January was a slightly disappointing reading month, though looking at my list of books read it’s hard to say precisely why. It’s a good mix of writers I already know and ones new to me, of genre and literary fiction, but somehow it didn’t hit the spot. That’s why I’ve started February with a Penelope Fitzgerald – you just can’t go wrong with her.
Any oddities in this post are likely due to one of my cats repeatedly walking over the keyboard as I try to write it, occasionally deleting chunks of text.
The Singapore Grip, JG Farrell
This is the third of JG Farrell’s thematic Empire trilogy, but for me the weakest. The setting is Singapore on the eve of World War II and Farrell draws a portrait of an out of touch English colonial establishment who can’t see that their time is distinctly drawing to a close. Absurd preparations for a centennial celebration for a local trading house go on as the threat of war grows nearer. The family patriarch who heads the company worries about marrying off his clever daughter and managing his useless son, while ignoring how his and his peers’ fortune is built on brutal exploitation of the local population.
Farrell’s Troubles and his The Siege of Krishnapur are both marvellous, bitingly funny while somehow still entirely serious. This though is almost twice the length of either, and it felt to me like Farrell had left none of his research off the page. The good stuff from previous books was all there – the writing, the keen sense of human folly – but I learned more about troop movements in 1940s Singapore than I suspect I needed to. If you’ve read the others you’ll likely want to read this too, but otherwise it’s not essential.
Weather, Jenny Offill
I called Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation ‘perhaps the best written unmemorable book I’ve ever read.’ On reflection that may have been a sign that I’m not Offill’s reader. Her Weather however was widely and well reviewed and is an interesting example of the recent rise of climate-change influenced fiction.
Weather captures the sense of slow impending apocalypse that is part of the background now of everyday life for many. The narrator, a librarian, is living her life against a backdrop of news reports of political crisis and looming environmental collapse. It’s well written, often funny, and definitely captures something of our moment.
It reminds me of someone I used to work with back when I was a lawyer who started survival prepping for her kid for after the apocalypse (which in the UK is pretty unusual). She was otherwise a normal middle class professional woman, but she just didn’t trust in the future any more. Offill captures that sense of unease – the need to continue buying groceries while wondering if there’ll be a world for your kid to grow up into. At the same time, she remains a writer I struggle to personally connect to so I’ll likely leave her to other readers in future.
The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday, Saad Z. Hossein
This is a fun SF/fantasy novella. An ancient and powerful djinn wakes up after millennia of imprisonment to find himself in an advanced future world he of course doesn’t comprehend. Fortunately, it seems, he meets an elderly Gurkha who is willing to explain to him how this future works and who takes him to a nearby city run by an all-powerful AI. However, the Gurkha has his own agenda and the djinn for all his power might not be the one people should be afraid of.
If you don’t enjoy SF or fantasy this likely won’t convert you, but if you do this is a fun and not too serious tale that doesn’t overstay its welcome. I’ll read more by Hossein – there’s always a place for well written light entertainment. Also, great title.
Echopraxia, Peter Watts
This is the hardest of hard SF by a famously bleak writer. It’s the sequel to his widely acclaimed Blindspot, a first contact novel which among other things posits that consciousness may be an evolutionary dead end and one that other intelligent species aren’t troubled by. It’s not a cheery read.
Echopraxia returns to the same world and concerns, but for me less successfully. The main character is something of a passenger as various transhuman and alien entities battle it out at levels of intelligence he simply can’t understand let alone compete with, which is a bit of a problem for this merely human reader. Also, like the Farrell, I had a feeling that too much of the research had made it on to the page.
Things We Lost in the Fire, Mariana Enriquez and translated by Megan McDowell
I tend to read short stories on my kindle, often in bed to help me sleep. Argentinian writer Mariana Enriquez uses horror as a tool to explore Argentina’s traumas and some of the imagery makes this perhaps not a wholly ideal bedtime companion.
The stories are excellent, well written and with a sense of unease sometimes overspilling into out-and-out horror. In some ways though the horror is a relief – a ghostly visitation may remind us of Argentina’s history of disappearances but a missing street kid is a far more real and present nightmare.
One of the stories is available for free on Granta’s website, here, and there’s a nice review at Tony’s Reading List here. The title story, as he rightly calls out, is a devastating critique of women’s often limited choices. If I had to choose a book of the month this would probably be it. Recommended, but not for the faint hearted.
Sexing the Cherry, Jeanette Winterson
I loved Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and The Passion both (less so Winterson’s The Daylight Gate). I expected this then to be an early reading highlight of the year for me. There’s definitely a lot here to like: exceptional writing; Winterson’s sharp and slightly puckish sense of fun; and a lovely exploration of how a parent and child can love each other yet still somehow fail to communicate. Despite all that it just didn’t resonate for me on this occasion. I suspect this was me rather than Winterson. John Self, who knows Winterson’s work better than most, has argued here that this is her best novel so I’ve marked it for rereading. (He’s right on Heller by the way – Something Happened is Heller’s best novel.)
Shane, Jack Schaefer
I don’t generally read westerns so this was a departure for me, particularly as I haven’t seen the famous film based on it. It’s the story of a mysterious stranger who comes to a frontier farming community that’s under threat from a big local landowner. Classic stuff, and all narrated by a child old enough to follow events but not always their emotional undercurrents.
The trouble here isn’t the book’s fault, though it is perhaps the fault of the marketing. This is basically young adult fiction, juvenile as it would once have been called. I’d say maybe for a 12-14 year old? It was just too slight and too straightforward to keep my attention and not quite rip-roaring enough to work for me as pulp.
Goodnight Rose, Chi Zijian and translated by Poppy Toland
I chose to end the month with something of a departure, an unknown writer to me (though I think quite an important one in China) and a very different kind of story about a young woman in Northern China who moves to the spare room of an elderly Jewish woman. It becomes an exploration of the treatment and status of women, going to some fairly dark places as it does so but because it stays rooted in sympathetic and interesting characters it’s actually a fairly easy read. It’s cleverly done.
If you’ve any interest in contemporary China I would recommend this, and the angle of (admittedly lightly) exploring the Jewish diaspora in China adds to the interest. It gets perhaps a little unlikely in bringing things to a head, but a little melodrama later on gives the characters something to do and plays into the books themes so it’s not a serious issue.
And that’s it! Onwards and hopefully upwards in February.
