What I Read In August
Anna Mackmin Devoured Oh, but this struck a chord. This is a bizarre coming-of-age-novel in which the initially unnamed protagonist — a girl on the verge of puberty – recounts her life in a commune living in a ramshackle house somewhere in Norfolk in the the early 1970s. Our girl lives with her (selectively) mute sister Star and her parents who give house room to an eclectic assortment of deluded and self-absorbed poets, new-agers, artists, ne’er do-wells, druggies and dropouts. Eventually, of course, it all falls apart. The bizarrerie is mainly about the writing style, which some will find refreshing, others annoying. Also, recipes. I thought it was a lot of fun, but perhaps because it reminded me of the people I knew back in the day during my education in a Steiner School, when, at the start of the school day, clapped-out vans and Citroen 2CVs adorned with decals saying ‘Atomkraft Nein Danke’ pulled up, disgorging black fumes and an unfeasible number of children, and the gardening was biodynamic.
Carl Zimmer Life’s Edge Age, infirmity and the casting-around for another book idea have led me to catch up with the output of my colleague and friend Zimmer, whom I’ve known since we were both cub reporters and before he started writing books, but, now that we’ve passed a lot of water, he has written quite a few. In Life’s Edge he wrestles with that je-ne-sais-quoi we call ‘life’. Most people know that life begins when the kids leave home and the dogs are dead. Apart from that, telling the difference between the quick and the dead has been a somewhat fraught business, and yet the issue informs many of the debates we have today, from abortion to end-of-life care. The problem is that we all know life when we come across it, but, like jazz or pornography, it seems impossible to achieve a definition that satisfies everyone. In his masterly book How Life Works (reviewed here) Philip Ball suggests that life is that which has meaning, but that probably wouldn’t satisfy everyone either. You can drill down and down to the level of molecules, but then, what do you have? I’ll tell you — bupkes. As ever, Zimmer recounts his travels and encounters with scientists engaged in this evanescent issue with warmth, sympathy and affection. He doesn’t succeed in finding a definition, but the journey is nothing less than thought-provoking.
Leigh Bardugo Ninth House Where do those bright young witches and wizards go after Hogwarts? To Yale, of course, many of whose Secret Societies practice magic. There are eight Senior societies, and their activities are monitored by Lethe (the Ninth House of the title) which acts as a kind of magical military police. Meet Galaxy Stern, known as Alex, child of a hippy-drippy-trippy Los Angeleno mother of Ladino Jewish heritage, and an unknown father. Alex is a feral high-school dropout, but is recruited by Lethe because she has the remarkable ability to see ghosts without first having to drink the extremely toxic elixir otherwise required. A stranger in a strange land, she finds herself at Yale on a full scholarship, mixing with students much more accomplished (and more entitled) than she, so she has to succeed on chutzpah and street smarts. A deputy (‘Dante’) in an investigative duo working for New England brahmin Daniel Arlington (‘Virgil’), her already fragile world is thrown into confusion when she starts investigating the murder of a young New-Haven woman apparently unconnected with Yale, and Arlington is sucked into a vortex that leads straight to Hell. The parallels with Hogwarts are obvious: the ill-equipped recruit from a deprived home, the exotic and antique setting drenched in ancient ritual, the cast of eccentric and occasionally dangerous characters make it so. Just add a great deal of sex, violence and violent sex, all with or without a copious intake of drugs and not a little gore, and you are most of the way there. But where Bardugo succeeds (Rowling, meh, not so much) is in — well, everything. Ninth House excels: the quality of the writing, the nuanced characterisation, the taut plotting and the watertight world-building shine brightly. It helps that Yale, unlike Hogwarts, really exists, and so (I have learned) do many of the locations and institutions described in the story. As a novel, it has a conventional three-act structure. And with its plots, counter-plots, reveals, false trails and twisty ending, it is perfectly poised … and with enough untied knots for a sequel. Which leads me to…
Leigh Bardugo Hell Bent sees Alex Stern and her friends, notably shy, bookish Pamela Dawes (‘Oculus’, in Lethe language), hard-bitten detective Abel Turner (‘Centurion’, Lethe’s liaison with the New Haven PD) and plucky Mercy Zhao (Alex’s Yale room-mate) try and mostly fail to pull Daniel Arlington out of Hell. They succeed, mostly, but Arlington has, unsurprisingly, changed. And all this as Yale’s faculty seem to be dropping like flies. Hell Bent has a lot of Alex’s and Arlington’s back story, as well as those of the various ghosts and faculty we met in Ninth House. It’s a satisfying entertainment but not quite as good as Ninth House, which, perhaps, set an impossibly high standard. There are still a few loose ends — who was Alex’s father, for instance? I learn that a further instalment is in prospect.
