Do not use the words free speech! Free speech I practise with you directly to promote a meeting of the minds. This is not free. Every second an arm like a blade combs the surface of the earth for dopamine, yours and mine, our whims and arguments, our relationships with others, our attempts at love, our anger, our caring, to embezzle it as revenue for a dozen male college dropouts.
As a wickedly smart near-future speculative fiction, Meanwhile in Dopamine City feels like what The Circle wanted to be, and with a satirical snarky vibe (that works well to entertainingly expose the dangerous path we're all sleepwalking along), I was put in mind of David Foster Wallace and John Kennedy Toole. I have read D.B.C. Pierre before and I reckon this is his best work yet. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Good stuff in, bad shit out, don't let it mingle.
The above is Lonnie Cush's motto: As a recently laid-off sewer worker, Lonnie understands the necessity of separating the pure from the polluting, and as a single father with a dead wife and a mother-in-law scheming for custody of his two kids, he works hard to protect his family from the societal forces (and particularly those online) that would seek to foul them. Soon after the book begins, Lonnie gives in to the pressure to buy his nine-year-old daughter her first smart phone, and as Shelby is nearly immediately put in the crosshairs of trolls, bodyshamers, and men with questionable intentions (she's nine), Lonnie finds himself ramping up his own online presence in order to understand this new world. In a format that sees the main narrative constantly interrupted by developing online stories – viral newsbites that demonstrate how petty groupthink becomes enforceable policy – D. B. C. Pierre doesn't make too big a leap from our present day to show how fast the world can change and how little control we as individuals might have over these changes.
Time and place remain unstated (I presume Lonnie's in the UK and generic names are given for other countries: the news reports on a war in “Al Qemen”, immigrants come from “San Uribe”) and this choice serves to remove specific political considerations and makes the story feel more universal. And so, while Lonnie's concerns focus us on the domestic, another storyline follows the hidden reality: the billionaire technocrats and their covert quest for the singularity – and world domination, delivered through cute memes and addictive apps – barreling along unchecked at the nearby Octagon facility. I do think that “Meanwhile in Dopamine City” is a lame title for this book, but much is made of our monkeyness and how easy it is to control humans through manipulating the chemicals in our brains. So states the chief wonk at the Octagon:
If the amount of memory a grand can buy is the only flying curve on a graph of the last seventy years – what government can now be surprised? Specovius lets his head roll: They thought it meant jetpacks and monorails. Now the old guard whimpers in bed at night, it can see the game's moved beyond tech, the brain's rewiring, the battle's gone to nature, to neurochemistry, influence. Name any human battleground, all are now battles for territories in the brain, and the armoury's the screen in your hand. Think of this: if you subtracted the empty space between atoms in all our brains, the mass of global intelligence would barely fill a shot glass. He serves his eyes like canapés – We hold that shot glass. That's what gives them the jitters. We own a shot glass containing the species, Baz.
Serving as a voice of reason at the Octagon, Dr. Roos (hired merely to lend gravitas to their project but the good professor quaintly believes she can influence outcomes with her knowledge and wisdom):
By six o'clock my local time a hundred million people had focused their wills on a pair of runaway children in preference to matters in their own lives. As a proxy for those matters, breeding value in their brains without the risks of real life. And those children are unknown to them. They would stay unknown if they lived for a thousand years. The chemistry being deployed is there to encourage us to wave at the postman, meet a stranger's eyes – this is how it's relevant. Whereas their angst-by-proxy via advertising platforms designed to exploit vulnerabilities in the brain is making users happy to intrude until they crush to dust the status quo of anyone involved in the story.
And through it all, good and sturdy Lonnie – forever more in tune with meatware than software – demonstrates that dopamine is best delivered through in-person contact, as when he gets a hug from his daughter after a fight:
She shuddered and sniffed at his sturdy neck, lips squashed aside, guyed by cords of spit. After a minute she burrowed a hand down his back and rubbed as if to comfort him. He closed his eyes as his brain sucked the drugs that resolve busted souls and forge wisdoms, that bring on a binge after bloodshed.
The tone is certainly satirical – events ramp up from absurd to surreal – and Pierre constantly throws in colourful imagery:
• Lon's headlights swung over the flat like a puke of bleach.
• The girl crossed her arms and huffed like a freckled boy's stepmother.
• A rattle comes to the door and I pump Shel's hand to raise her head as a bare-chested man with a tan opens up, a forty-something man with a gym membership that he only uses for biceps.
I liked this a lot – I would have found it funnier if it wasn't so scary, but I guess it's laugh or cry at this point – and while I'd rate this a 4.5, it's just barely missing the something that would make me round up. (Pierre might have been setting this up for a sequel or a series, and while that might explain some dangling bits, nonetheless, they dangle to my disappointment.)
Sara had refused the sherry her mother had offered her – though she wanted it – because it was sherry, and because it implied permission. The tiny glass of blood in her mother's hand looked good now, though.
I had read Annabel Lyon's The Golden Mean and The Sweet Girl (semi-related books about Aristotle and his daughter Pythias) before I joined Goodreads, so I thought I kind of knew what I was in for with Consent. But this is something totally different – not historical fiction, and if I'm remembering them correctly, this is way more accessible – and while Consent doesn't feel as hefty as those earlier books, it's certainly relevant to today's world and gave me plenty to think about. A story about family and responsibility and the limits of what we can consent to, this finely written novel would be a great book club choice; there's just so much to discuss. I purposefully chose an opening quote that doesn't give away anything of the plot (while kind of riffing on the book's title, and certainly its cover), but everything that follows could be considered ever so slightly spoilery (but less so than the publisher's blurb; glad I didn't read that first), so: fair warning to anyone who'd like to go into this book cold, as I did. (Note: I read a digital ARC from NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Consent is the story of two pairs of unrelated sisters, and in each pair, there is one sister who is considered “the responsible one” and who is expected to take care of the other. In one storyline, Sara is an academic, a professor of ethics, and although she has spent her adult life trying to distance herself from her family, when their mother dies, Sara finds herself solely responsible for her intellectually delayed younger sister, Mattie. And Sara is horrified to discover that in the time it took to bury their mother and get all of the details of Mattie's future care sorted out, Mattie has gone and married her mother's most recent handyman; a recovering drug addict with a long rap sheet:
“I could have brought the police with me today. That would have been my right. It was recommended to me, in fact.”
