Reading Round-Up, July to December 2024
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.
The Playbook by James Shapiro
Professor Shapiro talked to Fintan O’Toole at the Dalkey Book Festival in June about America’s relationship with Shakespeare, and I grabbed the opportunity to go. He always speaks compellingly, and I wrote some notes on this appearance. I was able to ask a question about King Lear (in the light of the current fracturing of the US, and the prospect of two old men contesting the election, which of course didn’t happen).
The Playbook is the story of the demise of the Federal Theatre Project in the late 1930s, brought down in an early culture war by the likes of Martin Dies, chair of the head of the newly formed House Un-American Activities Committee, later to become even more notorious as the driving force of McCarthyism. As ever, Shapiro is expert at marshalling the disparate strands of a story. He shows compellingly how the ‘playbook’ we have seen in recent years has its origins well back in American history.
Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters by Brian Klaas
Klaas’s Substack The Garden of Forking Paths is worth signing-up to. The title of the newsletter explains what the central thesis of his book is: that every moment in our lives is a fork, and that our lives are massively ‘contingent’ rather than ‘convergent’. We have far less control or agency in our destinies than we imagine (that’s a comforting fiction). Klaas is good at using stories to elucidate complex ideas, starting with Henry Stimson and Kyoto, and this book was a thought-provoking read during travels in the European sunshine.
A good example of his thinking, in a post called ‘How the World Sped Up’:
The world now moves so fast that we can no longer understand it. Speed creates order and efficiency. But speed has also placed a ticking time bomb under the systems that govern our lives.
In December I used this book as one of the ideas behind a post on contingencies and decisions in Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, in which Bill Furlong is truly in a ‘garden of forking paths’.
Water and Earth by John Boyne
John Boyne is half-way through a four-part series of short novels called The Elements, which seem to be particularly interested in the viral nature of our public lives. The first, Water, is set on an island off the West of Ireland where Vanessa/Willow flees after a scandal involving her husband. It is tight and tense, and well-controlled.
In Earth, a minor character in Water, Evan Keogh, is tried for sexual assault. Boyne always knows how to make you turn the pages, though the plot here pushes the bounds of plausibility (particularly when looking at football).
Poor by Katriona O’Sullivan
Poor has been a huge success, and indeed won The Last Word Listeners’ Choice category in the 2023 Irish Book Awards. I took a while to catch up on it, but flew through the pages in a couple of days. She writes compellingly.
Education is central to this autobiography: the author’s faith in its power to change her life (and indeed it did, though as she points out there was a large slice of luck involved) from childhood, all the way to her university entrance via the Trinity Access Programme before getting her doctorate and now lecturing.
She remembers the impact of teachers, both good and bad, and of course here I’ll note her appreciation of her English teacher in Coventry, Mr Pickering:
Mr Pickering was a northern man in his forties. I loved him. I loved his pronunciation of Shakespeare, the way he thoughtfully read through the texts and explained each phrase to us, telling us how we might say it today. I took notes in his class, always wanting to make good on my homework. His praise meant more to me than other teachers’. I wanted to be the best in his class; he was hard on all of us, so you knew when he told you that you’d done well, you really had. In his class I gladly shot my hand up; even wrong answers were engaged with.
In October 2024, Katriona O’Sullivan gave a compelling key-note address at the INOTE conference.
A Flat Place by Noreen Masud
This is Noreen Masud’s intense account of her travels around ‘flat places’ such as Orford Ness, Morecambe Bay and the Newcastle Town Moor, and of how her childhood traumas from Pakistan manifest themselves.
The most powerful part is her marvellous story of travelling to Orkney with a surprise companion, her mother, who comes across vividly in all the complexities of her personality. Her father, now dead, is more elusive: his impact on the lives of all his daughters was plainly disastrous. In the end the book itself remains elusive and not fully achieved, though there are some vivid moments.
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
This caused a big splash in the publishing world. Perhaps surprisingly, she is now literary fiction’s equivalent of J.K.Rowling (midnight launch parties) or even Taylor Swift.
Disconnected comments:
I think it’s her best book so far. It has a warmth and capacious empathy which shows her talent deepening.
Oddly, that empathy seems to bypass one of the four main characters, Naomi, the one who maybe needs our attention most, but whose inner life is denied to us.
It’s probably also overlong. Evidence: some sex scenes.
It’s powerful on the surprising and unpredictable ways grief strikes.
As with previous Rooney books, you can be simultaneously drawn along and find the characters and the milieu irritating.
Question 7 by Richard Flanagan
This is one of my Books of the Year. It won the Baillie Gifford Prize in late 2024. I need to reread it before writing more entensively, but for the moment here are some scattered notes:
It starts like Sebald, and like Sebald you’re never quite sure where it’s going. But Flanagan knows exactly what he’s doing.
Personal link: we’re about the same age, and both our fathers were locked up in WW2. Though I haven’t yet won the Booker Prize.
In an interview, Flanagan said: [during Covid] I had lived, I realised, in the autumn of things, and the world I had grown up in was irrevocably lost. I felt the shades of my long dead parents near me and wanted to hold them close and did it the only way I knew how: with words.
An early passage: Sometimes I wonder why we keep returning to beginnings - why we seem the single thread we might pull to unravel the tapestry we call our life in the hope that behind it we will find the truth of ‘why’. But there is no truth. There is only ‘why’. And when we look closer we see that behind that ‘why’ is just another tapestry.
It leads us into the lives of the atomic physicist Leo Szilard, and the writers H.G. Wells and Rebecca West, and how each was significant in Flanagan’s own life in an extraordinary chain.
It’s disconcerting and edgy: Anne Enright wrote that it is one of those books where a writer bundles up his entire life and hurls it on to the page.
A section close to the end describing Flanagan’s near-death in a river is astonishing. You know of course that he survives, but still feel he might die. It drains you.