2020: A Year (in Books) in Review
2020 is over — what did I do? Well, the answer is I read more books than I had planned to, and sold far fewer. I didn’t feel like it would be particularly fair (or useful) to write a ‘top books of the year’ summary when the things I read last week feel incredibly distant, let alone what I read last January — instead, I’m opting to cover some of the highlights of my reading year, in no particular order, grouped under some pretty loose headers. These are books I enjoyed, yes, but they’re also books I feel didn’t get a good shot at finding readers this year: some are debuts overlooked in publicity for safe bets from big names, some are just on niche topics that will never make it into the spotlight. Not all were necessarily published this year, some were just new to me, but all are very recent. In any case, I hope you find something that appeals to you from my favourites of what was a very strange year in reading, publishing, and bookselling.
Best Debuts of 2020: True Story, Pizza Girl, Braised Pork
Grief in Nature: Ghostland, The Grassling, The Gospel of the Eels
Queer Storytelling, Queer Language: Confessions of the Fox, The Liar’s Dictionary, Something That May Shock & Discredit You
The Fire Right Now: Such a Fun Age, Friday Black
Spooky Season: Hag, Mordew
The World We Live In: Summer, Notes from an Apocalypse, Weather
Best Debuts of 2020: True Story by Kate Reed Petty, Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier, Braised Pork by An Yu
I love a debut novel: I love reading stuff that feels so full of potential, even if it’s flawed. The books I want to talk about under this header fit this bill perfectly — not without some small flaws, yes, but absolutely teeming with ambition and energy.
First up, Kate Reed Petty’s mesmerising True Story, published in August by riverrun — a genre-bending, nail-biting, stomach-turning thriller meditating on the nature of truth. True Story takes a sexual assault after a high school party as its inciting event, tracking the ripples of this moment across the lives of some of the people involved. It’s a story about stories, about how trauma creates and rewrites its own narratives, and how multiple truths can be true for different people at different times despite their seemingly contradictions. Kate Reed Petty uses formal innovations — parts of the story are told in a variety of documents, from saved unsent emails to drafts of a college admission essay, amateur movie scripts, letters between characters — to unsettle the reader, to make sure we never feel secure or stable while reading; like the characters, we are never really sure what is happening and what is not. We can’t be sure what is fiction, and we don’t know who is telling us what, or why.
True Story is not for the faint of heart: it’s deeply influenced by horror, and these genre inflections are really what make it stand out in the literary thriller market. Having said that, despite the premise, the sexual violence is kept to a minimum; the book focuses much more on the reverberations of trauma, and the horrors a mind can invent to fill a vacuum. It’s also about how truths can be twisted to suit different purposes — even well-meaning ones. The ‘twists’ here are less about plot beats and more about challenging our expectations of narratives about assault and victims, forcing us to question the entire framework of storytelling in this sense.
Still in the USA, my next pick for 2020’s best debuts is Jean Kyoung Frazier’s Pizza Girl, the story of an eighteen year old pizza delivery girl struggling with grief at losing her father and terror at beginning her adult life. Our heroine, pregnant and living with her mother and her boyfriend, becomes obsessed with Jenny, a woman who calls the restaurant every week to order a pepperoni and pickles pizza for her demanding son. Jenny is an all-consuming force for our pizza girl as she begins to neglect her relationship, her family, her job, and her own body; it’s easier, after all, to think about someone else in a hypothetical, than to accept responsibility for the material realities of your own life. Frazier’s deadpan prose is at turns heartbreaking, hilarious, and disaffected: in short, everything you want from a Gen Z novel.
The pizza girl is an everygirl in many senses, but she’s also specifically one girl: her mother is Korean and her dad was a white American, and her anxieties around race and belonging contribute to her mental crisis; her father’s alcoholism haunts her, driving a wedge between her and her doting mother and boyfriend, and bringing to the fore a self-destructive streak fuelled by her father’s own nihilistic philosophies. It’s a novel about inherited trauma, parental legacies, communication, societal expectations, queer longing, and class and ambition.
