book review – Page 68 – Fiendfully Reading

The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry

January 15, 2017 fiendfullyreading

The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry

Whilst reading The Essex Serpent, I did feel like some mythical force was keeping me turning the pages. I couldn’t remember the blurb when I started reading and had chosen the book based on it being the Waterstones Book of the Year 2016, so went in with a clear mind. I did not know what to expect. The novel turned out to be a surprisingly captivating depiction of belief and friendship, the kind of historically set novel that isn’t bogged down by the period in which it is set.

The book follows the mystery surrounding a strange creature apparently living in the Essex waters, but also Victorian developments in science, poverty, and feminism. These elements form major parts of the narrative, rather than feeling like forced backdrops, and help create the vivid characters which seem to be the real charm of The Essex Serpent. From Cora, looking for freedom in the serpent’s legend, to Naomi, a village girl overwhelmed by the spell that has fallen over the village, the characters are interesting and torn between aspects of belief and relationships.

The Essex Serpent took me a little while to get into. Once in, I wasn’t sure what to expect and though the plot line does centre around larger dramatic events, it was mostly propelled forward by the characters, meaning that you end up caring more what will happen to them than what will literally occur. There are lots of books out there set in the Victorian period, but this is a good one for sure, a gothic tale that shows wonder rather than repression.

The Woman on the Stairs

January 9, 2017 fiendfullyreading

My review, originally posted here on Goodreads, for The Woman on the Stairs by Bernhard Schlink.

As the blurb on this book suggests, it is a novel about regret, lies, and perspective which lets the reader imagine the truth more than it is given. I won The Woman on the Stairs in a giveaway on Goodreads and had very few preconceptions about the book before reading, other than a sense that it was the kind of the book that I’d read the blurb of, think it sounded interesting, but not be drawn in enough to buy it. Though the blurb and some of the story focuses upon a painting, art, and creativity, the novel is more focused on life and time and what could have happened.

The narrator of the novel occupies a strange space as both part of the story and somewhat of an outsider, a character who has been not quite part of the action for his entire life it seems. This character and narratorial style are one of the defining things about the book, as you are given looks into his past and realisations about what he could or should have done differently, but also kept at a distance from him. The way that the novel reveals things about his life and also about Irene’s as he recalls his past with her and has to reconsider and find out things from her later on creates a gripping read even though there is not a large amount of action.

The Woman on the Stairs is most suited to people who enjoy mediative books that involve characters looking back on the past, but also learning a few things about the present. Its short length and tendency to hold things back from the reader make it good for reading in a short space of time and then thinking about it afterwards.

Lily and the Octopus by Steven Rowley

January 3, 2017 fiendfullyreading

Lily and the Octopus by Steven Rowley

Novels about pets getting ill has never really been a category that appeals to me. The inevitable combination of sadness and positivity and the probable lack of much else is not something I’ve looked for. However, I was recommended Lily and the Octopus by someone who is exceptionally good at recommending books, so I didn’t doubt that it would be good. What it turned out to be, in fact, was a novel about coping mechanisms, loss, and hope that really gets inside how people think, grieve, and try to make deals with life.

The unreliable narration makes this book, because it allows for the processes people go through to try and deal with awful things to become the novel. You know from the start what the narrator is doing, but you can’t blame him because it feels so real. Whilst pet owners will understand the relationship between Ted and Lily and how their conversations are written, anyone who has ever tried to deal with something by trying to rewrite it in some way will understand how Lily and the Octopus is written.

Whilst it is not surprising how the book will move forward, it is the getting there that is the experience, the capturing of emotion and brain processes and how people tie things together and see them as interconnected. The ending (enjoyably for me) references another famous dog owner, Lord Byron, which I assume is there to chasten me for forgetting that I was already interested in an author who mentions his dogs. Even if – like me – you’ve no particular interest in a book about an animal getting ill, I still recommend Lily and the Octopus as a book about how we think and process things and also about hope and relationships. Also if you like dogs, I guess.

House of Leaves in a day

December 21, 2016 fiendfullyreading

This is a review, if a review is meant to be written wide-eyed, a little uncertain of reality, of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. Known for being a scary cult novel approximately the size of the Argos catalogue, it is somewhat imposing. I started reading it last night, got about twenty pages in, and then today I continued reading and, in amongst other tasks like decanting homemade sloe gin, I read the whole thing. So I may be a little intense.

