Fiction
A wild western
The Heart in Winter
Kevin Barry
The Heart in Winter Kevin Barry
A wild western
The hero of Kevin Barry’s new novel, The Heart in Winter, is a dope-fiend Irishman haphazardly subsisting in the mining town of Butte, Montana, in the 1890s. Tom Rourke has a poor excuse for a job as assistant to a poor excuse for a photographer, and earns drink money by writing letters for illiterate men luring brides from the east. His spare time is spent haunting brothels, racking up debt through his opium habit, and writing songs.
As the book begins, Tom has two fateful meetings, both involving love at first sight. The first is with a palomino horse, “a nervous animal, of golden aura”, which he stumbles upon while coming down from opium at 4am. The second encounter is with Polly Gillespie, a newly arrived mail-order bride who walks into his photography studio with her God-obsessed stick of a husband, Long Anthony Harrington.
Barry has written us a love story that never seems false or cheap, and an adventure where the violence is never gloating or desensitised. It’s a wedding of Cormac McCarthy with Flann O’Brien; a western but also the most Irish of novels; a tragedy written as farce. You might object that the plot isn’t perfect: Barry has one too many villains driven by odd sexual kinks, and the climax rushes by too precipitously. Still, I doubt these flaws will matter much to any reader’s admiration of this book. It’s made to attract superlatives, while inspiring joy with every incident, every concept, every sentence.
Barry does more with a single word like “mopesome” than some writers do in 300 pages. One should never say a book is the best of its year, since no one can read all the books of any year. I doubt, though, that anyone will publish a novel this year that is at once so beautiful, so lovable and so much fun.
Sandra Newman
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Fiction
Hugely enjoyable cold war espionage
Gabriel’s Moon
William Boyd
Gabriel’s Moon William Boyd
Hugely enjoyable cold war espionage
Shortly after leading the Democratic Republic of the Congo to independence in June 1960, the country’s first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, was overthrown and murdered. Lumumba, whom Malcolm X called “the greatest black man who ever walked the African continent”, had given a spine-tingling speech on the day of independence, upbraiding the country’s former colonial power, Belgium, for its despotic and racist rule. This – and his suspected openness to cooperation with the Soviet Union – may have sealed his destiny. His premiership lasted ten weeks. Lumumba’s spirit of defiance is still evident in the chilling newsreel footage of him being held captive by his political opponents shortly before his death.
The question of western involvement in Lumumba’s murder has hung over those events ever since and forms the backdrop to William Boyd’s new novel, Gabriel’s Moon, the first in an intended series. It centres on a young British journalist called Gabriel Dax who is on assignment in Africa at the dawn of the 1960s. Gabriel, orphaned in odd circumstances, has flourished in spite of this early tragedy and grown up to become a successful travel writer. Returning to London, he finds the recordings he’s made of an interview with Lumumba bear accidental witness to the conspiracy surrounding his overthrow. Now courted by shadowy intelligence officers, Gabriel is drawn deeper into the double-crossing world of cold war spycraft, pressured into further assignments and ends up on missions behind the iron curtain – all while negotiating the legacy of his early childhood trauma with an enigmatic psychoanalyst called Dr Katerina Haas.
Though it’s thoughtful and involving rather than out-and-out thrilling, I read this novel with huge enjoyment – looking forward to my appointments with Gabriel’s complicated life and the unfolding evidence of cold war skullduggery. The book succeeds in establishing Gabriel Dax’s world and whetting the reader’s appetite for further adventures in the Simca Aronde. It made me nostalgic not only for the period it described, but for a time when more people, including me, instinctively sought entertainment in naturalistic fiction of this kind.
Marcel Theroux
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Fiction
Water, water everywhere
There are Rivers in the Sky
Elif Shafak
There are Rivers in the Sky Elif Shafak
Water, water everywhere
Two children are divided by centuries, countries, language and religion, though each of those things also unite them, aided by the principle of “aquatic memory” that dominates a novel that is always absorbing and often painfully affecting. The first is Arthur Smyth, born on the foreshore of the River Thames in 1840 to an impoverished and terrified young woman. In 2014, at the edge of the Tigris, Narin lives in a small village where she is cared for by her grandmother, a water-dowser and storyteller.
