Review: Starve Acre by Andrew Michael Hurley

Hold the front page. I actually finished this one in under 24 hours! And given the fact that I’m a tortoise when it reading, that says something about Andrew Michael Hurley’s ability to captivate a reader.

Starve Acre combines some of the best elements of Hurley’s other books The Loney https://katecudahy.wordpress.com/2016/08/10/review-the-loney-andrew-michael-hurley/ and Devil’s Day https://katecudahy.wordpress.com/category/devils-day/, although I’d have to say that nothing ever really comes close to the drip feed of terror that infuses The Loney. It’s probably the best horror I’ve ever read.

However, what features in  Hurley’s writing at all times is the way landscape operates as another character in the book: often evil, certainly unwelcoming. Another character that mocks all human attempts to inhabit it and call it home. Whether it’s the bleak Lancastrian coastline in The Loney, the hillsides of the North West in Devil’s Day or the Yorkshire Dales in the case of Starve Acre, Hurley is intent on impressing how cruel, unknowable and dangerous nature is. And how it’s best left well alone.

Starve Acre incorporates all the staple ingredients of classic gothic. An old, ruined house; Folk tales of evil spirits; a dead child. And as Hurley racks up the pressure, you just know things are not going to end well. It’s true that, as Guardian reviewer Nina Allen observes, Hurley’s female characters could do with being a bit more nuanced: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/nov/23/starve-acre-andrew-michael-hurley-review. And I frequently found myself screaming at Richard, the main character ‘to just get out of there, you idiot!’ but I still reckon that there are very few writers around now capable of creating the same chilling sense of sinister atmosphere; of incipient evil as Andrew Michael Hurley.

Review: Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo

Review – Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo

The one thing I kept asking myself while reading this book was, ‘how did I miss this?’ And ‘why haven’t I read anything by Bernardine Evaristo before’? I mean Girl, Woman, Other won the Booker in 2019 for God’s sake. But it probably says everything that Evaristo was then forced to share the prize – a rule-breaking decision on the part of the judges – with Margaret Atwood. And that she was later referred to by Shaun Ley of the BBC, reporting on the award, as just ‘another author’:

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-50658750 .

Another author who just happened to have won the most prestigious literary prize the UK has to offer. No disrespect to Atwood – I love her work and I have yet to read The Testaments. But if this shameful incident proves anything, it’s that we need more books like Girl, Woman, Other. Because it’s a novel which brings to the fore the stories – and in some cases the hidden histories – of women of colour. It forces the reader to rethink over a century of British history; it challenges the very notion that there was no space for black women in post-war England, or that their stories are in some way not valid or of interest.

There’s no obvious underlying plot to Girl, Woman, Other. Instead, we encounter a chorus of voices; it’s fundamentally more polyphony than melody. But what rises out of that complex web of harmonies is a refusal to be silenced. A refusal to accept the kind of cultural erasure which has seen British history white-washed for so long. There are, for example, the lesbian political activists Amma and Dominique – their fight against establishment England ironically ending up in Amma’s  dramatic production for the National Theatre. There is trans activist Morgan, discovering their identity in their lack of  gender, and Hattie – Morgan’s great grandmother – Yorkshire farmer and proud of her mixed race identity. It is a glorious revelling in the lives of people who never get their stories told, and Evaristo has the ability to get so deep inside each of her character’s conscious that you almost feel as if you were journeying with them. Ultimately, it’s a book which demands a new way of looking at the world; of acknowledging the people around us, about thinking of them in a new way. It’s probably one of the most important novels ever to have won the Booker.

So, yeah, BBC. Well done.

Review: Middle England by Jonathan Coe

This is the first novel that I’ve read by Jonathan Coe. He’s frequently mentioned on The Guardian Books podcast as the kind of writer who always seems to just miss out on winning the top literary prizes – and indeed, Middle England was nominated for the 2019 Costa prize. I thought, therefore, that it was high time I gave his work a go.

Middle England picks up on the lives of characters from some of Coe’s earlier works, but it’s not necessary to have read these – as I discovered. In fact, they inhabit a world which is all too familiar, since Coe’s novel spans the years between 2011 and 2018 when what we thought we knew about Britain and the British all started to unravel. Middle England revisits events such as the riots of  2011, the build up to the 2016 referendum and the divisive fallout from Brexit. It’s a brave subject given the complexity of issues that feed into it, and Coe has (perhaps inevitably) had to opt for a broad canvas on which to set his narrative.  Ranging geographically from London to the Midlands and occasionally beyond, the narrative portrays a cross-section of English society and the issues which both divide and unite it. The main characters are Sophie – an academic specialising in fine art who finds herself at the sharp end of woke call-out culture – and her uncle Benjamin who is struggling to put a novel together.  Accompanying them as they try to navigate their way through a Britain so ill at ease with itself that members of parliament are attacked and killed in the street, are friends, enemies and family members representing all ends of the political spectrum – from Helena (Sophie’s bigoted mother-in-law) to the scowling Corbynista, Corrie.

