LaRose

We have a small branch library in Much Wenlock, and we’re lucky to have that. As with the arts, education, health and social services, the traffic is all in the direction of austerity. So when I get into that welcoming little building I don’t rely on what happens to be on the shelves. I’m usually picking up a request I’ve made, where I’ve read a review and they get the book from somewhere else in the county.

But this time was different. Short of things to read, I idly trawled the shelves, and found LaRose, by Louise Erdrich, and thought I’d give it a try. It’s just brilliant. The outline is staggering, though apparently based on a real incident. A man aiming to kill a deer finds that by accident he’s killed the sone of a friend and neighbour. Drawing on Native American custom, he decides that the way to atone for this is to hand over his own son to the other man’s family, for them to bring him up.

An outrageous premise, but she makes it totally believable, and gripping throughout its fouyr hunded pages. On the way, she takes in family tensions, teenage sex, the development of tribes over generations, the delusions of revenge and conspiracy, amid the background of current US politics. Erdrich is a poet as well as a novelist, and it shows. I can’t remember having enjoyed a book so much in years.

The Joy of Books

When the news is so unremittingly gloomy, it’s a relief to slid into an alternative world, to lose yourself among people or stories that writers have cunningly devised. Just at the moment, I’m doing that twice over, in incredibly different ways.

Downstairs, with a cup of tea before breakfast, and then at various points through the day, I’m working through the massive “The Covenant of Water”, by Abraham Verghese. It’s an Indian family saga, like Rushdie and many others, tracing the development of a range of characters over years. It’s lovingly, carefully told, totally convincing and enthralling, a real pleasure to read.

But when I go to bed I’m in an utterly contemporary America, inhabited by smart middle aged people who know what they think but aren’t quite sure how they feel. “Romantic Comedy”, by Curtis Sittenfield, is exactly what it says on the tin, a witty and affectionate study of a relationship, between a comedy writer and a singer. It features conversations and e-mail exchanges and is utterly contemporary but also driven by the same “will they? won’t they?” suspense that drives Jane Austen’s novels. I’m so lucky, and I’m dreading finishing them both.

James Gillray

I’m not a huge fan of Christmas, but I am impressed by the impact of a well-chosen Christmas present. This year, on the strength of a rave review in the LRB, my son bought me a copy of “James Gillray”, a massive, expensive study of the eighteenth century caricaturist. It was too heavy to comfortably manipulate on my lap, so I ended up reading it at the dining room table, for a quarter of an hour each day.

And what a treat that was. The drawings are amazingly intricate, and fantastically energetic. The text carefully explains which particular politician is the target and why, and the illustrations are brilliant, often producing two copies of the same picture at different scales, so we can grasp both the specific detail and the overall design.

There is, too, a complex political and technical background, whereby different people may contribute to a particular cartoon - original idea, drawing, engraving, publication, promotional campaign. Sometimes Gillray was personally involved, but sometimes he wasn’t - serving whichever power group was willing to pay for his services. His work inspires modern artists like Martin Rowson and Steve Bell, but it’s astonishing to grasp that many of these masterpieces were never drawn at all - but inscribed immediately, in reverse, onto metal platyes. Just astonishing.

The Booker shortlist

The Booker has always been controversial, and I can see why there are risks involved in turning the writing of novels into a competition, in the damage it does to books not selected etc etc…but it’s still hard to resist the pull of getting involved in focussing on a few books that serious readers have decided are worth our attention.

This year’s list, in particular. There was the initiual curiosity that two of them were written by Irish Pauls, but beyond that silliness was the fact that both The Bee Sting and Prophet Song were compoulsive reads. I had them from the library at the same time, and was gripped by both, but in very different says. I ended up buying a hardback copy of each as Christmas presents, one for my son, one for my daughter. And who got what was another interesting internal debate…

So I enjoyed reading an extract from a blog published in The Guardian, where the writer was comparing their responses to these books, and wondering which of the two of them was more likely to win the prize, and why…and then the realisation that this blog was written in Gaza, and by the time I was reading it the writer could well have been killed.

