Hosted, as always, by Rebecca at Bookish Beck, posting on the last Monday of every month. There’s no set formula to this; you can post anything about libraries, whether you’ve recently been to an event at one, heard about an initiative at one, whatever! I use it for rundowns of my monthly library reading. Join in on your social media space of choice using #LoveYourLibrary.
This month, eight of my read books were from the library, including a fair few long-awaited holds and purchase requests coming in at once. Three were for 20 Books of Summer; two of those went in a roundup of books 8-10, and the remaining one will be in the next roundup. That leaves five others to discuss, and here they are.
Essays, by George Orwell, ed. Bernard Crick (written 1931-1949; this edition published 2000): Genius! Genius!! Genius!!! I started off looking for his long critical essay on Charles Dickens, found it online, and was so impressed with its incisiveness. (Orwell gets that Dickens is not really a reformer; Dickens believes that the solution to the societal problems that he delineates so devastatingly lies in the individual human soul, or as Orwell brutally puts it, “if men would behave decently, the world would be decent.” And yet Orwell also gets that, in its own way, Dickens’s is a sincerely held and quietly radical point of view: that humans therefore must behave decently, that they have an absolute moral obligation to it. He has this great capacity to convey both exasperation by and admiration for Dickens’s perspective.) Then I realised that the rest of his essays were probably worth reading too, and so they are. The most famous ones, “Shooting an Elephant” and so on, are almost short story-like, and indeed may not have actually happened as Orwell narrates them, which is a question of authorial ethics for another day. They are very well written, though. Especially when discussing political or artistic topics, his argumentation is clear and authoritative. He is the antithesis to academic wind-baggery, which might be why I like his literary criticism the most out of everything in the collection. Because of this clarity, he is also memorable, which is why people tend to talk about, quote, and misquote him as though he were God. He was not God—he was an intelligent man with opinions and a readily admitted Leftist/Socialist bias who nevertheless generally engaged in good faith with whatever he was thinking about. He doesn’t snipe or bitch or attempt to score cheaply. Nor he does let anyone or anything off the hook. My fiancé got such a torrent of Orwell-appreciation from me, the week I read this, that he bought me, for my birthday, the 1000-page Everyman hardback collection of the complete essays, more or less. I cannot wait to find out what I haven’t yet read.
An aside: on two separate occasions someone asked what I was reading, I showed the cover of this, and my interlocutor made a face that I could not confidently interpret, but which might have been mild distaste. It was not at all what I expected. Has Orwell’s reputation changed? Was it just that the Penguin cover image is of a Coronation street party and we’re automatically suspicious of British flag bunting in these cynical postmodern times? (In fairness, it isn’t the cover image I’d have chosen.) Am I overthinking this? (Yes.)
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, by David Mitchell (2010): This highly engrossing and immersive historical novel is part of Mitchell’s overarching mythos, although it takes a while for a name we recognise (one irascible Doctor Marinus) to show up. Set in the dying days of the Dutch East India Company’s trading outpost in Japan—an island enclave called Dejima off Nagasaki which most of the European staff are not permitted to leave—it follows the titular Jacob as he falls in love, loses the woman he loves, attempts to keep both his career and his life, and eventually negotiates the future of Dejima with British would-be colonisers and the Japanese authorities. Meanwhile, the woman he loves, Aibagawa Orito, is legally abducted after her father’s death to live in the Sisters’ House of a shady monastery up a nearby mountain, where terrible things are happening and no one has ever survived to whistleblow. Devoted Mitchell readers will have strong suspicions about what exactly those terrible things are, and although he didn’t reveal the full extent of his metaphysics until The Bone Clocks in 2014, there are plenty of clues seeded here.
Unfortunately, the novel itself is a 300-page story stretched over more than 500. There is just a lot of extraneous length here. Partly this comes from an odd scene-setting habit of Mitchell’s: he adds descriptive colour by repeatedly inserting single sentences of it into scenes that otherwise contain dialogue or progressive action, like walnuts in a brownie (condemnatory). It’s probably meant to mimic the sweep of a camera lens, but it gets very annoying, especially because the details he lights on don’t generally seem to have any particular significance. I don’t know how well this would stand on its own, either; to me it reads more satisfyingly because I read The Bone Clocks and Slade House before it, but for anyone who hasn’t yet encountered those (including its first readers), it might prove quite annoying in its tendency to hint but not actually confirm. Worthwhile for a holiday read, but not a top-tier Mitchell, IMO.
The Safekeep, by Yael van der Wouden (2024): Spoilers of a sort follow. Quite a lot better and more interesting than I expected it to be, about the postwar treatment of surviving Jews in the Netherlands (awful; it was the only country that sent no official escort to collect its citizens from the death camps). Many couldn’t get their property back afterwards, even—especially—from neighbours who were supposed to just be looking after things for them. Our protagonist, Isabel, a bitter and miserable person whose head it can be very difficult to spend time in, lives in such a house, procured by her uncle during the war; she has never asked questions about it, and her mother never acknowledged that the house was basically stolen goods. When her brother Louis brings back a new girlfriend, Eva, whom Isabel loathes, to stay at the house with her, it doesn’t take the reader long to clock who Eva might be and what she might be doing there. The evolving sexual attraction between Eva and Isabel is both melodramatic and hot: the sex is well written even if their tormented conversational style gets a bit tiresome. My favourite bit of the whole book was Eva’s diary, which we get to read with Isabel near the end; her memories and experiences, her way of surviving both literally and emotionally, are instantly engaging. Not a bad Women’s Prize winner.
The Creature in the Case, by Garth Nix (2005): Fun, reasonably scary, inessential long story/novelette that picks up with Nicholas Sayre in Ancelstierre after the events of Abhorsen and just before those of Goldenhand (literally just before: the final few pages of this story are recapitulated in the early chapters of that novel). As aforementioned, I find Ancelstierre inherently less interesting than the Old Kingdom, and it turns out I find Free Magic inherently less interesting than the Dead, but I do like Nick as a character and Nix makes his wild dash across the country fun and believable. (Arriving by train, disheveled and with no ticket, at the capital, he’s mistaken by the platform guard for a hungover undergraduate whose friends have pranked him: an excellent little sequence.) Glad I read it, and my Old Kingdom series reading is now complete.
Annie Bot, by Sierra Greer (2024): I just finished this yesterday so I didn’t have a lot of time left to think/write about it, but: this year’s Clarke Award winner really goes to all the places that you’d both hope and fear a novel about sexbots might go to. Deeply disturbing, emotionally convincing, and one of the better imaginations of how a robot of this sort might think and order their thoughts (helped by Greer’s choice to keep the narrative voice in tight third person throughout, not first). Doug, Annie’s human boyfriend/owner, is terrible and pathetic and terribly, pathetically normal, committing acts of abuse in precisely the manner that most people do commit them: small, selfish, persistent. Annie is an extremely compelling protagonist, and her journey towards freedom is so well paced. The emotional dynamics of being helpless not to seek the approval of your abuser are ones Greer knows inside out and can convey with appalling efficiency; they are exacerbated by the extent to which Doug is capable of controlling Annie’s programming. (Those who have read the book will understand when I say: the closet scene.) I truly did not expect to be so shaken by Annie Bot, but it’ll stick in my mind for a long time to come.
Have you read anything good from the library in July?
I think I first saw this on Laura’s blog, but her post apparently came from Eric Karl Anderson’s (Lonesome Reader’s) YouTube video. We’re precisely halfway through 2025, so… let’s see how the reading has been going.