I have this feeling that we Brits are at our best when we’re laughing at ourselves, and perhaps that’s one of the many things Brexit has stolen from us. It’s certainly one of the points I feel that Coe makes very well in this book: that what we once took for granted  as British values – tolerance, fair play, the capacity for inclusive dialogue, the ability to take everything with a substantial pinch of salt – have all been called into question or even trampled on by a constant toxic stream of abuse and mud-flinging both in the press and social media. If anything characterises the Brexit ‘debate’ it is, in my opinion, a failure to truly engage with or understand other’s fears or arguments.

I felt there were a couple of places where Coe’s characters became a bit too caricature, or where the analysis felt a bit flat (I happen to believe, for example, that the 2011 riots were about more than the issue of race relations)* But I applaud any attempt to take a measured look at what has become one of the most complex and divisive issues of our time. Coe dives deep into the sense of deep-seated frustration and anger which channelled the leave vote, while his novel is equally sympathetic to those who felt loss and anxiety over the country’s decision to leave the EU. And to be honest, at a time when the country seems to have become so polarised that one wonders if it will ever be possible to unite it, Coe’s approach is exactly what is needed.

 

*In ‘“Shoplifters of the World Unite” – Slavoj Žižek on the Meaning of the Riots’ London Review of Books 19^th August 2011,  Žižek points to the fact that the rioters might be best described as ‘disaffected consumers’. Fed with images of luxury and wealth which they were unable to obtain, he argues that the riots were fuelled by decades of pent-up frustration. And how else to explain one young rioter’s claim: “Having the nicest clothes … the updated things, the big tellies, the fancy phones … People with the Ralph, the Gucci, the Nike, the trainers, the Air Forces … it’s all the style, just everyone wants it. If you don’t have it you’re just going to look like an idiot. Like, that’s how we see it, you just look like an idiot. It’s a fashion thing.” http://www.guardian.co.uk./uk/2011/dec/05/summer-riots-consumerist-feasts-looters

 

 

Review: Spring by Ali Smith

I’m tempted to think of the third instalment of Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet as a literary sucker punch. But that does the book a disservice, as it’s so much more than a simple wake up call to the damage and division caused by hate speech and our failure to genuinely connect in the age of social media.

Surely, however, this is the angriest and most bitter of Smith’s works to date, with its attack on the dehumanising apparatus of Britain’s immigration service: the UK Immigration Removal Centres, in which detainees are reduced to ‘deets’ – stripped of all rights and dignity. And, importantly, Spring is also an exercise in how that process  transforms the people who work in such places into machines. And how, in fact, we are all in some way contaminated by that system; by the fact that we live in a society which allows it to happen and engage with media that condone it.

Spring is littered with sections in which the author hurls that sense of social atrophy in our faces: condensing, for example, the hate speech of trolls (together with punctuation issues and typos) to frightening effect:

SHUT UP just shut the fUck Up can someone tape her mouth shut she deserve to be relentlesly abused what a Cunt go and die hang yourself you ugly Cunt we are all having a laugh at you You are a shit show nobody couldn’t play fuck marry kill with you its just Kill you are a Tampon you are odios you deseve to be raped left for dead your Daughter deserves to be raped and stabed to death with a Kitchen KNnife your like a broken record bleeding heart liberal fuck WE know where you Live

Smith, Ali. Spring (Seasonal Quartet) (p. 223). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

Painful to  read, these are moments which prove just how normalised such discourse has become. Smith picks apart facile claims to freedom of speech. Language is no longer a system of communication, but a signifier of difference. And while the language of division comes cheaply, our failure to engage in genuine dialogue costs us dearly.

Language, then, is both barrier and bridge, depending on where you stand, as IRC officer Britt discovers, on hearing her fellow worker speak in Gaelic:

For some reason just hearing it made her angry. It made her near tears. It felt like being bullied did, back when she was at school and had to pretend she wasn’t clever. Then Torq made it worse by smiling at her like he really liked her while he made the impossible sounding sounds. Her throat started to hurt like it does when you try to stop yourself crying. It was the language that was making it hurt.

