Category: English

Tramp Press: Seven Steeples by Sara Baume

2nd May 2022 / / 0 Comments

Sara Baume’s third novel begins with a disconcerting description of a mountain in south-west Ireland. First, Baume emphasises that this apparently passive landscape is full of the eyes of animals:

And each eye was focused solely on its surrounding patch of ground or gorse or rock or air. Each perceived the pattern, shade and proportion of its patch differently. Each shifted and assimilated at the pace of one patch at a time.

Then, the mountain itself becomes an eye:

It’s kept watch on the sky, sea and land, and every ornament and obstruction – the moon and clouds; the trawlers, yachts and gannetries; the rooftops, roads and chimney pots; the turbines, telegraph poles and steeples.

The image of an eye recurs throughout Seven Steeples, along with the sense of the landscape as an antagonistic (or at least indifferent) presence. 

Into this landscape come Bell and Sigh, a couple who believe that “the only appropriate trajectory for a life was to leave as little trace as possible and incrementally disappear.” They have moved here determined to cut all ties with their old lives (for reasons which are at most only hinted at). They resolve to climb that mountain, but for the seven years of this book, it remains unclimbed. 

Seven Steeples is one of those novels that takes you into the minds of its protagonists through the way it’s written. This is not a novel concerned with ‘what happens’ so much as with the ebb and flow of the life Bell and Sigh want to lead. The rhythms of Baume’s prose reflect that the couple want to live as part of the landscape, and it’s absorbing to read. 

Published by Tramp Press.

Click here to read my other reviews of the 2022 Goldsmiths Prize shortlist.

New Island Books: Lenny by Laura McVeigh

19th April 2022 / / 0 Comments

Today’s book is from the small Irish publisher New Island Books (the last title of theirs I read was Sue Rainsford’s excellent Follow Me to Ground). It’s the second novel by Laura Mcveigh, who grew up in Northern Ireland and now lives in London and Mallorca.

In 2011, a boy named Izil watches a pilot fall from the sky to Libya’s Ubari Sand Sea. The man has lost his memory, but takes the name Goose and is reliant on Izil’s people to help him survive.

In 2012, we meet ten-year-old Lenny, who lives in Louisiana. His mother has left and his father is scarred from PTSD. He spends much of his time with old Miss Julie, who longs for her husband to return from the war in Korea; and Lucy, the town librarian. The town itself has suffered deprivation and is also threatened by a sinkhole. Lenny searches for something he can do to help.

It gradually becomes clear how these two timeframes are connected. What unfolds is then a poignant tale of loss, family and belonging. McVeigh creates a distinctive atmosphere in her novel, one where time itself might potentially be held back or twisted. I enjoyed spending time with Lenny – both the book and the characterisation.

Henningham Family Press: Pupa by J.O. Morgan

7th April 2022 / / 0 Comments

Another handsome volume from Henningham Family Press (not that there’s any other kind), this time the first novel by Scottish poet J.O. Morgan. I don’t know Morgan’s poetry, but after reading Pupa I am certainly intrigued. 

In the world of this novel, people hatch from eggs and may choose to spend their entire lives as a larval (apparently of insectoid appearance), or go through a pupal stage and become an adult (who seem to bear a closer resemblance to humans as we know them). We meet Sal and Megan, two young larvals in low-level admin jobs. The question of whether to pupate is on their minds, and Sal for one is sceptical. As he says to Megan:

“And when you end up looking so different, how can you be sure it’s really you? You can’t know if you’ll like how you’ll turn out. And you can’t switch back again. That’s it forever. You’re stuck. At least this way you already know. You can be content. Just as you are.”

Megan is more inclined to keep her thoughts to herself, and Sal eventually discovers why: she has chosen to pupate. The two then find themselves in different social worlds, and having to reconfigure their friendship as a result. 

There’s potentially a whole history behind the world of Pupa, but by focusing in on these two characters, Morgan highlights the metaphor. The larval/adult divide could stand for age, class – any social division where you could move from one side to the other. There’s an openness to Pupa which allows the reader to imagine with it in different ways. It’s a sandbox of a novel, and a pleasure to spend time with. 

