Search Results

What about this title, Drive your plow Over the Bones of the Dead? It’s strange, it’s sinister and at the same time it’s an everyday scene, a farmer ploughing a field. It's taken directly from William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. It’s one of the proverbs of hell, but don’t worry too much about that. Blake’s conception of hell, in fact Blake’s conception of most things, is far removed from the world as most people find it. But it is worth devoting a little more time to Blake, because Tokarczuk does. She starts each chapter with a Blake quote. He is easy to quote, if difficult to read in bulk, because he often wrote in aphorisms. One of the characters in the book is deeply immersed in translating Blake into Polish and two qualities of Blake’s suffuse this book. One is rage. Blake raged against a lot of things, social injustice, people who tried to pick holes in his spiritual conception of the world, cruelty to animals, dark satanic mills, you name it and Blake had a fiery opinion on the matter. The other is Blake’s belief that every person’s imagination is sacred to themselves and not to be denied by others. So are you prepared for the weird, the opaque and the hyper-individualistic? Janina Duszejko (but don’t you dare call her Janina; she has a deep feeling that she is not a Janina) lives in a forested area of Poland, near the Czech border. Most people only inhabit the remote houses, above the valley and on the plateau, in the summer. Mrs. Duszejko stays all year round. She calls the other two neighbours who stay Oddball and Big Foot. Oddball calls on her in the middle of the night, to tell her that Big Foot is dead: ‘The porch light went out automatically and we walked across the crunching snow in total darkness, except for Oddball’s headlamp, which pierced the pitch dark in one shifting spot, just in front of him, as I tripped along in the Murk behind him. “Don’t you have a torch?” he asked. Of course I had one, but I wouldn’t be able to tell where it was until morning, in the daylight. It’s a feature of torches that they’re only visible in the daytime.’ And there you have it, the protagonist and narrator of the story, the world she lives in and a deft movement from a modern porch light into an intimidating and archaic world ( M for Murk is not a typo) and from there into the mind of someone intensely witty but somewhat off course. But remember, everybody’s imagination is sacred to themselves and in this book there are coterie of odd characters with large imaginations who are realized with love and respect. There are also a large number of more everyday characters who are raged against in true Blakean fashion. Here is Mrs. Duszejko’s reaction to the parish priest, who is about to give a sermon on the patron saint of hunters: ‘It occurred to me that if there really was a Good God, he should appear now in his true shape, as a Sheep, Cow or Stag, and thunder in a mighty tone, he should roar, and if he could not appear in person, he should send his vicars, his fiery archangels, to put an end to this terrible hypocrisy for once and for all. But of course no one intervened. He never intervenes.’ Blake, rage and odd characters aside, this book is at heart a complex noir mystery. The first death is an accident but later people start getting killed in bizarre ways reminiscent of The Name of the Rose. On one side of the story there is Mrs. Duszejko, with her passionate feelings about animals and her belief that astrology can predict the time and nature of a death, on the other is an increasingly backward-looking, church-oriented and male-dominated Polish society. Mrs. Duszejko has a theory that the animals are uniting and taking their revenge on the hunters. She pesters the police with her ideas. More murders happen. She speaks out against hunting during the priest’s sermon. She loses her job teaching English at the local school. There are more murders, and motives and clues and reveals and twists, and eventually an ending you might not expect.

The Keeper of Stories is fast paced, full of eccentric characters and above all funny. It is an ideal read for those times when you simply want to enjoy a rollicking good story and there’s the added bonus of a very sharp little dog.   Janice is a cleaner in Cambridge – the university town in England, not the one in Massachusetts – and she has discovered that a good cleaner can pretty much dictate her days and hours, so why would she take on a job for the mother-in-law of one of her least favourite clients, especially when that mother-in-law makes it quite clear she doesn’t want a cleaner?   ‘The globule of spit hits the pavement less than an inch from her shoe. It is either a very good shot or Mrs YeahYeahYeah’s mother-in-law has missed. Janice stands looking at the small, elderly woman in the open doorway… Does she really need to be here? And what is this woman wearing? It seems to be some sort of kimono thrown over and pair of men’s cords (rolled up many times at the ankles), and on her head she has a red hat with artificial cherries on. The cherries appear to be covered in what Janice suspects is mould.’   Mrs YeahYeahYeah is the only client Janice doesn’t like. She doesn’t like Mrs YeahYeahYeah’s husband either. She calls him Mr NoNoNotNow. The only reason Janice hasn’t walked out in four years of working for them is because of the dog, who’s called Decius.   ‘“This is Decius, he’s a fox terrier.”             This was one of the first things Mrs YeahYeahYeah had said to her. Quickly followed by, “I hope you like dogs we’d like you to walk him.”’             