Smith, Ali. Spring (Seasonal Quartet) (p. 326). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

Spring also picks up on Smith’s preoccupation with the act of storytelling. “All my work is about books,” she tells Christina Patterson in an interview for The Independent. “It’s all circular and it all comes back to books and what they do.” www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/ali-smith-the-power-and-the-story-226080.   Thus Spring zings along with the intertextual mastery so characteristic of her other work, intertwining its own stories with those of other narratives – such as the (almost) encounter between Katherine Mansfield and Rainer Maria Rilke in 1921, or tales of Scottish history. All of this reinforces the sense that it is narratives which make and break us. But that stories also feed in and off each other – and that in this respect, it is impossible to ever truly end a story. Continually surpassing their boundaries, stories spill into our lives and offer points of resistance and change. And that, at the end of the book, is what perhaps  Spring offers by way of hope.

While Spring can be read by itself, I would recommend reading it alongside Autumn https://wordpress.com/post/katecudahy.wordpress.com/1358 and Winter https://wordpress.com/post/katecudahy.wordpress.com/1292 as this reveals the way in which Smith is pulling a yet larger narrative together in startling and beautiful ways as she works through the seasons. It is also a novel which requires a second reading in order to allow all the hidden quirks and twists to fall into place.

Yet another masterpiece which reinforces Ali Smith’s status as perhaps the greatest writer of her generation.

 

 

Thoughts on Pride and Prejudice

Thoughts on Pride and Prejudice

So here’s confession of the day – I had never read Pride and Prejudice until about a month ago. I think I picked it up at the age of ten, decided it was probably beyond me and never returned to it.

As I got older, I also harboured the sense that Austen just wasn’t for me, with her formalities and her social hierarchies and her neat, well-maintained romantic arrangements. I’ve always been more into the freak show masochism of Wuthering Heights, or the quiet probing of inequalities that is Middlemarch. And even though it’s really not possible to fault Pride and Prejudice for its well-tempered romanticism, there’s something that irks about Austen’s refusal to question or interrogate her subject matter. Why, I want to ask her, is Lydia so incapable of self-restraint? Doesn’t Lizzy’s marriage to Darcy reinforce rather than critique the prevailing materialism of the time? And it’s no use telling me that she was just reflecting the attitudes of her age. Clearly, she was astute enough to recognise the infantile behaviour of some women; to hold Lizzy up as a paragon of just what a good girl should really be like. But if she could see all of that, why didn’t she – as Mary Wollstonecraft had done some 21 years previously – suggest that there might be something lacking in women’s education? Or that there was something deeply unjust about depriving women of a means of supporting themselves if – heaven forbid – they found themselves without a single man in possession of a good fortune?

There’s so much to love here – I don’t deny it. The zinging wit and repartee – the observational humour and awareness of human failure and foibles. But there’s also so much I have trouble digesting. And I don’t just put that down to twenty-first century sensibilities. I want my great writers to ask questions; not to reinforce the status quo.

Review: The House on Vesper Sands by Paraic O’Donnell

I recently mentioned how much I was enjoying the recent strain of gothicism which is emerging in British literature (https://katecudahy.wordpress.com/2018/12/20/review-melmoth-by-sarah-perry/). My latest foray into this territory was The House on Vesper Sands by Paraic O’Donnell, which has received much praise for its cunning nod to older literary forms. Part Conan-Doylesque mystery, part Wilkie Collins style chiller, this is a story packed full of malevolent aristocrats, charismatic detectives, unexplained deaths and disappearances, and cunning twists.

The story is largely told from the perspective of Gideon Bliss – an impoverished Cambridge undergraduate – and Octavia Hillingdon, an orphan adopted by a wealthy newspaper magnate. Octavia’s indeterminate social status turns out to be to her advantage in her role as journalist and society columnist, with one foot in the banqueting halls of the upper classes and the other in the treacherous streets of Whitechapel. Both characters find themselves gradually sucked into the sinister world of the so-called ‘spiriters’, who may or may not be responsible for the unexplained deaths of several young, working class women.

It is, however, O’Donnell’s sleuth – Inspector Henry Cutter – who proves the most memorable character of all: a Scotland Yard police officer with a mouth like a sewer, who has a history with the spiriters and aims to see true justice served – a kind of Dickensian Spooky Mulder. Cutter takes Bliss under his wing and the two form a perfect old cop/young (fake) cop pairing – Cutter as world weary father figure to Bliss’s innocent, geeky son.

The book melds its supernatural theme into a realistic depiction of Victorian London and O’Donnell has the most amazing handle on imagistic language, conjuring, with a few deftly chosen words, the glamour of a society ball or the bleakness of the Kent coast. It’s a book you feel rather than read: a novel which slings the reader head first into a maze of dark, forbidding streets, flesh and blood characters and dialogue which captures speech rhythms and idiolects so well that it reads like eavesdropping.