Composite Creatures by Caroline Hardaker: a Strange Horizons review

16th March 2022 / / 0 Comments

I have a new review up at Strange Horizons. This time I’m looking at Composite Creatures, the debut novel by Caroline Hardaker (published by Angry Robot).

Composite Creatures is set in a future where nature has mostly been replaced by artificial substitutes. Norah and Art are learning to live together with Nut, their “perfect little bundle of fur”, and Norah feels she’s presenting different versions of herself to the world.

I found that reading Composite Creatures felt like peeling back successive layers of the novel, so that’s how I structured my review.

You can read the review in full here.

A bite-sized chat about The Tomb Guardians

4th March 2022 / / 0 Comments

Something a little different today, as I make my debut on YouTube. Shawn the Book Maniac is a Canadian BookTuber based in Tokyo. He has an ongoing series called Bite-sized Book Chats, where he invites different people to talk about a book they’ve enjoyed. Shawn kindly invited me to take part earlier this year, and I chose my favourite book of 2021, Paul Griffiths’ The Tomb Guardians. You can see my chat with Shawn as part of the latest episode below.

And Other Stories: Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs by Gerald Murnane

15th February 2022 / / 2 Comments

My introduction to Gerald Murnane was his debut novel Tamarisk Row, which I loved for the way it depicted childhood imagination and the sense of strangeness hidden within the everyday. Murnane’s 2005 essay collection Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs came as part of my And Other Stories subscription, and it has proven an ideal follow-up to Tamarisk Row. I’ve valued it for the chance to spend time in the author’s world. 

The essays in this collection gave me some insight into how Murnane perceives the world. For example, the young protagonist of Tamarisk Row would imagine whole worlds in the abstract patterns of light through glass. It came as no surprise to discover that, when Murnane played horse-racing games with marbles, he would focus on the patterns created out of each small movement. He also mentions a liking of charts and diagrams: some of his essays feel like diagrams put into words, as they circle back over images and memories. 

Murnane’s writing often seems to return to landscapes, but landscapes of the mind, imagined grasslands or plains. As he puts it in ‘Birds of the Puszta‘:

Plains looked simple but were not so. The grass leaning in the wind was all that could be seen of plains, but under the grass were insects and spiders and frogs and snakes – and ground-dwelling birds. I thought of plains whenever I wanted to think of something unremarkable at first sight but concealing much of meaning. And yet plains deserved, perhaps, not to be inspected closely. A pipit, crouched over its eggs in the shadow of a tussock, was the colour of dull grass. I was a boy who delighted in finding what was meant to remain hidden, but I was also a boy who liked to think of lost kingdoms.

Murnane’s work keeps evoking for me a sense of “lost kingdoms”, imaginative spaces hidden just out of sight. When I finished Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, I had been changed by it: when I looked around at the world, something felt different. 

Daunt Books: Inheritance by Dani Shapiro

8th February 2022 / / 0 Comments

This year Ninja Book Box are offering a subscription of indie-published memoirs. I don’t read that many memoirs, so I thought this would be a good chance to try something different. I didn’t know which books I was going to get, but I very much enjoyed this first one. It’s published by Daunt Books. 

American writer Dani Shapiro was born into a large Orthodox Jewish family, and this culture is in her bones, though people have often commented that she doesn’t look Jewish. Shapiro is in her fifties when her husband Michael suggests she join him in taking a DNA test through a genealogy website. She thinks nothing of it, but the results reveal that she cannot be biologically related to her father. 

Shapiro’s parents are no longer alive, but she recalls an offhand comment from her mother that she, Dani, was “conceived in Philadelphia”. Her mother said she had been travelling there for tests relating to artificial insemination. Further research reveals that, at the time, sperm from the prospective father would be mixed with those from other donors, often medical students. With some investigation, Shapiro is able to identify ‘her’ donor – and decides to make contact. 

Inheritance is then the story of how Shapiro is forced to reconfigure her long-held notions of family and identity. She tries to find out just what her family knew about the circumstances of her conception, and wonders if she can make a connection with her new-found biological relations. 

I appreciate that Shapiro doesn’t try to resolve any of these issues definitively – they’re too complex for that. Rather, this book is account of the author coming to terms with the issues for herself. I found Inheritance compelling as the story unfolded to begin with, and it kept my interest to the very end. 

