Short review round-up, 2022
Here are some books I read this year, but about which I didn’t write fully in the reviews which are now on my books page. Alphabetical order by surname of the author.
Patience Agbabi: The Infinite.
A guest recommendation by my (then) 9 year-old, in case you also know a child looking for a good read. She recommends Patience Agbabi's The Infinite (and also much enjoyed the sequel, The Time Thief). A time-travel adventure, it features lots of lively characters, and is funny and unpredictable.
'It's SO good. It's so interesting.'
However, you definitely should not read Agbabi's fabulous book Telling Tales to any children. A contemporary version of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, it's extremely salty (and very funny).
Sara Baume: Seven Steeples
Sara Baume now has an impressive corpus of four excellent books. I wrote last year about her recent non-fiction handiwork, and Seven Steeples has become her third novel to be published, after Spill Simmer Falter Wither and A Line Made by Walking. The central characters, Sigh and Bell (originally Simon and Isabel - even their names are reduced) confine themselves to poor isolated rural life, their only companions the dogs Pip and Voss, and over the years their lives become increasingly constrained. They are both almost totally disconnected (from 'the world') and totally connected (with each other, to the extent that they almost become one).
She writes beautifully, particularly about the natural world. Her books are strangely compelling, given how little 'happens'.
Jeffrey Boakye: I Heard What You Said
I'm drawn to books by teachers about their teaching experience, for obvious reasons. In his new book, English teacher Jeffrey Boakye gives an angle I haven't come across before, narrating his own story as a black man in an overwhelmingly white education system (not as overwhelming as ours in Ireland, though).
Boakye's previous book Black, Listed, was a sharp and funny account (in list-form) of vocabulary in and about black British culture. In this one, he ranges widely across the education system as well as personal stories of his own 'odyssey', knitting both together powerfully:
Being black and being nice at the same is cause for frowns of concern... Niceness, as a proxy for white acceptability, becomes a mask that cannot slip and must not crack. And maintenance of this persona is akin to an ongoing trauma. It takes effort and premeditation; a constant pressure that goes unnoticed by the audience it is designed for.
Craig Bromfield: Be Good, Love Brian
I'm not claiming this this memoir, on ‘Growing up with Brian Clough’, is high literature, but boy did I enjoy it. A lot of things came together for me: the time, the milieu, the football. Bromfield and his brother bumped into the Nottingham Forest squad on a beach near Sunderland in 1984, and over the succeeding years he became part of the Clough family, more or less moving into Brian and Barbara Clough's house in Derbyshire.
The arc of the story is both sweet and, eventually, sad (and if you follow football you will remember the disappointment of Clough's declining alcoholic years).
If this is your thing, you should also look at the wonderful documentary film I Believe in Miracles, the story of the European Cup triumphs engineered by Clough and Taylor.
Natasha Brown: Assembly
You'll only need 90 minutes to read this novel, and indeed it's the best way to do it. In a series of increasingly distressed shards, Brown tells the story of a successful young Black woman in contemporary London, whose selfhood is increasingly undermined by the white and highly privileged society in which she moves.
There are lots of vivid moments (particularly in her boyfriend's country house). It's properly uncomfortable, with a steadily increasing sense of dread. There's also a too-obvious disease metaphor, but she's a talent to watch out for in the future.
Joshua Cohen: The Netanyahus
Cohen won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction last year for The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family.
The book is a mere 229 pages in the lovely Fitzcarraldo format, but somehow contains multitudes - a campus comedy from the early 60s, Jewish politics, Harold Bloom, a history lecture on Iberia and, indeed, that Netanyahu's family. All of this is stitched together with tremendous bravura. In the end, it exhausted me.
Rachel Cusk: Second Place
Cusk is a Marmite writer. She is one of the few writers I enjoy but would be hesitant to recommend to a friend (too risky). Her Outline trilogy was terrific and wholly absorbing, and you always have a strong sense of her sheer intelligence. Coventry was a fine collection of essays, too.
Second Place is her first novel since the Outline books, and is more conventional than those. It was long-listed for last year's Booker. The narrator is a woman who asks a famous artist to stay in the 'second place' beside her rural home, and complications ensue. Her husband Tony is sympathetic: none of the other characters are, including her.