This was a great read to start the year with, and left me with the feeling that if ever a detective deserved his own spin-off series, it is surely Inspector Cutter.

Review: Public Library by Ali Smith

Recently I ordered a couple of ‘real feel’ copies of works by or about Ali Smith – Girl Meets Boy, and a collection of critical essays on her work. I already had one of these books on my Kindle, but as I needed volumes with page numbers, I decided to order from second hand bookshops. When both books arrived, they were coated in library issue plastic covers, and one of them still contained stamps from Dulwich public library. Coincidentally, I was just reading Smith’s volume of short stories Public Library, which addresses the demise of this treasured institution across the UK following a decade of local government cuts and austerity.

It was both ironic and deeply saddening, and it made me think of what a focal point the library was in the small Derbyshire town where I grew up. (I’m happy to say that’s one book palace which survived the chop). A visit to the library meant opening up new worlds: a very private new world as a reader in a very public space.  And it meant measuring one’s progress from childhood to adolescence when you received the adult reader card – a rite of passage noted by a few of the contributors to Smith’s volume. Libraries are communal spaces and democratic spaces. They function like an enormous secret we’ve all been let in on. Downloading an ebook is just not the same – you don’t have that same sense of sanctuary, or of paying books their due respect while celebrating the fact that this is one of the few times life genuinely gives you something for free. Because without an internet connection and a credit card, you’re mostly forced to source your books the pirate way. And that demeans all of us – authors and readers.

The short stories in Public Library are also a celebration of the act of reading itself, of words and their power, of writers and their histories. Smith has the most amazing ability to mine for joy and subversion in all of her work; to eke out a space in what we take for granted, enabling the reader to see it from new perspectives. I can think of no other author who could effectively pair a tale on credit card fraud with an investigation into the death of D H Lawrence. Or who could trace the breakdown of a marriage to an obsession with Katherine Mansfield. Smith is best at making the incongruous seem a vital part of lived experience – at tracing analogies and associations between the most disparate of pairings. She’s a rebel writer whose work casts an even light over popular culture as much as the literary past, if it will draw her reader’s attention to an idea or image. And snaring our attention is something she never fails at.

Public Library is a paean to our most treasured communal spaces, and to how books connect us across geographies and across time. An essential read and a provocative one.

Review: Melmoth by Sarah Perry

Review: Melmoth by Sarah Perry

Neo-gothicism seems to be the order of the day in contemporary British literature, with writers like Sarah Perry, Sarah Waters and Andrew Michael Hurley all offering new takes on a much out-moded genre. What all these authors have proved is that the gothic – with its hauntings and secrets, its dark retreats and the way it plays on our most hidden fears – offers perfect territory for exploration of all that we would still repress, even in our current age of confession, self-expression and over-sharing.

What Perry achieves in Melmoth is nothing short of astounding, and I have to admit that as much as I enjoyed her previous outing The Essex Serpent, Melmoth proved a more satisfying read, abounding in cunning devices which deceive and challenge the reader. To such an extent, in fact, that Perry claims one American newspaper was entirely taken in with the myth of Melmoth when in fact it was her own invention! Taking her cue from Charles Maturin’s 1820 novel Melmoth the Wanderer, Perry transforms Melmoth into a biblical figure – one of the women who witnessed the resurrection of Christ, but refused to acknowledge it. As a result, she is forced to walk the earth until the day of judgement, watching the guilty and, in her loneliness, summoning sinners to walk with her.

Though set in 21st century Prague, Melmoth has a timeless feel which Perry creates through artful use of dialogue and description so that, in her own words, she renders the present ‘strange’ (podcast: The Guardian) or uncanny, thereby creating the perfect gothic backdrop to the horrifying story which unfolds. And what emerges is a story which terrifies far more through its exploration of human cruelty than its supernatural references. The narrative pivots around the shy, shrinking figure of Helen Franklin: an English translator enduring self-imposed exile for a crime committed long ago. Because Helen refuses to confront her past, the reader is denied knowledge of what that crime might have been until the very end of the novel. In stead, Helen sets about uncovering the myth of Melmoth through stories left behind by the Wanderer’s victims, each of which reveals an aspect of human cruelty and weakness. And by the time Helen is ready to examine her own conscience, we are left in no doubt that her sin was truly grave.