“Jesus.” He shook his head. “Why?”
“Why? Because she has the capacity of a child. She can't consent to any of this, not legally. Not to marriage. Not to – ”
Although this Robert had been acting as a very sweet and respectful caregiver for Mattie (a medical exam confirms that she's still a virgin), Sara has the marriage annulled – because of course she did, even if it broke Mattie's heart. In the second storyline, Saskia and Jenny are twins: Saskia is (in the beginning) an academic, in grad school studying comparative literature, and is forever being asked by her family to rein in her more wild sister – a hard partying interior designer whose impulsivity disorder calls into question her own ability to consent to what she engages in. When Jenny is in a car accident, it is Saskia who stays at her hospital bedside as she starts to recover from a coma; Saskia holding an alphabet board while Jenny blinks out her end of a conversation:
At first, Saskia's conversations with Jenny were frustrating. She had to learn not to try to finish words for her sister, to distinguish purposeful blinks from eye-clearing blinks, not to rush through the alphabet, not to ask her too many questions at once. Some days Jenny refused to cooperate, and in the hallways the nurses would whisper to her that Jenny was depressed. On those days, Saskia would hold up books and magazines until Jenny blinked her consent, and then she would read to her.
There are many parallels between the two stories (perfumes, fashion, addiction, French literature), but as the two pairs of sisters are from different generations and the bulk of their stories aren't happening at the same time, I was surprised when their paths do cross:
“Do you ever wonder about consent?” Sara would ask, and Saskia would repeat the things she'd read about safe words and the psychology of the submissive. “But in the car, that text,” Sara would say and Saskia would shrug. What must Jenny have been thinking in that moment?
“Do you think Mattie was happy with him?” Saskia asked. Sara looked at the bar; nodded at the bar.
Consent in a sexual relationship is the way we're most likely to use the term today (and is the way that it is most obviously used in this book), but consent is explored in other ways, too: To what can you consent while under the influence of alcohol or drugs, and what responsibilities do you bear while so impaired? Why should family bonds force us to be responsible for others without our consent? Characters make presumptions (wrapping up purchases before the buyer has agreed to the sale), do things for another's “own good” (removing belongings that might be upsetting), manipulate, deceive, and take advantage; all without consent. All of this is churning behind the scenes, and in the foreground, a surprising (and surprisingly satisfying) narrative unspools to its inevitable conclusion. Unpredictable, smartly observed, and leaving me with so much to think about, what's not to like here?
I didn't want to be wandering around Levant once night fell. It would be a very strange thing to see, some old woman in her dusty coat grasping Death in her hands and whistling into the forest. Ghod, on his way to the party, would surely stop to ask if I'd lost my mind.
Death in Her Hands is (no surprises here, coming as it does from the singular mind of Ottessa Moshfegh) weirdly experimental and oddly affecting. Whereas Moshfegh's previous bestsellers (Eileen and My Year of Rest and Relaxation) used black humour and uncomfortably unmentionable material to explore the unhinged uninhibited inner minds of young women, in this outing the protagonist is 72-year-old Vesta Gul – a new widow, recently transplanted to a remote cabin in the woods in an unfamiliar state – and the reader is trapped in Vesta's claustrophobic “mindspace” as she finds herself working through an apparent murder mystery. This book seems like one thing, veers off into an entirely different direction, and ends up exposing the lifetime of hurts that created this forgotten old woman's obsessive interiority. Part creepshow, part whodunit, with layers of irony you can feel in your fillings, I was left with an overwhelming empathy and sadness for all the Vestas out there; what Moshfegh's previous books exposed about the inner lives of young women, Death in Her Hands does for an elderly woman looking back on her life, and if you have any interest in a short, offbeat, and disquieting journey, I'd recommend visiting with Vesta in her cabin by the lake. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms. More on this at the end.) It all begins with a note:
Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn't me. Here is her dead body.
While out walking her dog Charlie (“some bastard combination of Labrador and Weimaraner” according to the vet) in the birch woods adjacent to her cabin, Vesta Gul (meant to sound like the seabird but the locals keep mispronouncing it as “ghoul”) discovers this note on the path, and quickly pockets it. Vesta – a longtime reader of detective fiction – begins to obsess about the details of the note: Who could Magda have been? Is she really dead? Who wrote it? As Vesta begins to imagine answers to these questions, she finds herself both creating a mystery narrative and starring in one, and as the story evolves, the line between imagination and reality becomes ever more murky; the dangers ever more manifest as Vesta goes about her life in a remote cabin in the woods, no phone, no family, no friends, with only her dog for protection and companionship.
What if the doctors were wrong? What if the mindspace was not something made by the brain, and what if it continued even after death? Oh, I could get carried away imagining all sorts of theories. At times I wondered, Walter, are you hearing all this? Was he still up there, sharing the mindspace with me? What would he think if he could see me in this new life in Levant, a single old lady in the woods, with a dog? Walter always hated dogs. How did I love a man who hated dogs? We all have our quirks and issues, I told myself.
There's plenty that could be said about the strange metafictive mystery-story-within-a-mystery-novel, and the intriguing clues from the Bible and Blake (not just the weirdly Biblical place/character names and the serendipitous discovery of “The Voice of the Ancient Bard”, but the fact that “blood-rimmed tide” can be found in both the Bible and Blake). But the most interesting aspect of Death in Her Hands, to me, was the slow revelation of the details of Vesta's long marriage to the academic Walter Gul, a German epistemologist, and the sad fact that his lecturing and condescending voice was still dominating her mindspace after his death. Every impulsive decision or action that Vesta takes seems to be in defiance of the lingering Walter's expectations, and that not only makes more sense of some strange events, but it also feels very truthful...and sad.
