NEW YEAR ROUND-UP: More authors and booksellers tell us what's on their reading piles

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Susan Price:  Having just finished reading Dennis Hamley’s wonderful, subtle The Hare Trilogy, deciding what to read next will be difficult. My friend Karen Bush has just sent me Inheritance, a collection of short stories by a Robin Hobb, a writer we both admire. Another friend, Linda Strachan, has sent me her Guide To Writing for Children, which is a must-read. Visiting my local charity shop resulted in the purchase of Bryson’s A Walk In The Woods. And I firmly intend to re-read Isabella Tree’s Wilding, which I found exciting the first time.

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Ross Bradshaw of Five Leaves Bookshop, Nottingham:  Have I read the Australian writer Patrick White before? I can't remember but a customer said I really have to read Riders in the Chariot (Vintage), which is about four independently damaged and discarded people wandering round the wreckage of a once fine city ... oh dear. But the cover blurb says there is a possibility of redemption. I hope so.

Discourse on Colonialism by Aime Cesaire (Monthly Review) comprises a short essay and material about this essay, first published in 1955 and is our bookshop open book group read in January. We try to vary our reading between fiction and non-fiction, and this came out of our discussion of James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain. The bookshop recently put on a talk by Priyamvada Gopal on her Insurgent Empire (Verso) which was inspirational, as part of an irregular series of events on race and Empire and this is a developing theme among our intellectual and activist customers. It's decades since I read Frantz Fanon and Edward Said but their work seems to be reaching a new generation. I need to revise.

I'm a sucker for Patti Smith so I'm saving her Year of the Monkey (Bloomsbury) for the two day Christmas break (poor old retailers, eh?). At heart I want to be Patti Smith, sitting in a cafe in New York munching sourdough toast with olive oil dribbled on it, drinking black coffee and rocking out in the evening. I do wear the same cap as she does, which is a start but it's too late to have been a friend of Robert Mapplethorpe and Allen Ginsberg. Here she wanders round the American west coast, writing her short dreamlike essays, illustrated by her usual Polaroid pictures.

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Wes Magee:  In 1975 I traipsed to the Poetry Society HQ in Earls Court, London, and listened to a bespectacled, slight young man talk about his recently published first book. He reported the book’s unheralded emergence, and how ‘traffic continued to flow along the Brompton Road.’ Thus did I discover Ian McEwan’s collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, and marvelled at such a confident debut. Since then he has gone on to become a multi-award-winning author, whose novels unfailingly surprise with their virtuosity. I have read the lot, and it is with high anticipation that I look forward to opening his 18th, Machines Like Me, on New Year’s Day, 2020.

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Rachel Phipps of The Woodstock Bookshop: The book I am most looking forward to reading is Actress by Anne Enright, which comes out at the end of February. I have to come clean and admit I read the proof, but a member of staff has snaffled it and I desperately want to re-read it. She is such a good writer, and this is about an actress and her daughter and their relationship – the daughter’s attempt to reconstruct and understand her mother’s life. I loved it and can’t wait to read it again, which is rare. I have a few days break over Christmas and will take books that I meant to read properly and haven’t – Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellman, which I have been eyeing in the shop since it first appeared and reading little bits of here and there. It is over a thousand pages which does tend to deter people, but the few pages I have read are enticing. And A Kitchen in the Corner of the House, a collection of stories by Tamil writer Ambai, beautifully produced by Archipelago Books.

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Linda Newbery:  I've already had one go but am allowing myself a second slot, for non-fiction. These two titles, Animal Languages and The Hidden Life of Trees, will complement each other: both look at the lives and communications of non-human creatures, from whale songs and the apparently complex information shared by prairie dogs to the mysteries of the 'wood wide web' by which trees nurture each other and create ecosystems. Both should illuminate how much in the natural world is overlooked by our anthropocentric short-sightedness.

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 Daniel Hahn: Books I’m excited about for the early months of next year? OK, I’ve narrowed it down painfully to, um, thirteen, some of which I’ve read and some I’m looking forward to. My pair of top tips, though, both of which I have read and mean to read again:

Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season, translated by Sophie Hughes, is an utterly ferocious piece of storytelling from Mexico; it’s a village story, in part a story of mystery and myth, but told with uncompromising realist brutality and a kind of incandescence from which it’s impossible to look away.

