2024

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

Autocorrect by Etgar Keret

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A few years ago, one of my favourite reads was Suddenly, A Knock on the Door by Israeli short story writer Etgar Keret – so when I saw that a new collection had been published, I was keen to get a copy. Autocorrect (2024; English translation 2025) was sent as a review copy, and I loved getting back into Keret’s strange mind. The stories in here were published in various places over the past few years, translated from Hebrew by Sondra Silverston and Jessica Cohen. (Only one was written after the 7 October attacks in Israel, and the subsequent extreme violence upon citizens in Gaza, and this story does look at the aftermath of the October attacks in a fairly oblique way. He is not the sort of writer you’d expect to write un-obliquely about it.)

What I love about Keret is his matter-of-fact surreality. The first story ‘A World Without Selfie Sticks’, for instance, opens like this:

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have yelled at Not-Debbie. Debbie herself always said that yelling doesn’t solve anything. But what is a person supposed to do when, a week after saying a tearful goodbye at the airport to his girlfriend, who was flying to Australia to do her doctorate, he bumps into her at an East Village Starbucks?

From here, things just get weirder. We quickly learn that Not-Debbie is from a parallel universe. She is taking part in a gameshow where five contestants are ‘sent to a universe that contains everything they have in their own world, except for one thing’ and their goal is to figure it out. (The last episode was the one with selfie sticks – the solution to this particular iteration is in the final line of the story.)

I don’t think anybody would describe Keret as sci-fi, but there are elements he borrows from that world. Another story, for instance, is about overcorrection when trying to make robot boyfriends have the right level of sensitivity. The title story, ‘Autocorrect’, is about somebody continually restarting their day to make subtle changes, hoping to evade her father’s death. In all of these odd scenarios, what makes Keret so good is how little time he spends on world-building. He gives us a couple of sentences about what’s going on, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, and we are thrust into the plot for a handful of pages that are disorienting in the best possible way.

He’s very good at opening lines. The example above is a good’un. ‘Gravity’ starts “Three days after they moved into their new apartment, the woman who lived upstairs jumped out of her window.” How could you not want to read on? But he is not all stark sentences – ‘Present perfect’ opens rather more philosophically, with rather a striking image:

It’s about time we acknowledge it: people are not very good at remembering things the way they really happened. If an experience is an article of clothing, then memory is the garment after it’s been washed, not according to the instructions, over and over again: the colours fade, the size shrinks, the original, nostalgic scent has long since become the artifical orchid smell of fabric softener.

There were some stories I thought less successful than others. Quite a few are extremely short – three pages, say – and that feels too abrupt to try and do something that leans into the unusual as much as Keret does. Others have pay-off with a comment on faith or politics that feels trite and undergraduate-y – can he really think he’s being profound in these moments? For those reasons, I still prefer Suddenly, a Knock on the Door. But it’s also true that our first encounter with a striking, new-to-us authorial voice can be the one that we retain the greatest fondness for, with the glow of discovery.

That voice is sparse and conversational, which makes the strangeness work. I’m glad to reacquaint myself with him, and glad to know there are others I’ve yet to read.

Shadow Lines by Nicholas Royle #ABookADayInMay Day 20

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Shadow Lines: Searching for the Book Beyond the Shelf [Book]

Today’s book is another one I can lay at Karen’s door, with her recent review, but I was always likely to get hold of Nicholas Royle’s Shadow Lines (2024) since I enjoyed White Spines so much. That bookish memoir was centred around Royle’s need to collect all of the white-spined Picador books. Shadow Lines has less a throughline – it’s really just an ambling non-fiction around the joy of books, with chapters on topics like reading while walking, the different Penguin Short Stories books, books in films etc.