Carl Zimmer Planet of Viruses Originally written as a means of public education for the National Institutes of Health, Planet of Viruses is now in its third edition, and so covers Covid. Written in plain and simple language, this primer on what viruses are and what they do should be on everyone’s bookshelf. Essential.
Leigh Bardugo The Familiar Searching for more by Leigh Bardugo but avoiding her Young Adult fantasy, Offspring#1 suggested I try this. Set in Spain some time between the failure of the Spanish Amanda Armada and the death of Queen Elizabeth I (so, between 1588 and 1603), it concerns the life of Lucia, a cloddish scullion in a Madrid household at the lower end of the upper class, in a society absolutely obsessed with ancestry and status. Every nuance matters, and the slightest mistake could mean ostracism, exile, torture, even death. Spain’s Jews had been either expelled or converted a century earlier, but ‘Secret Jews’ could still be punished by the Inquisition, and Lucia’s family is of Jewish heritage. She is unwittingly thrown into the spotlight when it’s revealed she can perform magic (‘little miracles’) and finds herself in a tourney of magicians that will be set before the King, seeking a Vengeance Weapon against the heretical English. As with Alex Stern in Ninth House, the heroine is of Jewish heritage; of humble beginnings; can perform magic; and is thrown into a milieu she can barely understand and in which she can succeed only by her own ingenuity. The unfamiliar setting was a little off-putting — all those Spanish names made it sometimes hard for me to distinguish who was who in a large cast of characters — but it was as well-wrought as I now have come to expect. Despite the setting, the atmosphere in which people can be ‘cancelled’, their lives ruined by a chance remark that reaches the wrong ears, might be horribly familiar to those who fall foul of the self-righteous and sanctimonious guardians of public morality today. Should be subtitled Everyone Expects the Spanish Inquisition.
Shirley Jackson We Have Always Lived In The Castle I seem to have settled into a groove by reading novels in which the protagonists are young, female and a bit odd. In this novel she’s Mary-Katherine Blackwood — ‘Merrikat’ — who is 18 and lives with her elder sister Constance and her Uncle Julian in a rambling old pile just outside an unnamed village in the United States, sometime in the mid-twentieth century (there are cars and telephones). Six years earlier the rest of the family had been killed in a mass poisoning for which Constance was blamed but later acquitted. The event has alienated the Blackwoods from the increasingly hostile villagers, and had catastrophic consequences for the surviving Blackwoods. It left Uncle Julian disabled and increasingly senile and Constance an obsessive agoraphobic. Only Merrikat goes out to run errands in the village. We see the world through her eyes, and as a narrator she is extremely particular, and peculiar: it’s clear that she has what we’d now call autism and learning disabilities. I don’t want to spoil it by revealing what happens next. After listening to this on Audible I discovered that the novel was written in 1962 and has become a minor classic. Jackson wrote several novels and stories, mainly mysteries and tales of horror. We Have Always Lived In The Castle was a late work and is now seen as a masterly study of otherness and alienation, and even a metaphor for the antisemitism that Jackson and her (Jewish) husband reportedly experienced in their own lives, with its themes of ostracism, persecution and social isolation from the outside world, and the obsessive maintenance of ritual despite (and because of) increasingly desperate straits. Jackson’s best known work is The Haunting of Hill House and I think I’ll try that next.