Colum McCann’s Apeirogon is a novel of Israel and Palestine – it is huge and thrillingly original and political and intimate and perhaps the best book I’ve read this year. But I’m not telling you any more than that. Just order it now.

But oh, there’s so much else besides those two. Also in January/February we have Bae Suah’s Untold Night and Day, currently next on my TBR; Andrew Krivak’s strange and mesmerising The Bear (I loved this – a proper read-in-a-couple-of-sittings kind of book); Intan Paramaditha’s The Wandering, which I have not yet read but which looks intriguingly like a sort of grown-up Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story from Indonesia; and Paul B. Preciado’s bold, provocative and thought-provoking An Apartment on Uranus. Then through the spring we have the very short and very gripping Elly, by Maike Wetzel, and many new books by familiar greats: Samanta Schweblin coming in April, and Judith Schlansky, Andrés Neuman and Yuri Herrera in June. June is also when we get David Trueba's Rolling Fields (I loved this) - oh, and there’s a début by Elaine Feeney to look out for. It's called As You Were - I’m only fifty pages in and it’s already bursting with emotional power.

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... and finally, an unusual approach from Sally Prue:  I've just read a library book chosen by a friend (just get anything! I'd said) about Edward VII's mistress Mrs Keppel. It was scattered with dreadful ahistorical generalisations and horrible snobbishness, and I enjoyed it hugely. I have therefore resolved that next year I shall read a) completely random books (I've usually neglected the bottom shelves in the library because of the strain to the knees and eyes) as well as b) as some scorned ones. For instance, I’ve never read Jeffrey Archer. Can he really be as bad as all that. Can he? I shall find out!

Guest review by Susan Price: THE THIRD POLICEMAN by Flann O'Brien

"Blends a keen sense of wonder and beauty, with poetry, comedy, horror and despair. I don’t think there is another book like it." 

Susan Price has written everything from picture book texts to ‘cross-over’ novels like The Sterkarm Handshake, which won the Guardian Children’s Fiction Award but is read by teenagers and adults alike. Her book The Ghost Drum won the Carnegie Medal. She is one of the bloggers at Authors Electric. Susan Price’s website is here.

“Not everybody knows how I killed old Phillip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with my spade; but first it is better to speak of my friendship with John Divney because it was he who first knocked old Mathers down by giving him a great blow in the neck with a special bicycle-pump which he manufactured himself out of a hollow iron bar. Divney was a strong civil man but he was lazy and idle-minded. He was personally responsible for the whole idea in the first place. It was he who told me to bring my spade. He was the one who gave the orders on the occasion and also the explanations when they were called for.

"I was born a long time ago…”

That’s the opening of The Third Policeman,  and it contains a psychology of psychopathy. The cool, unemotional account of a violent murder. The ranking of murder as equal in importance to the manufacture of a bicycle-pump, and the instant shifting of blame.

Flann O’ Brien is known as a ‘comic writer.’ This is a ‘comic novel.’ It’s also a masterpiece.

It is very funny — and also bizarre, poetic and despairing. It’s sinister. This is sinister, eerie, unsettling comedy.

I first read The Third Policeman thirty years ago, and on re-reading, I find I remembered the comic scenes most: the atomic theory, as applied to bicycles and Irish roads; the men who are more than 75% bicycle; the delicate legal matter of deciding, when a man who is predominately bicycle, commits a murder, which should be hung? The man or the bicycle?

I remembered the book as much more light-hearted than, on re-reading, it actually is. Scathingly funny, yes. Comic in the sense of ‘holding human nature up to ridicule.’ In its inventiveness and originality, it's even playful. But light-hearted? No.

On second-reading, I still laughed at the scenes set in the police station — O’Brien’s inventiveness and verbal audacity is second to none — but was more struck by the poetry of many passages, and how frightening much of it is. I’ve read whole ghost stories that don’t manage to convey such a sense of menace and ill-omen, as, in a few lines, O’Brien does.

The prose is beautiful. O'Brien could move, with ease and perfect rhythm, often in the same passage, from the cant of the pub, to officialise, to poetry.

As I read, certain images kept coming into my mind, all drawn from ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,’ with its strange, skewed perspectives.