The last thing I want to note has to do with the strange formatting of my digital ARC. I don't know why it caught my eye, but the copyright page for Death in Her Hands has a longer statement than usual: Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader. I don't know if that's Penguin's usual statement, but it does, naturally, make me doubly uneasy about quoting even as meagerly as I did here. But what's even stranger, is that the words “Not for Distribution” are stamped on some of the pages throughout this book, in a ghostly background font, sometimes all three words, and sometimes just one or two. Lines of the text can also be broken up, stuttering or appearing out of order, in large, bold letters, and the ghostly Not for Distribution seems to interact intentionally with these phrases – as though it's Walter, as negative and prescriptive as in life, interrupting Vesta's thoughts. A more or less random example of one page in its entirety:
Because the formatting constantly required me to stop and interpret meaning – always wondering just how intentional the effect was meant to be; is this just how the digital ARC turned out? – I found that it made for a more interactive and elevated reading experience for me (and I hope it is a part of the physical book as well). Ultimately, everything about this book was suited to my tastes – the eeriness, the ironies, the exposition of a woman's experience – and while I acknowledge that this wouldn't be for everyone, it certainly was for me.
On warm summer evenings swifts that aren't sitting on eggs or tending their chicks fly low and fast, screaming in speeding packs around rooftops and spires. Later, they gather higher in the sky, their calls now so attenuated by air and distance that to the ear they corrode into something that seems less than sound, to suspicions of dust and glass. And then, all at once, as if summoned by a call or bell, they rise higher and higher until they disappear from view. These ascents are called vespers flights, or vesper flights, after the Latin vesper for evening. Vespers are evening devotional prayers, the last and most solemn of the day, and I have always thought “vesper flights” the most beautiful phrase, an ever-falling blue. For years I've tried to see them do it. But always the dark got too deep, or the birds skated too wide and far across the sky for me to follow.
Written as assignments or for friends, “for the joy of exploring a subject, for piecing together a story or investigating something that troubled or fascinated”, the forty-some essays in Vesper Flights cover an array of naturalist topics – very often autobiographical, very often political – in the beautifully lyrical writing style of Helen Macdonald that would be instantly recognisable to fans of her acclaimed memoir, H is for Hawk. I was fascinated by the range of scientific topics here and inspired by Macdonald's travels – not only through space, from experiencing the top of the Empire State Building with an Ornithologist to camping in Chile's Atacama Desert with an Astrobiologist, but also sharing Macdonald's travels through her own interior landscapes – and it all solidly underpins her ultimate quest for “finding ways to recognise and love difference. The attempt to see through eyes that are not your own. To understand that your way of looking at the world is not the only one. To think what it might mean to love those that are not like you. To rejoice in the complexity of things.” Helen Macdonald has lived a rich and curiosity-filled life, and being a poet, a naturalist, and a historian, she has the factual knowledge and literary skills to make persuasive art out of her experiences. Exquisitely suited to my own tastes and interest. (Note: I read an ARC from NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms. I know it's unfair for me to excerpt so extensively here, but passages are preserved for my own future recollection of what inspired me, and are not to be considered authoritative. Mea máxima culpa)
When I was a child I'd assumed animals were just like me. Later I thought I could escape myself by pretending I was an animal. Both were founded on the same mistake. For the deepest lessons animals have taught me is how easily and unconsciously we see other lives as mirrors of our own.
As “an odd and solitary child with an early and all-consuming compulsion to seek out wild creatures”, Helen Macdonald felt privileged to grow up on an estate complete with woods and meadow, teeming with wildlife for her to observe, engage with, and explore. This compulsion seems to have never left her and these essays cover a huge range of the places and species, mostly birds, that Macdonald has sought out around the world. It would be impossible to offer a summary of everything these pages contain, so what follows are just some of the bits that I found personally engaging in Macdonald's philosophy. And one of the main threads of that philosophy seems to be that we humans are blind to the diversity of life around us; and that which we don't see, we don't concern ourselves with. We find ourselves fascinated by raptors (and especially in urban landscapes):
Falcons haunt landscapes that speak to us of mortality: mountains, by virtue of their eternity; industrial ruins, by virtue of their reminding us that this, too, in time will be gone, and that we should protect what is here and now.
But something like the fungal networks underpinning forests – some of the oldest and largest organisms in the world – are all but invisible to us:
We are visual creatures. To us, forests are places made of trees and leaves and soil. But all around me now, invisible and ubiquitous, is a network of fungal life, millions of tiny threads growing and stretching among trees, clustering around piles of rabbit droppings, stitching together bush and path, dead leaves and living roots. We hardly know it is there until we see the fruiting bodies it throws up when conditions are right. But without fungi's ceaseless cycling of water, nutrients and minerals, the forest wouldn't work the way it does, and perhaps the greatest mystery of mushrooms for me is in how they are visible manifestations of an essential yet unregarded world.
I was particularly intrigued by Macdonald's trip to the top of the Empire State Building for night bird watching; a glimpse at an annual teeming swirl of life going on mostly unobserved, far above human notice. As she notes, insects travel above us in extraordinary numbers (half a billion a month over a square mile of English farmland – making up nearly three tons of biomass – a number estimated to be higher over New York City as “a gateway to a continent”), and in the wide open air over Manhattan's skyscrapers, it is said, “Once you get above six hundred and fifty feet, you're lofted into a realm where the distinction between city and countryside has little or no meaning at all”:
During the day, chimney swifts feast on these vast drifts of life; during the night, so do the city's resident and migratory bats, and nighthawks with white-flagged wings. On days with north-west winds in late summer and early fall, birds, bats and migrant dragonflies all feed on rich concentrations of insects caused by powerful downdraughts and eddies around the city's high-rise buildings, just as fish swarm to feed where currents congregate plankton in the ocean.
