EIGHTH BIRTHDAY SPECIAL FEATURE: our best reads of 2024 so far, by Adèle Geras, Linda Newbery and Celia Rees

 

Part two of our 8th birthday celebration!

Adèle:

Lionel Shriver's new novel Mania is about the near future where cleverness has been forbidden and it's a crime to be clever. There is no distinction between intelligence and stupidity, but no one is to be called stupid or dumb or thick or any synonym for these words. This conceit is taken to the extreme: our protagonist, Pearson, almost loses her job as a college lecturer because she dares to teach The Idiot by Dostoevsky in one of her courses. She was born a Jehovah's Witness but has escaped from her background and now has a husband who's a tree surgeon and three children. She has a son and a daughter, (born with the use of a donor) who are very clever indeed. Her second daughter, born to Pearson and her husband after the introduction of the new laws, becomes a danger to the household by her adherence to the rules. The results of such a law play out in disasters. Bridges collapse. Planes fall out of the sky. Doctors are no longer required to study medicine. There is no such thing as intellectual rigour or careful science. So far, so Swiftian. It's written with all the sharpness and brio we associate with the author of We need to talk about Kevin but it's also about the importance of close friendship and love (of your spouse and your children) and personal betrayal and forgiveness. It's about the way we navigate our lives in the face of horrendous goings on in the wider world. It's quite a short book and very fast moving and even if you don't agree with Shriver's take on things, you will never not want to turn the page.

I haven't yet watched the Netflix version of One Day by David Nicholls but I was very upset by the book because (no spoilers!) it didn't end in the way I was expecting. His latest novel You are Here is a joy from start to finish. And starting and finishing is relevant. It's about a walk undertaken by a group of people: the Coast to Coast walk. Maps are provided throughout and many details about this walk are included seamlessly in the story. The main narrative is about two people: Michael, a Geography teacher with problems and an editor, Marnie, who is also far from happy in her private life. She has made the mistake of bringing some work along with her for the walk and her descriptions of the book she's editing and her remarks about editing in general are a really hilarious highlight. The fact that Michael teaches Geography is a short cut to having the landscape and natural surroundings described for us with enormous skill and subtlety. We learn things without knowing we're learning them. I try to say as little as possible about the plots of novels but this is the perfect book to take on holiday. It's truly engaging and engrossing and totally satisfying. Read it before it's on Netflix.

My final choice is a poetry book. Nic Aubury writes short, rhyming poems in the Wendy Cope tradition and I guarantee that even if you think poetry is not your thing, you will find something here to make you laugh and think at the same time. The collection is called Things my Children Think I'm Wrong About. Instead of telling you about it, I will quote two poems in full. They're that short!

No Right Turn

We'd rather go on suffering the pain of our mistakes,
pretending this was really what we wanted all along,
and promising to see it through, no matter what it takes,
than face the mild discomfort of admitting we were wrong.

Polonian

If I were more convincing and
my children more convincible
then this would be the wisdom I'd impart:
be ready to abandon an
opinion, not a principle,
and learn to tell those different things apart.

Linda: 

All Among the Barley by Melissa Harrison is set in rural Suffolk in 1933, narrated (with hindsight) by fourteen-year-old Edith. The First World War is still a recent memory, the farm affected by the loss of Doble's son and the emotional scarring of horseman John, while there are also foreshadowings of the war to come, brought into focus by the arrival of Constance, a young journalist from London. At first Constance seems to offer Edith an escape route from the inevitability of marriage to a local lad, childbearing and farm work; but her obsession with rural traditions soon reveals a disturbing affinity with Nazi ideals of nationalism and racial 'purity'. Melissa Harrison's beautiful observations of countryside, weather and routines give the novel a real grounding in time and place, with a sense of wistfulness - the corncrakes, nightjars and turtle doves are part of Edith's experience but largely lost from ours.

Middle England by Jonathan Coe moves from 2010 through general elections, the Brexit referendum and London Olympics and on to 2018 (in the future at the time of publication). Known as a chronicler of our times and the various attitudes, biases and aspirations of the public, Coe looks at this turbulent time from the perspectives of characters including political journalist Doug, Ben Trotter who finds unexpected success as a novelist, and lecturer Sophie who deplores her mother-in-law’s casual racism, finds herself at serious odds with her new husband over Brexit and is suspended from her university post over a casual remark to a transgender student. In this larger-than-life, still topical, left-leaning but not one-sided novel, Coe blends pathos, seriousness and comedy with a deft touch. I especially enjoyed the snippy conversations between socialist Doug and a Downing Street press apologist for ‘Dave’ (i.e. Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton). 

