, decisive tone, that feels a bit like listening to a self-styled expert in a bar:

When Alan first met the young woman he was destined to marry, he was delighted to discover that she could quote episodes from The Rabbits line by line. Perhaps that’s why he married her. Seriously. He liked that. He liked it very much.

I know I’m singling out suspect sentences, but this isn’t intended as a censure. I only mention them to explain the sort of book this is: it’s a chatty, charming book about an author I love, written by someone who shares that love. Somewhere, a Boy and a Bear is not the work of a biography exploring new territory. It’s a bibliophile sharing his enthusiasms. And, you know what, that was exactly what I was in the mood for.

Hope Never Knew Horizon (2024) by Douglas Bruton

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You might have seen by now that Blue Postcards by Douglas Bruton was one of my favourite reads of the past year. Bruton himself happened to stumble across me talking about it, and very kindly sent me a copy of Hope Never Knew Horizon (2024) – and I loved that one too!

There are three threads to the novel, and it took me a long time to work out how they could possibly relate to each other. If you’d like to maintain that mystery, then maybe skip some of this review – and it wouldn’t have been a mystery to me if I’d properly remembered the note that Bruton sent me alongside the book. I hope he won’t mind me quoting from it.

The genesis was this: “I wanted to write something filled up with hope.” And then…

I stumbled across two people messaging back and forth online, discussing a programme they had seen on the TV about the blue whale skeleton in London’s Natural History Museum and how it had been taken down and restored and rehung; and it had been given a name: the blue whale skeleton was not called Hope!

Then I remembered a poem by Emily Dickinson: ‘Hope is a thing with feathers’ […] And, finally, I recalled a painting I had seen in my early twenties, a painting by G F Watts and it had held me captive for twenty minutes or so when I knew nothing about art, and it was called ‘Hope’.

Three contributions to art or science – three places where the term ‘Hope’ came to the fore. There are no other connections (in reality, at least) between any of the people related to these three creations. But reading them alongside each other forms a curiously moving tapestry of human curiosity, emotion and, yes, hope.

When Ned Wickham is deeper in his cups than any man has a right to be, he tells the story of the Wexford Whale and like I said before he is not ever to be believed. In the weeks and months after, the story grows arms and legs and runs crazy through the streets, hollering with its arms waving above its head. Ned tells how he single-handedly wrestled the whale into submission, up to his knees in the briny, and then took its life with all the heroism fitting of a sabre-wielding cavalryman at the Battle of Waterloo.

Ned is an ordinary, working-class man who knows the sea as well as the land. He does not single-handedly do anything regarding the whale, except he does find it on the shore and is ultimately paid a small amount by the crown for this discovery. It is the first step of many in the whale’s posthumous journey, and it is the only story of the three that is narrated by many different people – starting with a woman who may or may not have a future with Ned.

On we go, through years and years, as the whale skeleton is bought and sold, cleaned and constructed, and hangs high up in the ceiling of the British Museum. Each voice is captured beautifully for however long it is on the page, and Bruton sees so much in the many invisible stages behind a public spectacle.

Next we have perhaps the most famous figure in the novel: Emily Dickinson. Or, rather, we have her servant, Margaret. Her first words are ‘Sure but Miss Emily thinks no one knows’. Dickinson has more than one secret, but the key among them is her deep love for the woman destined to marry her brother. They surreptitiously send letters to one another, and this has a firmer basis in fact than some other elements of Hope Never Knew Horizon, because a volume of letters from Dickinson to Susan Huntington (though not the replies) has been published. It may have been secret from the world, but servants don’t miss anything. What makes Margaret’s perspective so compelling is her investment in the relationship, and in Miss Emily’s happiness, even while she doesn’t fully understand all the implications. She has all the hope that Emily can’t bear.

‘Open me carefully,’ Miss Emily’d written at the bottom of the page. And the letter was to Susan Huntington, ‘Dear and darling Susie,’ she’d wrote. And ‘open me carefully’ and not when anyone is by so that it is a secret just between Miss Emily and Miss Susan, ‘cept now I know and my heart yearns and I look for the postboy now, as much as Miss Emily does, and I wonder where on earth he can be with his dillying and dallying, and I am a little cross when he does turn up and there is nothing for Miss Emily.

Third and final is Ada, an artist’s model known professionally as Dorothy Dene. I will confess that I had not heard of ‘Hope’, the painting by Watts, a detail of which is on the cover. Her introduction shows us the sort of plucky woman she is:

Men’s hearts are so easily won. Just a carefully timed dip of my head, a look that holds his and then lets it go again and a way of shaping the mouth so the lips almost make one half of a kiss, needing only his lips to complete the act.

Ada is another working-class character, making a precarious living in a world of men who are more powerful than she is – yet she holds her own power over them. As with the other characters in the novel, she is on the peripheries of renown and spectacle, though obviously more present than the others by appearing in the painting. But she is very much the subject rather than the artist, despite her self-possession and confidence. Her story becomes one about love and different kinds of love, and what the relationship between artist and subject can be.

Hope Never Knew Horizon would be an interesting novel if it were ‘just’ an unusual slant on three notable moments in British cultural history, told by people (real or invented) whose names are not the sort to be recorded for posterity. But what elevates it above that is Bruton’s extraordinary writing. I do not know how he does it, and I would think it impossible to analyse, but he breathes humanity into his prose with every sentence. That is his special gift: humanity. These are not just characters who are vivid and vital. They are creations whom the author clearly respects, dignifies, and loves.

And, yes, This is somehow a book suffused with hope. There is no heavy-handed moral, or perhaps a moral at all. But I ended it feeling greater hope about the world and the people who populate it. In his note, Bruton wrote “I wanted to write something filled up with hope.” Even after reading two books by him, I can see that that sentiment is quintessentially Bruton. Hope Never Knew Horizon is special and beautiful. If I didn’t have a rule about only including one book by any author on my end of year lists, it would have been a strong candidate for the top 10. I am so looking forward to continuing exploring Bruton’s work, and thankful to have discovered it.

Others who got Stuck into it:

“By the time I started the third story, a mere 22 pages in, I was gripped, transported to that extraordinary utopia of fiction where life is more vivid and meaningful than ordinary reality.” – Victoria

“Douglas Bruton’s haunting writing is the kind that changes you once you’ve read it; this is a truly original and wonderful book and I can’t recommend it enough.” – Karen

“Bruton’s writing is strikingly beautiful, his storytelling captivating and his theme is one close to my heart.” – Susan