Tag: book review

Goodbye Europe: Writers and artists say farewell

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Goodbye Europe is a collection of pieces by various artists and writers of various backgrounds and focuses that looks at Britain’s connection to Europe and people’s feelings about being European post-Brexit. Perhaps inevitably, it is predominantly pro-Europe and pro-Remain, featuring a variety of personal recollections of times in Europe, thoughts on Brexit and national mentality, and the odd bit of fiction or humour.

Even for Remain-supporting readers, it is quite a strange experience to read it. Most people are sick of hearing about Brexit by now, or have been trying not to think about it any more than necessary for their own mental wellbeing. Many of the pieces are undeniably good, but there is something jarring—especially as a twentysomething reader—to hear how great it was to visit Europe in the 1970s and 80, or have the chance to live there. Perhaps it is a book for older people who can look back with a plethora of memories of Europe, rather than a desperate wish for those days not to be over.

One of the best piece is one by a fifteen-year-old who won a prize to be included in the collection, because it strikes a chord with how many young people felt about their future and their hopes and dreams after the referendum, especially those too young to vote. The humorous inclusions are good, too: like watching Have I Got News For You, repetitive news is good to find jokes in. Jacob Rees-Mogg seems to be in there to provide “balance” or as a kind of publicity stunt, particularly as it seems unlikely many people who strongly believe in leaving the EU would buy or read a collection of essays which are almost entirely pro-Europe.

The collection doesn’t feel like it has much hope for the future, though a few of the contributors have a stab at suggestions. The real audience for this book has got to be people with decades of memories of feeling European and visiting Europe, who want to enjoy thinkpieces and reminiscences that often look back to these times. It is fond, but for younger readers, it is like being told how great things were before you were born, or old enough to appreciate them.

Winter by Ali Smith

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Winter is the next in Ali Smith’s seasonal novels that began with Autumn last year. As with the previous one, this is a novel both about a season and characters in that season, and a novel about modern Britain and strange contradictions and times in the country. When four people gather for Christmas in a large old house in Cornwall, they bring together their own personal truths, but these don’t all match up. Two warring sisters, a son being falsified on the internet, and a stranger he wants to masquerade as someone important find themselves together in winter, for better or for worse.

From the opening pages, Smith intermingles the idea of winter—a tough, cold, stark time—with the modern world and a post-truth era in which people can believe totally opposite things as the objective truth. She asks, in a world where everything—art, love, romance, god, every media form and method of communication—is proclaimed dead on a regular basis, what happens in winter when nature reflects this deadness? Like with Autumn, the story itself feels almost incidental, some people who happen to be written together, their lives connected by art and nature and relationship.

The strange position of Lux, a girl paid to pretend to be someone’s girlfriend whilst visiting his mother, is a highlight, the kind of transitory character that Smith writes well and who feels well into her transformative writing style. The expected punning and witty style is there, but also feels a little more sparse, maybe wintry.

The novel features many classic elements of Smith’s writing, a fitting follow up to Autumn, but also gets across the post-truth, Trump and Twitter age surprisingly well, mingling the failings of human memory and the certainty of disagreeing siblings into a new form of fake news. This is the perfect book to read over the holiday season this year to reflect on the season and the year in delightful style.

Peach by Emma Glass

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Dark, poetic prose: Peach by Emma Glass

Peach is a visceral book about a girl who has been assaulted, written in an unforgettably immediate style. Peach comes home bloody and plagued by the smell of meat, but her parents are too preoccupied with their new baby to ask the right questions. She goes to college to see her boyfriend Green, but still nothing is right. Her body is wrong. Glass uses a distinctive style written in sharp immediacy to show Peach’s thoughts and actions after she is attacked.