Lauren Bravo's How to Break Up with Fast Fashion may seem a peculiar choice for someone too old and certainly not enough interested in fashion to be the target audience. But a friend lent it to me because I was organising a Clothes Swap for Great Big Green Week, and I found it both entertaining and a source of information and advice. Knowing nothing of Lauren Bravo, I immediately warmed to her humour and empathy. Once a self-confessed fashion victim, she challenged herself to a year of nothing new, and realised how addicted she'd become to the thrill of seeking out and buying new garments - something the fashion industry is adept at encouraging, with temptations and 'must-haves' flaunted everywhere. Alongside shocking facts about the waste and pollution of fast fashion and the abysmal working conditions and pay for many textile workers, she suggests ways to do better: seeking out charity shop bargains or vintage clothes; swapping with friends; hiring outfits for special occasions like weddings instead of buying something that will spend the rest of its life in a wardrobe; and of course simply buying less and making the most of what we already have. She looks too at ethical fashion and how to avoid 'greenwashing'; most brands now make some kind of sustainability claim, but how can we be sure we're not paying for worker exploitation, use of hazardous chemicals in the dyeing process, or animal abuse? There are websites such as Good On You and Ethical Consumer where fashion brands are assessed and compared. An irresistible read that looks beneath the surface of new-new-new.

Celia Rees

I first read George Orwell's 1984 in the sixties but I was seeing so much that is relevant to our world now, that I really had to re-read it. The year, 1984, is never mentioned in the novel. Clearly, the writer's deliberate choice. One neat theory is that Orwell reversed the numbers of the year in which he was writing his dystopian future, arriving at 1984. Sufficiently distant, but unsettlingly close. When 1984, the actual year, arrived, Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister. I remember her crowing that Orwell had got it wrong and I remember thinking, 'No, you're wrong, Maggie. He was spot on.' 1984 is a novel of no time and all time. Orwell was writing when television was in its infancy. Now his tele screens are everywhere. I'm looking at one now and have another beside me on my desk, another downstairs in the living room and still others scattered round the house. We carry the means of our own surveillance in our homes and outside it we have CCTV and Facial Recognition. The slogan Orwell coined, Big Brother Is Watching You, is universally recognised. He might be, might not be, we don't know, not for sure, but we've made sure that he can. So much of the novel has uncomfortable modern resonance. The world has changed in ways he could not have imagined but the underlying impulse towards totalitarian power and control that he foresaw remain the same. The destruction of language and thought complexity, which he calls Newspeak, is present in the deliberate limitations of X (ex Twitter) and TikTok and in the Gifs, text language and emojis of WhatsApp, social media posting and messaging. The inversions of meaning: Ministry of Truth for Lies,  Love for Hate, Peace for War, and so on, are present in Alternative Facts, False Truths, Fake News and are part of of our everyday lives. Technology has brought Orwell's dystopia that much closer. He might not have got it all right, but he gave use fair warning. Let's hope we heed it.     

The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson. I first came to Jon Ronson through his podcast series, Things Fell Apart. The title is taken from the W. B. Yeats' poem, The Second Coming. Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. In the first series, Ronson looked at the plethora of conspiracy theories swirling on the internet and traced them back to their sometimes surprising origins. The second series, explored the culture wars and did pretty much the same thing. Ronson is an engaging journalist but beneath his informal, gonzo, faux naive cover he is a serious and meticulous investigator. The Men Who Stare at Goats begins with the disclaimer: This is a true story. It then goes on to describe how a man hurls himself at his office wall convinced that he has the power to pass through it into the office next door by mind and will power alone. He doesn't, of course. He ends up with a bruised nose. All a little bit weird and quirky, except that he is a Major General,  the U.S. Army's Chief of Intelligence with 16,000 soldiers under his command.  From this starting point, Ronson tracks backwards to the Vietnam War and 1960's alternative culture, forwards through the U.S. Military top secret psyops goat staring operations to the chilling application of torture techniques developed during the Bush Administration's war on terror. 

Empire of Pain by Patrick Redden Keefe is the story of the Sackler family, one of the richest families in the world, best known, until relevantly recently, for their patronage of the arts, museums and academia. Their name adorned the walls of the National Gallery, the Tate, the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Louvre, Harvard and Oxford Universities but a visitor to any of those institutions today, would find that name removed. Empire of Pain tells us why. Extraordinarily secretive, three generations of Sacklers deliberately obscured the source of their immense fortune.  It lay in the manufacture and marketing of two highly addictive drugs that they made ubiquitous, first the tranquillizer, Vallium (Mother's Little Helper) and then the powerful, opioid painkiller, OxyContin. The relentless, aggressive marketing of OxyContin, particularly the claims that the drug was virtually non addictive, generated thirty billion dollars of income for the Sackler family and triggered an opiate epidemic in America that has brought misery to millions of Americans and claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. The story of how this happened, the unmasking of the family behind the crisis and the extraordinarily challenging task of bringing them to account is unputdownable. A real life thriller.  