Whether writing about how she lives in denial of the symptoms of oncoming, crippling migraines (which Macdonald then extrapolates to explain how humanity can live in denial of the biggest threats to our collective existence), or writing about viewing a solar eclipse and feeling an overwhelming sense of community, Macdonald makes many surprising connections here. And as I opened with, many of them are political connections: Conservatism and Swan Upping, deer as jingoistic symbolism, waiting for a thunderstorm like waiting for the next Brexit or Trump, “Waiting for hope, stranded in that strange light that stills our hearts before the storm of history”. A few examples that gave me pause, as in the morality of tagging and tracking migratory animals:
In our age of drone warfare, it is hard not to see each animal being tracked across the map as symbolically extending the virtues of technological dominance and global surveillance.
Or watching a gathering of migratory Eurasian cranes in northeastern Hungary and contemplating the razorwire on that country's southern border, meant to keep out Syrian refugees:
Watching the flock has brought home to me how easy it is to react to the idea of masses of refugees with the same visceral apprehension with which we greet a cloud of moving starlings or tumbling geese, to view it as a singular entity, strange and uncontrollable and chaotic. But the crowds coming over the border are people just like us. Perhaps too much like us. We do not want to imagine what it would be like to have our familiar places reduced to ruins. In the face of fear, we are all starlings, a group, a flock, made of a million souls seeking safety.
Or the flaw in thinking that a species is native just because it's familiar:
The history of hawfinches in Britain reminds us how seamlessly we confuse natural and national history, how readily we assume nativity in things that are familiar to us, and how lamentably easy it is to forget how we are all from somewhere else.
Several times Macdonald returns to the idea of people conflating natural and national history and it made me wonder if it reflects a new idea – a pushback against globalisation and freer borders by those who idealise a return to some “purer” past – but she also shares older stories, like the farmers during WWII who attacked migratory birds that gleaned their fields: “No protection for the Skylark” ran the headlines in the local press: “Skylarks that sing to Nazis will get no mercy here.” She writes about the glamour she assigned to Bewick's swans when she was a child – because they migrated from the Soviet Union, “crossing the Iron Curtain with absolute unconcern”. And she tells the fascinating story of a book she loved as a child and found more insidious when she revisited it as an adult: A Cuckoo in the House by Maxwell Knight – a former MI5 intelligence officer known as “M'; yes, he was the inspiration for the James Bond character – was a popular book about the bird famously known for its nestly subterfuges, and Knight not only hid within its pages the vocabulary of his secret world of agents, runners, and handlers, but its release somehow transformed Knight into an avuncular naturalist who began a second career on BBC radio, encouraging children to observe, explore, and report on their environments, in a way that incidentally was training the country's next generation of spies and spooks. I suppose this conflation of the natural with the national has always been with us.
If there is a common theme here, I suppose it's a call to be more aware – of both the hidden ecosystems around us and the hidden biases we harbour – and through this awareness, to spread more of that notion of love that Macdonald opens with; to see with the eyes of others and rejoice in the complexity of things. Thoroughly worthwhile read, beginning to end.
In unison, they raised the apple slices to their lips, Hamnet with his right, Judith with her left. They put them down, as if with some silent signal between them, at the same moment, then looked at each other, then picked them up again, Judith with her left hand, Hamnet with his right. It's like a mirror, he had said. Or that they are one person split down the middle. Their two heads uncovered, shining like spun gold.
With both an introductory “Historical Note” and a concluding “Author's Note”, it is explained in Hamnet and Judith what little is known of William Shakespeare's family: That his wife (popularly remembered as Anne Hathaway but named as Agnes [apparently pronounced Ann-yis or Agn-yez] in her father's will (so that is the name that author Maggie O'Farrell uses for her) and three children (Susanna and the younger twins Hamnet and Judith [with the explanation that “Hamnet” and “Hamlet” were the same name, used interchangeably in written records at the time) remained in Stratford (living in the home of William's father, a glovemaker) while the playwright lived and worked alone in London. In 1596, Hamnet died of unrecorded causes at age eleven, and four years later, Shakespeare wrote Hamlet. With this scant information (and something like thirty years of intermittent research), O'Farrell attempts to flesh out this cast of supporting players; these “historical footnotes”, with their uncertain names, but once upon a time, very real and fully human existences.
This is not so much a story about William Shakespeare himself – he is not even properly named here, only referred to as “the Latin tutor” or “Agnes' husband” – but he does appear in the story: as a loving and playful husband and father, but mostly, as an absence. Losing a child is unimaginably tragic to me, but O'Farrell captures the pain and grief of everyone so well that I felt I had really gotten to know these people (and keeping in mind this idea that her project was to breathe life into the supporting players, it worked well to only experience Hamlet as a finished work through Agnes' eyes, rather than watch William Shakespeare's process of working out his own grief on the page). I don't think that everything about this book works, but it made me smile and it made me cry and I am going to emotionally round up to four stars.
Later, and for the rest of her life, she will think that if she had left there and then, if she had gathered her bags, her plants, her honey, had taken the path home, if she had heeded her abrupt, nameless unease, she might have changed what happened next. If she had left her swarming bees to their own devices, their own ends, instead of working to coax them back into their hives, she might have headed off what was coming.
In O'Farrell's imagination, Agnes is a healer and seer – daughter of a rumoured gypsy – whose everlasting sorrow will result from not only being unable to save her own child when the time comes, but also not seeing the looming threat to his life beforehand. I kind of get why O'Farrell gave Agnes these powers – not only for these ironic narrative purposes, but to make her a strong and independent woman of her times; not some mindless rube abandoned in the sticks by her genius of a husband – but these powers (and especially her ability to “read” people by grasping their hands) had a whiff of trope about them; must Agnes have been superhuman for us to see her as human? I found so much of the writing to be lush and lyrical – so evocative of sixteenth century sights and sounds and scents – and while I found the love story between the wild girl and her brothers' Latin tutor to be thoroughly charming and electric, I was also flummoxed by the following:
It was his hands that undid the bows at her neckline, that pulled down her shift, that brought out her breasts into the light – and how startled and how white they had looked, in the air like that, in daytime, in front of another; their pink-brown eyes stared back in shock.
