SEVENTH BIRTHDAY FEATURE: our books of the year so far, by Adèle, Celia and Linda

 

As usual on our birthday, the three of us recommend books that have caught our attention so far this year.

Adèle:

End of Story, by Louise Swanson, is a lockdown-influenced dystopia and the premise is so ghastly (all fiction, stories etc firmly banned by the state) that I absolutely had to read it to find out what happens. I’m going to say very little about it so as not to spoil the pleasure of anyone coming to this book for the first time. Try and avoid looking up any reviews…that way, the twists as they occur will be all the more startling. I’m looking forward to seeing what this author does next. She manages a many-layered story with terrific virtuosity.

Yellowface, by Rebecca F Kuang, is the kind of book I call a “frying onions” book. Once I start one of these, I really can’t put it down, even to cook and I’ll be stirring a pot with one hand and holding the book up to read with the other. This is a story of a writer becoming hugely successful by stealing another writer’s novel. It’s tremendously good about the often mad world of publishing, and such hot button topics as cultural appropriation.  Though there are various bones one could pick with it, while you’re actually reading this book you notice none of them. It was a huge bestseller, and Rebecca E Kuang has a big following as a fantasy writer.

The North Shore by Ben Tufnell is the last book I read, but it’s so unusual and so perfectly conceived and written that I know it will stay with me in a way that only special books can. I’m not sure what to call it or how to describe it. It helps to know that the author is also a botanical illustrator, and a curator and knows a great deal about art. It’s a short book, and only partly a story about a storm on the Norfolk coast and what or who a teenage boy brings into his house…weaving in and out of this plot strand are short essays about all kinds of things and careful digressions in which various works of art are described and considered. The Green Man makes several appearances and Linda Newbery (of this parish) will be especially pleased about that. I can’t urge this book o you enough. It’s mind-boggling. I was tremendously grateful to have my phone handy, ready to look up specific art works on Google as I went along. It’s a book that has echoes of W G Sebald here and there but which is really unclassifiable. I loved it. 

Linda:

Eleanor Catton won the Booker Prize for The Luminaries, a Victorian mystery which was adapted for TV. Birnam Wood, a very different follow-up, also set in her native New Zealand, pitches a group of guerilla gardeners, led by the idealistic Mira, against Lemoine, a venture capitalist; both have ambitions, very different ones, for a farm abandoned after a landslip, and without the knowledge of the owner. When Tony Gallo, former member of Birnam Wood and aspiring journalist, learns of the deal struck between Mira and Lemoine, he's horrified that Mira has so readily sacrificed the group's ideals, and conducts his own investigation into Lemoine's activities. A catastrophic accident raises the already high tension, leading to a high-octane denouement. A compellingly literary and character-driven eco-thriller.

Naturalist Colin Tudge is well known for The Secret Life of Birds and The Secret Life of Trees. I was lucky to hear him speak recently; he's immensely knowledgeable and an engaging thinker. The Great Re-Think is an ambitious and heartfelt project in which he examines sustainability, government, ethics, environment (though 'biosphere' is his preferred term, 'environment' having been degraded by over-use and commodification), food and farming, the past and the future of how we see the planet and our place in it. His outline is that "All human action should be guided by moral/metaphysical principles on the one hand, and by the principles of ecology on the other"; neoliberalism has led to a belief that we can ignore planetary and ecological boundaries in our quest for endless growth. We do indeed need a great re-think of how we use and abuse the planet's resources - and urgently. If only there were the political will for this to happen ...

The Help by Kathryn Stockett is set in 1960s Jackson, Mississipi, 'where black maids raise white children but can't be trusted not to steal the silver'. College graduate and would-be writer Skeeter returns home to find that the maid who reared her, and whom she loved, has been dismissed. Setting herself apart from her privileged social group, she finds her niche as an author when she determines to give a voice to the black maids who service their homes and bring up and love their employers' children, only to see those children trained to share their parents' prejudice. It's been criticised as a 'white saviour' novel (of the kind condemned in Adèle's choice Yellowface), and Viola Davis, who played Aibileen in the film, said afterwards that she wouldn't now take the role, as she felt that the film wasn't focused enough on the black characters. But the novel, moving between the perspectives of Skeeter, Aibileen and Minny, does give powerful insights into the background and daily lives of black women and the stark differences between their homes and neighbourhoods and those where they work (and don't miss the Afterword by Kathryn Stockett). In fact, if anyone is thinly-drawn, in my view it's a couple of the bitchy, entitled white employers. If you've read the novel or seen the film, what do you think? Have to say that I found it completely gripping and sympathetic.

