I’ve set myself the challenge of reading all 80 books nominated for the 2015 Folio Prize. Several I’d already read before the list was announced – which was what gave me the perhaps inaccurate idea that it would be possible, or a good idea, to read all of the remainder. Each week, I’ll update with the books I’ve been reading ‘new’, as it were, plus, while I catch up, some of those I read beforehand.
The Emperor Waltz – Philip Hensher (Fourth Estate)
In 1922 Weimar, student Christian Vogt is about to embark on a course of study at the Bauhaus. In 1979 London, Duncan Flannery establishes The Big Gay Bookshop, the city’s first ‘out’ bookshop for gay readers. In AD302 Rome, a merchant’s daughter, fascinated by the new cult of Christianity, becomes a convert and submits to sacrifice. And in 2014 London, Philip Hensher is in hospital for a foot infection. I’ll admit this was a book I wasn’t greatly looking forward to reading – a dedication to Thomas Adès stops the browsing reader dead in his tracks, and I have an allergy to novels in which ‘real people’ appear as characters: in this case we encounter, among others, Paul Klee, Paul Bailey and, er, Philip Hensher – but it won me over almost completely. The links between disparate times and places in this huge and intriguing book are associative rather than direct (a gesture recurs, an artefact, a name, and the piece of music which gives Hensher his title), but in each setting the focus is on groups of people that might be described as cults: in Weimar, alongside the Bauhaus student body, despised by the townsfolk, there are members of an actual religious cult; in 1970s London, The Big Gay Bookshop’s founders and their friends are discriminated against by their neighbours and discriminate, in turn, against the hypocrites or the humourless among their own number. Always there are families, biological or post-nuclear, with their own rites. While cults will come and go, as various characters observe, some endure, and stop being cults, for a while, anyway: killed for her faith, St Perpetua knows that among the Christian-haters in the audience at her execution, some will be moved and undergo the conversion she herself has. Sometimes you need to suffer in order to move society forward; sometimes you suffer, are punished, and nothing changes. I did feel at times that the gay characters were benefiting from a kind of special pleading: in one of his first scenes, Duncan Flannery is cruelly taunting his dying father with the information his estate will be used to found a bookshop for “perverts”, yet we never have much sense of a reason for the animosity between the father and son: liberal, novel-reading folk are, it seems, expected to side with the put-upon gay character from the off. The two sections set in contemporary London, one of which bravely features teenage characters and their slang (by the time The Emperor Waltz was published, probably no-one was saying “bare long” for “really boring” any more), seem surplus to requirements somewhat. On the whole, the book is a bit too bitty for me, and not quite as wholly thematically integrated throughout as it might have been – but for long stretches, particularly the 1970s sections, this really satisfied me as the kind of book I wanted to vanish into for hours over Christmas: a big, broad, densely peopled, fully imagined novel with a point to make.
Young Skins – Colin Barrett (Vintage)
Small town Irish life laid bare in these six stories and one novella, ‘Calm With Horses’, in which the youthful characters are caught up in an escalating series of violent reprisals for territory-overstepping. At a loss for anything better to do, the youths who “have the run of this place” are bristling for a fight or a shag; their loyalties are fiercely defended, and in the most placid of them runs, just beneath the skin, the capacity for violence, thuggery, coldly premeditated murder. A contingent kind of happiness, or at least satisfaction, creeps in at odd moments, too; ‘Diamonds’, one of those one-thing-happens-then-another stories I like so much, where the themes – despite the on-the-nose title – are subtle and associative. These stories – thematically linked but diverse, and written in some of the finest prose I’ve read this year, worked but not overworked – are very good indeed; Barrett has already landed the 2014 Guardian First Book prize for the collection. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this shortlisted, though, as with lots of first short story collections where the author is setting out a stall to some degree, writing to the limits of it but no further, I find myself already looking forward to Barrett’s next book: he’ll muscle through any self-imposed limits into wild new worlds.