1. How many books have you read so far this year? 91. This puts me, apparently, 60% of the way to my reading goal of 150 (Goodreads thinks I’m 24 books ahead of schedule, and StoryGraph makes it 23, which makes it obvious that one of them is programmed to round up and one to round down!) I’m pretty sure this has been boosted by my obsessive comfort reading fortnight in May.
2. What’s your favourite book so far this year? This is a very hard call and I refuse to make it. Thus far I’ve had about one book per month that feels like a worthy candidate for the year’s-end best-of list, which is good going, but I can’t pick a standout from those.
3. What’s the most disappointing book you’ve read this year? “Disappointing” to me implies initially high expectations; Susanna Clarke’s individually-published short story The Wood at Midwinter fell far short of the haunting, resonant work I know she’s capable of. I was also hoping for more from Garth Nix’s Clariel, despite having been warned.
4. What genre have you read most this year? According to StoryGraph, “literary” (although they include edge-of-genre writers like Karen Russell and Nina Allan in this category), followed by “fantasy” (boosted by all the Pratchett and Nix in April and May).
5. Name a new favourite author that you’ve discovered this year. If I can define “new favourite” as “new-to-me author from whom I would like to read more”, this is a toss-up between Vernor Vinge and Ralph Ellison.
6. What’s the most surprisingly good book you’ve read so far this year? I did not expect to genuinely adore and feel compelled by The Pickwick Papers. I thought it’d be one of the weaker Dickens novels; instead, it’s one of the most exciting and least annoying.
7. What are your favourite and most anticipated 2025 releases? I’m not reading a whole lot of 2025 releases (though more than I realised, mostly via NetGalley). The best ones I’ve read so far have been Susan Barker’s supernatural chiller Old Soul, Colwill Brown’s gorgeous evocation of Northern girlhood, We Pretty Pieces of Flesh, and Megan Hunter’s evocative Days of Light. I’m also currently reading Eliana Ramage’s To the Moon and Back, about a young Cherokee woman who wants to be an astronaut, and LOVING it—more on that soon (it’s one of my 20 Books of Summer).
8.What’s your next big priority for your reading? I’m partway through 20 BoS, so finishing that is my next major reading priority.
9. What’s been your bookish highlight of the year so far? Usually this is some combination of book and travel, or book and environment, or a literary event. I haven’t traveled much yet this year apart from on business, and haven’t been to many (any?) literary events. Maybe the answer is the cloudy spring Saturday when I took myself on a date to the largest park in south London and sat in the café in the basement of a restored manor house on the grounds. I had a cheese-and-ham toastie and a brownie and two coffees and spent about four hours reading Garth Nix’s Goldenhand. It felt like a pocket of time recaptured from the way I read in childhood, unselfconsciously and with abandon.
Hosted, as always, by Rebecca at Bookish Beck, posting on the last Monday of every month. There’s no set formula to this; you can post anything about libraries, whether you’ve recently been to an event at one, heard about an initiative at one, whatever! I use it for rundowns of my monthly library reading. Join in on your social media space of choice using #LoveYourLibrary.
This month, the vast majority of what I read came from the library: a solid fifteen books, often at the rate of one a day. Mostly this was popcorn reading to get through a month that demanded every ounce of mental, emotional and intellectual energy I could summon. Below, you’ll find my account of figuring out this reading strategy, or rather, being told it by a sympathetic and impartial observer, because sometimes I’m still not that good at stepping back and figuring out what I need.
Clariel, by Garth Nix (2014): Hm. Big hmmmm. This is a prequel to the Abhorsen trilogy (discussed in April’s #LoveYourLibrary post), set six hundred years in the Old Kingdom’s past. I don’t regret learning more about what this country and world were like in their heyday (nor do I regret getting to see Mogget in a new context, interacting with new characters!) But something about both Clariel the character and Clariel the book never quite cohered for me. She feels like a far more generic YA heroine than Sabriel or Lirael: one who wants things she’s told she can’t have, acts out in response, and ultimately achieves very little. I never felt I knew her. I knew her traits: uncontrollable rage (berserker blood is part of her heritage), what seems like agoraphobia, a monomaniacal obsession with returning to the Great Forest where she grew up. But I never felt that she was more than that list. The pacing, also, is very off: the chapters set in Belisaere take far too long, more time is spent in the Academy than the plot can possibly justify, and the climax occurs in the very final chapter and takes (I just counted) ten pages. Disappointing on the whole.
The History of Mary Prince, by Mary Prince (1831): The first book by a Black woman published in Britain. (She dictated it to a white amanuensis, so [insert necessary warning about the mediation of manuscripts by marginalised voices here].) It’s an account of her life, and her experiences of being enslaved in Barbados and Antigua, until she came to Britain with the Woods, the family that enslaved and abused her. There, she left them, because in Britain she was legally free—but she could never return to Antigua, and to her husband, unless the Woods chose to manumit her, which they would not. You don’t need me to tell you that this is harrowing. Prince’s rhetoric as she meticulously sets up all the pro-slavery arguments she’s ever heard, then knocks them down one by one, is very gratifying. So is the afterword from her contact at the Anti-Slavery Society, who describes John Wood’s vindictive attempts to regain her through the British court system, including slandering her character and provably lying about her treatment at his family’s hands. There were people who knew at the time that slavery was a moral stain; never let anyone tell you otherwise.
Then came a DNF, @ 38%. I ran out of books, you see, or I nearly did, and was reduced to prowling the library ebook app with the kind of frantic hunger with which one is generally discouraged from visiting supermarkets. Everything on my “of interest” list seemed to be already borrowed, and much that was available was rubbish (or in e-audiobook form, which has never worked well for me). I sampled the first chapter of In the Shadow of Vesuvius: a Life of Pliny, by Daisy Dunn (2019), then borrowed it. I really wanted to like it. Unfortunately, it offered little more than constant quotation from Pliny’s Letters, which I’ve already read. Dunn is also prone to digression without clear purpose, which looks suspiciously like padding in the absence of any compelling argument about her subject’s life. (Do I care about the efforts made by nineteenth-century twin brothers from Como to claim him as a native of their town, or require four paragraphs on Mary and Percy Shelley’s visit to his villa? Not really.) I was in low mood anyway, and none of this was helping at all. I mentioned it to M. He gazed at me in loving incredulity, and said (more or less), “Why on earth are you trying to read this right now? Go find some popcorn books at once.”
Equal Rites, by Terry Pratchett (1987): This was the first thing I borrowed after M. set me right. Pratchett rarely fails me, and he didn’t fail me here. This, the third Discworld novel, is the first to feature the Witches of Lancre and I haven’t read very many of those, so this felt both comforting and new, which was the perfect combination. It’s about second-wave feminism as applied to magic. (A girl can’t be a wizard! And witches differ from wizards in fundamental and unchangeable ways! …Right?) It’s not as funny as some of the others—I don’t think he’d quite found his rhythm yet, though it’s already loads better than The Colour of Magic (1983) and The Light Fantastic (1986). There is something odd about the time scale here; Esk is eight or nine during the first part of the book, but seems a bit older by the time we get to the University, but there’s no indication that actual years have passed. And according to those who know, Granny Weatherwax is much better in the company of her coven; in Equal Rites she does seem quite harsh and not a little shifty, whereas (having read some later books where she crops up) I remember her being easier to warm to. But maybe that says something about gendered expectations, too. Did the trick, anyway. I felt loads better after reading this.
