Category: English

#1961Club: The Ha-Ha by Jennifer Dawson

16th April 2026 / / 1 Comment

This week is a new ‘club’ week hosted by Simon and Kaggsy, with a focus on books published in 1961. I’ve picked out this novel, which was reissued last year in Faber Editions.

British author Jennifer Dawson (1929-2000) draws on her experiences as both a patient and a social worker in a psychiatric hospital. The Ha-Ha was written shortly after the Mental Health Act 1959, which I understand was intended partly to move mental health treatment from institutional settings into the community. Dawson’s protagonist, Josephine, is on the edge of this change: she’s a patient at an institution who is allowed out to work, and waits to be “regraded” (and, one assumes, released) by the committee.

Josephine has had a breakdown while at university in Oxford. The particular incident that led to her being committed was when she laughed uncontrollably at a tea party, where she had visions of the other people as animals. The outside world now seems a long way away, even though she can come and go to an extent. Just in front of the institution’s outer wall is a ha-ha (a sloping hidden ditch), which represents the gap between here and there for Josephine. She meets Alasdair, one of the male patients, at the bottom of the ha-ha one day, and he proves to be the only person she can really talk to comfortably.

I don’t know much about the history of conceptions of mental health, but Dawson’s novel struck me as quite contemporary in the way it depicts Josephine as having her own way of looking at the world, and wondering why she’s puzzled when most other people seem to just ‘get it’. She says:

I used to take in with amazement this poised, confident world of men and women who never seemed to have any doubts about existence.

Or take this, one of the lines I found sharpest in the book:

I wanted the knack of existing. I did not know the rules.

One of the scenes that most sticks in my memory comes when Josephine is invited to a party, and finds the conversation sliding around her, and is unable to grab on to it:

Each time my turn came to lay a contribution I found myself catapulted into this empty space in the middle of nothing, discussing with no one but myself the longevity of badgers or Myra’s thorny spider.

The layering of conversational, mental and physical space on top of each other is striking. For Josephine, leaving the institution would not just open up the world. It would be the chance to make her own meaning, to think and feel in the way that’s right for her. That is why so much is as stake in The Ha-Ha.

A Granite Silence by Nina Allan: reviewed for Strange Horizons

28th December 2025 / / 0 Comments

I’m back at Strange Horizons with a review of Nina Allan’s latest novel, A Granite Silence. It’s an exploration of a historical murder case, which on the face of it might seem a sharp turn away from the fantastical work Allan is largely known for. But she approaches the case as a network of jostling and intersecting stories, and the resulting book is distinctively hers, and fascinating to read.

Read my review of A Granite Silence in full.

The Bridge Between Worlds: A Brief History of Connection by Gavin Francis

30th January 2025 / / 0 Comments

In his preface to this book, Gavin Francis writes that his interest in bridges began in childhood, from the Forth Rail Bridge just a few miles from his house, to a Ladybird book about bridges (which I’m pretty sure I must have read as a child too), to the tale of the Billy Goats Gruff. That is to say, it’s not just the spectacle or the technical aspects of bridges which captured Francis’ interest, but also how bridges can be used imaginatively – what they may represent. 

All these aspects come together in The Bridge Between Worlds, which is not a history of bridges as such, but a tour of bridges that Francis has visited or lived near, bringing in elements of memoir, history, geography, technology, culture and metaphor. The way I phrase that, it sounds a lot, and I honestly wasn’t sure at first whether it would all fit together – but it does. 

The first chapter, about the Union Chain Bridge across the River Tweed at the Scotland-England border, is typical of Francis’ approach. He sets the scene with a link to his own life (in this case, crossing the bridge on childhood holidays), then goes into the history of the bridge and its construction, a wider look at the border and the changing position (so to speak) of Berwick, and a mention of bridges as a metaphor in Paradise Lost, before touching on the politics of that point in his life (shortly before he was born in 1975, Britain had voted to stay in the European Community).

Francis ends the chapter reflecting that the announcement of a new bridge may bring hope:

Perhaps during periods of retrenchment behind borders, when literal and metaphorical drawbridges are everywhere being pulled up, people are comforted to think that the closure of bridges won’t prove permanent. We want to hear that new connections will one day be laid across the boundaries we draw around ourselves.