Celia:

I’ve always been a fan of the brooding, complicated, brainy detective – from Sherlock Holmes to Hieronymus Bosch by way of Adam Dalgleish. I can now add Jane Harper’s Aaron Falk to the list. I also like a good detective series and have now read all three of the books that feature Falk as the hero. I was upset to read that Exiles might be the last. Apart from their likeable hero, the books share seemingly effortlessly clever, seamless plotting. As a writer, I’m always looking for the sleight of hand, the shadow of the puppeteer’s strings. Each of the novels begins with a profound puzzle. As with all good puzzles, the solution is impossible to predict but ultimately completely convincing. It’s the steps leading to it that make for such compulsive reading. The novels are set in Australia and the continent itself is a powerful presence. The people, the landscape, the weather, extreme or benign, make these novels very much of their place. I’ve never really wanted to visit Australia, they have poisonous spiders and snakes, but after reading Exiles, I was prepared to brave such dangers and go to see this extraordinary place for myself.

Broken Light, by Joanne Harris, is as brilliant as the shards alluded to in the title. Many of the chapters are prefaced with a quotation from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s The Lady of Shallot and mirrors, glass, brittle, sharp reflective surfaces, provide a running motif from the first chapter to the last. As does Magic. Joanne Harris is a clever, restless writer who has written in many different genre since her beginning in the Magic Realism of Chocolat. Magic Realism is a notoriously difficult genre to handle and Joanne Harris does it superbly, walking a razor thin line between reality and, well, magic. The book begins with the memory of a magic show, a dazzlingly beautiful female magician, the Great Corovnik, and a trick done by mirrors. It also begins with a dream about woman being murdered in a local park: #shewasonlyrunning. The dream and the memory belong to Bernie Moon, late forties, menopausal and vanishing fast. Now she is remembering the words whispered by the Great Corovnik to her eight year old self: Make them look and Bernie does just that. Joanne Harris acknowledges Stephen King’s Carrie as one of her sources of inspiration. In King’s novel, the onset of womanhood unleashes her superpower. Joanne Harris reverses this, one of her many mirror tricks. The child Bernie had a superpower, she could see into people’s lives, into their minds, into their ‘houses’ but with her first period, she lost that power. The onset of the menopause brings it back - with a vengeance. Instead of accepting the invisibility brought on by having reached ‘a certain age’, Bernie comes to see who she really is and she Makes Them Look!

Adèle Geras and I are enthusiastic supporters of The Rest is History podcast, hosted by Tom Holland and Dominick Sandbrook. The podcast ranges far and wide. I’m constantly learning new things and new ways of looking at history: areas I already thought I knew about, subjects completely new to me. In March, they broadcast an episode rather alarmingly titled, Climate Apocalypse. Their guest was Peter Frankopan, Professor of Global History at Worcester College, Oxford and author of The Silk Roads: A New History of The World.  His latest book, The Earth Transformed: An Untold History, is if anything even more ambitious. A history of the world, written from a fundamentally environmental perspective and spanning time from c.4.5bn BC to the present. Truly global in scope, Frankopan examines the powerful effect of environmental change, how it has shaped life on earth and the lessons we can learn from previous civilisations and their responses, or their persistent failure to respond, to changes in climate. Ambitious indeed, and a very lengthy read, but fascinating and informative. As an early adopter of James Lovelock’s Gaia theory, I found it very interesting indeed and in a week when global temperatures have reached historic highs and wild fires rage across several continents, it couldn't be more timely.  

What are your best reads of the year so far? Please tell us in the comments! (They don't have to be new books.)

SECOND ANNIVERSARY post by guest Joanne Harris: RECORD OF A SPACEBORN FEW by Becky Chambers

Kyte Photography

Joanne Harris (MBE) was born in Barnsley in 1964, of a French mother and an English father. She studied Modern and Mediaeval Languages at Cambridge and was a teacher for fifteen years, during which time she published three novels, including Chocolat (1999), which was made into an Oscar-nominated film starring Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp.