Not, “We hope you like dogs.” Pause, “Would you possibly mind walking him?” (Polite British requests always involve interspersed ‘would you minds’.) ‘All Janice had been able to say was, “Decius?”             “Yes, he’s named after a Roman emperor.”             And that’s when she first noticed it. She looked at Decius. He looked at her and his expression said, as surely as if he had barked it out loud, “Don’t say a word. Not a fucking word.” She didn’t blame him, but after all this time it still amazes her how much he swears. For a fox terrier.’   There are other clients, all with their own stories. There is Geordie Bowman, an internationally renowned opera singer with humble roots. And there’s recently widowed Fiona and her son Adam. Fiona is creating a doll’s house. ‘Most of the rooms are complete, perfect in their miniature form. Bedrooms, a drawing room, a nursery, and Janice’s favourite, a beautifully fashioned county-style kitchen with pastry part-rolled on the table alongside a bowl of plums the size of pin heads.’   And there’s Carrie-Louise, a nearly-ninety year-old whose greatest entertainment is sparring with her old friend, Mavis, and proving she can make better elegant little cakes for tea than Mavis can. Carrie-Louise actually has Janice bake the cakes, for Janice is a woman of many talents. Janice can handle a soldering iron as easily as she can whip up batter for madeleines. She’s a woman who is severely underestimated by some of her clients. Mavis clearly thinks she’s the sort of woman who buys her cakes. She is also underestimated by her husband.   Janice travels to her jobs by bus and likes to listen to music on her headphones while inventing stories about her fellow passengers and the bus driver, whom she is sure must once have been a geography teacher. She hauls her vacuum cleaner and her bag of supplies onto the bus because her husband uses their car to get to work at a college in the centre of Cambridge, a place easily accessible by public transport. ‘“You don’t want to take the car in, Jan, it’ll be more trouble than it’s worth. Parking’s a nightmare in the city.” This is true, although it is also true that most of her employers have parking for visitors or drives. “Whatever you say, but I think you’ll find I’m right.” He had beamed good-naturedly at her.’ (Janice’s husband has a nice line in passive-aggressive dominance.)  ‘She returns to the hall, kicks off her shoes, flexes her toes and heads for the kitchen. She knows the first thing he will say when he wakes is, “What’s for dinner?” He doesn’t ask this in a nagging or demanding voice, but in a jolly tone that suggests they are all in it together. She is no longer fooled.’   So there’s the cast of characters, or most of them. What about the plot? It’s a double story: Janice’s, both her past one and her current one, and the story of Mrs. B (as Janice starts to call Mrs YeahYeahYeah’s mother-in-law). It’s a story with suitably villainous machinations, a suitably dark secret and a suitably sweet romance.

If you’ve read the Iliad, and I know some of you have, you are going to enjoy this book. I can say that unreservedly. This is not Cliff Notes for the Iliad. If you haven’t read the Iliad you are also going to enjoy this book, because Madeline Miller has achieved a thoroughly contemporary story of the Trojan War and the years leading up to it, while placing you firmly amongst ancient Greeks. The Song of Achilles is written from the point of view of Patroclus, Achilles’ beloved companion who was slain by Hector on the battlefield. There’s no issue with spoilers here. Achilles’ doom is foretold and although the characters don’t know exactly how fate will play out the reader probably does. Patroclus, a minor character in the Iliad, almost a plot device, is such a significant character in Madeline Miller’s version that the book could have been called The Song of Patroclus. This is a modern novel, not a re-telling of the Iliad; character development and relationships are at its core. Patroclus and Achilles are lovers. Achilles is half god, half human. Thetis, Achilles’ sea-nymph mother, is a scary hyper-controlling parent. Chiron, the boys’ tutor, is a centaur. And that’s perfectly fine. He’s a character. In the Iliad the gods intervene in human lives with breathtakingly casual arrogance. In The Song of Achilles they are part of the fabric of the world. The interweaving of the known story with the reader’s expectations about the story is masterful, and all done in Patroclus’ voice. ‘ “I thought you said it would be an easy campaign, home by next fall,” I managed. I had to do something to stop the relentless roll of their words. “I lied.” Odysseus shrugged.’ And this: ‘He put on his best singer’s falsetto, “A thousand ships have sailed for her.” A thousand was the number Agamemnon’s bards had started using, one thousand, one hundred and eighty-six didn’t fit well in a line of verse.’ Most of the book is not the Trojan War, it is the boy’s lives before the war, but some of it is, so if you are wondering how the violence is handled the answer is with immediacy and speed, but without the seemingly endless, anatomically detailed, descriptions of the many ways a bronze age weapon could penetrate a human body that you find in the Iliad. Madeline Miller has only a few lines like that, but they are enough to put you on the battlefield. In the author’s own words: ‘I will say that at some point a friend of mine – let’s be honest an ex-boyfriend – referred to the story as “Homeric fan fiction.” That was fairly dampening. But I decided: so be it. If it’s fan fiction, it’s fan fiction. I’m still going to write it.’ If it’s fan fiction, so be it. It’s amazingly good fan fiction.