There’s something big-sisterly about the book in the affection it holds for its messy, sad, and seemingly lost protagonist: Frazier said that as she grew older and more comfortable with her own body and sense of self, she wanted “to write a character with a voice close to my own, a voice that would’ve made eighteen-year-old me feel a little less ugly” — the novel feels like it’s reaching out a hand to every struggling eighteen year old, as if to say, “I know things feel like a mess now, and I know you don’t know what you’re doing, but believe me: things will be more ok than you can know.” If you like Sally Rooney and people keep recommending you Dolly Alderton but you want something more substantial, with less polishing over the uncomfortable and messy cracks in the world, Pizza Girl is the one.
I also want to add here a few words on one of my earliest reads of 2020 — Braised Pork, the debut novel from Chinese writer An Yu, which also follows a young grieving woman on her (literal) journey to acceptance. Jia Jia’s experience is in stark contrast to Jean Kyoung Frazier’s pizza girl’s, however. Braised Pork is an utterly hypnotic vision of grief as a dimension-bending emotion: as Jia Jia adjusts to her husband’s bizarre and unexpected death, and her subsequent independence, to which she is pretty ambivalent, her perception of the world around her shifts away from reality and into a realm of metaphor and folk tale. At the same time, the book itself shifts generically, opening almost like a slick Chinese noir, moving through a kind of detached millennial novel, to a strangely comforting level of magical realism. The way Yu’s extremely plain prose contrasts with the imaginative scope of her novel leads you, as a reader, into Jia Jia’s near trance-like state — it feels mystic, meditative, and like you, too, are healing. The sparse, minimalist language is an accurate representation of the depression Jia Jia is experiencing; the surreal, strange imagery becomes a metaphor for understanding the self. Braised Pork is a quiet masterpiece, a profound novel that will sit with you for a long time after reading, in the core of your chest.
Grief in Nature: Ghostland by Edward Parnell, The Grassling by Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, The Gospel of the Eels by Patrik Svensson
2020 was the year we all ~rediscovered~ nature, whatever that means, and kindled complicated connections with the natural environments near to us; publishing seemed eerily prepared for this with a glut of excellent books about being outdoors, some more pragmatic than others. From Simon Barnes’ Rewild Yourself to Helen MacDonald’s Vesper Flights to Rebecca Tamás’ Strangers, you could pretty much have your pick of practical tips and meditative essays. The three releases I want to touch on here though all examine how we can process grief via a relationship with nature.
Ghostland was one of those books I put off buying for a long time because it felt too on the nose for me to read. Nature writing about places in Britain that have inspired ghost stories or where filming of particular touchstone pieces of British horror took place, in order for the author to discuss his own personal losses of family members in the background? Yes please. Having said that, for the first few chapters Ghostland did feel a little bit like folk horror bingo — Alan Garner, check, Children of the Stones, check, M.R. James, check… (Though perhaps this says more about me and my reading habits than the book itself: I was born 20 years after it aired but I feel like I’m probably more familiar with the Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water public information film than most people who originally viewed it on television, thanks to the many cultural critics who bring it up as a touchstone piece of 1970s media.) The more I read of Ghostland though, the more engrossed I became in this strange, meandering tale of grief and haunting: Edward Parnell balances his writing on place with just the right measure of biographical anecdote; all our landscapes are haunted, and often the presence of ghosts is more comforting than terrifying. If you’re already very au fait with British folk horror, and you know the BBC adaptation of James’ Lost Hearts like the back of your hand, then this book might be a little too surface for you; if you have a more general interest, or have got into folk horror via nature writing — as many do now — then Ghostland is a more than worthwhile read.
I was taken by complete surprise in the summer by The Grassling, a wondrous, amorphous, sensuous slip of a book by poet Elizabeth-Jane Burnett. I pored over every page of this: every line is sublime. Burnett takes the reader through the fields and hills of the West Country, near her terminally ill father’s home, attempting to find connection with her family roots through the very soil of the region itself. The book is haunted by the figure of the Grassling, a strange mythical creature made of grass and reeds, at times following Burnett on her journey, at times becoming her. This elemental figure, a new idea of being, helps her to accept her father’s declining health and the unpredictable shifting of her own identity in accordance with her loss.
