Tag: books

English Animals by Laura Kaye

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English Animals by Laura Kaye

English Animals is a witty and emotionally gripping novel about love and belonging in modern England. Mirka moved away from her unsupportive family in Slovakia to England and is about to start a job at a country house with what she thinks will be a quintessential countryside couple, Richard and Sophie. She finds herself suddenly drawn into Richard’s taxidermy business and falling for Sophie as she settles into life at Fairmont Hall and soon the situation is far more complicated than her vision of the English countryside.

Mirka’s narration gives the novel an endearing centre, with her wry observations and longing emotion showing how complicated her relationship to the country is. England is a place of hope and potential belonging for her, a place she imagines settling down with a wife and maybe children. But from aggressive comments about her or other Eastern European people from those around her to Sophie’s stuck up and scary father viewing her as their lowly cleaner, she faces tension around the England she wants to live in. Mirka is a charming central character and the bittersweet ending feels fitting to the book as a whole, with quirks like her newfound taxidermy skills adding a distinctive and often satirical flair. Her relationship with Sophie, and indeed with Richard, is touching, and it is these characters and the messy web they create that makes the book hard to put down.

English Animals is an important novel about contemporary life that shows the perspective of someone who just wants to come and work in Britain and hopes to find a more tolerant society in her new home, but ends up with various kinds of prejudice as well as happiness and opportunity. It combines wit and satire with a story about love and hope, and ends with a fairly ambivalent message about modern life and England.

The Silent Companions by Laura Purcell

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Creepy historical gothic: The Silent Companions by Laura Purcell

The Silent Companions is a tense gothic novel set in the nineteenth-century, centred around a dilapidated old house and the newly widowed woman who goes to live there. Elsie’s short marriage is quickly ended by her husband’s death at the country seat he was trying to make hospitable for her, but when she moves there herself to see through her pregnancy, there is more for her to worry about than the hostile neighbours and inexperienced servants. Between her and her husband’s strange, awkward cousin Sarah, they discover the diaries of a woman who lived in the house in the seventeenth-century—a diary full of death and despair—and a strange wooden figure, a silent companion. This companion is not the only one, however, and they might be silent, but their influence scares Elsie to an ever-increasing extent.

The novel is written with different threads of narrative, with Elsie trying to recall her story in an asylum, her third person narration of the events she lived, and excerpts from the earlier diary. Through this, Purcell weaves mystery and darkness, leaving the reader wanting more with each narrative jump. There are plenty of classic gothic tropes to enjoy, with spirits, mysterious doors, noises at night, and unsettling family secrets on all sides. At times the story is genuinely unsettling, both in terms of fear and in the claustrophobic atmosphere.

The presentation of Elsie—a heroine with a tormented past and a present in which men seem to be threatening her freedom—is clever, combining sympathy with an uncertainty for what she could be potentially forgetting or misremembering. The position of women in Victorian society, particularly in relation to class, is near the forefront of the novel though not explicitly discussed, and the gothic heroine is one contained by men against her will. At the same time, the novel is populated by other women who are trapped in a position or have done bad things without realising the consequences, reflecting her plight.

The Silent Companions fits very well into the gothic genre and provides a suitably eerie and unnerving read. In atmosphere, it has similarities to Waters’ Fingersmith as well as older gothic novels, and its use of an additional seventeenth-century narrative both fulfils the trope of an older, inset narrative and gives a different aspect to the novel, showing how women could be seen as witches or as insane and hysterical depending on the century. Purcell’s novel shows that the historical gothic novel is a genre that will continue to live and continue to question female autonomy whilst providing chilling reads.

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

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Opening a door on the global refugee crisis: Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

Exit West is a novel about migration, love, and borders, told through a world in which black doors have started appearing that take people to random cities. Nadia and Saeed meet in evening classes and slowly they get closer, but their city is unsafe, with bombs, militants, and executions. Soon they find themselves faced with the question: do they use one of these doors and end up who knows where, but hopefully somewhere better?

Hamid writes in a distinctive prose style that captures the pace of the novel as the characters move through a year, negotiating their own relationship as they search for where to stay. Though the book has an extensive backdrop of how the black doors and the migrating people affect the world and the very concept of a nation, the real focus is Nadia and Saeed and how their relationship changes. Nadia in particular is a gripping and sometimes enigmatic character with a strong sense of independence. Hamid uses the two characters to draw parallels and show differences in their viewpoints whilst also telling a more ambivalent kind of love story.