The links between the two young characters will take several hundred pages to unfold, although the narrative is seeded throughout with hints and signs, and given additional help by a determined contemporary hydrologist, Zaleekhah, whose passion for uncovering the world’s buried rivers is providing a distraction from her broken marriage.
Like Arthur – who is modelled on the real-life assyriologist George Smith – Shafak is a voraciously eclectic reader. The reign of Ashurbanipal, John Snow’s fight to prove cholera outbreaks originated in London’s tainted water supply and not its foul air, the science behind changing hydroclimates; all find their way into her novel. You can feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information, and the almost breezy briskness with which it is relayed, but it is balanced by the delicacy of Shafak’s observations about human dynamics, the furtiveness of her characters’ most deeply held emotions and desires.
Alex Clark
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Economics
The ticket to prosperity
Growth
Daniel Susskind
Growth Daniel Susskind
The ticket to prosperity
According to economics professor Daniel Susskind, from the Stone Age to the 18th century most people lived in poverty, “engaged in a relentless struggle for subsistence”. Modern economic growth only began 200 years ago: “if the sum of human history were an hour long, then this reversal in fortune took place in the last couple of seconds”. The first half of Susskind’s fascinating study examines why there was no growth for such a long time and why this “unprecedented prosperity” began so suddenly and was sustained – at least until recently.
Material prosperity has freed billions of people from the struggle for subsistence and the average human life is now both longer and healthier than ever before. This new wealth has also been used to make astonishing discoveries, like splitting the atom. But there has undoubtedly been a price to pay for this growth, including climate change, the destruction of the natural environment, and the creation of large inequalities: “growth has an irresistible promise and an unacceptable price, it is miraculous and devastating”. This “growth dilemma” and how to respond to it, is the subject of the second half of Susskind’s book. It is, he argues, the most urgent issue facing us today. But it also offers an opportunity to “create a renewed sense of collective purpose in society in pursuit of what really matters” – not just more prosperity, but a fairer society and a healthier planet.
However, in the last few decades almost all countries have “slumped” and recent global crises mean economies are now “sluggish shadows of former selves”. No country seems to have a solution for how to return to stable growth, without also threatening climate stability and social order. At the same time, politics have polarised, split between “far-left ‘degrowthers’” and “far-right national populists”. Susskind argues that to reject the pursuit of growth would result in a “catastrophe”, leading to poverty and poorer healthcare. Instead, we need to make growth less destructive, while accepting there will always be trade-offs between its “promise and its price”.
He argues passionately for the pursuit of growth at a time when its costs seem to outweigh its benefits. He highlights “the power of ideas” and their economic exploitation as the catalyst of growth, and sees this as the key to unleashing a fresh wave of prosperity, a “Second Industrial Enlightenment”. Thanks to the “innovative genius of humankind”, the resulting technological and economic renaissance will, he believes, eventually allow us to solve the problems facing the world.
This is a remarkable survey of a complex subject that is both erudite and immensely readable. Susskind’s thoughtful discussion of the issue is historical and practical, offering insights into how innovation and growth can be boosted, and it is a timely contribution to a vitally important debate.
PD Smith
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Society
An intimate account of how China is changing
Private Revolutions
Yuan Yang
Private Revolutions Yuan Yang
An intimate account of how China is changing
Yuan Yang, the former Financial Times China correspondent, has written an engrossing new book, recently shortlisted for the Women's prize for nonfiction. Yang meticulously reports on a country in the throes of change, using the lives and choices of four women from her own generation as a lens.
Leiya, Sam, June and Siyue, born in the late 80s and 90s, all hail from different regions and social classes – but they share the trait of being “unusually accomplished idealists”. Lieya, who drops out of school to work in a factory, later goes on to run a childcare collective. Sam, “born into a special sliver of her generation: the urban middle class”, is drawn into the world of labour activism after interviewing an injured factory worker for a university sociology course. June is just 13 when her mother is killed – crushed on a conveyor belt in a coal mine. She becomes the only one of her village primary school classmates to make it to high school, and then university. Headstrong Siyue’s stressful childhood is characterised by the rising and falling fortunes of her parents, who try their hands at various business ventures (repairing Nokia handsets, for example). Later, as a single mother, she is adamant about parenting her daughter differently – and giving her own mother (who she tricks into going on her first ever holiday, to Bali) a new outlook on life, too.