The Grassling is a book about the desperation to find roots when the anchors of your identity — your family — are starting to slip away. Burnett writes insightfully about the feeling of being an outsider in the place you call home: she grew up in the same Devon village her father has lived in his entire life, but during the process of writing the book she travelled there from Birmingham, leaving the city to return to the countryside; Burnett is also mixed race — her mother is from Kenya — and her rural upbringing combined two quite different cultural approaches to the natural world, as well as informing her work in the overwhelmingly white and male sphere of nature writing. (Much is being done to change this, but it still remains that the majority of books on the shelf in a Nature or Travel Writing section will be by middle aged, middle class white men.) She pushes the prose to the very edge of possibility, never hampered by cliche or form, constantly stretching the language to make every word work for its place — it’s a masterful display of control and balance. If you want a trite description, The Grassling is like Robert Macfarlane’s Holloway meets H Is For Hawk; if you want an accurate description, it’s like nothing else out there.
Late in November, I finally picked up the copy of The Gospel of the Eels that I’d been sent by Picador, and devoured it in a couple of days, much to my partner’s chagrin — his reading of The Goldfinch for his work book club was sadly not enhanced by my many interruptions of, “Did you know that eels eat frogs??” and the like. But that’s the power of this entrancing little book: in not knowing much about eels before I started reading, I didn’t know how little we know about them in general, which is pretty much Svensson’s whole premise. Eels are captivating precisely because, no matter what scientists do, we just can’t pin them down. We’ve never observed the European eel mating. We think they do it in the Sargasso Sea — that’s as close as we’ve got to solving the mystery. Eels, Svensson suggests by juxtaposing stories about scientific endeavours to understand them with chapters about his relationship with his own father, whose only joy in life was eel fishing, remind us that we can’t know other people or creatures as fully as we want to. Invoking Thomas Nagel’s essay ‘What Is It Like To Be A Bat’, The Gospel of the Eels is an exquisite exploration of one of the world’s great mysteries — great because of, not despite, its mundanity. This is a book partly about the history of science, but Svensson’s connection to the eel is a spiritual one, finding comfort rather than frustration in the enigma of their existence, and memorialising his father in his research. The literal bats of their late night fishing excursions echo through the book in the discussion of Nagel’s essay; the willow tree by the river becomes the “willow leaf” shape of the eel larvae; his father’s obsession with catching eels is repeated again and again in the excursions of Johannes Schmidt or the dissections of Sigmund Freud (yes that Freud). So much of the pain of grief comes from realising that we can never truly know the person we’ve lost; perhaps thinking about eels can be a model for letting that pain go.
Queer Storytelling, Queer Language: Confessions of the Fox by Jordy Rosenberg, Something That May Shock & Discredit You by Daniel Mallory Ortberg, The Liar’s Dictionary by Eley Williams
The first book I read in 2020 was published in 2018, but was one that crept up on me, continually reappearing in my periphery until I finally caved. In my opinion, this is the definition of the queer novel, in all senses. Jordy Rosenberg has crafted not only a compelling piece of queer historical fiction and literary detective novel, he has then positioned this fiction in a metatextual dialogue with the idea of the academy, the canon, and the straight-washing of history itself. It’s a marvel that he can do all these remarkably clever things and still make the book readable. Rosenberg reimagines Jack Sheppard, eighteenth century thief and inspiration for Mack the Knife, as a young transgender man, his story told via his “confessions”, archived, edited, and annotated by a Dr Voth, whose story we also follow in the footnotes. Voth’s narrative soon swells to be on a par with Jack’s, and it becomes clear that the “confessions” are being doctored, corrected, and altered — but in what sense, we can never fully be sure.
One of the main concerns of the novel is that the body is never static: it is always changing, always transforming, never complete or finished. We have the power to change our bodies; love and sex can alter our bodies. Bodies, voices, texts, all shimmer atop each other until the boundaries are blurred — do we blur our own boundaries or is it out of our control? Confessions of the Fox delights in the mutable, finds joy and eroticism in the mercurial, but also gestures to how those qualities are ceaselessly exploited, criminalised, and made grotesque spectacle of by capitalist forces. One of the most thrilling scenes in the novel shows Jack breaking into a toyshop and hearing the cries of the commodities within, desperate to be stolen and thus freed. The sense of being made spectacle too permeates the book: Jack and his lover Bess are given privacy not normally afforded to characters in fiction, and at one point Voth comments on the authenticity of the manuscript, suggesting that “it is almost certainly the case that if there were a hack job — some pretend literary masterpiece written by a third party — this section would include a voyeuristic depiction of Jack’s genitalia.” The right to privacy, secrecy, and respect are as much at the forefront of the book as themes of transformation and queerness.