The Rose Rent, by Ellis Peters (1986): A Brother Cadfael mystery, set in twelfth-century Shrewsbury’s Benedictine monastery. They are the most perfect comfort reads. I went on a tear with them about three years ago and am picking up the series again now. This one is about a young heiress and widow, Judith Perle, who gives a large house to the monastery in exchange for an eccentric annual rent: a single white rose from its garden, in memory of her much-loved late husband. Murder and abduction throws suspicion not only on Judith’s household but on the many local men who have been attempting to convince her of their suitability as second husbands. As always, I absolutely love the way Peters writes medieval women: living within the bounds of their time, with social proprieties and religious conviction given due importance, but also people. Proud, brave, clever, shallow, whatever kind of person they are, they’re always people first. Partly because Cadfael became a monk as an adult with life experience, after going on Crusade and fathering his own son, he’s capable of seeing, and not fearing, women, in a way that those of the monks whose parents gave them to the monastery as children simply can’t manage. This emotional/psychological reality becomes an inciting incident in The Rose Rent. I really do love these books.
Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett (1988): Pratchett does Macbeth, and also Hamlet, and really Shakespearean tragedy in general, plus a bit of satirising the theatrical profession as a whole just for fun. Granny Weatherwax has a coven now (not by her own doing—it’s the keen young witch Magrat who’s gotten them all socialising). My favourite of the three witches, at least in this book, might be Nanny Ogg, who has fifteen children and innumerable grand- and great-grandchildren and is clearly Discworld’s version of a working-class English matriarch (she always has a family member, an “our Shawn” or “our Sandra”, working in the kitchens or the guardroom of wherever they might want to break, or sneak, into). She also has the terrifically awful one-eyed cat Greebo, described as “radiating a smell that would have knocked over a wall and caused sinus trouble in a dead fox”. Also, this is the book that introduced the world to the Discworld drinking song “The Hedgehog Can Never Be Buggered At All”. I understand some enterprising readers have written a full set of lyrics, but it’s much, much funnier to just hear snatched and horrifying excerpts of it from drunken characters.
Ink Blood Sister Scribe, by Emma Törzs (2023): I took a punt on this—it was the kind of book that I always find very appealing in the premise (library of magic books, family secrets, hidden rivalries), but everything hangs on the execution. Törzs does it perfectly. It does a lot of contemporary fantasy tropes, especially around complicated feelings within families and legacies of abuse and colonialism, without hitting you over the head; everything arises from the characters that Törzs creates and the fondness we’re encouraged to feel for them. Amongst many other things, I loved that Esther’s lesbianism isn’t presented as a problem for her or an obstacle to acceptance; if anything, that obstacle is about her identity within and relationship to magic, not to sex or love. I loved Nicholas, a sheltered wealthy magic-user who’s both alarmingly privileged and sweetly oblivious about how a lot of things in the world actually work. I loved his relationship with his bodyguard Collins, a sarcastic giant of a man, and the fact that his dog is a (female) Pomeranian named Sir Kiwi. I loved the magic system, which functions via reading and writing and therefore is bounded by time. I loved the way mothers are represented, how the book shows different kinds of mothering, not all cuddly, but none portrayed as “wrong” or evil. I loved that the villain is properly scary but a big part of how well that works is the way the villainy takes time to unfold and become obvious, to the reader as well as to the characters. There’s some romance, but it isn’t romantasy. The tonal balance is somehow always perfect. An ideal book to curl up with—I’ll be keeping an eye out to buy a copy of my own.
Pyramids, by Terry Pratchett (1989): Pratchett does ancient civilisations, specifically ancient Egypt and a bit of ancient Greece—although I’d argue this is really more about satirising people’s received ideas about ancient civilisations. Parts of it are still uncomfortable levels of culturally appropriative caricature, and the plot strands get overly frenetic as they come together. I’d happily have taken an entire novel about Teppic, the crown prince of not!Egypt, receiving a first-class foreign education in the Assassins’ Guild; those early bits were superb.
Writers and Lovers, by Lily King (2020): LOVED this. Like the Törzs, there were a million ways this could have gone wrong, and it went right at every one of them. The title made me expect that this would be a love triangle novel, and it is, but there’s considerably more going on here, from an extraordinarily delicate dissection of grief over the loss of a parent to a clear-eyed look at financial precarity and the fucked job market for creative arts and academia. (It’s set in the ’90s, and King manages to have these conversations in a way that feels resonant with the 2020s but still belongs clearly to that earlier time. Some of this is down to the way she writes about sexual harassment in the workplace. We really have made some progress in the last 25 years.) It’s also about writing a novel, in the most unromantic, unsexy way, which I appreciated enormously, and although I’ll avoid spoilers about the love plot resolution, it’s about how important it is for a prospective partner to take your creative work seriously. I mentioned in an earlier post that Siri Hustvedt’s What I Loved sets a high bar for “books that feel real“; Writers and Lovers clears it. Everyone in this novel feels like an actual person; every event in this novel feels like something that really happened. Don’t sleep on this.
Terciel and Elinor, by Garth Nix (2021): I was not expecting this to be the better of the two Old Kingdom prequels (despite Laura’s assurance), but she was so right and it so was! Dual protagonists work even better here than in Lirael, perhaps because Nix does alternating chapters instead of a whole section with one and a whole section with the other. Both Terciel and Elinor are interesting, engaging, and rounded; Elinor is a good example of what Clariel could have been like, someone with a strong non-magical interest (theatre and acrobatics) who nevertheless isn’t a monomaniac and whose skills actually serve her well (she’s better at fighting and strategy because she has abilities like juggling and tumbling). Terciel’s uncertainty about his necromantic heritage, and his shift from raw apprentice to confident Abhorsen, is well managed, too. If the climax is less terrifying than in Sabriel, it’s partly because we’re already familiar with this villain and know he gets defeated elsewhere and elsewhen. I bought the romance, too, which is sweet and convincing and deals with sexuality very well. Overall, a relief to have such a delightful experience. Still waiting for the library system to deliver up the collected stories in Across the Wall.
The Heretic’s Apprentice, by Ellis Peters (1989): As you might be able to guess from the title, this brings in questions of heresy, of which it can be quite as dangerous to be accused as murder. You can always tell where Peters stands with her characters—if Cadfael gets good vibes from a guy, he’s never wrong—but that’s partly why these are such effective comfort reads, they’re not going to pull the rug out from under you. Instead you generally get a range of bad-vibe emanators, who are the gallery of suspects, to maintain suspense. This one ends with a tense hostage situation, and a resolution of the kind that Peters favours: death comes to the wrongdoer before they can be put on trial, usually via accident or suicide. It effectively prevents Hugh Beringar, the sheriff and representative of state power, and Cadfael’s dear friend, from being made unsympathetic as a character by having to carry out the sharp end of his office. She uses this device too often for these books to be properly literary; it’s a soft way out. Who cares, though, this is what they’re for.
When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain, by Nghi Vo (2020): Vo’s first novella, The Empress of Salt and Fortune, is on my 20 Books of Summer possibles list. Her second one came to my hands first, though, when I wanted something short for a day spent traveling to and from the ExCel Centre in London’s Docklands. Each book in the series is basically standalone; the premise is that Chih, a nonbinary cleric in a fantasy Asian-inflected society, travels around their world listening to the stories of people they meet and recording them for the archives of their order. In this installment, Chih and a local guide, who rides a mammoth, get trapped by three hungry tiger sisters who can take human form. To stave off being eaten, Chih tells them a story of a legendary tiger queen, Ho Thi Thao, and her wife, the human scholar Dieu. The tigers object to details of Chih’s narration at various points (“no no no! It was like this…”), and the novella deals explicitly with how we construct truth in history writing and storytelling. I liked it plenty, but I suspect the Singing Hills Cycle might be more than the sum of its parts; the more of them I read, the more they’ll probably build to a greater, more memorable reading experience than each individual element can provide. (I’m not going to lie, I also struggled with the violent and entitled behaviour of Ho Thi Thao. As love stories go, it’s not a perfect romance by any means.) Anyway, interesting, I would certainly try at least one more by Vo.