In the Approaches – Nicola Barker (Fourth Estate)
What are Nicola Barker’s books about? In the Approaches is a love story between odd folk – of the same type, though hardly the same style, as Kate Grenville’s The Idea of Perfection. Where that book was sentimental, Barker is caustic; her natural tendency is to highlight the odd, the slapstick, the vernacular. Nominally about an academic who’s come to a small town to investigate a famous but tragic artistic family that lived there before, this takes in unexpectedly resurrected dogs, the rivalry between a parrot and a Mynah bird, a character well aware he’s in a Nicola Barker novel (and not happy about it), and a Mrs Overall-esque housekeeper. Tiny mysteries occur and are swiftly resolved, and there are some neat surrealist strands, but there isn’t much plot to speak of. Barker is never less than pleasurable to read, but your impression on finishing In the Approaches is that it was written swiftly and edited only slightly, and that come late 2015 or early 2016 she’ll have out another 500+ pager on the weirdnesses and involutions of small-village life.
In brief: Among the books I happened to have read before the Folio Prize list was announced were Donald Antrim’s The Emerald Light in the Air (Granta), which I found patchy: too often, the confusion in the characters’ minds – many of them are in recovery, or being treated for mental illness – seemed to leach into the text of these stories. The opening, gloriously antic ‘An Actor Prepares’ (its portentous title only making the shagginess of the text funnier) and the concluding, more stately title story are the exceptions. They’re always enjoyable stories, but sometimes waffly where they should be sharp. Though I enjoyed much of it, I did lose patience when Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation (Granta) veered from its initial pithy, insightful, apothegmatic remarks on a relationship’s highs and lows gave way to ‘My child says the cutest things’; one’s patience for other people’s babies is exhausted as quickly by fictional as real-life ones. At its best, this fragmented text is funny, candid and a little shocking: ‘Is she a good baby? people would ask me. Well, no, I’d say.’ Unfortunately this does mean that pretty much every paragraph is excerptable as a ‘favourite quote’ on the book’s Goodreads page. In some ways – quotable and Tweetable – it’s the most 2014 book possible. Akhil Sharma’s Family Life (Faber), one of my favourite books of 2014, is a super-dense, controlled and enjoyable family saga. I read it shortly after the third volume in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle; Sharma’s book is like the incredibly refined single-plate meal to Knausgaard’s vast and sprawling banquet. Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others (Chatto & Windus) (full disclosure: Neel and I are good friends, and he kindly gave me a cover quote for my own book, The Glasgow Coma Scale) is a massive, sprawling, breathtakingly impressive saga of Naxalite uprising and internecine family relationships. There is a streak of cruelty through the book that might remind you of Hardy, or one of the philosophers who postulates a vast and indifferent universe in which no good deed, as the saw has it, goes unpunished. The vast cast of this novel suffer in their different ways; the book open with a moment of personal cruelty and concludes with one of mass destruction. No-one gets out of this world alive. It seems unfair to judge Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation (Fourth Estate) by itself, as it’s the first volume in his Area X trilogy; it’s one of those books you imagine the Booker running from in fright as it is, really, science fiction, or ‘weird’ fiction: the account of an exhibition to the mysterious Area X by one of the investigating team, who first chronicles then starts to succumb to the strangeness of the place. I haven’t read the remaining volumes (Authority and Acceptance) – not through lack of interest but through a desire to wait until I’m back in the US and can purchase the beautiful FSG paperback editions of the two concluding books.
Running total at 2nd January: 20 read, 60 to read, 80 days until the prize is announced. There’s a lot of nice round numbers. Next time: Dinaw Mengestu, Hermione Eyre, Tim Winton and more.