Don't miss the guest post by our birthday guest, award-winning crime writer Simon Mason!

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.)

Sixth birthday round-up: Adèle Geras, Celia Rees and Linda Newbery

Adèle, Celia and Linda share the books that have impressed them so far this year.

Adèle:

Tansy Devoy by Anne Fine.  A disclaimer: Anne is a friend, but alas, many of my closest friend are excellent writers (cf Linda Newbery and Celia Rees of this parish). This tale is of a social worker trying to find out whether the young girl she's investigating is sad or bad. Is the way she's behaved seemingly since the day she was born the result of nature or nurture?  We don't find out till quite late in the story what Tansy has done and along the way, we meet teachers, family and see what effect Tansy has had on everyone she's met. Fine grabs your attention with her first person narrative and you can't stop reading. I loved it.

Bad Actors by Mick Herron: I've been a passionate Herron fan since the appearance of the first novel in his Slough House series, Slow Horses. This has now been turned into a wonderful TV series on Apple TV. I'm so glad that this has catapulted the denizens of Slough House to the top of the spy genre pile. I adore these books, because not only are they exciting and hilarious, but they're also some of the best-written books I've come across in a long while. The beginning of Slow Horse is knowingly  Dickensian. I'm delighted at Herron's success. It's very well-deserved.

Left on Tenth: a second chance at life by Delia Ephron. Readers of this blog will know how much I love Delia Ephron. I reviewed her novel Siracusa and I do still recommend that, especially if you're  going on  holiday any time soon. This book is non-fiction and it's just as brilliant. It begins with the death of Delia's beloved husband. After becoming a widow, Delia finds love again and it's this late love that gets her through the terrible disease that strikes her. The writing of this book tells us at the outset that cancer was overcome, but the oonclusion is: love helps enormously. Delia's sister, Nora Ephron, died of cancer and that haunts Delia as she lies on her sickbed. It's a warm, heartfelt, funny and terribly sad story but most of all it proves the truth of Larkin's words: "What will survive of us is love."

Linda: 

Regenesis: how to feed the world without devouring the planet by George Monbiot. Like many readers, I know and admire George Monbiot as environment writer for The Guardian and as an eloquent speaker and campaigner. This being a subject close to my heart, I bought a copy on publication. I didn't know that his background is in zoology, one of many areas in which he's tremendously knowledgeable. Regenesis looks at our farming systems and how we must urgently move away from intensive animal farming (though as I know from experience, it's an uphill struggle to convince people to change long-established eating habits) if we're to have any chance of reducing carbon emissions, and how we must understand and respect the soil and its complex ecosystems if we're to avoid exhausting its potential for growing crops to feed us. A must-read for those of us who recognise that business as usual will destroy the planet. 

Tenderness by Alison MacLeod has been reviewed here by Jane Rogers and it was on her recommendation that I read it. What a tour de force! Daring, original and wide-ranging, it moves from D H Lawrence's death in Italy, back to his stay in a Sussex artistic community and forward to the Lady Chatterley trial. Another thread portrays Jackie Kennedy in the months leading up to her husband's election as President, and her interest in the novel which FBI chief J Edgar Hoover tries to use as a gambit against Kennedy's campaign. Wonderful, eloquent writing throughout. I shall look out for more by this bold, accomplished author.

Derek Jarman's Garden: After seeing photographs and reading about Prospect Cottage, I at last visited in July and was captivated both by this iconic garden and by the unique landscape and atmosphere of Dungeness, with the nuclear power station looming in the background. On my return a friend lent me this book: Derek Jarman's notes, reflections and poems, the last book he wrote before his death in 1994. Weakened by illness he finds inspiration in the garden he's shaped, collecting stones, driftwood and rusted metal to make sculptures and pebble garlands. "A cold, grey day. I write the poems, and while the poems form the rain blows in. Slowly the puddles gather at the roadside. Then, as the day draws to a close, sunlight floods the Ness and the wet shingle glistens like pearls of Vermeer light." Photography by Howard Sooley lovingly captures the uniqueness of the garden and its maker.