The Summer of the Danes, by Ellis Peters (1991): There is technically a murder in this, but Cadfael spends absolutely zero time on solving it and the murderer ends up confessing when mortally wounded right at the end. The whole book is about politics: the Welsh king Owain Gwynedd’s brother, Cadwaladr, has been sanctioned for being semi-rebellious, and in order to get his estates back, Cadwaladr hires Viking mercenaries from Dublin to back him up. Hostage-taking, negotiations, and losses of honour ensue. Cadfael has a front row seat to it all as one of the hostages, and as always, there’s an extremely interesting woman, in this case the daughter of an ambitious cleric who was born before his ordination but whose existence is still an embarrassment to an institution whose priests are supposed to be celibate. Heledd is about to be tidily disposed of via marriage, but she’s resentful of her father’s shame about her and not at all ready to give him and the Church what they want. Heledd is great. It can be a gamble when a series writer shakes up their formula, but it works very well here.
I, Claudius, by Robert Graves (1934): Reread, although I was 14 at my first (and last) reading of this. I’m amazed at how much has stuck in my memory, though; mostly the characters, Claudius’s awful murderous grandma Empress Livia and terrifying mad psychopath nephew Caligula. I also love Claudius’s prostitute mistress, Calpurnia, her practicality and kindness and professionalism, and I wish we’d seen more of her. As an adult, I suppose my biggest question is why does this book exist, given that we already have Suetonius (whom I haven’t actually read, but I understand this is mostly his material). Graves’s Claudius says he’s writing the secret history, the part that wouldn’t have made it past the propagandist guardians of Rome’s reputation for greatness. Until I read the actual history, I won’t know how much of this is in the real historical record, but I think quite a lot is, so what’s the impetus here? Maybe just that it’s a vivid, engaging introduction to the early years of imperial Rome. I don’t think people were writing much historical fiction like this in the ’30s: so intimate, so conversational! I loved it as a teen, and it’s lost none of its power to fascinate, horrify and entertain.
The Holy Thief, by Ellis Peters (1992): There are at least three separate crimes in this one: the theft, during a historic flood, of the bones of St. Winifred, whose presence at the abbey is responsible for both apparently genuine miracles and continued income; the robbery on the road of the wagon containing her reliquary; and eventually the murder of a young shepherd who might have been able to identify the mysterious figure, dressed as one of the brothers, who asked for help loading the parcel that contained the stolen saint. Continuing with the increased political edge of the later books, this contains a whole scene between Hugh, the sheriff, and Earl Robert of Leicester, in which the latter warns the former that the state of civil unrest in England between King Stephen and Empress Maud can’t last, and that every man of authority will have to think carefully about how to end the strife in his own area. This reflects the final years of the war, where active hostilities were winding down and individual nobles were beginning to make peace agreements with each other. There’s also a strong theme of the danger of a false vocation—two young men, at beginning and end, realise they don’t belong in the cloister—plus interesting stuff about the lives of troubadors (including their urgent need for patronage) and the practice of enslaving (mostly) Celtic and Welsh captives, which, although condemned by the church, continued in the twelfth century. Certainly one of the better, more complex entries in this series.
Goldenhand, by Garth Nix (2016): Not quite as good as Terciel and Elinor; loads better than Clariel. We get much more geography this time, going farther north than before, and I liked the implication that the barren wastelands beyond the Great Rift are a remnant of another world, destroyed by Orannis, the entity that Lirael re-bound in the last volume of the Abhorsen trilogy. Goldenhand is, casually, pretty good on disability—Lirael has a prosthetic hand now, and another major female character, Ferin, loses a foot above the ankle and treats it as a minor inconvenience but basically nothing to be too concerned about. The romance between Ferin and Prince Sameth happens quickly but feels right: he’s indecisive and shy and practical, she’s decisive and fierce and practical, they complement each other well. In fact, Ferin’s journey is one of the best things in the book, giving it a Sabriel-like quality as we meet another determined young woman whose only resource is herself and who must flee powerful, mysterious supernatural antagonists. I wanted a lot more to be made of Ferin’s psychological change of state, like in LeGuin’s The Tombs of Atuan—you live your whole life preparing to become a flesh vehicle for a centuries-old malevolent spirit and then that fate is taken away from you, it’s going to have more of an effect. On the other hand, Clariel/Chlorr is a much better character here even though she’s drawn with less detail. The scene in Death where the shard of her spirit that remained human finally embraces her larger, scarier, inhuman self, and they both pass through the final gate, had me crying. A good sequel, not an essential one.
If you made it this far, thanks for persevering! I did read non-library books this month, but not many. I’ll talk about them at the end of the week. How did you do with library reading in May?
Edited to add: I read this for an event that Kaggsy and Simon co-run every six months, where they pick a year between about 1920 and 1980, then encourage us to read a book(s) from that year. It’s a great way of establishing a cultural and literary snapshot of a moment in time. I’ve enjoyed participating in a few now: 1940, 1962, and 1970. Go check out their blogs for the roundups, and if you want to join in yourself, just use the hashtag #1952club!
This book starts with a scene that may be familiar to you even if you’ve never read it, because it is the scene that most people writing about Invisible Man tend to talk about. It’s referred to shorthand as “the battle royal”, and describes a gathering of white businessmen and local grandees into which a handful of Black high schoolers is imported. Our narrator, unnamed, has just won a major speech competition and thinks he’s been brought in to give his speech. Really, the boys are there to undergo a series of humiliating physical assaults, including being forced to fight each other blindfolded and bare-knuckled, and being forced to crawl for coins around and onto an electrified floor mat that shocks them when they touch it. Only after these tortures is our narrator encouraged—rather, forced—to give his speech, which he does with a sense of deep confusion and humiliation, having to shout over the hecklings of the crowd, who sardonically ask him to repeat himself every other sentence.
You can see why most readers get stuck on this scene, though I can’t help but wonder if Ellison shot himself in the foot by putting it so soon. It’s very powerful and very disturbing. Still, it doesn’t entirely represent the experience of reading Invisible Man, which is less a novel of “the Black Experience” (capital letters mandatory) and more a novel of total disillusionment, of complete unraveling not just from the racist demands of white supremacy but from the pressure coming from one’s own “people”. I’ve never read a novel by a Black author—certainly not one written so early in the twentieth century—that more fully captured the cruel contortions of “racial uplift” thinking, the attitude that educated Black people were responsible not only for dragging poorer Black people out of “ignorance” but for actually making the whole race “more human”. A huge chunk of the first part of the book involves our narrator—at this point an undergraduate at what’s clearly meant to represent the prestigious Tuskegee Institute—driving a very wealthy white donor, Mr. Norton, around the campus. Norton’s interest in our narrator is noticeably self-centered and utilitarian: he believes the young man important only because he believes him to be essential to his (Norton’s) “destiny”, whatever that means. They end up in a section of the grounds containing old slave cabins (presumably from when the campus was a plantation), where poor sharecroppers now live. Norton’s encounter with one of these men, Trueblood, shocks him badly, and our narrator’s attempts to revive him with whisky take them both to a local bar-cum-brothel, where another Black man, an inmate of the local lunatic asylum, speaks to Norton with an openness and lack of deference that do even more damage. Despite Norton’s assurances that he bears the narrator no ill-will and knows none of this was fault, the narrator is expelled. His conversation with Dr. Bledsoe, the Black principal of the college, chillingly reveals the nature of the deal that white supremacy asks Black men to make in exchange for power in their arena:
“I’s big and black and I say ‘Yes, suh’ as loudly as any burrhead when it’s convenient, but I’m still the king down here. . . . The only ones I even pretend to please are big white folk, and even those I control more than they control me. . . . That’s my life, telling white folk how to think about the things I know about. . . . It’s a nasty deal and I don’t always like it myself. . . . But I’ve made my place in it and I’ll have every Negro in the country hanging on tree limbs by morning if it means staying where I am.”