This short novel is an exercise in darkly poetic prose that takes a difficult subject and inhabits the trauma of the experience. At times it is so visceral that it is painful to read and its depiction of the aftermath of sexual assault and the mental processes of the main character mean that any reader needs to be aware of this content before reading, but it is also carefully done, with a skilful use of minimal words and descriptions of physical sensations and sounds. It has similarities to books like Eimear McBride’s The Lesser Bohemians, but far more condensed, focused on detail and spanning a short space of time. Every word feels like an attack or relief in this impressively written book that depicts a terrible subject in an emotive and haunting way.

Hings: The B-Sides by Chris McQueer

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Hings: the B-Sides is a further eight witty and surreal stories from Chris McQueer that weren’t included in his collection published earlier this year, Hings (which I reviewed here). There’s the ‘too hot for TV/the original collection’ like the weird ‘Road Closed’ and the disgusting yet strangely relatable ‘Bursting’. Both ‘Love Is Love’ and ‘News’ feel like comedy Scottish snippets of Black Mirror ideas, with the former definitely a comedy smart home advert. For fans of the A-side, there’s another little bit of Sammy, and there’s two little tales with clever twists that feel very much in keeping with the strange twists in Hings itself, ‘Crisp Packets’ and ‘Flowers’.

This is a welcome bunch of up to date and clever short stories, something for fans of Hings and for lending to people to convince them to commit to reading the larger book. In a handy zine format, it’s a great antidote to just reading another pointless Buzzfeed end of year listicle.

Her Body & Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

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Her Body And Other Parties is a book of incisive short stories that combine bodies, sex and relationships, horror, science fiction, and pressing issues in imaginative ways. The main characters are mostly women, living in uncanny worlds that can be apocalyptic, magical, and/or unnervingly almost real. In one, the truth about a dress shop and the women slowly going incorporeal drives an employee away from the store. In another, the ribbon around a woman’s neck becomes a mysterious focus in a story that highlights the act of telling stories and of the sounds of telling them aloud. Others play with structure—an inventory of sex that depicts a virus epidemic across the globe, a story told using Law & Order: SVU episode titles—or with common issues like dieting and motherhood, in ways that rethink how these things can be considered.

To describe the stories doesn’t quite do justice to the freshness and imagination of the collection, not only in the ideas and the blending of magical realism, sci-fi, horror, and the reality of life, but in the way they are written. The writing style is distinctive, creating atmosphere and digging deep into the female protagonists. These women have varied relationships with their bodies, different dynamics with their male and/or female lovers, assorted pasts and futures, but what unites them all is the way their stories are both real and surreal.

Some of the stories will likely have a greater effective on different people—as someone who actually thought the acronym was SUV, the Law & Order structured one passed me by quite massively—but this is an important collection. The stories do exciting things with ideas and writing, and the use of the uncanny and the monstrous to highlight issues particularly around women’s bodies and sexualities is creative and thought provoking.

The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzi Lee

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The eighteenth century, redux: The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzi Lee

If someone had asked me ‘would you like a book about a rebellious eighteen-year-old bisexual aristocrat in the eighteen century?’ I would have obviously said yes. Add in the fact that it’s about going on a Grand Tour, full of adventure novel tropes, and is completely ridiculous in the way fun modern historical fiction should be and well. That’s The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue.

The book is aimed at older young adult readers, though I think it’s real target audience is anyone who enjoys trash eighteenth century (and/or is a fan of Byron). It follows Henry “Monty” Montague, who has been kicked out of Eton and faces his tyrannical father’s disapproval for his lifestyle of drinking, gambling, and sleeping with various women and men. He has been allowed to go on the stereotypical Grand Tour of Europe alongside his best friend Percy, his little sister Felicity, and a boring guardian, as a final yearlong break before he must start learning how to take over the family estate. However, when one bad decision too far on Monty’s part puts them in trouble, soon the cultured Grand Tour turns into an adventure across Europe full of highwaymen, pirates, and alchemy (plus Monty’s inconvenient massive thing for his best friend).