I couldn't possibly leave out Mother's Boy by Patrick Gale (I think we all loved this, but I got here first). It's based on the life of Cornish poet Charles Causley, relating his childhood, adolescence and naval experience, Charles's viewpoint alternating with that of his devoted mother Laura. Patrick Gale has described this as ‘a story of someone becoming a writer’, and although Charles was musically talented too, we see his early efforts at drama win him popularity in service life, where he became a coder first at sea (difficult, as he was hopelessly seasick), then in Gibraltar. He lived an uneventful life post-war, living with his mother until her death in a small Cornish town, but Gale draws on the poetry to enlarge on his inner life and sexuality, while Laura, in his depiction, has her own story. A poignant, absorbing read, as readers of Patrick Gale will expect. Read our Q&A with Patrick here.

Celia:

The Wrath To Come: Gone With The Wind and The Lies America Tells by Sarah Churchwell: I have long admired Professor Sarah Churchwell for her fearless writing and journalism; her powerful and distinguished work as historian and academic. The Wrath To Come examines the American Civil War and its legacy through the lens of Margaret Mitchell's novel Gone With The Wind and David O. Selsnick's subsequent film adaptation. Margaret Mitchell, a native of Atlanta, Georgia, from an antebellum plantation and thus slave owning family, published Gone With The Wind in 1938. The novel sold a million copies in the first six months of publication and remains one of the best selling novels of all time. The film was similarly successful. It won a slew of Oscars, including Vivian Leigh for her Scarlett O'Hara and is one of the highest grossing films ever. This huge success has promoted both film and book to 'cultural phenomenon'. Everyone has seen it, read it, or at least heard of it. Rhett Butler's 'Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn' tops the list of the most famous movie lines. The trouble, as Sarah Churchill sees it, is the whole novel is based on romantic myths and lies about the Confederacy, the Old South, the Lost Cause. It deliberately ignores the realities of slavery, of a slave owning society with its implicit assumption of White Supremacy and its legacy of routine violence, judicial and actual, against African Americans. It is all there in the novel, but it is mediated by Mitchell. Sarah Churchwell looks with different eyes. She teases myth from reality and forensically demonstrates how the extraordinary success of Gone With The Wind, book and film, amplified these myths down through the years, becoming one of the defining stories  America tells itself and making it possible for a Confederate flag to be unfurled in an insurrectionist storming of the Capitol, a place where it had never flown before. Some things cannot be consigned to History. Some myths have to be debunked.     

Dead Lions by Mick Herron. Like my fellow Writers Reviewer, Adèle Geras, I am a huge Mick Herron fan, and I would have been reviewing Bad Actors, if she hadn't got there first. I'm re-reading his second book, Dead Lions and I may re-read the others. I rarely re-visit anything but I have to confess to gobbling his books too quickly the first time round.  The novels are extremely funny and hugely entertaining, the closest we've got to a satire of modern politics, politicians, apparatchiks and Whitehall obfuscation and general incompetence. As he says, 'In the past couple of years, no matter how far you push [the story], something stupider and even worse is going on in the real world.' Herron's novels are the opposite of the conventional spy novel, although he acknowledges a debt to Le Carré: 'John Le Carré gave me permission to become a writer - he showed me you could invent an entire world, invent its language, too.' Like Adèle, I am mighty pleased to see Mick Herron enjoying such well deserved success and thoroughly enjoyed the Apple TV series and Gary Oldman's playing of the appalling Jackson Lamb, the boss of the Slow Horses. Not exactly an overnight success, Dead Lions was turned down by his first publisher. Herron jumped ship, found a publisher who could see the potential and who was willing to give the books another chance. He describes himself as a 'rescue author'. I like that. 

The Power of The Dog by Thomas Savage. During lockdown, I joined a book club run by my friend Julia in South Wales by the magic of Zoom, I'd never been in a book club before and it was a new experience to read books I would not necessarily have chosen. One of these titles was The Power of The Dog. I had seen and enjoyed the Jane Campion film, as had the rest of the group (there was some discussion as to whether Benedict Cumberbatch has the legs for a cowboy) and I welcomed the chance to read the book that had inspired the adaptation. My first surprise was to discover that the book was written in 1967. The author was Montana born and ranched raised so the novel, set in 1924, is his lived and remembered experience. It casts an unusual and authentic light on another of America's myths about itself, 'The American West'. As a Western novel, it is out of time. There are motor cars and wirelesses. It contained none of the tropes of the traditional Western. This is a real world and it's  changing. The two brothers, George and Phil, reflect this. George is a prosperous, modern rancher, he has a wife, a house, meetings with the bank manager. Phil hankers for a romanticised past that may never have really existed. He is full of contradictions: classically educated, he won't even wash before eating. His overt, über masculinity is an elaborate cloak for his homosexuality which is ultimately his nemesis. A clever book and an impressive movie. Thank you Book Club for making me read it.  

Don't miss our special birthday guest post by Michael Arditti!