It could feel self-indulgent, and perhaps some sections go on slightly too long – the books in films is an endless topic that does begin to feel a touch endless – but it’s really a delight because you are in the hands of such an ardent bibliophile. And I use bibliophile in its true sense – Royle loves reading, but he really loves books. It’s a distinction that not everybody would understand, though I suspect most readers of this blog would. Book shopping, book hunting, book collecting, book browsing. They are all pleasures that are only tangentially linked to reading – and Royle fully understands the validity of those pleasures.

I felt affinity with him in broad themes rather than individual mentions, for the most part. Our tastes in literature are clearly very different, and I hadn’t heard of many of the authors he prizes. He, in turn, didn’t instantly know who Clive Bell is, which suggests he’s spent less time than I immersed in the interwar years. But none of that matters. I was in such good company with a bibliophile that I lapped it up – there is no pretension to Royle’s tastes or writing, or any attempts to cloak the reality of his interests with what Should Be Liked. It’s all from the heart, albeit filtered through the recognisably British deflection of dry humour and self-deprecation.

Oh, and occasionally I felt truly like I was with a brother. I marked out this section:

If we agree that it’s impossible to read everything, then we have to choose which books to read and which books to leave on the shelf. Assuming the act of choosing is more sophisticated than flipping a cooin, it is surely not unreasonable to apply criteria. For mine, see above. I’ll read just about any other adult fiction. Apart from historical fiction, romance, and novels over 400 pages long (with exceptions).

Amen! Both in person and in the blog I’ve had people get slightly irked when I say I don’t want to read historical fiction, as though there were only a thousand novels in the world and I’d limited myself from a large swathe of them. I could say ‘I only want to read novels set in mid-century America by authors beginning with G’ and I’d probably still find enough to last me a decade. Part of coping with the vast and growing world of literature is to demarcate the bits you’re not going to invest in. One day I’ll write out my full list of ‘no thank you’s.

So, what of the title? A ‘shadow line’ is the indication, looking at the top of a book, that there is something physical hidden inside – an ‘inclusion’, as Royle terms them. I don’t think he ever explains quite what attracts him to these, but he buys a lot of books simply because of these inclusions. Bookmarks don’t cut it. Here are some examples of things he does like:

I love a bus, tram or train ticket. I love a boarding pass. I’m more than happy to find a postcard, business card or Debenhams store card (inside Irene Nemirvosky’s Fire in the Blood, which I found in Mark Jackson-Hancock’s extremely well-kept Chapter Two Community Bookshop in Chesham. Mrs M Sussum, get in touch if you’d like it back). I’m over the moon if I find a PR’s request for support for a book addressed to a former member of Blur (PG Wodehouse’s Blandings) or a personal message on hotel memo paper for a founding member of Del Amitri (Anais Nin’s Little Birds).

To do Royle his due, please know that the two missing accents/diacritics in the authors’ names above are my own laziness, not his. Any typos, it goes without saying, also my own.

Like most people, I imagine, I often find things tucked in books and I throw them away. It’s seldom anything more exciting than a receipt or business card, though I did recently find a birthday card with a tenner in it (sadly one of the old paper ones, so no longer in circulation). But it draws Royle, and he adds duplicate books to his collection if they have something tucked away inside. As when I read White Spines, I marvelled at the enormous house Royle must have, to house many duplicates of books for any number of reasons. (And I reflected that he bought books for very odd reasons, until I realised I do too, but for different odd reasons – see that time I wrote 27 Genuine Reasons I Have Bought Books.)

Would I phone someone if I found their telephone number in a book? No, and I’m not sure what conversation Royle expected to have if anybody answered, which nobody seems to. Would I return a book to an old address I found in it? No, but it does seem rather a lovely thought. I guess my point is that I am a very different book-lover from Royle in my activities and my tastes – but we are birds of a feather when it comes to loving books as objects and as histories of their owners’ experiences. I absolutely loved reading Shadow Lines because that love comes across so strongly. If you solely love stories, just as happy to have them as ebooks as books, then this particular book probably isn’t for you. If you are a bibliophile in the purist sense of the word, then race towards Shadow Lines. And if you end up giving it away, make sure to leave the strangest possible inclusion inside it.