In mixing the different topics together as he does, Francis makes his book feel both wide-ranging and intensely personal, which is fascinating to read. Francis’ other destinations in the book include London as a 17-year-old, where he has a sense of life’s possibilities opening up at a student science forum; Türkiye, and the world’s oldest bridge still in use; and Scandinavia, whose bridges suggest to him a picture of international cooperation, post-Brexit. It’s a world tour of bridges, their roles and meanings – one that I found rewarding. 

The Bridge Between Worlds is published by Canongate.

A selection of 2024 favourites

30th December 2024 / / 0 Comments

2024 was another year when, for whatever reason, I just didn’t click with reading in general as much as I would have liked. There’s no point dwelling on it, I just hope this will turn around next year. In the meantime, I have picked out the following four highlights from the reading year:

Leonard Cohen: a Novel (2024), by Jeffrey Lewis

An aspiring songwriter named Leonard Cohen writes to his more famous namesake, and we learn of an intense relationship that ended in ambiguous circumstances. This is a novel of a life haunted by possibility: what if Leonard could step out of the celebrity’s shadow? What else could have happened in that relationship? Other realities, just out of reach. 

Weasels in the Attic (2012-4) by Hiroko Oyamada
Translated from Japanese by David Boyd (2022)

This is the shortest book I read in 2024 – a collection of three stories – but it certainly carried its weight. Each story centres on a meal which acts as the focus for broader currents at play. For example, a tale told over dinner about weasels in the house points to deeper problems in a couple’s relationship. I found these stories to open out more the further I went in. 

84, Charing Cross Road (1970) by Helene Hanff

Collected correspondence between American writer Hanff and the staff of a London bookshop. It suggests that Hanff could be spiky but also generous, and there’s an obvious warmth in her relationship with the shop. This book felt like a fascinating glimpse into an older world, with an unexpected echo of the future in a comment about buying books without leaving the typewriter. 

Mary and the Rabbit Dream (2024) by Noémi Kiss-Deáki

If I were to choose a favourite book of 2024, I think this would be it. Mary Toft was a real-life 18th century figure who (for a time) was believed to have given birth to rabbits. In the novel, this is a scheme devised by Mary’s mother-in-law that gets beyond her control. What I like most is how the prose itself embodies the forces holding the characters in place, and enables Mary eventually to find a voice. 

***

So, there was 2024. You can find my highlights of previous years here:

2023, 2022. 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, and 2009.

You can also find me on social media at Instagram, Facebook, Bluesky, and X/Twitter. I wish you well for 2025!

Gliff by Ali Smith: Strange Horizons review

20th December 2024 / / 0 Comments

Over at Strange Horizons, I’ve reviewed the latest novel by Ali Smith. Gliff is the tale of two young siblings living in a future of banal oppression, and the ways they find to resist. I found its abstract dimensions strongest, the way it articulates that resistance must take place partly at a conceptual level. But the concrete aspects of its future are a bit too sketchy to have real heft. There will be a companion novel, Glyph, next year, which will apparently tell a story hidden in the first volume. I will be curious to see how that turns out.

Read my review of Gliff in full here. The book is published by Hamish Hamilton.

#1970Club: 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff

17th October 2024 / / 10 Comments

Twice a year, Kaggsy and Simon host themed ‘club’ weeks dedicated to books from a particular year. Joining in has long been on my to-do list, and this week finally I’ve managed it, with the 1970 Club. 

84, Charing Cross Road was the address of a London second-hand bookshop, Marks and Company. The book of the same name is a collection of correspondence between the shop and Helene Hanff, a writer who lived in New York. The letters begin prosaically enough in 1949, with a note from Hanff accompanying an order, and a formal reply from the manager, Frank Doel. But, over the years, this blossoms into far more. 

Hanff’s voice in her letters is often spiky and forthright, and I can imagine the British bookshop staff finding it disconcerting. For example, here Hanff writes in 1950, wondering where her books are:

you leave me sitting here writing long margin notes in library books that don’t belong to me, some day they’ll find out i did it and take my library card away. 

I have made arrangements with the Easter bunny to bring you an Egg, he will get over there and find you have died of Inertia. 

As that second sentence suggests, though, Hanff was also often generous, sending the shop parcels of food and other supplies at a time when rationing was still on in Britain. Hanff’s evident warmth gains a response in kind: Frank’s letters become less formal, and Helene also hears from other shop staff, and even Frank’s family. 