There are echoes of Confessions of the Fox through Eley Williams’ first novel, The Liar’s Dictionary: queer novels, and especially queer historical novels, have long been preoccupied with ideas of authenticity and the multiplicity of truths and narratives that make up so-called historical fact. Williams’ PhD was on mountweazels, a term denoting invented words in dictionaries, used much like cartographers would use “trap streets”, made up locales that would instantly demonstrate if another mapmaker had plagiarised their work. Mountweazels function similarly for lexicographers, except in the case of the mountweazels that Mallory, the intern at Swansby’s Encyclopaedic Dictionary, starts to track, which seem more whimsical and mischievous. Mallory’s main job is to answer phones, and the calls only ever seem to come from one person: a voice that has been threatening the Swansby offices ever since the dictionary altered the definition of “marriage” to be inclusive of different sexual orientations. Mallory’s story alternates with that of Peter Winceworth, one of the many original writers of the dictionary. Winceworth is, as his name suggests, an endearing klutz, hopelessly in love and continually put upon and bullied by others in the Swansby office.
Since reading Williams’ short story collection, Attrib., I’ve felt that if I’m going to compare her writing to anyone else’s, it would be Ali Smith’s — particularly the Ali Smith of Girl Meets Boy. There’s that same triumphant, playful delight in language, experimentation with form and structure but in an inherently warm and welcoming way, as opposed to the kind of alienating writing you might initially associate with the word “experimental”. The Liar’s Dictionary, of course, continues Williams’ obsession with language, seemingly in the sense that playing with language is the same kind of queer play at work in gender non-conforming fashion or presentation: language means something, yes, and that is important, but it’s not fixed and unchanging, in fact quite the opposite; the reason Williams’ invented mountweasels work so well is because they are rooted in linguistic rules and structures we recognise. Bending the rules means nothing if the rules don’t have weight themselves; equally though, the weight of the rules can exist not do restrict or do harm, but purely to allow themselves to be bent.
To complete this trifecta of playful queer literary narratives, I want to talk about Daniel Mallory Ortberg’s memoir, Something That May Shock and Discredit You. Ortberg writes frankly and wittily about his transition, the many revelations that finally put him on that path, and the difficulties and pleasures of being able to be himself. It’s not the “classic” trans narrative in that he started transitioning in his late twenties, after “running away” from the idea for years, but it is one that resonated heavily with me — “The trick is,” he writes at the end of an essay titled ‘The Stages of Not Going on T’, “not to imagine it and not to want anything.” This self-flagellation and restriction is a cornerstone of the book — it’s absolutely fine for everyone else but not for me, no way! — and you get the sense of a person holding themselves in very tightly, until the chapter in which he describes transition and being sober as not imposing more rules and controls on oneself, but as letting go, “giving up the idea that I could manage myself out of my own body”. This was a linguistic presentation of transness that I had not come across before: it’s so often described in terms of discovery and revelation, not, as Ortberg puts it, a kind of positive resignation. You can give up trying now. It’s ok, you can rest.
Ortberg’s transition story is interspersed with pieces more akin to his work at The Toast, interludes titled things like ‘Lord Byron Has a Birthday and Takes His Leave’ or ‘Columbo in Six Positions’, as well as being woven with Biblical scholarship and literary criticism. Queerness and queer acceptance is everywhere in these cultural references, whether it’s the “powerful T4T energy” inherent in the Addams Family or Steve Martin’s The Jerk, figuring Captain Kirk and Duckie from Pretty in Pink as lesbians, or finding transmasculine narratives in the story of Jacob “wrasslin’” the angel. You get the sense reading that language, and in particular the satirical language of thought experiments like ‘How I Intend to Comport Myself When I Have Abs Someday’, is where Ortberg has always been himself; the tension between the soul as loved by the divine and the body as a potential site for fear and disgust, the self in the text and the body in the world, is what draws the disparate threads of this collection together. Danny’s words brought me to tears on several occasions, speaking too closely to my own feelings for comfort. There’s a difference between being comfortable and being yourself though — my wish is that all good people can be allowed to be both at some point in their lives.