More reviews from #ReadIndies 2022

Valley Press: Siphonophore by Jaimie Batchan

1st February 2022 / / 4 Comments

This February sees the return of Reading Independent Publishers Month, hosted by Lizzy’s Literary Life and Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings. Independent publishers are a big part of what I read, so I should be able to join in with this fairly easily. We’ll see how it goes, anyway. 

To start, I’m off to Scarborough’s Valley Press, and the first novel by Jaimie Batchan. He’s the co-host of Unsound Methods, a podcast I would recommend as it features many authors whose work is squarely in my area of interest. It came as no surprise to me discover that Siphonophore is in my area of interest, too. 

Our narrator is MacGregor, marooned on the Darién isthmus (now Panama) in the 16th century following a failed attempt to establish a Scottish colony. The novel begins straightforwardly enough, with McGregor explaining how he ended up in his current predicament. He communes with his Creator – who isn’t quite the kind of being one might anticipate:

His procrastinating, for example, is noticeably absent from the scriptures. Once He becomes committed to the work he must undertake, this stalling finds a fresh set of robes in which to creep upon the earth. His time-wasting swiftly dons the attire of legitimate research. So much for omniscience. He diligently bookmarks web pages for future reference, scribbling notes in his spidery handwriting and hiding away in the ailing libraries dotted about the borough.

MacGregor is fully aware that his Creator is a 21st-century novelist. The Creator’s life and speech patterns bleed into McGregor’s narration, which ties the two timeframes together. We discover that the novelist has a rare terminal illness, and is desperate to complete his book. McGregor, in his turn, wants the writer to stay alive long enough to get him home. 

This has the effect of giving a real sense of urgency to an approach that might otherwise seem just a gimmick. MacGregor and his Creator are mutually dependent on each other (like the marine organism after which Batchan’s novel is titled). Siphonophore examines their differing thoughts on living life when time is short. 

Batchan’s novel creates a whirlwind of perspective that only grows more intense as language breaks down and the line between MacGregor and Creator blurs. It’s quite a ride. 

The Fat Lady Sings by Jacqueline Roy

14th January 2022 / / 0 Comments

This is another title from Bernardine Evaristo’s Black Britain: Writing Back series. Jacqueline Roy has written a number of children’s books. The Fat Lady Sings (published in 2000) was her first novel for adults – her second will be published later this month.

The Fat Lady Sings revolves around two Caribbean women living in a psychiatric ward in 1990s London. Gloria is in her fifties, a naturally exuberant presence: her mental health was assessed when her neighbours complained about her singing. It’s as though life has conspired to prevent Gloria from living it on her own terms. She has been ostracised by the family of her partner, Josie. When talking to police at the scene of the train crash that killed Josie, Gloria only felt able to describe herself as Josie’s friend. It’s a similar story on the ward: Gloria is told to keep her voice down, and the food is bland English fare.

Gloria has been in the unit for some months. Roy’s other protagonist is a new arrival: twentysomething Merle, who’s quiet and afraid of the voices in her head. Where Gloria’s narrative viewpoint is continuous, Merle’s is fragmented and subject to interruptions. But over the course of the novel, we see both women’s pasts, and they try to find a future for themselves.

The Fat Lady Sings is written in a way that brings the reader close to both its protagonists. We have to piece together their lives, just as they are doing. But there are moments of humour and light along the way – ultimately this is a tale of survival.

Published by Penguin.

My favourite books read in 2021

29th December 2021 / / 8 Comments

Here we are again, approaching the end of another year. As usual, I’ve picked out my twelve favourite books that I read in 2021, regardless of when they were first published. I always find that doing this provides me with an interesting snapshot of my reading year as a whole. This year’s snapshot has given me cause to reflect – but more on that in another post. For now, here are my reading highlights of 2021:

12. Angélique Villeneuve, Winter Flowers (2014)
Translated from French by Adriana Hunter (2021)

A novel set in the aftermath of World War One, in which a woman tries to rebuild her relationship with her disfigured husband, while the community around comes to terms with its own traumas. Winter Flowers is one of those books that cuts through preconceived notions about its subject matter to capture raw feeling. 