(That encounter gets better from there; it would need to.) Mostly, however, I appreciated the writing around Hamnet's death and how the others in his family responded:
Agnes finds she can bear anything except her child's pain. She can bear separation, sickness, blows, birth, deprivation, hunger, unfairness, seclusion, but not this: her child, looking down at her dead twin. Her child, sobbing for her lost brother. Her child, racked with grief. For the first time, the tears come for Agnes. They fill her eyes without warning, blur her vision, pouring forth to run down her face, her neck, soaking her apron, running between her clothes and her skin. They seem to come not just from her eyes but from every pore of her body. Her whole being longs for, grieves for her son, her daughters, her absent husband, for all of them, when she says, “No, my love, he will never come again.”
I did cry while reading this book, more than once, and I reckon that's a sign that I was connecting with the humanity of these people and their experiences. And as that seems to have been O'Farrell's objective, I would say she achieved it.
In December 1994, my youngest sister, Franki, died unexpectedly in Edinburgh, hemorrhaging during childbirth while giving birth to twins. Three months later, my eldest sister, Sally, killed herself near London, stuffing the exhaust pipe of her car. Soon after, I started reaching for rocks, stones, and other seemingly solid objects as anchors in a world unmoored, ways to make sense of these events through stories far larger than my own, stories that started in the most fundamental and speculative histories – geological, archaeological, histories before history – and opened unmistakably into absences that echo in the world today, absences not only mineral but human and animal, and occasionally vegetable, too.
Hugh Raffles is a Professor of Anthropology at The New School in New York, and previous to The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time, the author of the New York Times Notable Book The Illustrated Insectopedia. Unconformities opens with the quote above, and as a presumed thesis statement, I found it very intriguing. But although Raffles spends the rest of this book travelling the world, exposing different forms of rock, and exploring the stories of those tied to the various geologies (and in particular, those indigenous peoples, animals, and landscapes exploited by Western White Men), his lost sisters don't really figure into what follows. To be clear: the travel and science writing, along with the historical storytelling, were consistently fascinating – and Raffles doesn't owe me any exploration of his grief or personal life – but after opening with that bombshell, I kept waiting for the material that follows to tie back into what I thought what the premise. Still, a highly original, informative, and engaging read. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley, and although I know better than to quote from an ARC in reviews – and especially in this case as the digital version is filled with errors – I only quote to give a spirit of things; don't quote my quotes, I guess.)
Geologists call a discontinuity on a deposition of sediment an unconformity. It's a physical representation of a gap in the geological record, a material sign of a break in time, readily readable once you know where and how to look.
Raffles begins in Manhattan, where he now lives, with an exploration of the types of rock to be found underground, an overview of the history of amateur and professional geologists in the city, and in what felt like a bit of a swerve, a longish recounting of the mistreatment of Manhattan's original inhabitants, the Lenape people. I soon realised, though, that the swerve is rather the point: In every locale that Raffles visits, he describes the unique geological features (from weirdly magnetised lava stones in Iceland to Spitsbergen's “blubberstone” – an artificial stone made of spilled whale oil [from the days of their mass slaughter and processing here] concretised with “sand, gravel, and coal into a rocky mass”), and after an introduction to the people living and working in the area today, the majority of each section then details some terrible exploitation of the innocent by the mighty.
Raffles visits the Standing Stones at Callanish on the Isle of Lewis (which stones used to be visible from one lost sister's house), and I was fascinated by the information he shares about their construction in deep history, and also appalled by the more modern stories of the rich Brits who bought up the Orkneys (in a wave of Scots-mania inspired by Victoria and Albert), who then enforced the Enclosure Act and forced the mass emigration of generations-long residents, all while knocking down and pulverising the standing stones that spoiled their views. In what was probably the most disturbing section, Raffles begins by writing about modern meteorites found in northern Greenland and then rewinds to the days of Polar Exploration, when Europeans were first encountering the local Inughuit people. We learn that Robert Peary, first to reach the North Pole, was also the first to convince the locals to show him from where they source their iron – and then he relieved them of the three giant meteorites that the Inughuit had been using, selling them to the American Museum of Natural History in NYC. We learn that Peary's companion on his push for the Pole (and the man who repeatedly saved his life) was an African-American named Matthew Henson, who received no acknowledgement for his accomplishment during his lifetime (he couldn't even get hired by the AMNH as a chauffeur in later years), and along with the meteorites, Peary brought back six Inughuit people for the museum to study, most of whom soon died. Nothing in this book was really what I expected, but it was constantly surprising, engaging, and informative.
The problem, as so often, is time: written, then oral histories evaporate; myths and legends rear up, then fade from view. Only material remains, summoning archaeopoetics from archaeologists, just as it summons geopoetics from geologists, and poetic poetics from poets, all gathering up the millennia to apprehend life from these and other stones.
And so, I suppose, Unconformities is a summoning of anthropoetics from an anthropologist, and I loved every bit of it. Not the read that I thought the prologue was preparing me for, but an absolutely topnotch read nonetheless.
I hope to have done Jerusalem thoroughly in a couple more days and I'm letting them get me out an itinerary at Cook's so as to do the Holy Land thoroughly — Bethlehem, Nazareth, Tiberias, the Sea of Galilee. It's all going to be mighty interesting. Then there's Jerash; there are some very interesting ruins there — Roman, you know. And I'd very much like to have a look at the Rose Red City of Petra, a most remarkable natural phenomenon, I believe that is, and right off the beaten track; but it takes the best part of a week to get there and back and do it properly.