I may be part of its specific audience, but this is how historical fiction should be done. Based in historical fact and with a few actual figures thrown in, but for the most part using the spirit of the period to do something adventurous (literally) and enjoyable. The tropes are used purposefully (and anyone whose read eighteenth century stuff like Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey will know things written at the time were full of ridiculous tropes too) and add to the charm of the fast-paced and witty plot. The true highlight is the characters: the scandalous Monty who needs to learn to think about other people whilst escaping his father, his younger sister Felicity who has better plans for her life than the finishing school she’s meant to be going to, and the likeable Percy, Monty’s companion in gambling and drinking who is hiding a secret or two.

This is not your accurate historical fiction. This is what happens when history is treated with sufficient irreverence and as a vehicle for adventure, romance, and general hilarity, whilst touching on a few major issues that all still have relevance now in some way. The style is modern with a hint of eighteenth century, and it works for the story. Some people will be scandalised by it (probably), but this is a fun and fresh novel that gives a happy ending to a scenario plenty would think should have no hope of one.

Anatomy of a Scandal by Sarah Vaughan

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Increasingly relevant: Anatomy of a Scandal by Sarah Vaughan

Anatomy of a Scandal is a tense novel about power, privilege, and knowing the secrets from someone’s past. James is a politician on the rise, a family man with a long-standing connection to the PM. His wife Sophie has known him since they were both at Oxford and thinks she knows all the skeletons in his closet. However, when he is accused of a crime that cuts right into Sophie’s vision of her husband, she must consider whether she will continue to stand by him. And Kate, the barrister prosecuting James, has a past of her own, and is certain James is guilty, willing to put her all into getting him convicted.

Vaughan weaves together these main characters into a drama that jumps between the courtroom, the modern political world, and early 90s Oxford. It has elements of a psychological or domestic thriller, complete with questioning of the truth and intense legal proceedings, but Anatomy of a Scandal is more than that, an anatomy of individual viewpoints surrounding a scandal that covers political coverups, drinking societies and class difference at Oxford, and difficulties of rape accusations and trials. The epigraph is from Mantel’s Bring Up The Bodies and the way that Mantel combines the political and the personal whilst talking about the truth makes it a good comparison, despite the vast difference in subject matter. The novel is not solely psychological, or just a courtroom drama, but one that shows personal emotion within larger power structures.

The narrative is told from the points of view of major characters, with Vaughan withholding information or structuring it in a way that builds tension and gives the reader a sense of being caught in the middle of the secrets as they unfold. Her Oxford is very recognisable to anyone who has been and the whole novel is detailed, giving enough information to allow the reader to work out elements, but also keep guessing about what really happened or will happen. Though James and Sophie’s marriage is a real focus, it is Kate who stands out as someone caught between past and present, though at first she appears to just be a simple barrister character who will form the courtroom threat.

Anatomy of a Scandal is the kind of book that will appeal to both fans of thrillers and those who prefer something a bit more general, combining character relationships and backstory with tense prosecution. The focus on a privileged world—from the arcane rituals of both the court and Oxford to the money and power of politicians—can be fascinating and adds to questions of who should really be believed. It has plenty of gripping drama and would clearly make a great TV adaptation in the future.

This Is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel

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This Is How It Always Is is a novel about family, secrets, fairy tales, and gender. Rosie and Penn are busy parents—Rosie a doctor and Penn a writer—with five children, all boys. When it turns out their youngest wants to grow up to be a girl, Rosie and Penn do what they can to be supportive parents, but that turns out to involve making a big change for the entire family and keeping a secret that nobody sees lasting forever.

The book is focused particularly on being a parent of a transgender child, and particularly a set of parents trying to be as encouraging and accepting of all of their children as possible. The whole family is very important to the novel, as Frankel gives all of them—not only the parents and Poppy, the youngest—individual personalities and lives, which are all tangled together as families are. The narrative is split into separate parts, broadly different phases in the family’s life across five years, and the writing style is informal, meaning it is quite easy to read much of the book in one sitting.