11. Judith Bryan, Bernard and the Cloth Monkey (1998)

If it hadn’t been for the ‘Black Britain: Writing Back‘ series curated by Bernardine Evaristo, I might never have come across Bernard and the Cloth Monkey. I’m so glad I did. This tale of a young woman returning to her family home constantly shifts in register, creating a kaleidoscope of emotion in a seemingly ordinary setting. 

10. Adam Mars-Jones, Batlava Lake (2021)

I like stories that are shaped by a strong narrative voice, and that’s very much the case with Batlava Lake. Mars-Jones introduces us to Barry, a matey, chatty engineer who’s really not equipped to convey the brutality of war in Kosovo. But that very inadequacy is what makes the book work so well. 

9. Andrew Komarnyckyj, Ezra Slef, the Next Nobel Laureate in Literature (2021)

Of all the books I read in 2021, I think this was probably the most fun. It’s a spoof literary biography whose purported author talks more about himself than his subject, and deals with a Twitter troll by (inadvertently) making a deal with the Devil. Just thinking back to reading Ezra Slef makes me smile. 

8. Rebecca Watson, little scratch (2021)

little scratch was the least conventionally written novel that I read all year, with its words scattered in different patterns across the page. Those words are the thoughts of a young woman going about her day while something plays on her mind. It’s a technique that really brought me close to the narrator and the tension that grows throughout the book. 

7. Ivana Dobrakovová, Bellevue (2009)
Translated from Slovak by Julia and Peter Sherwood (2019)

This book was probably my biggest surprise of the reading year, in that I wasn’t prepared for the way it turns, so subtly and effectively. Its protagonist takes a summer job working with disabled people, but struggles to cope. Her mental health is affected, which we see entirely through changes in the shape of her narration – which is what makes the effect so powerful. 

6. Natasha Brown, Assembly (2021)

More shapeshifting prose here, but in this case the protagonist is finding her voice. A Black British woman working in the banking industry reflects on her situation, and asks herself how she really wants to be. The prose is constantly changing to match her thoughts as she assembles the pieces of her life, building to a crescendo for narrator and reader alike. 

5. Isabel Waidner, Sterling Karat Gold (2021)

A worthy winner of the Goldsmiths Prize, this novel strikes me as a carnival – in the sense of both an entertainment and a festival challenging social structures. Sterling and their friends face a nightmarish authoritarian world that works against them in ways they don’t understand. There are matadors, showtrials, time-travelling spaceships – and hope to be found in pushing back. 

4. Federico Falco, A Perfect Cemetery (2016)
Translated from Spanish by Jennifer Croft (2021)

I love story collections that work as a whole, and this one certainly does. Falco’s protagonists are all facing pivotal moments of change in their lives, and his stories are suitably dynamic. There’s a great sense of place and character about these tales, and each one opens out memorably as it ends.

3. Claudia Piñeiro, Elena Knows (2007)
Translated from Spanish by Frances Riddle (2021)

Elena has Parkinsons, and this novel is structured around the ebb and flow of her energy levels. She’s forced to confront the limits of her knowledge about her daughter, which reflects the limits of what she can do during the day. With so many of the books on my list, the language brought me right into the protagonist’s world – perhaps none more so than Elena Knows.

2. Jon McGregor, Lean Fall Stand (2021)

I was intrigued at the prospect of a Jon McGregor novel set partly in the Antarctic. In the end, I experienced Lean Fall Stand as viscerally as any of his others. A polar guide tries to rebuild his life and self after a stroke. McGregor explores how language breaks down and re-forms around this event, in a dizzying rush of a novel. 

1. Paul Griffiths, The Tomb Guardians (2021)

The single most powerful reading experience I had in 2021 was this slim novel interweaving conversations between the guardians of Christ’s tomb and a present-day lecturer examining 16th-century depictions of them. The book hovers on the knife-edge of uncertainty, and rivals Convenience Store Woman for the sudden power of its ending. This is why I’m reading fiction in the first place.

***

There we go. I hope you’ve found some books in 2021 that you enjoyed as much as I did these. If you’d like to see my selections from previous years, you can find them here: 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, and 2009. As ever, thank you for reading, and I’ll see you next year – you can also catch me on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

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