Having not read an Agatha Christie murder mystery since borrowing several from my Mom's bookshelf as a teenager, I was nonetheless pleased when Kennedy gifted me a copy of Appointment with Death for Mother's Day (after I had offhandedly mentioned an interest in its settings of Jerusalem and Petra). Having now finished it, and read some reviews from other readers (including excerpts from original reviews after the book's release in 1938), I'll note that this has never been considered one of Christie's “better” mysteries – and it doesn't quite compare favourably with what I remember of my Mom's more popular titles. Still: this was a thoughtful gift, a quick and interesting read, and no, I didn't know whodunit before Hercules Poirot made his big reveal.
"You do see, don't you, that she's got to be killed?"
Appointment with Death opens with Poirot overhearing this statement as he is closing his hotel window in Jerusalem, and immediately dismisses it as some author or playwright trying to work out a plot. Other than crossing paths with a couple of characters a few days later – at which point he'll absorb a few more important clues – Poirot then disappears for half of the book. In his place, the narrative centres around a family of rich Americans – a large and imposing matriarch and her band of cowed and servile adult children – and the doctors (Theodore Gerard, a famous French psychologist, and Sarah King, a recently qualified British doctor) who spend their time together discussing the sadistic psychological hold that this Mrs. Boynton has over her brood. By the time this group, and others, meet in Petra by happenstance and a body is discovered that will have Poirot called in by the British authorities in Amman to investigate, the reader has a pretty good idea of who everyone is – what their motives, capabilities, and desires might be regarding murder.
"I never forget," she said. "Remember that. I've never forgotten anything, not an action, not a name, not a face. . ." There was nothing in the words themselves, but the venom with which they were spoken made Sarah retreat a step. And then Mrs. Boynton laughed. It was, definitely, rather a horrible laugh.
Although Mrs. Boynton's children are all highly nervous and under sway to the old woman's malevolent powers to the extent that they refuse to speak to strangers, the two doctors are interested in helping them (each of them even states that it might be for the best if she were poisoned for the sake of her grown children). Gerard's first impression of Mrs. Boynton:
"Heavens!" thought Dr. Gerard, with a Frenchman's candid repulsion. "What a horror of a woman!" Old, swollen, bloated, sitting there immovable in the midst of them — a distorted old spider in the center of a web!
And Sarah's reaction upon discovering that the Boyntons had arrived in Petra before her group:
Gone was the feeling of peace — of escape — that the desert had given her. She had been led from freedom back into captivity. She had ridden down into this dark winding valley and here, like an arch priestess of some forgotten cult, like a monstrous swollen female Buddha, sat Mrs. Boynton.
(The cover of the edition I read, as seen above, uses images of the Buddha and the spider web, along with that quote that Poirot overhears in the first scene and a syringe; how ugly is that? I see that the first edition has a picture of one of the Petra monuments - the Treasury or the Monastery - on its cover, and that's so much cooler.) Soon enough there will be a body and an investigation; Poirot will interview everyone individually, they all will lie, and he will then gather the group together for a big reveal.
So far as the mystery goes, I guess it all hangs together nicely – but I think I would rather see Poirot psychoanalyse his suspects after a crime is committed than watch as two random characters do so throughout. I suppose it was interesting (for 1938) to have one of the doctors be a young woman, and Dame Christie uses this Sarah character to make some pretty forceful points about gender (I wonder how all this went over in the day?):
• Like many high-spirited women, Sarah believed herself to admire strength. She had always told herself that she wanted to be mastered. When she met a man capable of mastering her she found that she did not like it at all! To break off her engagement had cost her a good deal of heart burning, but she was clear-sighted enough to realize that mere mutual attraction was not a sufficient basis on which to build a lifetime of happiness.
• It's awful, isn't it, but I do hate women! When they're inefficient and idiotic like Miss Pierce, they infuriate me, and when they're efficient like Lady Westholme, they annoy me more still.
• I'm sorry, but I do hate this differentiation between the sexes. 'The modern girl has a thoroughly businesslike attitude to life' That sort of thing. It's not a bit true! Some girls are businesslike and some aren't. Some men are sentimental and muddle-headed, others are clear-headed and logical. There are just different types of brains. Sex only matters where sex is directly concerned.
And a final word on the setting – this was the basis of my interest in this particular book, and although I understand that Christie travelled throughout the Middle East with her archaeologist husband, the scenes in Petra could have been anywhere. There's nothing about the carvings or the monuments – just high cliffs and travellers being given the choice between sleeping in a cave or a tent – and perhaps that means Christie wasn't very impressed with the site?
"I think it's rather wonderful and just a little horrible," said Sarah. "I always thought of it as romantic and dreamlike — the 'rose red city.' But it's much more real than that — it's as real as — as raw beef."
"And very much the color of it," agreed Mr. Cope.
(I looked to see if there was a movie adaptation I could watch to get better into the setting, but the two that I could find were both filmed elsewhere. Rats.) Again, this was a thoroughly decent mystery – not one of Christie's best – and I wanted to read it, and now I have. No regrets.
Neela Sim, founder of the Dove Suite fansite, reported in a recent blog post that “Song for the End of the World” is frequently being played at memorials and funerals across the country. The post included photos sent in by ARAMIS survivors who were inspired to get tattoos featuring the song's lyrics. The band released a statement in response to the Trillis announcement. “Music has always been a way for people to come together, and that has never seemed more important than it does right now. If we've learned anything over the past year, it's that sometimes a voice in the darkness can reach out and save you from feeling alone.”
There are plenty of books and movies about disaster and survival, so it shouldn't really feel like too much of a coincidence that author Saleema Nawaz imagined and wrote about a novel coronavirus coming out of rural China in the year 2020. Having spent six years researching and writing about the progression of her fictional virus, Songs for the End of the World (although not exactly the same as COVID-19) certainly captures something of the times I find myself in right now – and that makes for a strange and weighty reading experience. It's hard for me to mentally separate this book from the times in which I read it (did I find it weightier because of its prescience?), and some of the narrative choices felt a bit too deliberate to me, so while I'd want to give it 3.5 stars if I could, I'm going to round down. Still enjoyed the weirdness of reading it right now.