Bledsoe proves a more formidable enemy than most of the white characters, poisoning the narrator’s chances of getting a job in New York by sending pre-emptive character assassination letters to his contacts. After abortive attempts at industrial work, one of which involves an accident serious enough to cause a head injury, the narrator discovers a talent for public speaking and is welcomed by “the Brotherhood”, a multi-racial group of organisers who seem to be a thinly veiled Communist Party. From the start, the reader wonders if and when the narrator’s adulation from the Brotherhood’s committee might turn sour, but the narrator himself refuses to allow himself what he thinks of as backwards and unenlightened race-based suspicion, and plunges ever deeper into community organising. The murder of an unarmed black Brother, Tod Clifton, by a white police officer plunges Harlem into mourning and forms the Brotherhood’s rationale for pulling out of Black neighbourhoods—a process which finally leads to the narrator’s complete disillusionment with any form of social belonging or endeavour.
There’s a tiny ray of hope at the end; famously, the narrator lives alone and underground in total isolation as he tells us his story, but it seems as if he might be about to head back into the sun and air, the world of action and striving, changed and refreshed. Mostly, though, this is a novel describing the downward spiral of a person’s hope, and you’d think, therefore, that it might be depressing or at least hard going. It isn’t hard going at all, largely because Ellison is a fantastic writer. He’s miles ahead of Wright, for example, whose Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945) are often bracketed with Invisible Man. On a sentence level, he’s a delight to read where Wright is rarely more than competent. He’s funny. (“Beware of those who speak of the spiral of history; they are preparing a boomerang. Keep a steel helmet handy” could be Vonnegut.) He can do wry aphorism: “I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.” Above all, he has a clarity of expression that cuts through to the heart: “Everywhere I’ve turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good—only they were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?” Invisible Man feels utterly fresh and contemporary to read because it’s working through these complicated philosophical and personal questions in that clear, incisive language.
It’s gutting to know that Ellison never completed another novel: when he died, the manuscript for his second was thousands of pages long, and two cut-down versions have been published posthumously, but neither is the book he wanted to produce. Still, he did this, and this has kept him in print, read, and studied for seventy years. It’s prime literature. Do yourself a favour and check it out.
Both of these novels deal with multiple generations of Southern families—not all women, particularly in Smith’s case, but usually held together by women. Both also take the form of a mostly sidelined “present-day” frame narrative that contains the family saga and emphasises the dynastic power of matriarchs. There are differences, though: Smith goes further back in time, and Gibbons foregrounds comedy as a response to adversity in a way that Smith doesn’t. They’re fascinating to read alongside each other, revealing the many facets of what might seem like stereotypical experiences.
Oral History, by Lee Smith (1983): We begin with naive, citified college student Jennifer’s ill-conceived “oral history” project, in which she leaves a tape recorder running in her biological mother’s family’s abandoned Appalachian farmhouse overnight. The frame narrative later implies that what’s on the tape are the voices of her ancestral ghosts; the farm was abandoned precisely because her relatives believe it to be haunted. The main body of the novel, telling the story of five generations of the Cantrell family, starts in the late 19th century and is split between multiple narrators. Among them are Granny Younger, an ancient nurse, healer and midwife; Richard Burlage, a well-meaning but foolish schoolteacher from a wealthier part of the state, slumming it in the mountains for “philanthropy”; Jink Cantrell, one of the many children of patriarch Almarine and his second wife Vashti; and, most interestingly of all, Ora Mae, Vashti’s daughter by an earlier relationship who ends up the second wife of her own stepsister’s husband. The structure is by no means straightforward, although it’s told chronologically. We come at events through the eyes of peripheral characters, or people who don’t understand the full ramifications of their own actions (Burlage, for instance).
The blurb promises high drama—suicide! incest! murder!—and you do get it, but with a perhaps unexpected level of subtlety. (I’m not at all sure where the incest happens; there are two or three different possibilities, but Smith is smart about not showing us everything.) Perhaps the best way to think of Oral History is as an early attempt to do what Smith achieved later in Fair and Tender Ladies (1988): showing the passage of time in a rural community and dramatising the changes in human relationships and in daily life over decades. In Oral History she does that by taking many voices and weaving them, Spoon River-like, into testimony; in the later novel, she distills this down to the voice of a single character, which is so strong that it has an arguably greater impact. But I absolutely loved Oral History, for taking seriously the lives and loves and tragedies and oddnesses of an extended family who—even to their own neighbours, let alone to the literary élite in the world outside the novel—are easily made a joke or a by-word. It’s proper dignified epic contained in a mere 300 pages.
A Cure for Dreams, by Kaye Gibbons (1991): The frame narrative here is a “present-day” (late 1980s) woman, Marjorie, setting down or reporting the recounted memories of her mother, Betty. Betty’s memories incorporate some of the early life of her own mother, Lottie, so we get a portrait of at least three generations of rural Southern women—and Lottie’s mother Bridget, a cantankerous Irishwoman who never learns to speak fluent English and spends her old age railing at her twelve children in impenetrable Gaelic, also gets air time, so make that four generations. Honestly, nothing much happens, but by the same token, quite a lot does: Betty’s husband and Marjorie’s father, Charles, goes from being a hardworking, dedicated farmer to an obsessive, paranoid workaholic; the Crash and Great Depression make their mark; there’s suicide and murder and childbirth.
What I particularly liked about A Cure for Dreams was its emphasis on communities of women who are not exactly isolated from men, but creating their own world within a world whose institutions and systems are male, a world that evades those institutions and substitutes its own forms of justice and care. A local woman named Sade is regularly abused by her husband Roy; when Roy is found shot dead in their front yard, Betty and the local sheriff both appear on the scene at about the same time. The sheriff seeks physical evidence outside, but Betty, sitting indoors with the wailing Sade, makes more relevant observations—the single dirty plate from dinner instead of two, the slice of cut pie, the sloppy stitches in Sade’s current quilting project—and, in a passage reminiscent of Holmes’s greatest deductive acts, comes to her own conclusions. Nevertheless, when the sheriff decides that a vagrant, vaguely described by Sade and never actually found, must be responsible, Betty keeps quiet. To what end would she speak up? Sade is unlikely to kill anyone else. Likewise, although government relief projects like the WPA are mentioned, along with a Roosevelt-funded district nurse named Odessa Hightower, the greatest acts of charity are effected by the local women fundraising amongst themselves: grocery money for Trudy Woodlief, whose husband runs off; baby clothes for her children. I don’t know if it’s the sort of book likely to make an impression on you if you aren’t (or don’t know) a Southern woman, but if you are or do, it will seem pitch-perfect.