The Fire Right Now: Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid, Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
I can’t believe it was a whole twelve months ago that I was reading Such a Fun Age and desperately trying to convince January shoppers on paperback budgets to buy this brilliant hardback. (It’s just come out in paperback this week though, so fill your boots if you’ve not already read it.) Compelling, thought-provoking, witty, and totally unpredictable, there was a reason people were going wild for Kiley Reid’s debut, and that’s because it’s ace. It has all the page-turning twists of a psychological thriller, while discussing complex issues like the intersection of race and class in community relationships, how money creates a barrier for connections, and ultimately how the “well-meaning white woman” has the potential to be the most dangerous person in the room. Reid carefully balances the perspectives of her two main characters — Emira, a Black 25 year old babysitter, and Alix, her white employer, mother to Briar — to ensure that what starts as sympathy for Alix and her well-intentioned missteps turns to sheer horror by the end at what her position in society empowers her to do. Emira and her friends are affectionately drawn, and the scenes that depict their nights out together are a joy to read; the way this book holds “fun”, “danger”, “safety”, and “responsibility” in such a considered tension with each other is just a thrill to read.
The inciting incident of the book happens when Alix calls Emira late one evening to come and look after Briar urgently — Emira takes Briar to the local grocery store, and is racially profiled by the security guard there, who suggests that Briar isn’t her charge and that she has in some way taken the child without parental permission. As bystanders start to film the incident, Emira has to call Alix’s husband to get him to set the record straight. This disruption of an abnormal but ultimately mundane evening because of an authority figure’s racism is so ordinary to Emira that it barely registers, but Alix resolves to befriend her employee and, it seems, make reparations. Emira does not consider Alix a friend but has to maintain the relationship: the tension comes not only from their different racial backgrounds, but the fact that it’s essentially impossible to be truly friends with a person who pays you to be nice and amenable. The economic disparities in Emira and Alix’s lives are as much a barrier to connection as race, though of course the two issues are inextricably linked. In her Guardian review Sara Collins described Such a Fun Age as “a thrilling millennial spin on the 19th-century novel of manners” — there’s definitely that sense of negotiating social mores, attempting to step around embarrassment (with all the pecuniary implications of the word), gossip, and game-playing which characterises that era of literature.
This next one is a bit of a cheat as it came out a few years ago, but I read it for the first time this year and…it’s my blog, so, we’re talking about it. Here we go. When it was published in 2018 Friday Black was hailed as a literary Black Mirror, pointing to the dystopian future we’re all headed for if capitalism, and especially white supremacist late-stage capitalism, has its way; Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah was given the book of the year prize at the PEN Awards— but the book failed to get the buzz that, having read it, I can see it deserved. As a collection of horror stories, Friday Black chills to the bone; as a reflection of our present day society, it terrifies — in his own words, Adjei-Brenyah wanted to depict “a world a little bit worse than ours…so maybe, collectively we could imagine a world that was much better”. Even with these aims in mind, this is not a comfortable book to read, nor is it meant to be: Adjei-Brenyah talks in the linked article about Black pain being made aesthetically pleasing to a white audience, and it’s clear that this collection is constantly questioning and resisting that idea. The opening story, ‘The Finkelstein 5’, is about community response to the brutal murder of five Black children by a white man wielding a chainsaw; a later story is told from the perspective of an employee at Zimmer Land, an immersive theme park where white patrons pay to enact violence on Black bodies. The title story depicts the onslaught of shoppers at Black Friday sales as near-literal zombies, with the retail assistants, mostly POC, fighting them off and sweeping corpses from the store, all for the privilege of winning one winter coat as a bonus. I know lots of people who have made commitments either individually or as book clubs to read more literature by POC this year: if that’s you, I would really recommend adding Friday Black to your reading list as something wholly fresh and different.