Jejo's dead. So are Cam and Lucas and the master. Teresa, Declan, Felix, and Paloma are in the hospital. It's that bad flu that's on the news. Sorry for telling you like this but I can't talk now and it's better that you know.
In early summer of 2020, a novel coronavirus – soon to be officially named ARAMIS (Acute Respiratory and Muscular Inflammatory Syndrome) – is brought to NYC; likely carried unwittingly by a visiting Chinese kung fu master. The virus spreads quickly – those exposed can act as asymptomatic carriers for weeks – and anyone who thinks they may have been in contact with someone who gets sick is asked to voluntarily self-quarantine for twenty-one days. The streets quickly start to empty out – many start working from home, and those who do venture out for essentials don masks and gloves – but what makes ARAMIS so very frightening is that it proves particularly fatal for children. As ARAMIS spreads throughout America (the US is the hardest hit country; not much is said about other countries, although Canada is able to contain the virus to its west coast), the biggest question seems to be whether a person's ultimate duty is to oneself and one's immediate family (to gather – even hoard – supplies and isolate in some remote place) or to society at large (and find ways to help others, even at personal risk). Nawaz obviously put a lot of research into how such a virus arises and spreads, as well as the typical global and personal response to such threats, and the ARAMIS pandemic proceeds in an all too familiar trajectory. It's not the same as what's happening now – Nawaz doesn't have the entire world staying home to “plank the curve” – but it's close enough to have made me keep reading with avidity to see how she would resolve everything.
Our lives have a way of getting bound up with those of the people we've known. Like heavenly bodies caught in one another's orbit. Even once you go your separate ways, it's hard to get fully disentangled.
Ultimately, this is a novel, and Nawaz complicates the story of the progression of her virus with characters and their little lives. Jumping around in time, a large group of disparate characters are eventually shown to all be within a few degrees of separation from one another, and that is one of the threads that felt too novelistically deliberate to me. Also, many of the characters cross paths through the Philosophy department of a small liberal arts college in New England, and that made it too easy (to my way of thinking) for everyone to be having deep philosophical conversations in every timeline. Also, with a virus that disproportionately kills children, it felt too obvious to have so many couples (and singles) having babies, or fighting about having babies, or discussing the morality of bringing babies into a broken world before ARAMIS even arrives. I enjoyed the book overall, but not so much the development of the plot.
I particularly liked the irony of a novelist character seeing a surge in sales of his own prescient book about an emerging novel coronavirus, How to Avoid the Plague; how weird this extra layer must be for Nawaz (and she responds to that notion in a Q&A at the end of the book – it's dated from March, so I imagine it has become even weirder for her.) And even if Nawaz's world doesn't respond quite as drastically as ours has (people can still go to work and there are still funerals, flights, and cruise ships, etc.), she did imagine much of what has come to pass (including racist backlash against Asian-Americans). A few examples:
• Even the grocery aisle at the drugstore was picked over. He leaned down to inspect a lone instant ramen bowl on the bottom shelf while a woman in a purple raincoat edged over to move away from him.
• He wondered why he was surprised that churches would change with the times. He imagined the Holy Spirit flowing like a meme through the internet.
• She has an involuntary vision of a pandemic-ravaged planet and a new global culture that will have her doing a Skype call in Esperanto with someone in China.
Maybe Esperanto is a step too far, but wherever the fictional chimed with my actual experience, I felt a surge of recognition; and that makes for an engaging reading experience. I don't think it's a spoiler to say that this isn't a hopeless read – Nawaz imagines us all to be pretty decent at heart – and that has also chimed with my own experience here in the real world. I am glad to have had an opportunity to read Songs for the End of the World (thanks to NetGalley) while in self-isolation, and I hope that Nawaz finds success with this upon wide release.
So there you are, Ronnie. At last. Well thanks for coming anyway. What a pity we couldn't have had a last little chat. Perhaps it wouldn't have got us very far anyway, probably not. And in any case, here's the main item for you. Here I am. Here we are. This is your mother, Agnes. And here's a fine little trick for you to perform, if you're up for it. So come on.
Here We Are is rather short and sweet, filled with many vivid settings from different, transitional, time periods. Graham Swift writes lovely and interesting sentences, but while I thoroughly enjoyed the reading experience, it didn't add up to very much. Still happy to have read it.
There are no magic wands, Ronnie. There are magic wands, but there are no magic wands. Do you understand me?
Here We Are is set (primarily) in three time periods: Just before and during WWII (from the POV of Ronnie Deane, an eight-year-old boy evacuated to a country manse from his modest London home); 2008, from the POV of aged former showgirl, Evie White; and the summer of 1959 on the Brighton Pier, when Ronnie and Evie paired up as a magician and his assistant, to appear in a variety show hosted by charming song-and-dance man, Jack Robbins. Each timeline demonstrates how people transition into new selves, conflating identity with illusion – performers assuming stage names, an actor being called by his most famous TV character's name on the street, a playboy's girlfriends collectively called “Flora” because no one could be bothered to remember their actual names, a married woman wanting to keep her maiden name but forever called by her husband's – and the idea of “illusion” is made manifest by the magic taught to Ronnie by his foster father in the country (a familial situation that each side wishes could be made permanent, even if it's never discussed):
He had an audience of two, and he stood facing them, the green-topped table beside him. He knew by now that the surface was called “baize”, a nice word, but he knew also that the table was not what it seemed. It was a table and not a table, and this might be true of a great many things. It was the first door that you had to pass through, as it were, into a new way of thinking about everything around you.