Both books were bought secondhand from Daedalus Books in Charlottesville.
I read two books on our return flight, both via NetGalley. They’re not exactly classic “airplane books”—too distinct a lack of either grifty faux-groundbreaking evolutionary biology mansplaining or tense revelation of shadowy conspiracies culminating in gunfire—but both kept my attention across the Atlantic while very tired, and both were very enjoyable. Quick considerations below.
Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird: the Art of Eastern Storytelling, by Henry Lien: This was absolutely super. I’ve often found myself struggling with two separate but related things: the apparent “diversity” of putting Global Majority characters inside plots that seem pretty Western to me, and the often completely alien feeling of reading a writer whose approach to plot, characterisation, pacing, and other literary building blocks is obviously formed by a totally different tradition. (This is the feeling I had when reading Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s Kintu, for example, and several other African Summer authors like Amos Tutuola; it’s also a feeling I get when contemplating much J- and K-lit.) Lien’s explanation for this makes total sense to me: the structure is different, first of all, and secondly—a very useful dictum—”values inform structures”. (He’s not super-prescriptive about all of this, thankfully; the case studies, which take in very Western media that use “Eastern” techniques like four-act, nested, and circular structures as well as Eastern media that uses three-act structures, are good at making clear the contingency of these theories.) His illustrations and dissections of three- vs. four-act structures are forensic, erudite, and deeply loving of the properties he discusses, from Metroid and Parasite to Never Let Me Go and Disney’s Mulan (and a hilarious reassessment of The Hobbit). I’m already fired up to use this in my own teaching, which in the first two weeks of term will be explicitly focused on plot and structure! Highly recommended to anyone interested in how stories are (or can be) put together. Source: NetGalley, publishing 4 Feb.
Blob, by Maggie Su: A very cute spec-fic novel with a premise reminiscent of Holly Gramazio’s The Husbands, in the sense that the speculative element is just there, no explanation is made, and you have to accept its existence. I can deal with this–it’s different from magical realism in that the mode is basically realistic, with actions having recognisable, logical causes and effects. Here, the speculative element is a beige blob that our protagonist, mixed-race Taiwanese-American Vi, finds in an alley behind a drag club. She takes it home and, realising that it can shape-shift (and loves reality TV), begins molding it into the ideal boyfriend. Vi’s loneliness, fear of abandonment, and habits of self-sabotage are clearly and painfully drawn, but the point of Blob is that she has to let go of some of these responses to be a happier, fuller person. (I thought of Lien’s observations about Western stories and their insistence on the primacy of individual growth and development. Vi’s story certainly qualifies, which feels especially interesting as part of her pain and confusion is connected to her sense of never quite belonging in either white America or the Taiwanese diaspora as a mixed-race person.) Blob is extremely funny, though, particularly the scenes where Vi is training “Bob” into a man’s shape and teaching him language–imagine if the Black Mirror episode where Hayley Atwell gets a grow-your-own replacement for her dead husband had been hilarious. Well worth a read if you’re a little dubious about full-on sci fi but are interested in dipping a toe in the water, and of course if this kind of wacky premise, delivered with both heart and irony, interests you. Source: NetGalley, publishing 30 Jan.
I don’t know how often this happens to other people. Most of those whose book blogs I follow appear to have groaning TBR stacks and a severe new-book-buying habit; I have never had much in the way of disposable income, and so my acquisitions over the past decade have tended to either be in the form of proof copies from publishers (mostly when I worked in bookselling) or, as is mostly the case now, secondhand purchases, library borrows, or finds on free shelves in places like train stations. Kind friends and family do also gift me books or book tokens, rarely, or my mum and I will nip into a bookshop on her semi-regular visits to Britain and she’ll spot me a paperback or two, or a blogging pal will offer to send me their copy of something. I’ve recently started noting where each of my books came from, in my review posts.
This occasionally poses a problem, because I read very fast, and although my Kindle does contain a few fat anthologies that can be dipped into in case of real emergency, sometimes I run out of chosen reading material and end up reading something because it’s the closest thing to hand that’s free. Such was the case recently, when my mum bought herself two British Library Crime Classics, read one and ran out of time to read the other, and passed them both on to me before her return flight to America. Would I have picked these off a bookshop shelf? Unlikely. Were they right in front of me and free of charge? Indeed. Was I going to pack them off to the charity shop untried? Of course not. And can I stop reading a book once I’ve started it? It takes a lot. Here, then, are thoughts on two books that I read because they were there. One turned out to rather confound my expectations, or at least to show itself a superior specimen; the other really just confimed them.
Impact of Evidence, by Carol Carnac (1954): This is subtitled “A Welsh Borders Mystery”, which you could be forgiven for thinking is just a colourful flourish, some slightly unusual setting to distinguish the book from the many other mysteries out there. Actually, the setting is incredibly significant: because the hamlet of St Brynneys is so remote, and because the weather has been so bad, there are very limited times between which the murderer, and indeed at least one of the victims, could have moved around. It’s a subtler way of creating environmental tension than the usual country-house-party-gets-snowed-in, and it’s easier to accept because the disastrous storm has real consequences in the world apart from making it hard to get the police in; some of the smallholders in the highest hills need emergency food relief sent to them, the Army is drafted in to help excavate flooded roads and bridges, and when various characters are detained under suspicion, their first thought is for who will volunteer to feed their livestock. The sense of tight-knit rural community and the demands that such living makes on people is well conveyed in the Lambton family, a farming couple who have two young adult children and have adopted an adolescent orphan boy named Ken, partly for the extra pair of hands but clearly with real affection. And yet that awareness that you can never really know your neighbours is also highlighted, as the Lambtons and two other local couples, the Evanses and the Derings, reveal and discover each others’ secrets. The ultimate solution to the mystery is not particularly important or interesting—in retrospect, it’s the person that the conventions of these texts require it to be, the one who seemingly couldn’t have done it—but I did enjoy this very much for the snapshot of life on the land after the Second World War. A pleasant surprise!
Dramatic Murder, by Elizabeth Anthony (1948): This is subtitled “A Lost Christmas Murder Mystery”, but really, there’s nothing Christmassy about it apart from the setup. The victim is found dead on Christmas Eve, apparently electrocuted by his tree lights, but Christmas itself is over by chapter three and everyone’s back in London by New Year’s; the investigation goes well into January. If you want a properly festive-set Golden Age mystery, then, I’d recommend Cyril Hare’s An English Murder (1951) instead. How does Dramatic Murder hold up otherwise? Well… not particularly well, I must be honest. The characterisation is decent, but Anthony’s plotting, and especially her seeding of clues, is very clumsy. In one scene, a character asks a doctor for sleeping medication, but they claim they can’t swallow pills and need the prescription in powder form, then ask one too many questions about how easy it’ll be to disguise the bitter taste. The game’s pretty much up at that point, surely; you might not know why they’re the killer, but obviously they are. Yet we’re nowhere near the end! There are a few surprises: the matter-of-fact, even sympathetic, presentation of what’s surely a gay mentoring/sugar-daddying relationship between a university student and the dead man, and the significance of several characters having an Eastern European background, especially just after WWII. But mostly this feels quite by-the-numbers, over-long, and in places grossly misogynistic. (We’re not meant to like one of the men who refers to adult women as “little girls”, but the other ends up with our heroine. Not an attractive quality, paternalism!)
Have you read either of these? Or have you ever read a book just because it was there?