House of Leaves is 700 pages of text about an apparent documentary, footnotes both scholarly and telling stories in good postmodern style, appendices, pictures, and typographic display that can leave you dizzy. Each layer of the story – loosely the tale told in and by the documentary, the story of the writing and compilation of the main text by Zampanò, and the discovery, introduction, and notes by Johnny Truant – questions its own reality and others, meaning that reading the book basically requires a reader to question both nothing and everything. This is partly what makes it compelling: the sense that there might be a truth, or no truth at all, keeps you reading through chapters full of gaps from apparent scorchmarks or scientific analyses mostly lost.

The reading experience is perhaps the most important part. With its footnotes and appendices (some of which you are directed to only to discover there is nothing there), there isn’t quite an exact way to read House of Leaves. For example at one point, the option to read an appendix giving childhood background to the editor (who tells his own story in his footnotes) is offered, but to take this option is to read a series of letters that themselves form a not so simple story. The effect of this experience is to draw you into the uncanny, to be looking for where you must read next and whether it will be part of a narrative or a list of notable buildings that exist. It is more like an immersive experience.

Unnerving is perhaps a good way to describe House of Leaves. The layers of narrative and their layers of uncertainty mixed with a vast amount of fictional academic debate and references to real and fictional texts mean that the reading experience becomes unnerving, as expectations are denied and the nature of a text questioned. In my opinion, what is scarier than the stories within the book are the stories and parts of the narratives left on the outskirts, the ones in your peripheral vision and the ones that happen as you interpret what you read.

If these paragraphs haven’t convinced you yet, it is not an easy book to describe or recommend. I would say it is like a cross between the Lunar Park end of Bret Easton Ellis, Nabokov’s more postmodern stuff, and a confusing critical book about some abstract concept that uses popular references to try and explain its points. There’s mythology, horror, academia, and the kind of contemporary American novel where everybody takes so many drugs you lose track. House of Leaves is worth reading, though perhaps not in a day.

(As apparent here, my secondhand copy has the added uncanny fact that it has a huge mysterious wave/dent running through it.)

Marlovian tales: The School of Night by Peter Whelan

December 9, 2016 fiendfullyreading

Christopher Marlowe, playwright, poet, and probable Elizabethan spy, is the perfect kind of historical figure to include in fiction. The information about his life is both striking and mysterious, with unexplained gaps of time and a suspicious death. Peter Whelan’s play The School of Night is one of many fictionalisations of Marlowe and doesn’t do anything particularly notable, but that doesn’t stop it being enjoyable.

First performed in 1992 and thus predating the publication of Anthony Burgess’ fantastic A Dead Man in Deptford, The School of Night features Kit Marlowe at Thomas Walsingham’s home in Scadbury, attempting to influence life with dramatic performance. For Marlowe fans, the characters are familiar: Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, Thomas Walsingham and his wife Audrey, Walter Raleigh, and the infamous men surrounding Marlowe’s death, Frizer, Poley and Skeres. Questions of religion, scandal, and betrayal haunt the plot, again no surprise to anyone with familiarity of Marlowe’s biography.The interactions between the characters and the play’s dialogue are what particularly help to make it stand out, combining literary and historical references with the kind of sixteenth century intellectual banter that draws you into the world.

As with many fictional Marlowe works, Whelan inevitably is drawn towards the Shakespeare question, weaving the more famous poet into the narrative and playing around with the claims that Marlowe either wrote Shakespeare’s works or was in deep competition with them whilst he lived. Whilst Whelan’s version manages to keep elements of this enigmatic, the plot requires the big Shakespeare question that Burgess was wise to sidestep in his novel about Marlowe. Luckily, Marlowe is written as a big enough character to keep himself central in his own narrative.

The School of Night is a worthwhile read for Marlowe fans, because unlike some other fictional versions of the playwright (for example, Tamburlaine Must Die) this one is solidly written and gets in all the major details or possible details of his life. For those more familiar with works centred on Shakespeare, the play may illuminate more about Marlowe the bit character in Shakespeare’s real/fictional life (though I’d recommend reading Park Honan’s biography of Marlowe too as the play format does not leave space for historical detail or elaboration).

Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood

November 26, 2016 fiendfullyreading

Brave New World, Brave Old Questions: Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood

What does it mean to adapt Shakespeare? Margaret Atwood’s contribution to the Hogarth Shakespeare series, a take on The Tempest titled after an insulting name for Caliban, asks this question, with knowledge that it is a old question without an easy answer. When discussing previous novels in the series, I have pointed out how many reworkings of Shakespeare there have been and how these end up inevitably compared with each other. Hag-Seed is open to comparison for sure.