The eighty nominated titles — with the ones I’ve read struck through (and links to my reviews where available) — are:
10:04, Ben Lerner
A GOD IN EVERY STONE, Kamila Shamsie
ACADEMY STREET, Mary Costello
AFTER ME COMES THE FLOOD, Sarah Perry
ALL MY PUNY SORROWS, Miriam Toews
ALL OUR NAMES, Dinaw Mengitsu
ALL THE DAYS AND NIGHTS, Niven Goviden
ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE, Anthony Doerr
ALL THE RAGE, AL Kennedy
AMNESIA, Peter Carey
ANNIHILATION, Jeff VanderMeer
ARCTIC SUMMER, Damon Galgut
BALD NEW WORLD, Peter Tieryas Liu
BARK, Lorrie Moore
BE SAFE I LOVE YOU, Cara Hoffman
BOY, SNOW, BIRD, Helen Oyeyemi
CAN’T AND WON’T, Lydia Davis
DEAR THIEF, Samantha Harvey
DEPT. OF SPECULATION, Jenny Offill
DISSIDENT GARDENS, Jonathan Lethem
DUST, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
EM AND THE BIG HOOM, Jerry Pinto
ENGLAND AND OTHER STORIES, Graham Swift
EUPHORIA, Lily King
EVERLAND, Rebecca Hunt
EYRIE, Tim Winton
FAMILY LIFE, Akhil Sharma
FOURTH OF JULY CREEK, Smith Henderson
HOW TO BE BOTH, Ali Smith
IN SEARCH OF SILENCE, Emily Mackie
IN THE APPROACHES, Nicola Barker
IN THE LIGHT OF WHAT WE KNOW, Zia Haider Rahman
J, Howard Jacobson
KINDER THAN SOLITUDE, Yiyun Li
LILA, Marilynne Robinson
LIFE DRAWING, Robin Black
LOST FOR WORDS, Edward St Aubyn
LOVE AND TREASURE, Ayelet Waldman
NORA WEBSTER, Colm Tóibín
ON SUCH A FULL SEA, Chang-Rae Lee
ORFEO, Richard Powers
OUTLINE, Rachel Cusk
PERFIDIA, James Ellroy
ROAD ENDS, Mary Lawson
SHARK, Will Self
SOME LUCK, Jane Smiley
STAY UP WITH ME, Tom Barbash
STONE MATTRESS, Margaret Atwood
THE BALLAD OF A SMALL PLAYER, Lawrence Osborne
THE BONE CLOCKS, David Mitchell
THE BOOK OF GOLD LEAVES, Mirza Waheed
THE BOOK OF STRANGE NEW THINGS, Michel Faber
THE COUNTRY OF ICECREAM STAR, Sandra Newman
THE DOG, Joseph O’Neill
THE EMERALD LIGHT IN THE AIR, Donald Antrim
THE EMPEROR WALTZ, Philip Hensher
THE FEVER, Megan Abbott
THE HEROES’ WELCOME, Louisa Young
THE INCARNATIONS, Susan Barker
THE LIE, Helen Dunmore
THE LIVES OF OTHERS, Neel Mukherjee
THE NARROW ROAD TO THE DEEP NORTH, Richard Flanagan
THE NIGHT GUEST, Fiona McFarlane
THE PAYING GUESTS, Sarah Waters
THE TELL-TALE HEART, Jill Dawson
THE TEMPORARY GENTLEMAN, Sebastian Barry
THE WAKE, Paul Kingsnorth
THE ZONE OF INTEREST, Martin Amis
THEIR LIPS TALK OF MISCHIEF, Alan Warner
THUNDERSTRUCK, Elizabeth McCracken
TO RISE AGAIN AT A DECENT HOUR, Joshua Ferris
TRAVELLING SPRINKLER, Nicholson Baker
UPSTAIRS AT THE PARTY, Linda Grant
VIPER WINE, Hermione Eyre
VIRGINIA WOOLF IN MANHATTAN, Maggie Gee
WE ARE NOT OURSELVES, Thomas Matthew
WHAT YOU WANT, Constantine Phipps
WITTGENSTEIN JR, Lars Iyer
YOUNG SKINS, Colin Barrett
YOUR FATHERS, WHERE ARE THEY? AND THE PROPHETS, DO THEY LIVE FOREVER?, Dave Eggers