The Bee Sting

What do the Irish put in their water? A couple of weeks ago I raved about Paul Lynch’s novel “Prophet Song”, and now Paul Murray, also Irish, comes up with “The Bee Sting”, also deservedly on the Booker shortlist, but completely different.

Superficially, it’s a classic family novel - like Middlemarch, like The Corrections. It’s over five hundred pages, and it follows each of the four members of a family, gradually unpeeling the layers of the family onion. But it’s also totally modern, exploring in turn, and (to me at least) with total conviction, the inner lives of each of the family members - male and female, young and old. There’s switches and dark secrets, and a complicated plot, but I’ve found it a pleasure to read, and now I’ve finished there’s the painful ache left by a stunning book. I may well reread it in the future, but never again will I discover it for the first time.

Prophet Song

The world goes to hell in a handcart, so I retreat to my warm cocoon, watch documentaries and mubi films, listen to music, and read library books. And just at the moment, there’s some stunning stuff around. The blurb for Paul Lynch’s “Prophet Song”, for instance, describes the creation of a future dystopia similar to the work of Orwell, Burgess and Attwood.

Which is plainly ludicrous. Except that it’s not. This contemporary novel about how ordinary life in Ireland sinks into an authoritarian nightmare is totally believable. As I read, I can see how little it would take for us to become former Yugoslavia, Ukraine, wherever. the pieces are all in place, and the crude, powerful oversimplifications which drive violence and repression are on the news every day.

It’s deeply domestic. A mother, trying to bring up four kids on her own, when she doesn’t know what’s happened to her husband. The pressures of surviving day to day, of feeding, keeping clean, staying safe, when bit by bit all the things which keep us sane are being wrenched away. Lynch puts us in that position, makes us care, as we long for this family to get away - but all the time we know that it would be ludicrous to expect a happy ending.

The Road Not Taken

I’ve been reading “An Uneasy Inheritance”, Polly Toynbee’s memoir/reflections on class, and it’s fascinating. But one moment stands out, where she describes Blair’s Beveridge lecture in 1999, when he set out his plans to abolish child poverty. He’d deliberately invited a wide range of experts, analysts and journalists - many of whom were openly sceptical - Does he mean it? Does he know what’s involved?

Toynbee’s answer to both questions is an emphatic yes, and she insists that by 2010 he had got a third of the way there. Whcih came to me as total news, and I reckon to follow politics fairly closely. But that wasn’t my fault; it was Blair’s. He felt the electorate was conservative and grudging, wouldn’t approve of doing stuff for the poor, so that kind of initiaive must be kept under the radar, surreptitious, on the sly.

Which means that when Cameron and Osborne take over, and immediately reverse a lot of that progress, there isn’t an informed public leaping to protest. Maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference if they had known, but it’s fascinating to think that if he’d played his cards differently Tony Blair might now be known as a scourge of inequality rather than a key architect of the War in Iraq.

Festival in a Book

This week has seen the launch of the anthology Festival in a Book, which celebrates the Wenlock Poetry Festival, which ran from 2010-2016. There are two kinds of anthology. One throws the poems into a heap, and sorts them out into alphabetical order of surnames. The other thinks very carefully about what goes where, how the poems are grouped, and in what order they should come. This collection fits very snugly into the latter category, of carefully considered work.

For anyone who was involved in WPF there’s a ton of memories here, reminders of details which are very much treasured, landmarks in a poetic journey which for a lot of us are of lasting significance: particular performers at the Edge, the Poetree, the Emergency Poet, tea and cake and at Priory Hall.

But there’s also the poetry, and that means poems from an astonishing range of contributors. I count at least sixty nationally known poets in the index, writing about a wide variety of subjects. I doubt there’ll be a more substantial anthology of any kind published this year, which makes this collection the perfect Christmas present. Whether or not you know Wenlock, whether or not you read a lot of poetry, this is the ideal way to get a taste of either or both.

Demon Copperhead

You can imagine a novelist working out what their next book will attempt. Tackle a current issue, say, like the systematic, evil campaign to promote the use of opioids. Or maybe you mount a defence of the area you come from, which - like the Black Country, say - has become the butt of lazy jokes and caricature. Or maybe you go back to the classics, and make your novel an updated version of a familiar book, but give it enough of your own character and voice for readers to feel they’re getting something original.