Exit West has an obvious relevance to the modern day and the conceit of the black doors and the difficulty of policing a world in which people can easily move between countries makes for an interesting premise. Maybe its messages about borders and humanity are a little obvious, but the charming and emotive style definitely compensates for this in a novel that is about finding your place in the world and working out who else might be there.

A Change Is Gonna Come

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A Change Is Gonna Come by various authors

A Change Is Gonna Come is an anthology of short stories and poetry by BAME authors aimed at a young adult audience. They touch on culture and identity in Britain and further afield today, using modern culture, alternate universes, and complex issues to tell stories about relatable characters. The authors are a mix of established names and fresh talent and the anthology is likely to be shared in classrooms as well as being a great read for teenagers, those who can remember being one, and anyone who wants to celebrate and enjoy diversity in YA writing.

A memorable early story in the collection is Aisha Busby’s ‘Marionette Girl’, which features a mixed race teenager with OCD charting the minutiae of her days, showing the frustrations of her condition as well as what makes her happy. ‘Hackney Moon’ by Tanya Byrne is a smart love story about Esther, half-Guyanese and half-English and in love with her female best friend, who meets Alesha at Rich Mix in Shoreditch and finds a place in the world. Byrne also uses a quirky, self-aware narratorial voice which adds a nice touch, commenting on teenage love and people being more than just ordinary. Nikesh Shukla’s ‘We Who?’ tells a Brexit story from a young adult perspective whilst looking at what happens when bigotry starts coming from supposed friends. And the emotional twist in Patrice Lawrence’s ‘The Clean Sweep’ can shock when it hits in a Black Mirror-esque story of justice systems and reality TV.

This is the kind of anthology to buy for yourself, for any (other) teenagers in your life, and for anyone who wants modern, diverse short fiction (and the odd poem). As the title suggests, it is full of characters looking and fighting for change, whether in their everyday lives or on a larger scale, and also dealing with a variety of things in their lives such as mental health issues, sexuality, and identity. Fiction has power, and this anthology is looking to prove it.

Quick book picks for September

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Quite a short selection this month, but there’s two novels with clear connections to the modern political and media world, a look at female friendship and perspective, and a fantastic book of poetry by a young poet that tells stories of love and personal struggle in snappy and concise ways. As ever, links in titles to longer reviews.

  • The Golden House by Salman Rushdie – Rushdie’s new novel tells the story of an American immigrant real estate tycoon and his children with a background of modern politics and culture. Highly referential, it is a novel that understands fact and fiction aren’t all they seem.
  • The Beast by Alexander Starritt – The target of comic mockery is the British tabloid press, in this novel about scaremongering and prejudice that follows Jeremy Underwood, a subeditor for The Daily Beast, as he breaks what seems to be a story about a terror threat.
  • The Burning Girl by Claire Messud – Through the eyes of main character Julia, using hindsight to reflect upon the breakdown of her friendship with troubled Cassie, Messud creates a novel about reliability and perception, and whether people are how we think we see them.
  • Bone by Yrsa Daley-Ward – A collection of poetry about growing up, making mistakes, and finding love that will strike a chord with teenagers and adults with its clever and emotional lines and sparsely told stories.

Bone by Yrsa Daley-Ward

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Poetry that strikes: Bone by Yrsa Daley-Ward

Bone is a striking and moving collection of poetry that focuses on growing up, love, sexuality, being different, and working through inner thoughts and feelings in stark ways. Daley-Ward’s poems vary from telling vivid stories in a tiny space (‘the not quite love’) and addressing concerns like growing up religious in a concise, direct way (‘liking things’) to longer, heartbreaking stories like ‘some kind of man’. There are poems that will strike a chord with teenagers and adults about love not being with the right people (‘emergency warning’, ‘I’ll admit it, I’m drawn to the wolves’) and poems that can offer advice, optimism, and blunt suggestions of regret (‘things it can take twenty years and a bad liver to find out’, ‘mental health’).