“Any mass transformation of society requires, and results in, massive change at the level of individuals, friendships and families,” Yang writes. “Yet it is also easy, at a time of such breakneck change, to lose sight of what it feels like to be alive.” Private Revolutions takes care to keep Leiya, Sam, June and Siyue’s individuality in focus without forgetting the broader stakes. As Leiya reminds herself: “I’m not the only one in this situation.”
Mythili Rao
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Fiction
A perfectly realised fictional creation
Crooked Seeds
Karen Jennings
Crooked Seeds Karen Jennings
A perfectly realised fictional creation
There’s nothing quite like a writer setting out their stall from the first page of a book so you know what you’re getting. When Karen Jennings – the South African author whose last novel, An Island, was deservedly longlisted for the Booker prize in 2021 – opens her new novel with a woman crouching over a mixing bowl to expel urine as “dark as cough syrup”, we know it will not be a feelgood comedy.
Yet this novel did make me feel good – feel joy, in fact, at its precise pursuit of its vision, at its grownup complexity and at the way central character Deidre is such a perfectly realised fictional creation. Crooked Seeds is not a “book that feels like a warm hug” but more what Kafka called “an axe for the frozen sea within us”. When Deidre says something isn’t “my kind of thing,” and she’s asked: “What is your kind of thing?”, she replies: “I don’t know. Nothing really.” She is afraid of what is inside her coming out. But in this outstandingly good novel it does come out, it must come out, and the reader is the beneficiary.
John Self
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Fiction
Relentlessly inventive
The Night Alphabet
Joelle Taylor
The Night Alphabet Joelle Taylor
Relentlessly inventive
A man walks into a bar. Well, no. At the beginning of poet Joelle Taylor’s first novel, a woman called Jones walks into a tattoo parlour. It’s 2233 and weather programmers have calibrated this part of London to “endless spring”. The already heavily tattooed Jones asks the two artists, Small and Cass, to connect all the images on her body by a thin line, using ink mixed with a vial of her mother’s blood. This will be an act of unification and completion.
The 23rd-century tattoo parlour is a retro one. The tattooists may use holographic laptops to book a sky cab, but their workplace is designed to be mid-1990s, right down to its soundtrack, a hard house CD. Setting 1996 on an endless loop in 2233 is a deft introduction of coexisting time periods, a central idea of the novel and one responsible for a thread of dizzying and delightful inversions, reversals and paradoxes. At the start, we’re in the future, but Jones says she is “back”. Cass and Small are ostensibly strangers to her, yet Jones is aware of aspects of their lives still to come – and their pasts. She knows how Small “got the scuff marks on the underside of her boots”. Even the sun is in on the act. It’s a “baby’s head retreating into the womb”.
It’s hard to think of many books more relentlessly inventive. The novel contains a phantasmagoric narrative of female vanishings and erasure. There’s an origin story, told with mythic clarity, about three furies who seek justice on behalf of wronged women. A tale about the commodification of family relationships involves a painful grafted identity. We enter the ugly psyche of an involuntarily celibate, violent misogynist, and in another story, that of a resourceful, vibrant 13-year-old girl, killed in a Lancashire pit explosion in 1911. There’s the apocalyptic satire of an England ruled by the Quiet Men, with their “Grande Toddler King” who vows to make the country great again, and there’s a chilling story of ectogenetic process and male control. We also encounter the Gutter Girls, a group of “prostitutes, drug users and poverty surfers” on a north London estate who become a vital movement of resistance against male violence.
More than anything, this is a novel about the power and importance of stories. How Cass and Small connect to them is significant, but equally important is how we as readers respond. Like water, Jones says, stories can get in anywhere. They’re rich and fattening. A story is an infinity: inside every story is another. When Small and Cass are unsettled by a tale about discarded girls, Jones observes that certain subjects are “precincts of avoidance, soft ground on which it is inadvisable to walk. We know these areas by the way our bodies twist around them. We know these stories by the way we never tell them.” But Taylor shows no such reticence or fear.