November is a time for two of the biggest book-blogging events, Nonfiction November and Novellas in November (aka #NovNov). As I did last year, I’m jumping in with a dual review here, one of an unbelievably obscure Gothic chapbook that probably barely counts as a novella—it’s only 24 pages long—but which I got to read in full during a research trip last week, and one of a nonfiction memoir/advice manual by a woman whose diagnosis with young-onset dementia has led her to become an activist for better treatment for those who live with the disease.
The Bloody Hand; or, The Fatal Cup, by Anon. (1800): Last week I was on a short research trip to Chawton House Library (held in the manor house in Chawton village which Jane Austen’s brother inherited; her own former home is also in the village and can be visited, though they are, confusingly, not the same place). The staff and curators there were absolutely excellent. Discovering that I was working on a novel by Mary Robinson that was an early example of English Gothic, and also has resonance with French politics and the Revolution, one of them brought me this, a tiny little chapbook in delicate condition that describes the travails of an individual in the prisons of Bonaparte’s France. Politically speaking, this is all rather odd and intriguing—is the author suggesting that monarchical France was better? Surely not, given the existence and widespread abuse of lettres de cachet—but literarily, the whole thing is a delightfully awful mess. The characters are entirely forgettable (there’s a star-crossed couple and also a noble and generous spurned lover; names? Other defining traits? Nah) and the pacing is totally off, with multiple long-lost uncles appearing on the penultimate page with no warning and no further elaboration. That isn’t even the worst choice this anonymous author makes: the villainous monk whose enmity has precipitated all the imprisonment gets his comeuppance when he strikes a prisoner in the face; the prisoner spits mercury (??! how did he get that??) into the monk’s eye, which (I guess) penetrates to his brain and kills him instantly. This happens in the penultimate paragraph. But this stuff wasn’t written to be undying literature; it was written to be cheap, daft entertainment. It isn’t a particularly good example of cheap, daft entertainment—there were better ways to do this kind of hack writing, even in the era—but it makes more sense when you know that’s what it is. Mostly, it’s just such a fun thing to have had access to. And it does constitute an interesting little curio. Source: Chawton House Library #loveyour(academic)library
What I Wish People Knew About Dementia, by Wendy Mitchell (2022): Diagnosed in her late fifties with young-onset dementia, Mitchell—a former NHS nurse and administrator—became determined to stand up for better treatment for other people with the disease. She’s written one previous memoir and is often to be found speaking at conferences, as well as posting online about her life with dementia. This book is less a second volume of memoir and more a practical, action-based guide for those who love people with dementia, giving suggestions as to why particular behaviours or confusions might arise, and ideas for how to adapt, listen, offer alternatives, and continue to show respect and love. I read it because my grandmother, now (I think) eighty-eight, has dementia and lives in a care home. Her condition is quite different to Mitchell’s, partly because the course of her illness is more advanced but also because she’s significantly older and was much less mobile even before she moved into care. Some of Mitchell’s ideas and coping strategies, therefore—supporting your loved one in continuing to get out into the world, allowing them to go to the shops themselves and so on—simply aren’t practical for my grandmother’s level of need. Sometimes that made me sad and frustrated, but I don’t think the book is written with the intention that everything in it will be applicable to everyone, so it’s hardly Mitchell’s fault. Perhaps less defensibly, nowhere in the book is Covid-19 mentioned, though it was published in 2022. The lockdowns and quarantines were reported as causing real and significant distress to people with dementia and I’m sure the social isolation contributed to the rapid progression of my grandmother’s illness.
What struck me most were passages dealing with food and scent. Mealtimes are a common source of struggle for people with dementia. Mitchell suggests hacks like using brightly coloured tableware (dementia affects visual processing, so white plates can be hard to differentiate from the food, especially if the food is pale, like fish or potatoes), bowls instead of plates (coordination trouble can mean that food gets knocked off the edge of a plate, after which it’s instantly forgotten about), and bite-sized pieces of food placed in ramekins (big plates and big portions can be intimidating, especially as many people with dementia—something like sixty percent—develop trouble swallowing). Scent, meanwhile, has been proved to be more efficacious than mere conversation in stimulating memory retrieval. Also, it’s a pretty quick and easy way to keep luxury in someone’s life. When we visited my grandmother, there were about five bouquets of flowers, but all were across the room from her; I lifted one or two and brought them closer so she could smell the lilies and white roses, and it seemed to cheer her. I found this a really useful and informative book, and Mitchell is clearly so passionate about improving quality of life and tackling stigma; well worth your time if this situation applies to you. (And even if it doesn’t, since dementia is nowhere near as well understood, and its research nowhere near as well-funded, as, e.g., cancer.) Source: local public library system #loveyourlibrary
Are you participating in either of these reading events this month? Have you read any novellas or nonfiction recently?
Boy, was this ever what I needed! After a run of books that were either short, hard work, or both, a book of over 450 pages that grabbed me instantly and contained beautiful writing throughout was such a delight. I already knew that I liked Stewart: her “romantic suspense” novels have been in regular rotation on my summer and holiday reading piles since my bookshop colleague Faye (perhaps the world’s leading expert on Stewart) introduced me to them back in 2017. They hit the perfect intersection of escapism and quality, usually set in at least mildly exotic surroundings and following a smart, talented but down-to-earth heroine who gets involved in shenanigans through no fault of her own and who generally also proves her worth to a curmudgeonly (or misleadingly villainous-coded) handsome man before the end. She’s a good writer on a sentence level, too; I’ve never read a Stewart book that wasn’t sheer pleasure to experience, the kind of thing where you can just trust that the author knows what they’re about. So for Kaggsy and Simon‘s 1970 Club, I was delighted to discover that there was a Stewart novel published in that year—but not one of her romantic suspense books. Instead, The Crystal Cave is the first installment in her Arthurian Saga, the other major achievement of her writing life. All I knew was that it followed the childhood and early adulthood of Merlin, the Welsh wizard who would later advise the legendary King Arthur, but I like Arthurian stuff and I trust Stewart, so figured at the very least I’d have a good time reading.
Frankly, I think in The Crystal Cave she surpasses herself. The romantic suspense novels are genuinely great, but there’s something in this novel that feels deep and true, a sense that she’s leveled up in some way. I hesitate to say that because it sounds like I’m saying that novels about women and love and thrills are lower in rank than novels about royal, magical and/or martial men; that isn’t what I mean. But Stewart does hit notes in The Crystal Cave that feel genuinely transcendent in a way that no novel set in the 1950s in the Riviera, for instance, is trying to do. There’s a scene in which Merlin, having completed the construction of what we know as Stonehenge, stands vigil all night with Uther Pendragon—his uncle, and the new King of all Britain—over the grave of Ambrosius, the former King. It’s the midwinter solstice; Ambrosius is buried within the circle of standing stones, and as the sun rises, a line of light is drawn directly over the main trilithon to illuminate his grave. It gave me chills to read it. There’s a sense of weight and significance—to characters’ decisions, to chance events—that convinces. It’s easy to make this sort of narrative, with prophecies and battles, tedious and self-important. (The Rings of Power series, for instance, is constantly aiming for this weighty effect and frequently ends up in self-important territory.) But Stewart never does.