What I really loved about this book was its structure: the stories slotting inside one another like the matryoshka dolls sold to tourists on the Charles Bridge, with Helen’s own personal narrative both framing and nesting inside each one. Perry’s skill as a writer means that the novel glides over a range of genres and styles, from biography to travel diary, with subtle intertextual references ranging from Maturin to Kafka. And the story pays out its surprises with such perfect pacing that its finale leaves you breathless – and in no doubt that while the author has dredged humanity’s dark side, it’s the light which remains. This is literary sleight of hand at its most dexterous – an absolute masterpiece.

Review: Autumn by Ali Smith

This was a re-read of Ali Smith’s novel Autumn, the first instalment in her ‘Seasons’ Quartet. It is, after all, a book which you can only take so much from on a first reading, since it is so wide-ranging in terms of its frame of reference, and it is crammed with internal echoes which are easily missed.

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2017, Autumn has been described as a post-Brexit novel, but it’s much more than that. True, it considers the way we become victims of our own lies and prejudices; erecting fences and borders in a deluded attempt to keep ourselves safe. But it also has a lot to say about the way we construct stories, about the way those stories unfold in time and space, and in turn construct our own sense of identity. And deep down, it’s also a love story of an extraordinary kind.

Danie Gluck is 101 years old, sleeping and suspended in his own subconscious; his memories merging with his dreams until it becomes impossible to know where the past ends and imagination takes over. His sole visitor at the Maltings Care Providers Plc is young art historian Elisabeth Demand, who befriended Daniel when he was her neighbour over twenty years earlier. Daniel’s conversations with young Elisabeth about art, books and story-telling, time, truth and lies, created a bond between them which Elisabeth later recognises as a kind of love. The love which enables one person to see another clearly. For as Daniel says, “we have to hope…that the people who love us and who know us a little bit will in the end have seen us truly. In the end, not much else matters.” (160)

Flitting freely between perspectives and time, Autumn is a bit like being on the inside of someone else’s memories. “Time travel is real,” Daniel claims. “We do it all the time.” This does not just concern personal memories but myth, literature, art, politics and popular culture, all of which get incorporated into Daniel and Elisabeth’s sense of self; their lives fusing with the books they read and the art they witness. Memory, then, emerges as a kind of mental collage, analogous to the collages of pop artist Pauline Boty whose joyous life and tragic death forms another narrative strand of this complex and beautiful novel.

As Smith states in an interview with Norwegian writer Linn Ullmann, “…love is multiple, various, takes all forms, is non-exclusionary; it will not be coralled, will not be given a shape, refuses to be fixed, and in that way unfixes us all. Thank God.” Few people can write with such truth about love, and of how much we lose in its absence.

Review: Winter by Ali Smith

As with all of Ali Smith’s work, Winter is couched in deceptively simple prose, lulling the reader into a sense that this will be a straightforward tale of loss and redemption. And while it is both of those things, it is also a charged, complex and astoundingly beautiful meditation on the way, as a society, we stake out ideological battle lines; on the relationship between art and nature, the fake and the real; on our attitudes to the environment and on our obsession with technology.

This is the second part of Smith’s seasons quartet, and as might be expected there is thematic overlap with Autumn, most saliently perhaps in the references to memory and loss. One particular character is also referenced, who may well prove to be a link throughout the series. The story pivots around the relationship between two women: Sophia, a self-made business woman in her sixties, and her older sister Iris who has been a lifelong defender of the environment and human rights. Ideologically worlds apart, the sisters have grown to despise each other’s life choices; Iris living in a commune and protesting at Greenham Common while Sophia emerges almost as the model Thatcherite business woman, building up her small empire of department stores. Sophia’s son Arthur is the casualty in this family war: a sensitive child who has been severed from his roots and left to fend for himself at a private boarding school. As an adult, he seems to live life in proxy via his blog on which he posts fictional encounters with the natural world.

The feud played out between Sophia and Iris mirrors in microcosm those social and ideological fractures which often seem insurmountable on a broader, social level and the book widens its references to take in Brexit, the Bosnian conflict and the Second World War. Yet Winter ultimately considers the potential for healing and reconciliation even in the most unlikely of circumstances. It is a book which refuses to take sides, and which foregrounds dialogue and the understanding of difference as key to a future which will rise above and beyond the hatreds of the past.

Winter is a novel which confirms Ali Smith’s status as one of the greatest living British novelists – she was recently placed first in a TLS poll of academics and authors (theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/05/). I am always grabbed by the playfulness of her writing: her love of invention combined with her unquenchable curiosity, and the way her sentences seem to feed off and into each other. Reading Winter for the first time, I felt I was only scraping at the surface of the story, and I am certain that this is a book I’ll be revisiting on more occasions in the future.