Reading Round-Up, January to June
Here are some books I briefly commented on in editions of The Fortnightly since the start of the year, but not in longer form for my books page.
Bourneville by Jonathan Coe
Coe is one of the most reliably entertaining and interesting English novelists at work, and indeed a recent enjoyable novel was called Middle England. I previously recommended Mr Wilder and Me, about the film-maker Billy Wilder. So Bournville (2022) was a fine holiday read, named after the model village area of Birmingham founded by the Quaker Cadbury family.
The story starts during the first days of pandemic, as Lorna finds herself in Austria and Germany just as things get sticky, and contacts her grandmother Mary via Skype; the book also ends with Mary in the pandemic (a very affecting account of a death all-too-familiar in those circumstances).
In between Coe visits the impact on an extended family of: VE Day, the Queen’s coronation, the World Cup final, the investiture of Charles as Prince of Wales, the Charles-Diana wedding and the 75th anniversary of VE Day.
Coe always gives you good value as a reader: all this is stitched together in rich and absorbing ways.
The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez
Nunez is an author I should have read before now, but at least I recently caught up with her ninth novel, The Vulnerables. The eponymous people are older citizens at the start of the pandemic, as one stranger upbraids the narrator while she walks around an almost-deserted New York City in the 'uncertain spring' of 2020. 'Don't play dumb. You're breaking the rules, and you know it... You're a vulnerable, and you need to act like one.'
The book opens in a fractured manner, appropriately, given the cognitive shock of that spring. But then quickly it settles down to the story of how she shared space with a male drop-out student and a pet parrot. It's not as irritatingly quirky as that sounds, though: Nunez always writes interestingly as she moves between different modes. Touches of Rachel Cusk, Ali Smith, Deborah Levy at times, though she's not 'like' any of those.
Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad
In November I wrote a post on ‘eclectic reading', the gist of which was that one of my fundamental reading pleasures is exploring new areas of life, new ideas, new places. So on that level Isabella Hammad’s novel Enter Ghost (2023) was interesting, set as it is on the West Bank. The details of everyday experience were vivid, and the feelings of Palestinians in particular, and in the light of the current horrific situation in that region I was grateful to get some insights beyond media reporting and social media extremism.
As a novel I didn’t find it particularly successful, however. For me it lacked narrative coherence. I found myself drifting, and the characters were not particularly well-developed. The use of Hamlet, which the central characters are rehearsing in difficult circumstances, felt somewhat bolted-on.
Hotel Milano by Tim Parks
You're always in good hands with Tim Parks. His fiction and essays over many years, mostly set in Italy, have provided plenty of pleasures. Many of us enjoyed A Season with Verona, his account of following the Hellas Verona football team all over Italy.
Hotel Milano is his latest novel. Frank is drawn to Milan from London for the funeral of an old acquaintance by a phone call on March 6th 2020. Our narrator is largely oblivious to the gathering dangers of the pandemic. After arriving in Italy he moves into the luxurious eponymous hotel as things start to deteriorate outside. And then something that happens inside the hotel changes everything for him.
Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry
Old God's Time shares a subject with Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These: a decent man tries to face up to the traumas caused by the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland. But Barry's approach is very different to Claire Keegan's: his protagonist, a recently-retired detective, is a very unreliable narrator, and the style is freewheeling and utterly unlike Keegan's scrupulous carefulness.
One other difference is the number of sensational events, especially involving death. But Barry is never less than readable, warm, often funny, and sympathetic.
The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui
Graphic novels are a gap in my reading, and I’d like to fill it that a bit.
I caught up with The Best We Could Do, which came out in 2017; since then it has justifiably won many awards. It tells the story of a Vietnamese family’s personal history before and after moving from Vietnam to America in the 1970s. The rich exploration of the author’s parents’ stories in particular is very affecting, driven on by the single-colour graphic format. Her illustrations are often stark and stripped-down.
For those teaching the Leaving Certificate, certainly an interesting comparative option: a rich exploration of a culture and a fascinating weaving of themes (warning: tough material at the start).
Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy
Claire Kilroy returns to fiction for the first time since her 2012 novel The Devil I Know. And she returns with a bang. Soldier Sailor is a deliriously intense stream of words voiced by a mother looking after her young son with virtually no help from a self-centred father. That father is a walking cliché, but who knows what the truth is: the narrator is drowning in an utterly changed world.
Also: it’s funny. For instance, check out a scene in IKEA as the family look for a bed for their little boy.
Among the Trolls by Marianna Spring
Marianna Spring is the host of a podcast I pointed out recently, Why Do You Hate Me?, an exploration of the appalling ways people behave online. Her new book, Among the Trolls, is another eye-opener (see a previous series on BBC Sounds, Marianna in Conspiracyland).
It’s a series of fascinating and often horrifying stories: that person who is so pleasant to you chatting in the supermarket queue goes home and writes dreadful things on social media, and is in hock to a weird conspiracy theory. Spring makes clear how difficult it is for those people to deconstruct their biases, how much their identity depends on them, and how catastrophically these can have real-life consequences.
Service by Sarah Gilmartin
This is set in the fevered atmosphere of a high-end restaurant Dublin some years ago, an environment which is notoriously intense. She weaves together several perspectives which gradually come to the central event prompting the narrative: a court-case involving sexual assault. The narrative is sharp and compelling.
Shy by Max Porter
Max Porter’s short novels often play with form. Shy’s form is determined by the personality of the chaotic eponymous character, a very disturbed teenager now at the well-meaning ‘Last Chance’ boarding institution. He’s not Holden Caulfield. The story is often powerful, sometimes poetic, occasionally mis-firing, always interesting.