Thinking about both these books while looking back on 2020 as a whole, it’s clear that as a white person, I just haven’t been listening. Black people have been saying this stuff for a long time. Black writers have been telling these stories for a long time. As Adjei-Brenyah put it in the far off world of 2019, “The fact that people are willing to think about it is good, but the problems that we’re trying to deal with might take a long time to sort out.” It’s good that it feels like change is beginning and that conversations are happening in the sphere of publishing and bookselling — it is, however, happening far too late, and still far too small. I’m part of that. The conversations we have need to acknowledge the whiteness of these spaces and the barriers to entry, but we also need to be wary of talking — as it felt like some publicity departments did this summer — like there are no BIPOC in publishing or bookselling at all, and importantly we need to remember that the readers we’re selling books to aren’t all white either.
That Such a Fun Age, with its plot so reliant on the filming of public racism, discussing the nuanced ways racism informs relationships without our (white people’s) conscious intent and the ultimate irrelevance of that intent when it comes to the harm done, was published five months before the Central Park birdwatching incident and the death of George Floyd, strikes me as not prescient or eerie but depressing: we (white people) haven’t been listening, and we haven’t been listening for quite some time. Why haven’t we been listening? Because it’s convenient for us to keep our heads down and move on. To quote from Sara Collins’ review of Such a Fun Age again, “It’s not opacity of vocabulary or vernacular that renders us so impenetrable to one another, the novel suggests, but rather our unwillingness to pay attention.” For better or worse, it was easier to pay attention this year — we were all inside and online, and this attention surely has to be one of the silver linings of this pandemic. The fact that so many people instinctively turned to anti-racist books as their route to change is heartening in many ways. It’s hard work, and we have a lot of catching up to do as a society. Personally, I’m hoping I can force myself to do the more difficult things going forward, and to be better at paying attention. If I’m not, feel free to tell me what I’m missing.
Spooky Season: Hag by var., Mordew by Alex Pheby
One of those books you really should judge by its cover in 2020 was Hag, a collection of reworkings of lost British folk tales by a range of authors, collated by Professor Carolyne Larrington (who also provides an excellent introduction to the anthology). With stories from the likes of Daisy Johnson and Eimear McBride, as well as figures whose fiction you might be less familiar with like Liv Little, the founder and editor-in-chief of Gal-Dem, Hag’s range of contributors means that every new story feels like it’s saying something fresh and exciting to the folkloric tradition. It’s also an anthology over which great care has been taken: Larrington writes in her introduction about how she aimed to commission each writer to work on a tale from either the region they live or are from, since a sense of place and landscape is so often key to folk tales. Some writers went one step further with this, like Mahsuda Snaith, who took the legend behind the Chillington coat of arms and wove it together with a folk tale of a princess transformed into a panther from her Indian heritage, or Irenosen Okojie, who made a similar move with the Norfolk tale of ‘The Dauntless Girl’, making the main character an Irish girl of Trinidadian heritage, searching for her missing father in a place far from home.
I adored Naomi Booth’s taut, tense version of a boggart tale, depicting a young lesbian couple trying to make a living on an inherited dairy farm; Daisy Johnson’s eye for the eerie is a perfect fit for the bizarre story of ‘The Green Children of Woolpit’; Liv Little works magic in refitting a tale of jealous brothers fighting for the love of the same woman to sisterly rivalry in modern day London. I could go on like this about every story in the collection — each is pitch perfect, entrancing, and rich with fascination for the source material. A touch I loved was that the original tales, as provided by Professor Larrington to the contributing writers, were included at the end of the anthology: some were so spare it was a marvel to me that the stories in Hag were so rich; in some the spark of inspiration for these new tales was obvious, in others, far more mysterious, speaking to the subconscious connection we all feel to these kinds of stories.