The idea for this newsletter grew out of something I read called 5 best book covers of…, you know the sort of thing. They all start with a number. It seems we can’t resist the combination of a number and the word ‘best’. The book covers were, in my not so humble opinion, awful. So I pulled books from my shelves until I found five I liked and photographed them. From there grew the idea. These were not just great covers; they were books I had read and enjoyed. Why not share them? Susanna Clarke wrote Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell. You are going to know that if it’s the last thing the publisher does, because it’s the only thing that mars an otherwise classically elegant cover. Don’t dismiss Piranesi out of hand if you didn’t like Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell. It’s recognizably a book from the same author with the same skills but it’s a different book, a lot shorter apart from anything else. In Piranesi you plunge into an alternative world through the journals of a character of such innocence you just want to hug him. You soon know his world intimately because that’s how he knows it. At the same time you know it isn’t the only world he has ever known, because he might be innocent but his cultural references are our cultural references and his scientific rationalism is our scientific rationalism and your ever-active mind tells you that he probably belongs in our world, and that our world is more real than his. Then, you feel sad because his world is so beautiful and mysterious and he negotiates it so perfectly. It’s a mystery plot, of the “What’s really going on here?” type. You might not find out, at least not from the author. You have to bring your own thoughts to bear on this book. The book reads itself to you, then you read the book to yourself, and when you close the cover you think, “What was all that about, really? But it was wonderful. Or at least it contained wonder. Wherein does that wonder lie?” If you like world-building and intensely close-up first-person narration, Piranesi is a good read for you.

The main penitentiary gate opened on schedule, without any last minute hitch. Sandra Treming and four other old cons walked out into a rainy Monday morning.   The first scene in Through Thorns packs in a lot. Sandra Treming is notorious, serving a life sentence. She has what the authorities call ‘attitude’; no time off for good behaviour, but none added on for bad. She is terrified of the outside world and so ill-equipped for it that she doesn’t know how to use a seatbelt in a car.   Through Thorns is a fast paced story told in two timelines. One is how Sandra survives in the world outside prison in 2007, the other is how she came to be convicted 25 years earlier. The main thrust of the plot is laid out quickly. The twists and turns are in the details and the attraction is in the author’s compassionate attitude towards some of his characters, his skilful pillorying of others and his ability to create a community of people who are at the same time both absurd and believable.   Sandra in 1982 lives in the Alexander Berkman Collective. According to her own memories she ended up there because she was a runaway with nowhere to go and was befriended by two of the collective members. The collective is the sort of place where they have house meetings about buying groceries that end in members walking out because they are not ‘interested in participating in group struggle that doesn’t advance the revolution’. Whether this reminds you of Monty Python, One Day in the Death of Ivan Denisovich or house-shares you once were part of is all part of the cleverness of this writing. These people are naïve, laughable and dangerous. Or would be dangerous, if they ever reached a decision. When that disaffected member storms out the meeting no longer has a quorum which means, believe it or not, they can’t buy groceries. They so despise capitalist, bourgeois society that they won’t work, take money from parents or accept government payments. Their only sanctioned way of obtaining the necessities of life is through ‘liberating’ property. And that, plus some actual decisions, is where it all goes wrong.   Sandra in 2007 is an ex-prisoner in a hostile world. People who should help her, a steward of a half-way house, a parole officer, are cleverly skewered by the author. There are elements of farce here but also elements of devastating truth. Who hasn’t been humiliated by an official at some time in their life? And the more vulnerable you are the more likely you are to be humiliated.   “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t have you apprehended,” Case officer barked.   “Sorry?” Sandra played contrite to mask the indignation she felt.   “I contacted the halfway house. You weren’t there. In fact, they have no record of you checking in. So, where the hell have you been?”   “I’m staying at a hostel downtown.” She kept her voice neutral. Perhaps, if she didn’t push any buttons, she could weather this storm.   “You’re required to keep this office informed of your place of residence at all times. Why didn’t you tell us about this move?”   “I did, I­—”   “You’re lying. I took careful notes from our meeting. You didn’t say anything about where you were staying.”   Sandra pointed to the receptionist. “I wrote the address on the registration form she gave me.”   And she had. And when it’s proven that she did, do either he or the receptionist apologise for their lack of communication? You guessed it, no, it’s all Sandra’s responsibility; the responsibility of the vulnerable, homeless and jobless person that they are paid, out of the public purse, to help.­   There is a lot of social commentary in this book, and a lot of compassion for the less fortunate and capable. Because her room at the halfway house has gone, Sandra checks into the homeless shelter next door. There the locker she is assigned is broken and all her money is stolen in the night. Angela, refused permission to take her shopping carts full of junk into the shelter, takes Sandra somewhere to sleep that is safer. Safer means behind a bramble thicket under a freeway overpass.   Sandra has a habit of being decisive in the wrong ways. She left the apartment her former comrade found for her. She went to a hostel instead of the halfway house. She stayed in the homeless shelter when she knew her possessions weren’t safe. You could say making decisions that work out badly is a character trait. And that’s nothing compared to some of the decisions she made 25 years before. Yet she has a nature that is open to Angela and to others. Will she survive in this world outside prison with so much stacked against her? That’s a later part of the story, after the thorns, when things get a bit less Monty Python and a bit more modern fairy tale.