Her writing is distinctive and offers stark stories and emotion. Many of the poems in the book have particular endings, a couple of lines or so that hit you right in the chest. A number of pieces near the end also consider the act of writing poetry and where creation and truth come from, highlighting storytelling and using words to work through difficult things. It is hard to talk about Bone without wanting to go through and point out the best lines in everything; it is a collection of poetry to savour in its blunt emotion and careful expression.

Dunbar by Edward St Aubyn

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King Lear the dark comedy: Dunbar by Edward St Aubyn

Dunbar is a modern retelling of King Lear in which Henry Dunbar, a Canadian media mogul, finds himself battling two of his daughters after they get him confined to a care home in the Lake District whilst they take over his company. At the same time, his youngest daughter Florence, who he recently removed from the company due to her lack of interest in his business, is on a mission with some of his other former allies to find and save her father before her scheming half-sisters succeed in their plan.

The novel is St Aubyn’s contribution to the Hogarth Shakespeare series, which aims to retell Shakespeare’s stories in novels by bestselling modern writers. The series has been a varied one, and Dunbar is another instalment with its hits and misses. King Lear is a fairly obvious choice for a business-related retelling and this world of Murdoch-esque media empires strikes a modern chord whilst giving Dunbar a questionable morality even in the face of the more overt amorality of his eldest daughters.

One of the main issues with the novel is the fact that the plot line—old man wrongfully imprisoned in care home and escapes, whilst daughters battle for power and deal with their own personal issues—is more darkly comic than tragic. This retelling takes the ridiculousness of Lear with its infamous Fool and dashing about in the dark and doesn’t quite make it feel more than the narrative of a dark comedy drama (there is also a similarity to one of the plot lines in Cloud Atlas). Even keeping somewhat to the ending of King Lear, the novel’s ending does not feel tragic, particularly as Florence, the Cordelia figure, isn’t really given enough space to be anyone (though the same could be thought about Cordelia).

This isn’t to say that Dunbar can’t be an enjoyable read. The transformation of Lear’s Fool into Peter Walker, alcoholic TV comedian who Dunbar befriends in the care home, is a good choice, and the way his storyline gets bolstered by some of Gloucester’s from the original text adds nastiness to Abigail and Megan, St Aubyn’s Goneril and Regan. Indeed the earlier parts, with Dunbar and Peter’s strangely witty conversations and references to Freud are a clever opening and more enjoyable than Lear’s discussions with the Fool in the play.

Dunbar turns King Lear into a dark caper for the most part, and whilst this might make it more enjoyable for people who don’t enjoy the tragedy of Lear, it is a retelling that has definitely chosen some elements of the original over others in a specific way. In this context, the exaggerated villainy of the modern counterparts to Goneril and Regan makes them almost comic bad guys, sometimes too busy having sex to keep an eye on their plotting, and Dunbar is not so much caught out in a storm than rambling around the Lake District. There’s no reason why King Lear shouldn’t be turned into this kind of story, of course, and Dunbar is a decent novel, but it doesn’t really say or do anything interesting with Lear beyond highlighting elements of ridicule.

[See my reviews of other books in the Hogarth Shakespeare series here.]

The Beast by Alexander Starritt

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Horrors of the tabloid press: The Beast by Alexander Starritt

The Beast is a compelling and at times horrifying novel about the modern tabloid press and how it exploits the nation’s fears and current events. Jeremy Underwood is a subeditor for The Daily Beast, which sees itself as the voice of Middle England, and when he comes back from holiday to spot two figures wearing burqas outside the newspaper offices, he sparks off a chain of events that he could have hardly imagined or planned. Fear is in the air as there are escaped suspects at large and The Beast needs a compelling story to keep its circulation up. Soon the staff are off to a secret bunker and the country is being divided by the story that Jeremy has set off.

Starritt’s novel is difficult to put down, partly due to the fast-paced narrative that feels akin to a film or feature-length drama, and partly due to the dark comedy as the events escalate, which carries with it a terrifying sense of observation. The author worked in a newsroom and The Beast’s one is described in careful detail, from its hierarchy to questionable working practices. His depiction shows the level of work ethic and rivalry that goes into making a newspaper, but also charts the way in which a single paper can affect national events and stoke fear and hatred. It is not entirely scathing, but is unlikely to appeal hugely to those who enjoy reading the kind of newspaper it depicts.