As a subscriber to Galley Beggar Press, I was incredibly excited to receive my copy of Mordew, the first of what I believe is intended to be a fantasy trilogy by the wonderful Alex Pheby. What a treat. What a dark, dingy, dirty, despairing, depressing treat. I loved it. Don’t ask why a disturbing and upsetting 600-page fantasy novel about oppressive hierarchies and class exploitation was what I needed in November this year, just know that it was. I don’t often read “long” books, but this year I had made a resolution to do better on that front, and what I discovered was that although it takes a little more effort, long books (like Mordew, or Wolf Hall, which I also tackled this year) bring back the thrill of reading I experienced as a child. I hadn’t realised how much I needed to be enveloped by a novel and its world. Mordew, despite its bleakness, was perfect for that: tactile and sensuous, you understand the city Nathan, our protagonist, is growing up in from the first page, even if you don’t understand the places he’s going or the things he’s experiencing. This is a new kind of narrative about a “chosen one”, and perhaps one that’s more fitting for the twenty-first century than the individualist strain of Rowling-esque fantasy. Pheby gets bonus points too for the amount of front- and endmatter included — a map, and a dramatis personae, and a glossary of terms, and an appendix! The note to the reader suggesting that they should be careful looking things up in the glossary as they may learn things Nathan does not yet know was a brilliant metatextual detail and meant that I read said glossary from A to Z once I’d finished the main text of the novel. I was going to say that Mordew is like if Dickens wrote Tolkien, but on reflection I think it’s more like if China Miéville wrote Dickens. I’m still unpacking the ramifications of the story in my mind months after finishing it; when I read the final page, I gasped aloud, “No!” In short, I need Malarkoi to come out as soon as is humanly possible, thanks.
The World We Live In: Summer by Ali Smith, Notes from an Apocalypse by Mark O’Connell, Weather by Jenny Offill
This is the hardest section to write. For me, these are the books that cut right to the heart of how I lived this year, and formed the basis for a lot of my thinking about the future — thankfully, they’re not all cynical or pessimistic, but they do point to huge things we need to change in order to make a better world for the generations to come. Thinking about this was tough and personal: I always thought I didn’t want children, couldn’t bear having children in this world; I realised, partly through reading these books, that actually I’m scared of how difficult it will be to bring up a child. In Weather and Summer, both authors have a serious — and rightly so — concern over what children are exposed to on the internet: 13 year old Robert in Summer skips school to watch hardcore porn online and play alt-right video games; Lizzie in Weather catches her son, who is in primary school, watching a YouTube video about sex robots. Neither of these incidents is in the realm of fantasy. (This is how it happens — the online indoctrination of young men by algorithms designed with no moral responsibility, their sole purpose just to keep them clicking, keep them viewing, keep them engaged. It starts that young and only gets worse. I could write a whole essay on this topic alone; the differences between my YouTube recommendations and my partner’s, even after clearing both our viewing histories, are stark, gendered, and terrifying. But enough about this.)
Could Ali Smith have picked a stranger year to finish her seasons quartet? Summer will go down in history for being the first coronavirus novel, the first novel to really confront the reality of life in 2020 in the UK — or at least, the reality of middle class family life in 2020 in the UK. The thing with the seasons books is that I can totally see why someone else wouldn’t like them, would find them too superficial, or too insular, focussed only with that artsy lefty middle class where characters are all writers or artists or professors, and that Smith’s writing is too sprawling, feels unedited (partly due to the nature of the project), feels at times lazy— I can see that clearly, those critiques are completely fair. But when I’m reading Ali Smith, I just…don’t care about any of that. Her prose brings me joy, her weird digressions on Katherine Mansfield and Rilke, or (in Summer) Lorenza Mazzetti thrill me, her forced Shakespeare references feel magical. Summer closes the quartet perfectly, bringing the story full circle back to Daniel and Elisabeth, the main characters of Autumn, and showing, through teenage siblings Sacha and Robert, that we do have forward motion, that it’s not all middle aged men having existential crises (Winter) or people who have been ground down to the point of just doing what they’re told, dehumanising others around them (Spring).
Summer intersperses its main narrative with letters from 16 year old Sacha to Hero, an immigrant held in a detention centre, describing her experiences of the UK lockdown in April and May, and how unaware she and the rest of her family were during the main events of the novel. (We’ve all experienced that this year — I’m thinking about the trips I made on full coaches between London and Norwich in early March, a matter of weeks before the full lockdown was announced. Similarly, Sacha, Robert, and their mother jump into a car with two relative strangers to drive from Brighton to Suffolk to meet two more strangers, one of whom is a 105 year old man.) The power of this quartet for me is how Smith captures the mood of the seasons she’s writing in so perfectly: small details in Autumn like how late flowers are blooming, how warm it stayed well into October, were particular things I personally remembered from the autumn of 2016; and of course political climate colours our experiences of the seasons as much as the physical changes in the natural world itself. Summer gets that weird balance of the inherent joy of the sun versus the tensions and fears of specifically spring and summer 2020 perfectly — it feels like it’s under your skin.