Frankel says in the concluding Author’s Note that the book is not based on her own experiences with a trans daughter, but is a made up story that has sprinklings of her own life as well as imagination and research. Indeed, this idea of storytelling runs throughout the book, through Penn as a writer using stories to give morals to his children and through the stories that everyone tells to make situations seem less confusing.

It is a heartwarming and sad book that ultimately tries to give hope, using a happy ending and a running theme of fairy tales and telling stories to make sense of life. I’ve seen people claim the happiness is unrealistic and the parents “too” accepting, but that is why this book is an important one as well as an enjoyable read: if a trans child’s fictional happiness is seen as unrealistic, it shows the one, there’s maybe something wrong with reality, and two, then books are needed that show happiness and a future for trans people of all ages, and This Is How It Always Is is one of these books.

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

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The Underground Railroad is a book deserving of its hype. It is a sharp, clever novel that gives the Underground Railroad of US history—a network of routes and safe houses used by slaves to escape into free states—a physical form as a steam-powered escape that must stay secret. Cora is a slave on a plantation in Georgia, ostracised due to her mother’s disappearance from the plantation when Cora was ten. When a new slave, Caesar, tells Cora about the hope of escape on the Underground Railroad, her journey begins to find safety along the lines of the railroad, whilst being pursued by the slave catcher Ridgeway.

Whitehead’s conceit is simple, yet the transformation of the metaphorical railroad into a physical one feels momentous. It brings a sense of momentum and also gets across the idea of something beneath the ground, beneath both Southern states and those in the North, that is alive and working to help black people escape. Cora’s story is a compelling narrative of a desperation to keep escaping, even when those around her are not so lucky. By combining a character’s personal battle with a sense of larger scale—not only through the railroad, but also by describing other characters’ lives and looking into the future at times—the novel is both an engrossing and brutal read and a sharp look at not only slavery but race in America across the centuries. It is clear that many of Whitehead’s concise sentences are true now as they are to the time of the novel.

The Underground Railroad is an impressive combination of style, structure, narrative, and concept to produce a novel about slavery that is both devastating and fresh. Whitehead’s writing style, clever and direct,  gives the book an immediacy that feels vital to reading it and thinking about the past, present, and future.

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

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Sparks and flames: Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

Little Fires Everywhere is an intricate and observant novel that shines a light on false perfection and the intricate way in which everyday things are interlinked. Shaker Heights is a carefully planned suburb of Cleveland, where everything has order and they pride themselves on being progressive. Elena Richardson embodies much of Shaker’s ideals, but when the Richardson house is found burnt down, the recent past must be unravelled to see how the arrival of the Richardson’s tenants, the artist Mia and her teenage daughter Pearl, affected the four Richardson children, their parents, and the whole community, showing how underneath things aren’t always quite as they seem.

The narrative structure is particularly impressive, with an omniscient narrator flashing back from the burnt house to tell the story from many perspectives in a way that foreshadows and hints at past events in a satisfying way. Key moments and details that will clearly cause a ‘little fire’ later on, be misunderstood or reinterpreted by other characters, are apparent to the reader, but also not overly signposted by the writing. Through this, the book has a great sense of connection and coincidence as the present and past come together in the relationship between the Richardsons and their new tenants and in the battle over the custody of a Chinese-American baby that grips Shaker Heights and puts Elena and Mia on different sides.

Little Fires Everywhere is a novel somehow both charming and tense, with the drama between the characters built upon tiny moments and the overall narrative one that doesn’t reveal surprises so much as fill in the gaps to show how interpretations can be different. The teenage characters are a highlight and this is the kind of adult novel that can also be enjoyed by older teenagers. This tangle of characters and detail is an impressive book with a very satisfying linking of structure and themes and a very apt title in multiple ways. The ‘little fires’ are what makes the novel blaze.