Since then, she has written 15 more novels, two collections of short stories, a Dr Who novella, guest episodes for the game Zombies, Run and three cookbooks. Her books are now published in over 50 countries and have won a number of British and international awards. She is an honorary Fellow of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, has honorary doctorates in literature from the universities of Sheffield and Huddersfield, and has been a judge for the Whitbread (now Costa) Prize, the Orange Prize, the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science.

She works from a shed in her garden, plays bass in the band she first joined when she was 16, is currently writing a screenplay and lives with her husband and daughter in a little wood in Yorkshire.

The first volume of Becky Chambers’ Wayfarers trilogy, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet was by far the best sci-fi novel I'd read in a long, long time. Genuinely different to the mainstream of the genre, inclusive and compassionate, it seemed to me to be doing what speculative fiction has been trying (and mostly failing) to achieve for most of the ‘90s. Two volumes later, I am convinced that Becky Chambers is near the forefront of a long-overdue revolution in a genre that has been seen for too long as very male, very white and with a general tendency to value space battles over psychology. Not that there’s anything wrong with space battles. But, with some noble exceptions, sci-fi has traditionally been seen by many as an action genre, plot-heavy and character-light, with aliens often presented as thinly-disguised racial stereotypes, and women as love interests, rather than fully-formed protagonists.

Becky Chambers’ first novel forms part of a fresh, new wave of sci-fi. Initially self-published when mainstream publishers failed to see its potential, or to understand the deep demand among readers for increased diversity, it is lighter on plot than most sci-fi, but far richer in character development. It concentrates on powerful themes of belonging and identity, and treats the concept of alien-ness - in terms of race, gender, sexuality and culture - as something genuinely different, rather than just presenting them as humans in clever makeup. The dialogue is terrific - Joss Whedon with more empathy - and the narrative style is spare and elegant and wholly, gloriously immersive.

Record of a Spaceborn Few  carries on from The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet and A Close and Common Orbit only in that it serves to further our knowledge of the universe in which the books are set. Only one character from the first book is mentioned – and that only in passing – which means that the books can be read alone or as part of a wider exploration. I would suggest reading them all – not only because they are excellent, but because they provide an expanding overview of the author’s universe; a universe at least as important as any of the characters. Unlike most futuristic scenarios, this is a universe in which Humans are neither the dominant nor the superior species. The order that has been established within interstellar society has come from an alien culture, as has much of the technology. Humans are a minority group – white humans even more so – challenging the assumptions of so much of our traditional science fiction.

Only on the Exodus Fleet are Humans still in the majority, but the Exodus Fleet is a relic, dating from many centuries ago, still bearing the descendants of the last generation of Humans to leave Earth. This fiercely isolationist group still retains its original cultural identity, though the ancient ships are in disrepair, and supplies are always a problem. Young people wanting to explore the outside world with its many colonized planets are faced with the same kind of culture shock faced by members of certain religious groups who choose to leave their traditional environment. Some leave for good; some return, unable to face life outside the bubble.

When a disaster rocks this already fragile community, those Exodans who still call the Fleet their home are faced with an existential crisis – how to face up to the knowledge that their final destination – the stars – was reached a hundred years ago, and that they are an irrelevance in a universe that has moved on?

Within this framework, the author manages to weave themes of inclusivity and diversity into her sci-fi, along with representations of mental illness, body dysmorphia, xenophobia, depression, gender fluidity and so on - all with the most delicate touch, and in a way that feeds directly into the plot, rather than appearing pasted-in for the sake of political correctness. This is the real deal emotionally: the characters are well-rounded, original and relatable, and the underlying ideas are compassionate and true. It's also a cracking story, well-paced and compelling, with more than enough plot to satisfy, but with a nice, grown-up element of personal and emotional growth, too.

The story is seen through the eyes of a number of different characters – a young mother; a hopeful visitor struggling for acceptance; a young man desperate to leave – all these stories intertwined to make up a larger – and strangely familiar – narrative. A tale of a grieving community; a tale of misplaced ambitions; a tale of optimism and rejection; a culture willing to do almost anything rather than face the outside world. The parallels with current events are inescapable, and yet are delivered with a welcome lightness of touch.