One reason for that, I think, is the groundedness of her version of Merlin in his world. Repeatedly while reading The Crystal Cave, I was reminded of Nicola Griffith’s fantastic Hild, about the young woman who would become Abbess Hilda of Whitby. The books have a lot to say to each other; both are about exceptional individuals whose powers begin to manifest when they are children, who are born into royal households but who live on the margins of privilege and are constantly menaced by the potential loss of safety, and whose abilities are at least as much about close, careful observation and quick thinking as they are the result of literal magic. Merlin clearly does practice literal magic in this book—he’s taught it by an elderly wise man, Galapas—and he has actual visions, but he’s also a capable linguist, engineer, and cold-reader of people. His confidence in the rightness of his prophecies isn’t a cover for arrogance, but a deep humility: he sees himself as a vessel for “the god”, though he never says which one. Late in the book, it’s clear that “which one?” is an irrelevant question: suggesting an easy accommodation of pagan faith with the influence of Roman Christianity, he says more than once that surely all gods eventually flow into one big God.
Yet that mystic element is balanced with a precise and evocative sense of historical atmosphere. Stewart’s fifth-century Britain feels, smells, tastes and sounds completely persuasive. Cold wind chaps skin. Wet wool is heavy and has a scent. Time moves completely differently in a pre-industrialised society. Battle campaigns are planned around seasonal weather changes. A Welsh noble dies from slipping on a flagstone where lamp oil has been spilled and hitting his head. My favourite example of this deep understanding of the realities of another time comes in a description of an invading army. The men have to move fast across the north of England because retreating Saxons have “wasted the land”. Stewart doesn’t spell it out for us; you don’t have to understand this to appreciate the urgency, but I was delighted to recognise that “wasting” the land means burning crops, which renders a large army unable to rely on foraging to feed itself. Hence the required speed: Ambrosius’s troops can probably carry three days’ worth of food, so they need to arrive at their destination, and win control there, before they run out. On these unglamorous logistical phenomena, kingdoms are won or lost. The Crystal Cave both totally gets that, and totally backs the legitimacy of Merlin’s supernatural power.
Initially, I had absolutely no idea what this book said about the time of its publication. Was there a flowering of obsession with medievalism in the late ’60s and early ’70s that helped the Arthurian Saga get started? (Maybe, actually; I know that Tolkien became immensely popular around this time in American undergraduate circles.) I think there’s a bit of a myth of the 1970s in the West as the lost-innocence decade, a period of dwindling hope. Perhaps, then, the start of a story that insisted that good leadership mattered—that there was such a thing as a once and future king—had obvious appeal. But there will always be a need for books that can absorb, compell, and enchant us. The Crystal Cave, very luckily, is one such. I’ve already set about finding the sequel. Source: the local library system #LoveYourLibrary
The autumn weather has largely been keeping its word, with more blue skies, cold air, and chilly nights; I’ve been reading more spooky/creepy books. Here are three that fit the RIP Challenge to a tee: a tale of rural terror, a novella that might well be Lovecraft’s best work, and a wonderful mélange of cosmic horror and comedy that’s full of tongue-in-cheek allusions.
The Events at Poroth Farm, by T.E.D. Klein (1990): I encountered a tantalising reference to this as being properly scary on Laura T.’s blog, and it happened to be part of the Penguin Classics American Supernatural Fiction collection which I bought as a cheap Kindle deal recently. It’s a novelette, really; the listing for the separately printed edition which I’ve cited on Goodreads says it’s 40 pages long, which is just the right length. In classic suspense tale fashion, it’s mostly presented to us in diary format, so we can feel our unease growing along with (or indeed slightly ahead of) that of the main character, a lecturer on Gothic fiction who rents an outbuilding on Sarr and Deborah Poroth’s remote farm in order to get through an uninterrupted summer of reading and syllabus-crafting. For a guy so versed in the evolution of horror, he is remarkably slow to understand what kind of story he’s in—which is all the more thrilling and nail-biting to read, of course. The pleasure of this story is in its particulars: when one of the Poroths’ many cats starts behaving even more strangely than usual, it’s no surprise, really, but figuring out what the menace actually is, and how it might engulf our narrator, keeps the tension high until the very end. When Sarr delivers a particular sentence (no spoilies!), it feels absolutely inevitable and still absolutely bone-chilling. This is a great example of something I can read, but could never watch as a movie: I can shut off, or blur, my own production of visuals, but a film of this story whose imagery I couldn’t control would scare the bejesus out of me. (It’s not especially gory, just terrifying.) Highly, highly recommended. Source: anthologised in American Supernatural Fiction,ed. S.T. Joshi, bought as a 99p Kindle deal
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, by H.P. Lovecraft (1926): This novella, the tale of a young man’s descent into madness (or is it?!) after years spent researching his maternal ancestor, Joseph Curwen, might be my favourite Lovecraft yet. It is absolutely superb. The racism is pretty glancing, for Lovecraft: we’re clearly meant to be chilled and disgusted by the idea of a man making human sacrifices of literal boatloads of enslaved people (though the idea of actually enslaving people, of course, goes unremarked-upon). The characteristic excess of Lovecraftian prose is minimal here, maybe because it’s the longest thing he ever wrote and he had to pace himself. He even spends enough time on characterisation to be both convincing and funny. The evil Puritan wizard necromancer writes letters in which he plots terrible deeds, sure, but he also gossips about nights at the theatre and someone losing their wig. On a grander thematic level, the tragedy of a person’s compulsive obsession with the past, and their being consumed whole by their heritage, is so rich and so sympathetic; I’m sure someone else has already read it as a metaphor for America itself (see also my review of The House of the Seven Gables, which is a much worse book but has a similar thematic resonance). Oh, and the Things in the cellar under the Pawtuxet Village bungalow! They reminded me of the frozen creatures and the shoggoth in At the Mountains of Madness. Almost despite himself, Lovecraft turns a source of deep revulsion into a source of deep pity. Those poor Things, abandoned and lonely. Sure, they’ll probably eat your face if you let them out, but it’s hard not to feel sad for them. If you’re interested by Lovecraft but put off by his well-documented weaknesses, this would be an ideal place to start. Source: part of the Collected Works of H.P. Lovecraft, bought for 37p on Kindle, which I’m slowly working through
A Night in the Lonesome October, by Roger Zelazny (1993): I actually tried to read this last year while I was traveling to Basel for a work conference, but it didn’t take. This time around it was easier to focus on, and what a fun, funny, surprisingly heartwarming novel it is. Snuff, our protagonist, is a dog—or rather, something in dog form—whose master, Jack, is pretty clearly the Ripper. Jack is “under a curse” and has to “gather ingredients” (a somewhat sinister phrase) for an upcoming ritual, but he’s not alone in his foraging; others are also playing what’s known as The Game, ranging from a local witch named Jill to characters who are obviously versions of Dracula, Victor Frankenstein, and the Wolf Man. Sherlock Holmes also appears, though referred to only as the Great Detective. A huge pleasure of this novel is in how Zelazny manages the dripfeed of information; you’re thrown into the middle of things, but by the end—and without ever resorting to info-dumping—you know exactly what’s going on, what the nature of Jack’s responsibility is, and the stakes of the ritual, which can only occur three or four times in a century, when the full moon falls on Hallowe’en. I also enjoyed the relationship between Snuff and Jill’s cat familiar, Graymalk. Neither knows which side the other is on for a long time, because it’s considered bad form to share or inquire about such things, but their growing alliance-cum-friendship (and maybe something more?) is a real highlight, and the possibility that they’ll lose each other is a real source of tension. A totally unique book, with scenes that are macabre and hilarious by turns: the mass grave-robbing scene is something Douglas Adams could have been proud of. Source: 99p Kindle deal
Have you found any spooky, creepy or scary reads for the autumn?
Elle Thinks 