“As I came round the bend of the road an extraordinary spectacle was presented to me. About a hundred yards away on the left-hand side was a house which astonished me. It looked as if it were painted like an advertisement on a board on the roadside and indeed very poorly painted. It looked completely false and unconvincing. It did not seem to have any depth or breadth and looked as if it would not deceive a child… What bewildered me was the sure knowledge deeply rooted in my mind that this was the house I was searching for… I had never seen with my eyes ever in my life before anything so unnatural and appalling and my gaze faltered about the thing uncomprehendingly as if at least one of the customary dimensions was missing, leaving no meaning in the remainder. The appearance of the house was the greatest surprise I had encountered since I had seen the old man in the chair and I felt afraid of it.”

'My gaze faltered about the thing...' What a phrase.

This sense of nothing being as it should be, of indeterminate dread, pervades the book — and is part of the very narration, with its cool, detached, measured descriptions of terrors and shocks.

The nameless narrator, who tells us he can’t remember his own name, is an orphan and, due to an accident, has a wooden leg. He has inherited a fortune, but by the time he is adult and returns to his farm, the money has been squandered by the caretaker, John Divney.

Both the narrator and Divney are keen to replenish the fortune — Divney so he can marry, and the narrator so he can publish a book on the scientist, De Selby, with whom he has become obsessed.

Asides and footnotes on De Selby make up a substantial part of the book, adding both to its oddness and its cool, detached manner. Among De Selby’s theories is the notion that darkness is a contaminating vapour which emanates from holes in the earth, and contributes to disease because we inhale it. This was once a genuinely held theory of the nature of darkness, before it was established that darkness is an absence of light, rather than a thing in itself.

De Selby also argues that if we angle enough mirrors, to give enough successive reflections of ourselves, we could look into our past. He claims, by setting up many mirrors, to have glimpsed himself at the age of eleven. Many of his theories seem to be twisted, or over-literal understandings of relativity or quantum theory, while their twisting of time and space relate to the literally twisted perspective in the description of the book’s world.

In pursuit of fortune, the narrator and Divney murder an old man, Mathers. Divney makes off with the cash-box, which he hides, saying they must spend none of the money until suspicion has died down.

Eventually, Divney reveals that he has hidden the box in Mather’s house. They go together, one night, to the deserted half-ruinous murder house, and while Divney waits outside, the narrator goes in to fetch the box. From this moment on, the book, already strange, becomes increasingly bizarre. The narrator climbs through a window:-

“I clambered through the opening and found myself, not at once in a room, but crawling along the deepest window-ledge I have ever seen. When I reached the floor and jumped noisily down upon it, the open window seemed very far away and much too small to have admitted me.”

He discovers that the cash-box has gone. And then:—

“I heard a cough behind me, soft, and natural yet more disturbing than any sound that could come upon the human ear. That I did not die of fright was due to two things, the fact that my senses were already disarranged and also that…the cough seemed to bring with it some more awful alteration in everything, just as if it had held the universe standstill for an instant…”

The narrator then takes tea with the old man he has murdered.

I don’t want to spoil the book by detailing the narrator’s adventures after that. Suffice to say that he meets with two enormous policemen, Sergeant Pluck and Constable MacCruiskeen, and also with his own soul. We learn about MacCruiskeen’s mind-boggling hobbies, and even more about De Selby’s experiments. We meet the brotherhood of one-legged men, visit Eternity and, eventually, meet the third policeman, Sergeant Fox.

If the book has a message, I understand it to be that Evil is self-centred, self-aggrandising, futile and barren. And, possibly, that to be such a person is its own punishment, though they will never understand that.

In fact, a lack of understanding is one of the book’s themes. The narrator obsessively studies the works of De Selby, trying to understand them — but his understanding of the world around him seems to dwindle as his knowledge of De Selby increases.

The Third Policeman is a book that blends a keen sense of wonder and beauty, with poetry, comedy, horror and despair. I don’t think there is another book like it — except those others by Flann O’Brien, whose real name was Brian O'Nolan.

His first novel, At-Swim-Two-Birds (also a must-read) was published, and acclaimed, in 1939.

The Third Policeman was his second novel, and it was turned down. It wasn’t published until 1967, after the author’s death, when it was recognised for the wonderful piece of writing it is.

I wonder if, these days, any conventional publisher would accept it at all?

The Third Policeman is published by Dalkey Archive Press