April feels like it was a long month. Looking at what I read at the beginning of the month, these seem a good while ago. So here’s what I got through in April.
Joe Country – Mick Herron
I started this month as I finished the last, with Mick Herron’s dodgy spies at Slough House. You know what you get with Herron, a sardonic look at the state of Britain, all with the entertainment of a spy story. I’ll be looking for the next one in the library.
Prophet Song – Paul Lynch
You need something funny such as Herron when you’re also reading this, last year’s Booker Prize winner. I think there’s a tendency in some Western liberal societies to cling to the idea of a benevolent state, to think ‘that sort of thing could never happen here’ when faced with the looming threat of a totalitarian state and this is what Lynch plays on for much of his excellent but incredibly bleak novel. Prophet Song is about an Ireland in the near future that has fallen under a dystopian government who have passed emergency laws allowing them to take more and more liberty from the people. The story is told in long paragraphs and no splits for dialogue, so as to recreate the inner voice of Eilish Stack, wife and mother of four, who has just returned to work (in a lab of some kind) following maternity leave and whose husband, a leader in the teacher’s trade union, is taken and ‘disappeared.’ Eilish’s first reaction is to carry on as before, even as more and more infringements and threats take place – her son is called for military service, the house is targeted by protesters, her children turn away from her – it’s a study in denial and impotence as any action could result in arrest herself. She’s also worried about her father who’s declining mental health means he wouldn’t last long alone – but in lucid moments, he has more idea of what she should do than she does. As I said, it’s really bleak and although very well written, I did finish it wondering what the point of it was, what he was trying to say, except perhaps that first point about being idle and letting tyranny take hold.
Go as A River – Shelley Read
This is published in paperback this month and I’d seen lots of great reviews for it when I picked it up at the library. I was really enjoying it until I went to describe the plot to a colleague and they looked horrified at the amount of death… so bear with me here. This is set in Colorado just after the Second World War and is the story of Torie Nash, who lives with her father, uncle and brother on a peach farm. Torie’s mother died, along with her cousin and aunt, in a car crash, and her uncle lost a leg in the war. When she meets Wilson Moon, a young Native American whose trying his luck from town to town, it’s love at first sight. But bad luck is looming over them all – Wilson is discriminated against by the townsfolk, blamed for all kinds of crime and eventually killed. By this point, Torie is pregnant and has to leave. I’ll leave it there in terms of plot – but I will say that although this sounds like a depressing read, it is infused with love and resilience and Torie is a great character. I think it says a lot about America that this could have been set at any point in the hundred years before it was set, such are the attitudes of the characters – it’s only near the end when the story moves to the 1970s that it feels even vaguely up to date (and still not that much.) But it’s an absorbing read, very well crafted and I thought it was excellent.
Booth – Karen Joy Fowler
The reading group choice this month and the story of the family of John Wilkes Booth, killer of Abraham Lincoln. So you know what happens at the end and the book is partly about how you get there. Fowler is clear that she didn’t want to write about John as much as his wider family, looking at how someone gets to commit a terrible crime and the impact that it has on family members. She was inspired by one or some of the mass shootings in America at the time, and then by the words and actions of the Trump presidency. The book reads like one of those historical documentaries you get these days, with reconstructions of some scenes and otherwise careful retellings of facts – it’s been well researched, and is clearly helped by Booth having a famous father and brother, as well as well documented letters and books about many of the rest of the family. I enjoyed this a lot, although the style is less involving than you might want from a novel, it’s still an absorbing read.
The Swimmers – Chloe Lane
One from the random generated tbr pile, this is set in New Zealand and is about Erin, returning to the family home after a failed love affair threatens her job. Her mother has motor neurone disease and has requested that she take her own life on the Tuesday, leaving Erin the weekend to fulfil some last requests, make some further mistakes (sleeping with inappropriate men, stealing things, punching people – all of which I assumed were included for light relief), and try to understand her mother’s decision. It’s told in the first person and is an enjoyable enough read about an obviously sad subject.
A Line in the Sand – Dorthe Nors
This is subtitled A Year on the North Sea Coast as Nors travels, lives and reminisces about the Danish west coast, combining history, personal memoir and some natural history in one. She also travels with a friend who provides some lovely line illustrations for each chapter. Although I enjoyed this, it read like a series of magazine articles and I cannot immediately remember anything about the contents, except that there are a lot of shipwrecks and bad weather here. I should do better. Or perhaps magazine articles are enough.
Patient – Ben Watt
Ben Watt, as music fans will know, is one half of duo Everything But the Girl and this is his first book, which I’ve been meaning to read for ages. (His second book, about his parents, Romany and Tom, I read a few years ago and is very good). This is about his experiences of a terrible illness that he got in the early nineties, and how it changed his life – it’s a rare illness and there were all kinds of symptoms and treatments, but he had to have most of his small intestine removed and then a load of treatment. This is a graphic account of his time in hospital, the treatment, the impact it had on his feelings and his family and how he eventually got through it. God bless the NHS. So much of how we generally talk about illness and disease is cloaked in mystery or heroism, and what I liked about this is how honest and raw it was, a lot like Delia Ephron’s memoir Left on Tenth which was also unsparing in its honesty about the rubbish bits. Though Watt does also tell you about massive farts with the glee of an 8-year old boy, which I found rather endearing (though grateful I wasn’t in the same room, obvs).
Drift Stumble Fall – M Jonathan Lee
This is a bit of an odd one. It was on the random pile and quite short, which helped. It’s about Richard, a man with wife and two children, who is at home in the days before Christmas when his in-laws arrive and get snowed in. Richard often notices the man who lives across the road from them who often stands and stares into their lives from his window. But Richard has a secret – he’s planning to leave them all. He feels trapped by his family and domestic life, despite not doing an enormous amount of domestic work or childcare. He is on the whole generally an unsympathetic character and his plans for leaving are ridiculous – The Ballad of Lucy Jordan did it better. The man across the road is a subplot which becomes the hinge for the entire book – he and his wife are incredibly sad interior souls who seem very lost and alone, and all will be explained. I’m not saying men shouldn’t complain about being trapped in domesticity – it’s a reasonable thought for many people every so often – but it could be done better and with a soupcon of empathy. The ending was a rush of emotion on the page which made me quite glad I didn’t know any of these people.
The Light of Day – Graham Swift
I enjoyed Swift so much last month I thought I’d try some more and this one was not as successful. It’s a similar style, the ambling through a single day in great detail that goes back and forth in time as it does, and so a bigger story emerges. In this case though, the characters were wholly unconvincing and I had no interest in them at all.
Lolly Willowes – Sylvia Townsend Warner
This is a bit nuts. Laura ‘Lolly’ Willowes is an unmarried spinster who, when her father dies, goes to live with her brother and his family and provides aunt-ish support until they grow up. She has a few odd habits that are indulged – walking around alone, making brews – and then one day announces that she will be moving to the countryside, a small village where she becomes a witch. It’s an odd kind of witchcraft and she does spend much of the last third of the book chatting to the devil rather than doing anything that witchy. But I rather enjoyed it anyway – whimsical and bonkers, as it was.
Moments of Pleasure
I’ve done very little that’s been culturally fulfilling or novel this month, which is my usual criteria for this section. But I have made some nice food. Here’s a salad recipe from The Guardian this weekend just gone, a Palestinian dish called Mafghoussa with courgettes and herbs. And I also made this Mango, Ginger and Lime tart. Enjoy.
Susan E Barsby 