Mind, Body, Forest, French: 3 non-fiction reads for #ABookADayInMay

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I’ve been getting my reading done for A Book A Day in May, but not very good at fitting in writing about the books – so today we have a triple whammy. And the last three books I’ve read have all been non-fiction (and all books I’d started before the days in question).

The Immune Mind

The Immune Mind (2024) by Dr Monty Lyman

Monty is a friend of mine, and I always make sure I read a friend’s first book – but he is also a brilliant writer, which is why this is his third and I’m still pre-ordering copies. The first two were on skin and pain, and the third is on the links between the mind and the body in health – specifically between the brain, the immune system, and microbes in the gut.

This is one of those areas which feels like less of a surprise the less you know? I know basically nothing about medical science (or any science), and would have merrily assumed that the mind and body were closely interlinked in health. We all know that being ill makes us feel sad and cross, and we know that feeling low is a time when you always seem to get ill – we use terms like ‘being run down’ to cover both. But apparently this sort of casual chat was not transferred to science – until recently.

The reality is that there is no mental disorder that is not also physical, and most physical diseases have some mental element to them. We have been trained to pigeonhole disease into either one or the other, even to the extent that we visit one hospital for the body and another for the mind. I know from my experience as a doctor that there are both implicit and explicit pressures to force patients down the grooves of either ‘physical’ or ‘mental’, evem when it is clear that neither is a perfect fit.

As Monty Lyman makes clear, this is an exciting area of medical science where things are starting to change. People are beginning to challenge long-held separations between mind and body, and increasing research is being conducted into the ways our mental health and our immune system affect each other. As one snapshot, a woman with severe allergies was shown a plastic flower – and not only responded badly in my mind, but also in her physical symptoms: the brain’s expectations affect the body’s defence mechanisms.

The first part of this book explores in depth what lies behind the immune system and behind the brain’s defences, and starts to look at how these crossover. Monty Lyman explains everything very well – I don’t know if it’s just because we’re friends, but it feels like he is cheerfully encouraging me along through the more densely scientific bits. It’s more challenging that skin and pain, because I instinctively understand what those are, even if I wouldn’t have a clue how to describe or define them. The immune system? That’s further from my grasp.

As The Immune Mind continues, I enjoyed myself more and more – the case studies are really helpful for illuminating Monty’s arguments. And you can’t say he isn’t game in his research. At one point he makes himself deliberating ill, and another time takes something that causes depression. He’s immersed! As with his other books, there is a compassion and empathy to his writing that makes it feel so much more than a scientific treatise. Again, I don’t think it’s just because I know he’s a good, kind man – it is evident there on the page. Particularly when he discusses people with long-term illnesses, there is great care as well as knowledge.

In the final section, The Immune Mind has advice for how to foster good microbial health, good mental health, and good non-inflammatory health. Monty Lyman is clear that this isn’t a work of self-help – but I appreciate that he doesn’t want to leave something with such potential, personal impact as theory alone. (I’m making a list of the number of different plants I eat this week – will I make it to the target of 30? I was surprised to find that I’m on 18 after three days, so fingers crossed.)

It’s a fascinating book, beautifully written – and I believe Brits can hear some it excerpted on Radio 4 this week, fyi.

Book summary: Consolations of the Forest by Sylvain Tesson - Live Wildly

Consolations of the Forest (2011) by Sylvain Tesson

There’s some nominative determinism for you! Consolations of the Forest by Sylvain Tesson – translated from French by Linda Coverdale – is subtitled ‘alone in a cabin in the Middle Taiga’. If, like me, you don’t know where Middle Taiga is – it’s in Siberia. This isn’t a balmy woodland retreat: Tesson went to spend six months in temperatures a long way below freezing, with ever-present dangers including bears. Why? The opening paragraph dryly suggests that it is to get away from the capitalist indulgence of a supermarket shelf having fifteen types of ketchup. Later on, he gives a list:

Reasons why I’m living alone in a cabin

I talked too much
I wanted silence
Too behind with my mail and too many people to see
I was jealous of Crusoe
It’s better heated than my place in Paris
Tired of running errands
So I can scream and live naked
Because I hate the telephone and traffic noise

Consolations of the Forest takes the form of diary entries over the time he is ‘alone’. I was surprised by how very many visitors he had. There were people in similar cabins about four or five hours’ walk in two different directions, there to deter poachers or similar, and he would sometimes trudge off to see them – but there are any number of Russians passing by who pop in to drink vodka and make crude jokes. At one point there’s even an American tourist. I felt sometimes like I am more alone in my flat than Tesson was in his cabin.

There are beautiful descriptions of unabashed wilderness in this book, and some people would find his account very interesting. I’ll admit that I did find it a bit hard to warm to the book. I think of similar ventures like Nell Stevens’ in Bleaker House (on Bleaker in the Falkland Islands) which I absolutely loved – and I think that was because she was freer with her foibles, more willing to reveal her practical and emotional struggles. Tesson leans more into philosophy. He is – how else to say it? – very French.

Our fellow men confirm the reality of the world. If you close your eyes in the city, what a relief it is that reality doesn’t erase itself: others can still perceive it! The hermit is alone in the face of nature. As the sole consciousness contemplating reality, he bears the burden of the representation of the world, its revelation before the human gaze.

I was quite happy to keep reading Consolations of the Forest through to the end, but some slight spark was missing in it for me. Interesting, but not quite up my street.

When in French: Love in a Second Language [Book]

When in French (2016) by Lauren Collins

Speaking of French – here’s a book I started ages ago, and somehow forgot to continue, all about French. Specifically, it is about Lauren’s experience being married to a Frenchman, Olivier. They met in England (she is American), and moved to Geneva, a French-speaking part of Switzerland. It is essentially asks the question: what is it like to love across a language barrier?

I was nervous, the usual anxieties a person has about whether or not her boyfriend’s family will like her overlaid with uncertainty as to whether, in the fog of language, they’d even be able to make out the right person to like or not.

In amidst that question is a huge amount of other research – are people different in their second languages? Can you be your true self when you are learning a language? Can goats have regional accents? (Yes, it turns out.) It’s an ambitious amount to cover in a book that is also a more straightforward memoir of living abroad, struggling to acclimatise, losing some of yourself, finding triumphs and humour in the everyday.

We spoke to each other in endearments. My darling, my love, mon amour, ma chérie, poussin, mouton, bébé. This was new to me, not characteristic. The word baby, applied to anyone over two, had always seemed like the adult diaper of endearments.

“Mon amour,” he’d say. “Pass me the salt?”

I’d yell across a store, trying to get his attention: “Bébé! Over here, in dairy products.”

People we knew, I think, made fun of us. What they didn’t know was that we couldn’t say each other’s names.

There are two very real people at the heart of the book, in Lauren and Olivier. Olivier is admittedly harder to read, and I’m not sure he comes across quite as Lauren sees him. As I’ve already mentioned this month, I love non-fiction where memoir and autobiography intermingle. I think I’d have preferred the balance in When in French to lean slightly more towards memoir, but that’s perhaps because the worlds of language and identity are so vast that you can only really scrape the surface on an objective level. The subjective is slightly easier to package.

I’d definitely recommend the book – and feel some personal triumph that my Duolingo French lessons have enabled me to translate most of the (easy) French she peppers into the story. It’s fun, thoughtful and honest.

A Body Made of Glass by Caroline Crampton – #ABookADayInMay Day 11

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A Body Made of Glass: A History of Hypochondria

When I was shopping in Blackwells bookshop last weekend, I saw A Body Made of Glass (2024) by Caroline Crampton on a display table and was very intrigued. As the month had rolled over, I had my 15 hours of audiobook listening time renewed on Spotify – and during the week, I spent 9.5 of those hours on Crampton’s excellent book.