Though the book is Evelyn Waugh-esque (the name of the newspaper is the same as that in Waugh’s novel Scoop), its level of modern relevance makes it more horrifying and less light than reading Waugh today. Not only does it depict the media’s involvement in Islamophobia in Britain and look at how terror attacks might be reported, but it touches upon topics of press freedom, print vs online journalism, and how newspapers might make the news rather than report it. The fictional papers within the novel all have fairly obvious real life counterparts and the satire is pointed even for those who have little knowledge of modern journalism.

The Beast is a kind of escalating dark comedy that mostly tips into a tense and horrible narrative about tabloid reporting in relation to extremism and hatred in Britain today. Some readers will find it funny, but its lingering feel is one of exposition, an anatomy of a kind of newspaper that many people read and devour and many others loathe.

4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster

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One boy, four lives: 4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster

4 3 2 1 is an epic novel that charts the life of one character in four stories that diverge from the moment he is born. Archie Ferguson, a Jewish American from New Jersey whose grandfather came to Ellis Island from Minsk, is born to Rose and Stanley Ferguson and from that point, his life goes four different ways, with four different Fergusons living and making choices and reacting to what goes on around them. They all battle with love and loss, write and play baseball and basketball, make friends and difficult decisions, all with the backdrop of America throughout the 1950s and 1960s, racism, the Vietnam War, and political upheaval. Every version of Ferguson has his individual story march on towards mortality, for they might’ve all started the same, but they don’t end up that way.

This is a masterful novel, a long ride through different ways that a single character could go, a character that is clearly the same person exposed to different things, allowed to have various thoughts and ideas, and with the people around him acting differently. Ferguson himself is decently complex, an aspiring writer who enjoys sports, learns French, and is sometimes a bit too clever for his own good. Auster doesn’t overplay the conceit too far, allowing central characters to appear across the stories and others to have cameos in one and a larger role in another, but not forcing every character into every story.

It is vital to know the concept before starting to read the book; this isn’t one to have its blurb ignored. Each chapter tells a different part of each story, chronologically, so that you get the first section of a Ferguson’s life four times, then the next section, and so on. This means that it is important to keep in mind which major events happen in which narrative, making Auster’s novel not much of a light read, but something to get stuck into, and it is far more rewarding when it is read in larger chunks.

4 3 2 1 deals with a number of recurring themes and issues—American life, Jewishness, success and failure, love, sexuality, the act of telling stories and writing them down—over its four narratives, making it a microcosm of America in the middle of the twentieth century as told through one character. It is a long novel, no light commitment and may take a little while to settle into the conceit, but it doesn’t let up and is a book well worth making it to the end of.

The Burning Girl by Claire Messud

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Female friendship on fire: The Burning Girl by Claire Messud

The Burning Girl is a novel about female friendship, growing up, and whether real life lives up to the stories. The narrator is Julia, a girl from a solid middle-class family, as she describes her friendship with Cassie Burnes, whose relationship with her single mother Bev is often tempestuous, especially after Bev gets a strange new boyfriend. As the pair get older they drift apart, but Julia’s penchant for imagining and creating stories doesn’t stop her thinking about what Cassie is doing, even when Cassie goes to desperate measures to find a life beyond the home that no longer feels like one.

The narrative is written with hindsight through the unreliable eyes of Julia, which makes for a strange yet distinctive style and a real awareness of the longing and loss of friendships drifting apart. At first it is difficult to see how the events will become more relevant, but after a certain point it is quite easy to work out how they will fit together. Despite this predictability, the novel captures very well a sense of growing up and being aware of the adult world in certain ways, a process that can be ominous and confusing. What Messud particularly emphasises is how Julia finds it difficult to deal with the breakdown of her friendship with Cassie—a girl she claims to know better than Cassie knows herself—and the intensity of still knowing all about somebody that you are no longer close to.

The Burning Girl has some captivating moments and a cleverly ambiguous ending reflecting the messages of the book. It can take a little while to get into, but is a novel that can be enjoyed by both adults and older teenagers for its careful evocation of a relatable feeling of lost friendship and imagination.