Wendy Erskine: Dance Move
This is Wendy Erskine’s second collection of short stories, following Sweet Home (2019), and is full of great pleasures. Along with Bernard MacLaverty’s Blank Pages, here is more evidence of the quality of writing from Northern Ireland [I know MacLaverty has lived in Scotland for many years, though his stories are often set in NI]. Think also of Anna Burns and her intense Booker-winner Milkman.
Aoife Gallagher: Web of Lies
Conspiracy theories are intellectually fascinating. Just how can such a superficially sane person believe something which is so far from evident truth for most of us? These are people who we chat pleasantly to in the supermarket queue, and while waiting to pick up children from school.
Aoife Gallagher's new book, Web of Lies: the lure and danger of conspiracy theories, digs into a world that is all too real now, supercharged by the internet.
The first part of the book gives background which may be familiar to many (the deep roots of anti-Semitism, McCarthyite anti-Communism), but then come the Web, 9/11-denial, QAnon, Pizzagate, anti-vaxxers and the rest (Ukraine-conspiracies have recently joined this awful cauldron).
Gallagher gives plenty of local detail, though as she says Ireland has been relatively untouched by the kind of widespread viciousness that resulted in the Capitol assault, by ‘this new globalised, hybridised, radicalised force'. But if recent years have taught us anything, it is that things can change quickly.
Tabitha Lasley: Sea State
I'm not sure that I'm actually recommending Tabitha Lasley's memoir, since you'd have to be prepared for some raw experiences set in Aberdeen as the author interviews over 100 men about their experiences 'offshore' on the oil rigs. But there's no doubt it's memorable, sharply written, perceptive and sometimes funny.
The first man she interviews is Caden, a married man who becomes her lover, and an obsession. Like all offshore workers, he regularly heads into that mysterious all-male world in the brutal North Sea, a world which of course she never encounters herself, inversely-marooned as she is in the Scottish city.
Early on, Lasley boys a copy of Villages, and her sub-editor Tom warns her: 'He's not going to turn into John Updike. You know that, don't you?' Hardly a spoiler: indeed he doesn't.
David Park: Spies in Canaan
Park is an author I took a while to catch up with (especially considering that he used to be an English teacher), but have now often recommended.
I got a proof copy of his latest novel, Spies in Canaan before publication. The first part tells the story of the painful experiences of Michael, an American spy in Vietnam; the second, contemporary, part is surprising, still more painful, and very moving.
If you want to start on Park, I recommend first stop being his short novel Travellers in a Strange Land, my book of 2018, and described by Claire Kilroy in the Guardian as 'a short but breathtaking novel about parental heartache.' And then perhaps The Light of Amsterdam.
Deesha Philyaw: The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
This was the most purely enjoyable read of my summer holidays. It is a collection about black women's desires, disappointments, resilience, strengths and vulnerability, and Philyaw shapes the narratives beautifully, and with impressive variety.
Ali Smith: Companion Piece
Ali Smith's Seasons quartet was a unique achievement (though so densely woven I'd need to revisit it for proper appreciation). Written and published fast partly as a response to current events, the four books covered a vast range of ideas and characters.
Typically of a rule-breaker, now she produces a fifth volume, a 'companion piece', both stand-alone and a companion to the longer sequence. It is typically light-footed, funny, angry. It tells two stories - that of Sandy (an artist) during lockdown, and a much older narrative; the two come together beautifully at the end in a surprisingly positive finale.
If you haven't read Smith, this short novel is a good taster; then onto the Seasons.
Lea Ypi: Free: coming of age at the end of history
Now a Professor at the LSE, Ypi tells the extraordinary story of growing up under one of communism's weirder régimes. For a long time, the Albania of Hoxha was a total mystery to those of us in Western Europe, perhaps like North Korea now.
She tells the story of a kind of loss of innocence, which brought with it liberation and freedom: but she also shows how that 'freedom' was far from perfect. It's a funny and affecting account, particularly in the portraits she paints of her parents. It reminds those of us in privileged parts of the world just how insistently history can press down on and distort individual lives.