A Body Made of Glass is subtitled ‘A History of Hypochondria’ and it’s in a genre that I really appreciate – non-fiction that merges historical research with personal memoir. Crampton is self-professedly a hypochondriac, which is also called (or at least strongly overlaps with) health anxiety. It is recognised in a couple of different variants by modern medical reference books and likely to be taken more seriously by doctors than it would have been a while ago – depending, as Crampton discusses, on your gender, race and class.

So what is hypochondria? It’s one of the questions Crampton poses and explores at length, and there isn’t a simple answer. It may vary between people, but the main things are hypervigilance about symptoms, and extreme anxiety about them. It may manifest as a lot of googling and fixation on possible illnesses, including genuinely developing symptoms that you are concerned about. It often includes medically unexplained symptoms – tests will show the all-clear, but that might not allay the anxiety. The hypochondriac is likely to fear that something has simply been missed,

Crampton’s own medical history can partly explain her anxiety. She had cancer as a teenager, and had to start chemotherapy at a time when most teenagers are concerned with far more trivial matters. As she explains, it means her fear about symptoms is always taken seriously. She gets rushed into tests that others might have to fight hard to get on a waiting list for. But it also means she knows her health is not guaranteed. She knows the truth of the hypochondriac’s fear that this time the slight twinge could be the first signs of something drastic.

But, at the same time, she knows her anxieties are not an accurate representation of reality. She has the brilliant line: “I become an unreliable narrator of my own body.” But how else to judge something as subjective as health? Especially when it comes to the complex, unclear tapestry of the interplay of mental and physical health.

A Body Made of Glass is not exclusively a memoir, though. Often Crampton uses her own experiences to set the tone of a chapter, returning to it when apt – but this is a work of history. The title refers to one form of historical hypochondria – people who believed that their bodies had become glass. King Charles VI of France was one of the most famous sufferers from this delusion. Victims of it would be terrified of touching other people, lest they splinter – or would sit on piles of cushions to avoid breaking. It’s interesting to see how the particular manifestations of hypochondria have changed over times – strongly influenced by the culture. People didn’t have this glass delusion before glass became a common household item. Fast forward centuries – there was a spate of people developing the ‘tic’ symptoms of Tourette’s after TikTok videos about the illness became extremely popular during the pandemic.

Crampton goes right back to Hippocrates, and has done a brilliant amount of research into different theories of health over time, and about how hypochondriacs were treated. To pick a handful – there was the period where the womb was believed to travel around the body, causing mischief. At another time, physicians believed the nose was a microcosm of the body, and treating part of the nose would heal the relevant part of body. She traces the way treatments have been sold and mis-sold over time – from quacks deliberating fooling 17th-century London society to the way in which placebos can be used in genuine medical treatment.

It’s a really brilliant combination. The deep history comes mostly in the first half, interspersed with Crampton’s own experiences. As the book continues, it becomes more philosophical – while tethering discussions about how you diagnose illnesses and how you consider the ‘reality’ of symptoms to the concrete world of the GP’s office. It is a book with a lot of heart and care for people with health anxiety, and a subtle clarion call for them to be respected.

This is one of the reasons I so appreciated A Body Made of Glass. Hypochondriacs – particularly in popular culture – are so often mocked and derided. Think Mr Woodhouse in Emma. His fears about health make him a sweet but tiresome figure of fun. There’s no real consideration about how these anxieties weigh on him. Hypochondriacs are often portrayed as ‘doing it for attention’, or dismissed simply as making things up. I saw so much of myself in what Crampton writes, and it was really encouraging and refreshing to feel seen and understood.

Crampton gives sufferers from health anxiety the dignity and voice they/we deserve. The autobiographical sections were the ones I most liked, but it is overall a well-measured balance of the subjective and objective. It’s an absolutely fascinating, brilliantly written book – and I hope many doctors are among those who read it.