The variety show setting on the Brighton Pier makes for many entertaining scenes, but always, there's a sinister threat posed by the nearby sea. From Evie's thoughts:
And it was strange how in all those shows, all those performances, a whole season's worth, you hardly stopped to think – she never thought about it as she looked at her face in the mirror and placed the tiara, like a regular coronation, in her hair: The sea is right beneath us now. Right beneath us now the waves are swishing and swirling, the fish are darting, the seaweed is swaying this way and that. If the stage were to open up, we'd all go tumbling through to the water.
From Jack's:
Sometimes, beyond the stirrings and the gaspings of the audience, he might think he could hear the creakings and strainings of the pier itself, like a big foundering ship. But perhaps it was more that he was the one who was going under.
And from Ronnie's:
He bent to kiss her forehead. It was cold to his lips and she made no sign – no smile or frown or flinch – that she knew what he was doing. And he felt that his lips were touching also the cold surface of the water, the deep heedless water under which his father lay, unknowing too.
Rabbits and romance, parrots and rainbows, air raids and sequins: Swift paints beautiful word pictures that certainly capture a variety of times and place, but they feel more like nice little scenes than a complete novel. Still happy to have read it.
He knew her, he believed. He would teach her that she was not his possession, he would show her she was free, he would see her flash her wings.
Possession: A Romance was an engagingly fun read – concerning an over-the-top literary quest that often strained credulity, I had the persistent feeling that A. S. Byatt was parodying her format while somehow keeping me 100% invested – and while I ended the book feeling like I could take issue with so many of the plot points, this sense of a non-mocking parody, or po-mo irony, made me feel like I was in on the joke, and therefore more amused by it than annoyed. Interweaving two timelines, I will note that I believed in and related more to the Victorian characters than those from the present, but as the point of Possession is the interplay between them all, it seems like it could have only been written precisely as it was. For sheer entertainment value, I'm rounding up to four stars.
All scholars are a bit mad. All obsessions are dangerous.
In an Introduction to my edition, written by Byatt, she explains that the genesis for this book was her observation of “the great Coleridge scholar” Kathleen Coburn as she haunted the British Library and Byatt's wondering, after having given her entire life to Coleridge's thoughts, would Coburn now possess the poet, or would he possess her? To this end: Possession begins with a modern day scholar – the quiet and unremarkable Roland Michell – who is an assistant researcher looking into the life of the (fictional) great Victorian poet, Randolph Henry Ash. While examining a book that had once belonged to Ash – so sooty around the edges that it had likely never been opened since the passage of the Clean Air Acts – Roland discovers the first few drafts of a letter, written by the poet, that hint at a relationship unknown to Ash scholars. Roland is so personally galvanised by this secret knowledge that he puts the drafts into his pocket – which is completely out of character – and endeavors to investigate the mystery for a while on his own. When he discovers a chance connection and wonders if Ash's letter was written to Christabel LaMotte – a (fictional) minor Victorian poetess and writer of fairy tales, now remembered primarily by feminists and those in Women's Studies – Roland decides to visit a LaMotte scholar, the quiet and studious Maud Bailey. As Roland and Maud fill each other in on the details of their chosen subject's life and works – neither of whom had ever been of the least interest to the other – they discover connections that had never been recognised before; and as they travel together to where the clues lead them, Roland and Maud unearth evidence that will force the academic world to reevaluate the meanings of, and inspirations for, each of the poet's major works.
Early on, Byatt describes Ash's reputation for erudite and muscular poetry, quotes they who dismiss LaMotte as the spinster “fairy poetess”, but as the narrative proceeds, Byatt judiciously reveals their work through intermittent excerpts; knowledge of the poets' characters (and the true value of their work) revealed to the reader at the same pace Roland and Maud are discovering new information and explaining to one another how it all fits into what is known about their subjects. With further excerpts from letters, diaries, and biographies, the whole reads as a great detective story; Roland and Maud pursuing clues and trying to keep ahead of the other scholars, hot on their trail, who seek to possess secret evidence and knowledge for themselves. And although everyone involved does seem possessed by their research subjects – Roland and Maud represent a sort of middle point in the mania, with quiet British scholars on the one side (Beatrice and Blackadder, toiling away in the basement of the British Museum for decades) and loud, rich Americans (Leonora and Crupper dashing around the globe to pursue leads) on the other – and although Roland and Maud have no moral or legal claim to pursue their leads without informing the rest of the academic world what they've discovered, as a reader, I desperately wanted them to solve the puzzle first. Between the able “ventriloquism” shown in the poems, stories, letters and diaries, and the tension added by the literary detective story, I was consistently in admiration of Byatt's writing.
Roland thought, partly with precise postmodernist pleasure, and partly with a real element of superstitious dread, that he and Maud were being driven by a plot or fate that seemed, at least possibly, to be not their plot or fate but that of those others.
This self-awareness in the modern storyline is likely what made the historical one more real (and engaging) to me; but it is also what allows for commentary on the necessity (or mischief) of studying authors' lives alongside their work. Until everything is revealed, the major works of Ash and LaMotte cannot possibly be properly understood (and particularly the latter's epic poem on the sorceress Melusina), but how important is it for the reader to know anything more than what appears on the page? Before this discovery, the unmarried LaMotte had been a model of feminist independence – if it turns out that she had some kind of relationship with the more famous and revered Randolph Henry Ash, she not only loses her status as a (possibly) lesbian icon, but she is open to accusations of being influenced or instructed by the more forceful male voice; how does this knowledge affect the legacy of her work? There is commentary on those “vultures” who rifled through Dickens' desk after his death to collect all of his papers, commentary on the fact that George Eliot had her most personal letters buried with her, and yet each of the scholars in the modern storyline (quiet British and loud American alike) believes that a plea for privacy does not survive death; that the need to possess every fact and artefact associated with an artist is in the interests of truth and art. It's all interesting stuff, and it's not by ironic dint that I started with a biographical nugget about Byatt in this review; I, personally, love knowing what inspired books (but I'm not about to start digging up graves to get that knowledge; I am not possessed).