For starters, comparisons with the Canadian TV series Slings & Arrows are beyond obvious. Hag-Seed is also set in the world of Shakespeare festivals, breakdowns, and life imitating art. In both, actors and directors fail to see the divide between the play and the world, inhabiting a certain famous line of Shakespeare’s. Reworking Shakespeare often requires this sense that Shakespeare’s world can easily bleed into ours, as is required in Atwood’s novel to engage the inmate actors.

Hag-Seed also focuses upon the use of Shakespeare in prison rehabilitation, a subject discussed both academically and in theatrical productions like the Donmar’s current trilogy (which also uses The Tempest). However, in Hag-Seed the rehabilitation is more focused upon the central character of Felix than the prisoners who, while important, do not learn as much as the grief and revenge stricken man who teaches and directs them.

Atwood’s method of combining performance of The Tempest with a man who – delusional or not – sees himself as a version of Prospero creates a metanarrative about trying to fit Shakespeare to particular purposes that ultimately ends up more ambivalent than perhaps to be expected. It is true that the plot concludes in keeping with the ending of The Tempest, but the play is also something that must be broken away from, with Felix needing to relinquish his version of his dead daughter Miranda. The actors imagine afterlives for their characters, performing more reworkings suggesting how Shakespeare can be full of possibility.

The novel is both enjoyable and at moments a touching look at grief, but also feels in some ways to be a comment on the Hogarth series: full of literary references winking to those in the know, but also questioning the usefulness of projecting Shakespeare onto everything. A late written play that questions genre and all-mighty authorial power, The Tempest can be both a strange and an engaging play. Like The Tempest, Hag-Seed questions what comes before it but also uses these tropes and expectations. Felix’s plot involving the play may seem contrived, but it has to work, because it works in The Tempest.

Miss Treadway and the Field of Stars

November 19, 2016 fiendfullyreading

I won a copy of this upcoming book in a Goodreads giveaway recently and I have written up a proper review on the site, so if you’re interested in detailed comments or other details, it’s here. Over here, however, I’m going to do a quick fun review.

Miss Treadway and the Field of Stars by Miranda Emmerson is a mystery about a missing actress and the woman trying to find her, set in 1960s London. Read if you like:

diverse, interesting cast of characters
well-written London
not romanticising the past but looking at problems within the plot
the BBC tv series The Hour, especially when in series 2 they won’t stop saying Vice
fairly light but not shying away from big issues type fiction
the kind of accuracy that means the 68 bus does indeed go via Elephant and Castle to Tulse Hill

Vinegar Girl, Vinegar Taste

November 4, 2016 fiendfullyreading

The problem with writing a modern American-set version of The Taming of the Shrew is that 10 Things I Hate About You exists. For anyone, myself included, who grew up with that film, with its lightly sprinkled references and liberally changed plot, it is perhaps difficult to read another version without comparing. Anne Tyler’s Vinegar Girl is another book in the Hogarth Shakespeare series, which I am broadly for (loved The Gap of Time, medium on Shylock Is My Name because I didn’t get along with the writing style). It moves The Taming of the Shrew to America, makes Kate’s father a scientist trying to arrange a marriage in order to keep his beloved research assistant in the country.

Although relevant to the source material, I didn’t feel Kate had enough character. Her sense of wasting her life thus far was apparent, but her textbook vague crush on the one guy in her workplace was pointless. Her eventual husband Pyotr was ambivalently dealt with, a guy trying to get on in a foreign country but also prone to fits of anger. Kate’s younger sister Bunny was the character I found most engaging: warning her sister off the scheme, rebelling against her dad, and constantly referred to as stupid by the other characters. Obviously, she has intelligence they don’t understand, as blunt and logical scientific thought comes up against other ways of thinking.

Kate’s choices weren’t totally nonsensical. She wanted to first help her father, who she mostly looked after, and then get out of his house to try and start a fresh chapter in her life. To follow the play, she has to commit to the wedding even when the need to keep Pyotr in the country is under threat, but it was hard not to root for her to just up and leave, both the wedding and her father’s house. The required ending speech was a bit forced and something that men’s rights’ activists might appreciate: her pity for the difficulties men faced seemed a bit too apparent in other points in the novel, as she realised how much they had to hold in their feelings, for the speech to seem particularly ironic.

Vinegar Girl was, for me, close to the original but without doing anything particularly interesting when updating it. The ending, whilst it gave Kate the freedom and second chance at college that she wanted, left me with a bitter taste in my mouth. Going back to college and achieving success required her to marry a guy with anger management issues. Sure, things can be tough for men too, but what Vinegar Girl suggested was that women should bend to them because of this. And there was no Letters to Cleo playing ‘I Want You To Want Me’ at the end, either.