Hanff’s correspondence with Marks and Co. lasts for twenty years, until Frank Doel’s sudden death. Reading the book now feels to me like a glimpse into an older way of selling and relating to books that, for better or worse, has now gone. There was one line of Hanff’s from 1950, though, which struck me as an unexpected echo of the future:

Why should I run all the way down to 17th St. to buy dirty, badly made books when I can buy clean, beautiful ones from you without leaving the typewriter?

I don’t know if Helene Hanff could have imagined how we’d be buying books fifty or more years in the future, but there’s a familiar impulse behind that comment all the same.

Scratch Books: The Unreliable Nature Writer by Claire Carroll

29th July 2024 / / 0 Comments

The protagonist of Claire Carroll’s story ‘Paddling Pool’ doesn’t really need to buy a paddling pool. But there’s nothing stopping that person from doing so – besides, it’s hot, and there’s the gentle voice of the narrator reassuring the protagonist that their choices are fine in the moment, even if the long-term consequences might be severe:

You might, years later, starving, dragging yourself along the beach in the unbearable heat, you might discover a fish, partially dried out on the orange sand. Peeling away at its skin, you might find microscopic parts of your paddling pool inside. But there’s no way you’ll ever be able to tell if it’s the same one, so don’t worry about that now.

That quotation was a powerful moment for me among a set of striking tales in The Unreliable Nature Writer (which is the first single-author collection from Scratch Books). Broadly, Carroll’s main theme is the relationship between humanity and nature, examined from a variety of angles. 

Some of the stories give form to a (perceived) distance between the human world and the natural, and look at what may fill the gap. For example, the narrator of ‘There Or Not There’ works on an advertising installation that places indoor objects among a patch of real woodland. Their work is supposed to be environmentally friendly, but it might have killed some nesting birds. The narrator’s doubts and self-reassurances give this piece its sharp edge. 

‘Re: Wreck Event’ creates uncertainty by giving two different versions of what happened on the day a couple split up. One partner writes an account which the other one annotates with footnotes, undermining most of the key details. The dead and dying birds on the ground that day become just another piece of this contested reality.

Carroll also ventures into the future (or sideways in reality) in some of her stories. ‘Dream Reading: On Higher Ground’ depicts extreme bureaucracy as housing applicants are chosen according to how well they describe their dreams – but also a raw euphoria at being in touch with nature. ‘The Sheer Delight of What You May Become’ juxtaposes a formal process for land to be acquired and returned to nature with the reality of what happens to the people displaced from that land. The interests of humans and nature are held in tension – which is what so often animates Carroll’s stories. 

Galley Beggar Press: Mary and the Rabbit Dream by Noémi Kiss-Deáki

25th July 2024 / / 0 Comments

Noémi Kiss-Deáki is a writer from Åland who writes fiction in English. Galley Beggar Press have recently published her debut novel, which is inspired by the story of Mary Toft, a poor eighteenth-century Englishwoman who (for a time) was believed to have given birth to rabbits. It’s a gem of a book.

Godalming, 1726: the cloth trade is in decline as more and more pasture land is given over to rabbit farming, benefiting the rich (who can afford to eat rabbit) over poor people who rely on the sale of cloth. In the midst of this, one Ann Toft devises a plan: using the parts of a dead rabbit, she will create the charade that her daughter-in-law Mary can give birth to the animals. Ann’s thinking is that this will be a new source of power – if a poor person has such access to a commodity so valued by the rich, then the rich will have to take notice.

Mary herself doesn’t have much say in the matter, being so far down the ladder even in her community of women:

One might imagine that such a community of women, where one is never alone, where one shares in all the work and always can rely on an extra pair of hands, could perhaps be cosy and intimate.

It is not cosy and intimate.

Instead, the community of women is fraught and permeated with tensions and hierarchies and privileges, tightly guarded.

Mary Toft has no privileges.

Ann Toft has all the privileges, even in such a household, a household in the town quarters inhabited by the poorest of the poorest.

Kiss-Deáki’s prose is full of rhythm and repetition like this, which has the effect of foregrounding the narrative frame that holds her characters. This reflects the way they’re held in position by society: Mary, for example, is caught in the ebb and flow of Ann and the other women around her. The same is true for others, because there’s always someone else further up the social hierarchy. Ann persuades local doctor John Howard to visit, in order to add credence to her claims for Mary. But he soon takes charge of matters to pursue his own agenda – and loses control in turn when three London medical men get involved. Even they don’t have ultimate authority, though, as Kiss-Deáki’s narrator comments on how much the characters don’t yet know.