What you probably wouldn’t do is take on all three at once. But that’s what Barbara Kingsolver has attempted - and magnificently achieved - with “Demon Copperhead”. She follows the outline of “David Copperfield” closely; you can tick off the characters as they arrive, and note some changes of name and crucial detail, but it’s also a vivid, lively account of the Appalachian area where she grew up, and a totally gripping read. Shropshire Libraries knew this would be big, and have quite a few copies. I think it’s the best book I’ve read this year, and I’d advise you to get your request in early.

Don Paterson

When I was fitter and younger I’d always go to Ledbury Poetry Festival. I’d go through the programme, and try to find a day where it would be worth driving for 75 minutes, going to three or four events spaced out over the day, having a lunch in a pub garden, and driving back in he evening. Now that looks like hard work, and in any case I couldn’t find a day-full of evens. So I settled for the easy life, booking into a Don Paterson reading on zoom.

It was well worth it. He’s dry and entertaining, a thoughtful analyst of poems as well as a skilled and versatile practitioner, and by the time he’d finishd I knew I had to have his latest collection “The Arctic.” It’s a real mix, some music and impenetrable Scottish dialect, but also a powerful confrontation of contemporary themes - Brexit, Covid, climate change. Back in the day, I was often told that poetry shouldn’t try t deal with politics, but for some reason that isn’t the orthodoxy any more.

Even better, Paterson sometimes deals with the old currency - regular forms, short lines that rhyme, tight four-ling stanzas that build up steam. Jonathan Davidson, who was interviewing him at Ledbury, seemed to regard this as a lovable eccentricity, but to me it was a vindication of something I’ve always known. Of course, regular forms shouldn’t be compulsory, but you’d be crazy to ditch them altogether.

Time to Think

That’s what books are for. A month ago, I wrote some comments about a TV documentary called The clinic, about the GIDS unit at the Tavistock. It was serious and constructive, avoided a lot of the obvious traps, and represented a fair range of views. But in an hour, it couldn’t tell the full story. A Guardian review suggested that this had actually been achieved by the Newsnight reporter Hannah Barnes, in her book “Time to Think.”

They were right. As a person of leisure, I could order the book from the library, read most of it in a day, on two three-hour train journeys to London and back, and I’m now considerably wiser. First, there’s the issue of management. Polly Carmichael didn’t appear in the TV documentary, and refused to co-operate with the writing of the book, but over the course of Barnes’ extensive enquiries her role becomes clear - she’s a pleasant, concerned professional who wants to look after her team, and listens to what they have to say. She just doesn’t do anything about it.

Another issue, not sexy, not conducive to good television, is record-keeping. What happens to these kids after GIDS stops seeing them? How many of them who transition to another gender regret it, or actually seek to have that process reversed? Nobody knows. Sure, it’s difficult work and they’re under pressure and the demand is growing all the time, but keeping track of the effects of your treatment surely has to be part of the job.

There’s a lot more, but no space for it here. But if you’re interested in what happened at GIDS, you have to read his book.

Buying Books

As Keynes apparently said “Of course I’ve changed my mind. When circumstances change, you change your mind. What do you do?”

Which is a consolation when I occasionally feel guilty about the amount of money I spend on books. I’ve always bought books. I have thousands of them, and know for certain that most have virtually no resale value, so my kids will inherit a huge store of knowledge which will be more of a pain than a profit. Five years ago, I sort of decided I wouldn’t buy any more books, unless I really had to.

Then Covid came along. I went to a ton of zoom poetry events, often featuring poets at the other end of the country, totally new to me but writing stunning poems. And how could I best support them? Answer: by buying their books online.