A novella, hardly more than a short story, this little book is pure, condensed Alan Bennett from the title onwards. Bennett is best known as a writer for stage, radio and screen including The Madness of King George, The Lady in the Van and The History Boys, all of which are a  must-see, preferably on the stage. His two BBC television series, Talking Heads 1988 and Talking Heads 1998 (a series of monologues with almost zero action) were an outstanding success and were reissued with new actors by the BBC in 2020. Bennett’s skills are the gently comedic observation of character, the dramatic twist, a mastery of dialogue and a deep love of playing with the English language. All these qualities are present in The Uncommon Reader. And did I mention that it’s fun? A common reader is a collection of extracts from texts that is prescribed to a group in the early stages of a course of study. It could also be an ordinary person who reads. The Uncommon Reader of this title is as noble is as it is as possible be, because she is the Queen. Definitely not a commoner. There’s much more to be said about the title that I’m not going to say. Be prepared for layers of meaning. Oh, and fun. ‘It was the dog’s fault…they careered along the terrace…and alongside the house…where she could hear them yapping at something in one of the yards.’ Note the language: ‘terrace’ and ‘yards’ (plural not singular like your back yard or my back yard) suitable terms to describe the environs of a palace but mixed with the common word ‘house’, the word you or I would use for the building we live in. ‘She had never seen the library parked there before, nor presumably had the dogs, hence the din, so having failed in her attempt to calm them down she went up the little steps of the van in order to apologise….“Though now that one is here I suppose one ought to borrow a book.” ’ So begins the Queen’s engagement with reading. Through his most uncommon character’s thoughts Bennett raises the same questions about reading that you see all over the internet. Who reads anymore? Why not? Whose fault is it that young people don’t read? Except in this opening scene a young person, a kitchen boy called Norman, is sitting reading in the corner of the travelling library, and an old person, the most senior in the land hesitates. ‘She’d never taken much interest in reading. She read, of course, as one did, but liking books was something left to other people…Her job was to take an interest, not to be interested herself. And besides reading wasn’t doing. She was a doer.’ The Queen takes Norman on as her special  advisor and plunges into a maelstrom of books that takes over her every free minute, leads to her asking visiting notables what they are reading and upsets her staff, and the prime minister, no end. ‘ “I would have thought,” said the prime minister, “that your majesty was above literature.” “Above literature?” said the Queen. You might as well say one was above humanity.” ’ Which is one of the many comments about the nature of literature that Bennett inserts to create the subtext of this little book. ‘It was only after a year or so of reading and making notes that she tentatively ventured on the occasional thought of her own. “I think of literature,” she wrote, “as a vast country to the far borders of which I am journeying but will never reach.” ’ Bennett, and the Queen, range far and wide over English literature, even venturing into French. (If you want to see just how many works are referenced look up the Wikipaedia article on The Uncommon Reader.)  As she gains confidence the Queen starts to wish some of the authors were still around, ‘so that she could take them to task’. ‘ “Am I alone,’ she wrote, “in wanting to give Henry James a good talking-to?”…“I can see why Dr Johnson is well thought of, but surely, much of it is opinionated rubbish?” ’ But as she reads more and more she finds even Henry James can be enjoyable. A novel, after all, need not be written ‘as the crow flies’. Much of Bennett’s charm is due to his authorial voice being rooted in his Yorkshire beginnings. Here he is, towards the end of the book, writing about an event at Buckingham Palace, speaking like he’s talking to his mum, only tidied up a bit. ‘ The prospect of a proper tea had fetched the privy councillors out in greater numbers than had been expected; dinner would have been a chore whereas tea was a treat.’ If you want an amusing read that is not a piece of fluff, something to curl up with and make you smile on a rainy winter afternoon, The Uncommon Reader is for you.