Imagine The Grapes of Wrath, set in space, with all the intensity, heartbreak and tension that implies. And grieve a little for the fact that the mainstream literary world is so slow in acknowledging the scope, skill and literary value of sci-fi - although frankly, anyone who scorns sci-fi as a lesser genre really doesn't deserve to read anything as splendid as this.

Record of a Spaceborn Few is published by Hodder & Stoughton.

A POCKETFUL OF CROWS by Joanne M Harris

"Ultimately, it's a tale of survival and of female strength and resilience..."

Linda Newbery has written widely for young readers and is now working on her second novel for adults. See more on her website.

Before getting far into this beguiling novella, I found myself thinking of folk ballads such as Tam Lin and The Demon Lover and hearing the voices of Maddy Prior, Martin Carthy and Sandy Denny. On finishing, I looked up The Child Ballads, 295, which inspired it (I am as brown as brown can be / And my eyes as black as sloe; I am as brisk as brisk can be / An wild as forest doe) and found that both Maddy Prior (with Steeleye Span) and Martin Carthy have indeed made recordings; I've added the link to the Steeleye Span version at the end of this piece, and you can listen to Martin Carthy on Spotify.

The story is steeped in folklore, from references to Jack-in-the-Green, the May Queen and the Winter King to the passing of the months marked by their moons: Hunter's Moon, Blood Moon and others, each carrying its own superstitions. We're in territory familiar from folk ballads - love, death, betrayal and revenge, and bewitchment by a creature not human but faery. Here our perspective is that of the enchanter, who to regain her true self must in turn free herself from bewitchment. 

"I have no name," this bonny brown girl tells us. "The travelling folk have neither name nor master. A named thing is a tamed thing." But when given a name by her human lover, she loses her power of shape-shifting, of taking on animal forms - hare, vixen, frog or nightingale, as she chooses. After the young aristocrat William names her Malmuira, meaning Dark Lady of the Mountains, she thinks: "I wear (my name) like a golden crown. I wear it like a collar ... I am a wild bird in a snare;" and is restlessly limited to her own self. 

There are inherent dangers in romances between mortals and faerie folk, as Katherine Langrish describes in an eloquent and wide-ranging piece in Seven Miles of Steel Thistles*. "Whether mortals woo, ravish or capture supernatural women, whether mortals themselves are carried off or seduced, marrying a fairy bride nearly always leads to grief at best, to death at worst." Our bonny brown girl is both enchanted and enchantress, destined to fall in love with William, and he with her, from the moment she picks up the adderstone, a love-charm left by a village girl at the hawthorn tree that stands within a stone circle.

Inevitably, their love is short-lived: "My love he was so high and proud / His fortune too so high / He for another pretty maid / Me left and passed me by."  Our bonny brown girl, though, isn't going to retreat to her woodland cave to pine and die: in the form of a wolf she has ripped out the throats of sheep, so we know she can be ruthless. Now she plans revenge, with the help of hawthorn - an ageless female figure who gives her a seemingly impossible spell (bringing to mind another folk ballad, Scarborough Fair) by which she can free herself of her bond to William, and punish him. William has tangled with the traveller folk at high risk to himself.

Ultimately, it's a tale of survival and of female strength and resilience. Who is that village girl? Who is hawthorn? And who is the white-headed crow, our bonny brown girl's companion and messenger as she goes into exile, accused of witchcraft? It all comes together both surprisingly and satisfyingly. 

Many readers will know Joanne Harris from her very popular Chocolat, Gentlemen and Players and others. As Joanne M Harris she writes stories inspired by mythology, and here she has found a sure-footed style which is lyrical without being indulgent. "I have no need of silks and furs. I have no need of servants. I have the silk of the dragonfly's wing, the snowy coat of the winter hare. I have the gold of the morning sun, the colours of the Northlights." Fine pencil drawings by Bonnie Helen Hawkins show animals and vegetation in realistic detail - I was particularly impressed by the wolves, and by William on his rearing horse - while for characters she doesn't go for Burne-Jones-like ethereality but for expressive, vivacious faces which could be those of modern teenagers. Gollancz have made this beautiful little book a pleasure to handle.

A Pocketful of Crows is published by Gollancz.

Listen to Steeleye Span: The Brown Girl

Katherine Langrish's Seven Miles of Steel Thistles is published by Greystones Press, reviewed for Writers Review by Penny Dolan here.