The worst of Covid has gone, for now, but I continue to want to support poets, and the easiest way to do that is to order their work from the local independent bookshop, Pengwern in Shrewsbury. And when I get there there’s often something tasty which I haven’t heard of, but award myself as a freebie, for supporting the good cause. Which is how I came across “The Music of Time”, by John Burnside. It’s a stunning survey of European poetry over the last hundred years - an incredible display of knowledge and enthusiasm. I’d never heard of it, but feel privileged to have come across it, and share that buzz by lending it to friends

Remembering Martin Amis

Reading the obituaries for Martin Amis really did take me back, to a time when I thought - quite a lot us thought, actually - that he could be the most exciting writer in the UK today. That was, admittedly, alongtme ago. He was always very male, brittle, combative, but briefly the energy and feel for language seemed briefly to make up for that, to make it matter a bit less. I can remember storing “Money” along with my favourite hardback novels, the select few I’d hang on to for the rest of my life. And then, in lockdown, came the time to put that to the test, and actually start reading it again. I didn’t take long. how n earth, I wondered, could I really have thought this was so special? When I compare how I feel now about Sarah Waters, Jennifer Egan, Jim Crace I’m just astonished that there was ever a time when I thought Amis deserved to be up there. Like others commenting on his death, I dare say I’ll happily go back to the memoirs and the collected essays, but I don’t see me re-reading a Martin Amis novel any time soon.

Confidence Trick

One of the interesting offshoots of the deeply depressing story of Donald Trump is his relationship with the reporter Maggie Haberman. that’s nothing like as sordid as he might like it to be, since she gets on with her professional work of reporting what he’s doing - and has done for years. He’ fascinated by her, occasionally lurching into outrage and insults, but also regularly coming back for more, in the belief that maybe he can charm her into being on his side.

It hasn’t worked. Her 500-page study of his rise to power, Confidence Man, is a thorough journalistic job, immaculately researched and resourced, and without a glimmer of personal bias. She carefully records whosaid what and whowrote what, and is toughly self-critical of herself on the occasions when she got it wrong. Anything further than Trump’s own style would be hard to imagine.

So the evidence is all there, about how he tricked and lied, deceived and backtracked, powered by his own inexhaustible vanity and constant need for admiration and support. Nobody reading his could imagine that he was fit to be in charge of a company, let alone a country - and yet reports still come in of influential Republicans deciding hat yes, he’s the man to represent them in the next presidential election. It’s the kind of thing to give democracy a bad name.

Our Missing Hearts

Asking at the library for a book by Celeste Ng might seem a bit daunting so far as pronunciation is concerned, but don’t be put off. This is a totally stunning book, which I ordered on the strength of a good review, and I’m so glad I did.

The obvious parallel is with The Handmaid’s Tale. They’re both set in imaginary dystopias which aren’t very imaginary at all, being closely related to stuff that’s already happening, or is just about to happen. But though the political insight and sense of threat is just as strong, in Ng’s book there’s also a tremendous warmth with which she views her central characters, and an exploration of family relationships which are often difficult but are always convincingly and sympathetically viewed, without ever being sentimental.

Lots to think about, but also a rapidly developing plot which is riveting - I’m so glad I’ve read it, but now that it’s over I feel the loss. So the least I can do is suggest you go to your library, and give yourself a treat.

A Quiet Triumph

This was that rarity - a bookshop purchase. I went into collect something else, browsed through the shelves, and picked up a book I’d never heard of. I hadn’t read a review, there were no blurb quotes on the cover, and it was more expensive than most but hey, I treated myself.

I’m so glad I did. Smart Devices, by Carol Rumens, is a collection of fifty-two “poems for the week” from The Guardian. She picks the poems, and writes about two and half pages of commentary, and that’s it. But it’s just a brilliant primer for poetry analysis, as well as an introduction to a wide range of poets and poems.

I’d heard of a few of them, but not most, and it’s obvious that Rumens is reading voraciously all the time, frequently referring to other poems in a particular poet’s collection. There’s a massive range of style, tone and form, but the constant elements are Rumens’ enthusiasm for what she’s reading, and the intelligence she brings to bear. Why she isn’t celebrated in e same way as J Bell or Jane Commane I don’t know,but she should be.