The obsession is the English love affair with gardening. Wulf, who was born in India and raised in Germany, writes in her prologue, “ I was amazed, when I moved to London in the mid -nineties, to find a nation obsessed with gardening. The shelves of my local newsagent groaned beneath lavish displays of gardening magazines; everywhere I went I saw signs for garden centres, and my new friends all seemed to think that the best way to spend a weekend was to visit the grounds of a stately home (unless they had an allotment, in which case the thrill of digging and weeding could not be surpassed).” In 1734 Peter Collinson, a successful London cloth merchant who traded extensively with the colony of Pennsylvania, collected a shipment of two boxes of plants from the customs house at the Port of London. Inside his boxes were hundreds of seeds wrapped in paper and, marvellous to behold, some living plants that had survived the crossing of the Atlantic, which could take between five and twelve weeks. Two of the cuttings were of Kalmia Latiflora, the Mountain Laurel, which Collingwood had only ever seen as a botanical illustration. Collinson was a man of means with a passion for botany at a time when European travellers were bringing home stories of strange and wonderful trees, flowers and shrubs. In his day a garden was a parterre, a pattern of low, neatly trimmed hedges enclosing a display of flowers, often only one plant of one colour. Municipal gardens in southern Spain are still like that, deep red roses in a frame of green box, and the gardeners you can employ where I live in California  seem to be in the same tradition. They will take a hedge trimmer to the shrubs you have carefully pruned to leave the flowering wood and mould them into tidy balls and ovals. Not so in Britain, thanks to Collinson, and the person at the other end of that shipment. That person was John Bartram, a farmer living on the outskirts of Philadelphia. Like Collinson he had adored plants since childhood but unlike him had few books to refer to and even fewer he could read because he knew no Latin. Collinson, a fellow of the Royal Society, heard of Bartram though his connections with Benjamin Franklin and the subscription library Franklin had founded in Philadelphia. Collison acted as the library’s London agent choosing, buying and shipping books to America. His hope was that he’d find someone to ship him back plants in return and eventually he did: Bartram. To begin with Bartram supplied Collinson with plants and seeds from around his Pennsylvania farmhouse; kalmias, tulip polars and lady’s slipper orchids. Later he ventured further afield; a lot further afield. He travelled, alone on horseback, throughout Pennsylvania and New Jersey and into the Carolinas and Virginia and on into uncharted territory. Meanwhile Collinson set up a subscription scheme for Bartram’s ‘boxes’. And that is why British gardens, large and small, are populated with so much more than the few species of trees that survived the last ice age. There are only five evergreens native to Great Britain: Box, Holly, Scots Pine, Juniper and Yew. The new generation of wealthy landowners were prepared to pay vast sums for the trees grown from Bartram’s seeds. Cedars, Bays, Spruces , Hemlocks and many new types of Pine all entered Britain from America and formed the backbone of the great gardens of the stately homes the British so love to visit. Add to that the great flowering trees of the Eastern and Southern United States, the Magnolias, Rhododendrons, and Dogwoods, and the deciduous trees with their astonishing autumn colours, the Maples, Aspens and Liquidambars, and it’s no wonder the great estate holders called filling their acres ‘painting with nature’. You have probably never heard of Peter Collinson and John Bartram before now but there are many characters in Wulf’s book who will be familiar. There are, for example, chapters on Linnaeus and the classification of plants. His ‘sexual’ system was considered scandalous by many British plant aficionados, not least because of the descriptions Linnaeus chose to employ: “ …the bridal bed…adorned with such precious bedcurtains, and perfumed with so many sweet scents” and other nomenclature so much more explicit that I hesitate to include it in this newsletter. The second part of The Brother Gardeners moves into the next generation of botanizers and has chapters on Joseph Banks, the botanical  expedition he tacked onto the mission of Cook’s first voyage of the Endeavor. As a young man he was one of the first Europeans to set eyes on Australia, because he didn’t just finance that expedition, he went on it. Then there was the ill-fated voyage of the Bounty, which Banks arranged to take breadfruit trees from Tahiti to be grown in the West Indies. Banks established Kew Gardens and later in life was president of the Royal Society. In my last garden I had a rose called Rosa Banksiae, Lady Banks. Whatever happened to it, it recovered from in a season, such as being cut down to its base so the deck could be repaired. I always wondered what the good Lady Banks made of having such a tenacious plant named after her.