Still, it all comes back to Mary Toft, who is the centre of the novel even as she’s at the bottom of its society. Things happen to her for most of the book, but Kiss-Deáki shows how Mary eventually gains her voice – in a way that shakes the story to the ground, while at the same time leaving the broader structures undisturbed.

Leonard Cohen, a Novel by Jeffrey Lewis: haunted by possibility

30th May 2024 / / 0 Comments

No, it’s not that Leonard Cohen. This Leonard Cohen is an aspiring songwriter in the 1960s, or maybe he’s the butt of a joke before he has even drawn breath. His ambition is to write a song as good as one by his namesake – or maybe just to step out of the shadow of the ‘other’ Leonard Cohen.

Leonard’s story unfolds in third-person chapters and first-person letters written directly to the more famous Cohen. In 1968, Leonard travels with a group of friends to an anonymous Greek island, where he falls in love with a local girl named Daphne. This is depicted as sudden, mysterious, and all-consuming:

Then some part of him touched some part of her, his hip or hers, his hand, her shoulder, so that he could feel the restless warmth that in the morning had sweated through her clothes. Neither of them could have said who turned first. They kissed because they were there or for a hundred other reasons. You can always come up with reasons, he thought, or she thought. 

Leonard’s relationship with Daphne comes to define his life, but so does the uncertainty running through that quotation. His friends are keen to leave the island, but Daphne wants him to stay. Leonard leaves for a time, and when he returns, he finds that Daphne has apparently died, with a laurel tree (as in the myth of Apollo and Daphne) now growing on ‘their’ cliff. Leonard imagines that he hears Daphne’s voice coming from the tree, but who is to say that it’s not just the breeze?

Time moves on, with Leonard returning to the US, becoming a lawyer, marrying, bringing up two children, and growing old… He lives an entire life, but still ultimately finds himself drawn back to that island, and the laurel tree.

What really animates Jeffrey Lewis’s novel for me is the constant sense of some other version of life being just over there, beyond reach. There’s the knowledge that the ‘other’ Leonard Cohen is out there living his own life, unaware of ‘our’ Leonard. What might it be like to live without other people having a famous reference point as soon as you give your name? What if Daphne had lived, what if she still lives, what if she became that tree? What if it all happened to her instead of Leonard? 

This novel is not a kaleidoscope of possible worlds. In the end, as in life, there is just the one world, for better or worse. But it is a novel – a life, a reading – haunted by possibility. “After Daphne,” Leonard writes to Cohen, “the only stories I came to believe were the ones that could go one way or the other.”

Leonard Cohen is published by Haus Publishing.

Les Fugitives: After Nora by Penelope Curtis

26th April 2024 / / 0 Comments

In her first novel, art historian Penelope Curtis imagines two episodes from her family’s history. The first part concerns Nora (Penelope’s grandmother, whom she never knew), a painter who tries to articulate what her art is ‘about’. Nora comes to feel that landscape is key:

Landscape had, without her quite realizing, become something essential…This had nothing to do with topography, but everything to do with understanding how we manage and what helps. And then she saw that landscape did a good job of disguising itself, wrapping something essential in so many trees. It re-attached litself to us when it was well painted. Then we remembered the painting, more than nature, but we found the painting again once we were back in nature.

In the 1920s, Nora divorces her first husband and marries Lewis, an architect. She is clearly attracted to him, but the exact source of that attraction is mysterious – there’s a certain feeling of distance to Curtis’s writing in this part. It’s not until Nora reads through a packet of Lewis’s letters from the Great War that she has a revelation: the letters’ repetitive nature evokes a way of seeing and feeling landscape that mirrors what Nora saw and felt in her own paintings.

The novel’s second part revolves around the relationship between Nora’s son (Penelope’s father) Adam and Maria de Sousa, both scientists in Glasgow in the 1960s. Scenes alternate between then and the present, after Adam has died, when the author-narrator is in Portugal and tracks down Maria, hoping to gain more understanding of her father’s life at that time.

Both parts then involve a character seeking understanding through art: Nora looking for a deeper understanding of herself through her painting, and the narrator seeking to understand her father better through imaginative writing. But Nora’s story here is itself an act of imagination, which perhaps underlines that there’s a limit to understanding, after all.

Published by Les Fugitives.

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