The Climate Book

Back in December (see blog entry for Jan 6 - “Glimmers of Light”) I attended the Guardian launch of “The Climate Book” on zoom. It was an inspiring gathering to set against the general gloom of the news, and now I’ve got the chance to see what the fuss was about, as Shropshire Libraries have the book on their shelves, and now on mine.

It’s brilliant. It’s not a passionate, fluent read, like “The Silent Spring.” It’s very bitty, lots of short chapters, but also substantial - 400 pages. But its forbidding form is a reflection of reality. The climate crisis is a huge, complex problem, which is actually a combination of tons of smaller problems - fires, insects, warming ice floes, deforestation, biodiversity…And Greta Thunberg’s brilliant achievement has been to get nearly a hundred experts each to write a short, clear chapter about their particular area of expertise. There’s some very big names here, and you wonder who else would have had the nerve to even attempt something on this scale. The contributions are all linked with her Thunberg’s overall commentary, clear and concise.

You wouldn’t want to read this over the weekend. I have it on the front-room table, and each morning I make a cup of tea, and sit down to read 15-20 pages, which might well mean three or four sections. that’s as much as I can take in, but I feel wiser, and increasingly I think that when this book has to go back to the library I’ll want my own copy, sitting on the shelves, so I can go back to it and remind myself what’s happening all the time.

Making Sense of Migration

Migration is a mess. It’s a really complicated topic, confused by angry rhetoric and political arguments which are passionate, confused and hard to disentangle. So what a worried observer with endless leisure needs is a good book, and luckily I’ve just discovered one. “The Fourth Time, We Drowned” is 400 pages about the situation in Europe, mainly in Libya. The EU doesn’t want large numbers of Africans coming to Europe, so they pay Libya huge amounts of money to make sure that doesn’t happen. But “Libya” isn’t a pleasant, rational country, organised to do a humanitarian job. It’s a mixture of competing militias, who make money by locking up migrants, threatening them, blackmailing their relatives, and either taking them off boats or putting them on boats, whichever is the more lucrative. Sally Hayden, in Irish journalist, uncovers all this with enormous patience, relying on social media links with a succession of migrants in horrendous circumstances. For many of them she is their only source of hope, and she pursues the story doggedly, chasing down EU representatives, spokespersons and whistleblowers from UNHCR, and other agencies unable to match their public statements with effective action. It’s depressing but hugely impressive, and on the back cover there are seven seriously good writers of various kinds, each testifying that this is a very special book. I got it from the local library. I’m guessing you could do thesame.

Glory

When a young black writer is said to be “out-Orwelling Orwell” in their mash-up of “Animal Farm”, you’d expect the eyes of aging white readers to roll - but they shouldn’t. NoViolet Bulawayo - yes, there is a clue in the name - is smart and supremely talented, and “Glory” is one of the best books I’ve read this year. After 150 pages I was thinking “Get on with it - at least Animal Farm is clear and short…” but by page 400 I was knocked out. It’s creative, funny and passionately angry - a massive demolition job on the corruption that seeps through the history of of Zimbabwe. Quite what she does and how she does it is hard to describe, but then I don’t want to do it for you - I want to say get it from the library, like I did, and see if her magic works on you the way it did on me. I hope so.

Mick Herron

It’s such a pleasure to discover a really good writer who’s written four or five books but somehow you’ve not heard about. I read a review of the latest Mick Herron and thought “Yeah. Maybe - why not?” Which is exactly why libraries exist. No need to pay big money or sacrifice precious shelf-space; just put in a requet and see what comes.

I was knocked out. For Le Carre fans there’s the usual pleasures of delving down into a murky, amoral world - but with the key difference that there’s a lot of jokes. Really good jokes, that you don’t see coming, in the dialogue and the needle-sharp description. It’s a rely pleasure to read, but it also hums along at a rate of knots, so you never get bored.

A tiny sample, one of many: “Perhaps de Greer had simply decided she’d had enough, and gone to seek more agreeable company: a bunch of drunk golfers, or a basket of rats.” It’s not a big deal, but there’s a constant supply, and there’s also smart plotting and confident movement between different characters. A writer who won’t ever be boring, but keeps me interested and entertained - and I’ve still got plenty to go.