The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye begins, as do all fairy stories, by announcing that it’s a fairy story. ‘Once upon a time, when men and women hurtled through the air on metal wings, when they wore webbed feet and walked on the bottom of the sea, learning the speech of whales and the songs of the dolphins, when pearly-fleshed and jeweled apparitions of Texan herdsmen and houris shimmered in the dusk on Nicaraguan hillsides, when folk in Norway and Tasmania in dead of winter could dream of fresh strawberries, dates, guavas and passion fruits and find them spread next morning on their tables, there was a woman who was largely irrelevant, and therefore happy.’ It's a fairy story but it is today. And for the next hundred pages it’s today - or 1994, when the book was published. Dr Gillian Perholt, the largely irrelevant, happy woman, is a narratologist. Narratology is the study of narrative and narrative structure and the ways that these affect human perception. (And, yes, I did have to look that up). Narratologists, as far as this story is concerned, spend most of their time flying to conferences to give talks to other narratologists. Gillian Perholt flies to Turkey, which we all know is a place where the air is full of spirits, some of whom get captured in objects such as lamps and bottles and are obliged to grant us three wishes if we release them. But one hundred pages in and, although the tone is still that of a fairy tale, the content is the story of Turkey; the rationalist Turkey of the 1990s, not the reactionary, reverted, Turkey of today. Although that Turkey is presaged. While looking for a supposedly magic pillar in the Haghia Sophia, Gillian and her Turkish  colleague, Orhan, meet a Pakistani family. ‘ “And she, does she speak English?” It was clear that Gillian had been taken for a quiet Muslim wife. She had been standing two paces behind Orhan as he cast about for the magic pillar. Orhan replied gravely. “She is English. She is a visiting professor. An eminent visiting professor.” Orhan, a child of Atatürk’s new world, was enjoying himself…the Pakistani gentleman was not happy.’ In the story called Dragon’s Breath a village is destroyed by a dragon. Then there should be a hero who slays the beast, shouldn’t there, not something sad and unnecessary about a fried pig? How is hopelessness converted into legend? The Story of the Eldest Princess… hang on, shouldn’t that be The Story of the Youngest Princess? It’s always the youngest one that gets it right, isn’t it?  And princesses are not supposed to befriend scorpions, toads and cockroaches (at least only sanitized, Disneyfied ones). Princesses are supposed to find their true love, ‘naked to the waist, with black curly hair, leaning on a long axe and singing: Come live with me and be my love And share my house and share my bed And you may sing from dawn to dark And churn the cream and bake the bread And lie at night in my strong arms Beneath a soft goosefeather spread.’ The Princess is about to fulfil the destiny the story demands, but a scratchy cockroach voice rasps out from her basket: ‘And you may scour and sweep and scrub With bleeding hands and arms like lead And I will beat your back and drive My knotty fists against your head And sing again to other girls To take your place, when you are dead.’ The cockroach knows. He has crept around the dark crevices of people’s houses. A S Byatt has such a mastery of the open tone and straightforward language of the fairy tale and so cleverly controls the way a fairy tale evokes the dark fears of the human psyche that it is hard to keep in mind that she has made all this up. Those verses are her own and this book is no re-telling of The Arabian Nights. She follows all the tropes, then she does something that hits you in the stomach. Intertwined, like roses and their thorns on a trellis, her fairy tales are both fables and commentaries on the preoccupations of modern times. And is there a djinn in a bottle? And where does a nightingale’s eye feature? I’m not going to tell you. You will have to read the book.

After a long break from reading prize-winning novels I’ve been enticed back into the Booker fold as the result of a three-pronged seduction. First, a friend asked me if I’d read The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton (2013). I hadn’t, so I did.  Second, I discovered the Booker Prize website and newsletter while searching for the progress of Paul Harding’s This Other Eden in the 2023 prize year. That website led me to an amazing Facebook group composed of people who read, consider and comment on books that won the Booker Prize. Low and behold, I found myself reading more Booker winners. I dug George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) out of the ‘to be read’ pile on my bedside table; I bought Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2014) as being the ideal long book for a long flight; I dithered over Prophet Song (2023) as promising to be way too depressing and doom-laden. Then, with a Booker road-map in my head, I turned to my bookshelf. Moon Tiger? Had I ever read that? Was it actually an unread book that had snuck its way onto the shelf? Its cover claimed it had won the Booker in 1987, back before the days of  prophetic doom, experimental formats and incessant rain. Although, judging by the date Moon Tiger was written (and by the blurb: Claudia Hampton – beautiful, famous, independent – is dying) the book could well be another depressingly familiar revelation about World War II. The cover was unmistakably Egypt. I was half way through before a light turned on. “Imshi”. It was a plunge into memory; the same light had flared when I’d read Moon Tiger in the past. “Imshi”, my father said when he’d had enough of us kids. It was a little piece of Arabic he’d picked up while in Egypt in 1945, collecting up unmarked drums of liquid from the desert and determining their contents. A romance lies at the centre of Moon Tiger; a romance that plays out in a few days in the bizarre limbo that is colonial Cairo at the height of the desert war. Like all respectable European capitals Cairo had a zoo. “The hippos share a small lake with flamingos and assorted duck; a keeper stands alongside with a bucketful of potatoes - five piastres buys a couple of potatoes which you then hurl into the pink maw of the hippo. The adult hippos wallow with their mouths permanently agape while two young ones, who have not yet got the idea, cruise fretfully up and down, occasionally struck by inaccurate potatoes. ‘Like an exotic form of hoop-la,’ says Tom. ‘Do you want a go?’ ‘Do you realise that potatoes are a luxury in this place?’ says Claudia. ‘ I can’t remember when I last ate a potato myself. We use yams. Mashed yam, roast yam, boiled yam….’ “Oh dear,’ says Tom. ‘Is indignation going to spoil your day? At least the hippos are happy, presumably.’ But Claudia knows that nothing can spoil her day…” And now you will be drawn into this story.  I say ‘now’ since you may not have been before. Beautiful, famous, independent Claudia, who is recalling her life as she ekes out her last days in hospital, has so far been self-absorbed, intolerant, neglectful, arrogant and frequently cruel Claudia. She is not the sort of person you’d want to know. But when she reveals what Tom has been in her life she becomes poignant, passionate, eloquent, resilient and astute. At the start of this newsletter I took a swipe at experimental formats, at the modern Booker winners like Lincoln in the Bardo and The Luminaries and implied Moon Tiger would take you back to a time when a novel’s format was more trustworthy. (Eleanor Catton was two years old when Moon Tiger won the Booker). But take a close look at that passage I quoted. It’s a scene that the narrator, the old Claudia, has been plunged back into. She’s seeing it with the crystalline clarity of morphine fueled vision. To achieve this effect of immediacy in distance Lively uses the present tense with a distant third person point of view. It’s risky. It can annoy a reader with its feel of a lack of sophistication. But you probably didn’t notice, because smart, acerbic Claudia is right there, being witty about yams and the English diet. Then Lively switches you right back into a first-person-type insight, but what’s on the page is still in the third person. Old and dying, Claudia is remembering this scene. She could think, ‘I knew nothing could spoil my day’, but that’s not what Lively does. She writes, “But Claudia knows that nothing can spoil her day”. All the way through this book Lively plays with tense, point of view and dialogue in a way which is thoroughly experimental but because it serves both the character and the plot you’ll probably be surprised when, and if, you notice it happening. And while reading the passage you probably imagined it was your sensibilities that conjoured up  the discomfort over the zoo-thing, and that your modern education detected the odour of colonialism. Look again and you’ll see it is Lively’s skill that put that there.

I’ve recommended a number of different books in this newsletter so far and they’ve had one thing in common, they were fiction. Safe, Wanted and Loved is not. It is a memoir written by a man whose wife suffered a sudden and severe episode of psychosis. Names and locations have been changed, Patrick Dylan is not the author’s real name, his wife’s name is not Mia, the family didn’t live where the book says they did and I guess many of the other characters are going under invented names too. But the scenes are real, devastatingly real, and the emotion and tension is stretched tight throughout. If you’ve seen the person-stealing effect of mental illness close up you will recognize it here. If you haven’t, this book will be an eyeopener. Patrick tells his story in a voice that is immediate and sincere. Raw fear, confusion, compassion and determination jostle with each other. They are feelings you can share in. Mia, under stress at work, became unable to sleep and convinced she was being videoed and would go to prison for a trivial mistake she might have made. She told Pat this after waking him at three in the morning. The next day she terrified her sister, telling her they had to contact the author of the children’s books because he had the ‘answer’. And so it began. ‘“Pat, we need to kill the dog,” Mia said in a calm voice. She was standing by the foot of our bed, our old miniature dachshund cradled in her arms…It’s the devil… He got inside her.” I started to look down, but she cut me off. “Don’t look into her eyes!” she shouted.’ There are wonderful doctors in this story, supportive school counsellors and threatening ones, brutally realistic police officers and intransigent health insurance companies. I’ve met them all during my years living in California. Patrick’s story has the supreme merit of being accurate. He soon knows his way around the entire pharmacopeia of mind-blasting drugs the medical profession has at its disposal and soon realizes how primitive the whole science is. He sees the effect on his children and how they need help to cope. He learns that the only way to deal with the industrial medical complex is to be as heartless as it is, ‘‘’ And now I owe you $30,000. But I can’t possibly pay that…I know how this works. If my insurance were paying this they’d have negotiated reduced rates…I am going to write you a check for ten grand.”’ And Patrick finds out just who will stand by him, an outrageously otherworldly brother-in-law, and who will make his life even more difficult, a school counsellor who has to be talked out of calling child protective services. Patrick’s declared motive in publishing his story is to bring mental illness out into the open and help people get over the shame and the feeling that they need to hide their sickness. Yet the book has enough instances of the kind of treatment families in this predicament can receive for it to be perfectly understandable why they would not invite it. Patrick interweaves the story of Mia’s illness with a mini-biography of their lives together. Personally, I found these sections less compelling and I didn’t take up the invitation to listen to the songs referenced at the start of each chapter. Other reviewers, however, found the love story heartwarming and the music-listening rewarding. They do both add structure and relief to a roller-coaster-ride of a tale; a tale which has the added advantage of being written like a detective story. Will Patrick and Mia ever find out who the culprit is, the name of the disease, and will they ever overcome it? This is not a depressing read. It’s emotionally challenging but also uplifting, and not in a soppy way. In the end the medication that helps Mia is alarmingly simple. No spoiler apologies here. You might not give this book a go if you thought it was going to be a tragedy. Although for many people with a mental illness the outcome is tragedy, or long, drawn-out misery and persecution, and that is something we should remember.