While on furlough in April, I read Mark O’Connell’s phenomenal Notes from an Apocalypse, the follow-up to 2017’s To Be a Machine. I barely have the words for what an achievement I think both his books are on their different, but linked, topics, and how much I value his philosophical and political insights into spheres often shielded from this kind of analysis. In To Be a Machine, the question is not “are these methods of prolonging life or altering our biology ethical?”, the question is “why do certain people want to do this?” Similarly, in Notes from an Apocalypse, the focus falls to the psychological motives driving different forms of apocalypse prepping, from building bunkers to planning the economic models of Mars colonies. O’Connell is quick to highlight the overwhelming white heteromasculinity of both end of the world planning and transhumanism and how this lends itself to creating models for the future which really serve as a mirror for our current society. Perhaps women, people of colour, and queer people have enough to deal with in trying to fix their material realities right now? It’s an undeniable privilege to be able to think about planning for the end of the world, or indeed to feel like the world isn’t already at its end in the here and now. Indentured servitude to a corporation to pay for your ticket to Mars: is that really miles away from where we are right now? Preppers filling their bunkers with weapons on the assumption they will have to literally fight for resources: doesn’t this just prove the lack of imagination or creativity in the capitalist mindset? That in designing a future based on a lack of resources, we can’t even think about sharing, living communally? Fundamentally what O’Connell captures as an overriding mood of all his chapters is this paralysing anxiety that comes with consuming news media or thinking about the state of the world and what we have done to it. (Incidentally, Rebecca Tamás covers the difference between this paralysing despair and actual grief for the climate in Strangers, which is the first book I’ve read in 2021.) There’s the indignant anger (we must do something about this!), the hopelessness (what can we possibly do about this?), and the self consciousness (am I only thinking it’s hopeless to act so I have an excuse not to act?) all in one.
While reading O’Connell, I was struck by its similarities with another book published by Granta in early 2020 — Weather by Jenny Offill. In Offill’s novel, as in O’Connell’s book, the effects of the aforementioned paralysing anxiety about climate change and late stage capitalism on a family with young children are pinned down with exquisite and agonising detail. Both books also bring focus to the idea of bringing up children in the modern world as a radical act of hope and defiance. The journey to hope in Weather is rough and turbulent, faltering, full of fear: when Lizzie accepts her old mentor Sylvia’s offer of a job, she doesn’t expect it to throw her into existential despair, but answering the listener mail sent in to Sylvia’s podcast forces a perspective shift in her own life, with every issue now seen in the light of climate change and civilisational decline. The 2016 election happens halfway through the book. Lizzie’s brother, a recovering addict who is deeply reliant on her for support (“enmeshed”, as her brother’s partner puts it), is about to become a father. Lizzie is scared of what the world will be like for her son when he grows up, let alone her new niece. The central concern of the novel is this: how can you work on making your small part of the world as comfortable and good as possible when you have a window to the desolation and destruction beyond your control? It’s the question we’re all asking. Weather is a tough read, and the title becomes a wry joke as both noun and verb, state of climate, state of nation, and state of mind.
The Shock of the New: What’s Coming in 2021?
I’ve been researching what to look out for in publishing in 2021 over the past week or so and to be honest, I’m burnt out. I’m not used to looking at it all in such a regimented way: generally the way I discover new books to be excited about is from other booksellers, recommendations from customers, proofs and ARCs I’m sent by publishers, or just plain unpacking something from a box and saying, “What is this???” (That’s how I found True Story and The Grassling.) Confronted with a 200-page catalogue from just one imprint of just one publisher, I don’t know what to do. I’m lost right now when I see things that make my heart jump — do I want to read this myself or do I just think my customers will like it? — and have no idea what to do with the knowledge other than build a list that, knowing my chaotic approach to bookselling, I’ll probably ignore when I’m back at work.
Having said that, there are a few bright lights on the horizon: next week I’m aiming to write a piece on some of the books I’m looking forward to reading this year, which will be a mix of new publications, reissues, and classics I just haven’t got round to yet. Feel free to comment with your highlights from 2020 and tips on what I should be looking out for this year too — like I said, I much prefer discovering new books this way!