The eight short stories and one novella in this collection are linked by the author’s interest in science. Characters from the past include great names such as Linnaeus, Darwin, Wallace and Mendel. Some of the stories are modern, some historical. The author approaches her topics at an angle: a day in Linnaeus’ old age in which he imagines he’s back with his favorite pupils; a young doctor who works at a quarantine station in nineteenth-century Canada; an American naturalist who meets Arthur Wallace on his expeditions. When I revisited these stories I found some of them still lodged in my brain from when I first read the book, some twenty years ago. In my grey matter there lingers an eighteenth-century woman who decides to test the contemporary belief that swallows live underwater until spring, a boat that passes over a river swarming with bedding, planks and straw thrown overboard from newly arrived ships and a man who brings back the first birds of paradise his country has ever seen, only to find it uninterested and in the throes of a civil war. The stories: The Behavior of the Hawkweeds , Mendel’s other plant, one that didn’t cooperate. The English Pupil , Linnaeus as an old man losing his grip on reality. The Littoral Zone , a tale of scientist lovers who spoiled their lives. Rare Bird, those underwater swallows. Soroche , a woman meets a man whose great-great-grandfather was Darwin’s guide in the Andes. Birds with no Feet , those birds of paradise. The Marburg Sisters , brilliant modern scientists. Was their mother a witch? Ship Fever , a devastating depiction of what became of Irish emigrants fleeing the potato famine. These are plainly told stories, with solid narration and well-built scenes. The author has a talent for locating big subjects and tough situations in vividly described places. The characters are complex, intelligent and often unfulfilled and unhappy, but, don’t despair, not always. If you like old-fashioned story-telling and are fascinated by what people used to believe, this book is for you.

In 2012 a friend persuaded me to apply for the Tin House writers’ conference, because Paul Harding was leading a class on novel writing. She had read Tinkers and she wanted to find out how he did it. I don’t know if I did find that out but I discovered a lot about writing, drank some great beer, and made lasting memories. Tinkers confounds all the advice my editor is currently giving me: ‘too much description, digression and diversion’. Tinkers is all description, digression and diversion. It hardly seems reasonable to call it a novel at all. It’s a collection of vignettes; the pieces of a stained-glass window that assemble themselves into a view on a story. George Crosby lies dying and thinks about his father; possibly that’s what’s happening. This book doesn’t bother itself with mundane attempts at rationalizing its existence. You have to take this book on its own terms. George’s father’s story is told. Howard Crosby, was a tinker, moving through parts of New England with a mule-drawn wagon. He was also an epileptic, in the days when the illness could have you confined in an asylum. George, for his part, tinkers with clocks. Or did, before he was dying. Perhaps ‘evocation’ rather than ‘novel’ would be a better description for this book. Harding places you closer than you could have dreamed possible to human thoughts, the natural world, and the insides of clocks. There is immense variety in his writing style. There might not be the pace you get from a fast-progressing plot or rapid dialogue but there’s plenty in the gallop from a dying man hallucinating his house collapsing, to the stubbornness of country women, to an eighteenth-century clock-repair manual. This is not a book you can read while letting your mind wander elsewhere. Every word has been carefully chosen; every scene is a story in its own right. Some images are surreal and disturbing, such as the description of what happens in George’s body as he dies. Some are poignant: ‘God hear me weep because I let myself think all is well if I am fully stocked with both colors of shoe shine, and beeswax for the wooden tables, sea sponge and steel wool for dirty dishes.’ Some are mystical: ‘When new buds light up wet black branches, they seem to burst forth from another side of time, which belonged to men like my father.’ Some are brutally matter of fact: ‘He was dying from renal failure. His actual death was going to be from poisoning by uric acid. Whatever food or water he managed to consume never came back out of his body.’ Perhaps it’s as well such an intense book is only 190 pages long, in a format smaller than your average paperback. If you like writing that shines out like the crown jewels, Tinkers is for you.