Wendy Erskine
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Publishing
Bound to be brilliant
The Book-Makers
Adam Smyth
The Book-Makers Adam Smyth
Bound to be brilliant
As well as the stories inside books, there are the stories behind them – tales of printers, binders, typesetters and paper-makers who are mostly unheard of. Adam Smyth, a literature professor who is also part of a printing collective, wants to do these men and women justice. Rather than go back to ancient China or dwell on obvious names (Gutenberg, Caxton), he picks out a handful of talented individuals whose lives are as exceptional as their achievements.
Among the most topical, given the disappearance of public libraries today, is the chapter on Charles Edward Mudie, whose vast Victorian circulating library was a bargain for members (one guinea for town subscribers, two guineas for country – less than the price of a three-decker novel) but angered many authors, especially those whose books were not made available, among them George Moore, who attacked Mudie as “the great purveyor of the worthless”.
Mudie said that no book carried in his library should make a respectable young woman blush, though the 7.5m books he owned by 1890 included many, including Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, that a more religious-minded gatekeeper would have judged unsafe, and his distribution of British books across the world (Hardy, George Eliot, Trollope) played no small part in the establishment of English literature as an academic subject. Hundreds of thousands of readers were indebted to him, yet the venture eventually ended in bankruptcy. That’s often the way in the book business, even as books themselves adapt and endure.
Blake Morrison
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Fiction
Comic novel or conceptual art project?
The Unfinished Harauld Hughes
Richard Ayoade
The Unfinished Harauld Hughes Richard Ayoade
Comic novel or conceptual art project?
The Unfinished Harauld Hughes is something like a South Bank Show House of Leaves: it’s the narrative of the making of a documentary that never gets made, about a movie that also never got made. Its protagonist-narrator is Richard Ayoade, an alter ego of the author of the book, Richard Ayoade. He’s in search of an alter ego of his own – or, at least, a doppelganger.
The late Harauld Hughes – author of era-defining plays with titles such as Platform, Table, Roast, Roost, Prompt, Flight, Shunt and Dependence, and subsequently a hack screenwriter – is Ayoade’s white whale. It so happens that the playwright’s author photograph looks extremely like Richard Ayoade, except that Hughes “wore the kind of glasses I would search for, in vain, from that moment on”.
The journey, it’s probably not too much of a spoiler to reveal, goes nowhere. But it’s not the journey. It’s the friends we make along the way, right? Those friends include the excellently imperious Lady Virginia, Hughes’s East End associates (who have about them more than a touch of Monty Python’s Piranha Brothers), a pompous theatre critic and, of course, the splenetic Hughes himself. Ayoade’s quietly intelligent, low-key wit, funnelled through his hangdog narrator, makes this a journey worth taking.
Sam Leith
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Fiction
Emotional crisis and comedy in Cape Cod
Sandwich
Catherine Newman
Sandwich Catherine Newman
Emotional crisis and comedy in Cape Cod
“You’re supposed to retrace your steps when you lose something, but none of my losses are like that. Where would I look for them? And what would I do if I found them?” wonders the narrator of Sandwich, the follow-up to memoirist and journalist Catherine Newman’s critically acclaimed and bestselling adult debut novel We All Want Impossible Things.
Returning to the writing stage after a commercial success is no mean feat, and it’s understandable that Newman has chosen to explore similar themes in each story. Both novels deal with loss. But while Impossible Things explores the very tangible loss of a terminally ill friend, the losses found in Sandwich are, at least superficially, much more subtle.
Rachel (in her 50s and known affectionately as Rocky), along with her husband, Nick, and their two grown-up children Jamie and Willa are all heading to Cape Cod for their annual vacation – a week’s escape, and a pilgrimage they have made together for the past two decades. Everything is comforting and familiar, from the “shore-lined peninsula” to the lobster dinners – even their regular holiday cottage with its temperamental septic tank and impractical furniture.
The only problem with annual pilgrimages, however, is that losses that might pass unnoticed in everyday life are felt only too keenly in a different landscape, especially when the family is joined by Rocky’s elderly and increasingly frail parents, and she finds herself breathlessly sandwiched between them all. “I am standing dead centre, still and balanced,” Newman writes. “Living kids on one side, living parents on the other … don’t move a muscle, I think. But I will, of course. You have to.”
Finally, literary fiction has started to fully appreciate the joy of an older female narrator. From Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer prize winning Olive Kitteridge to Marian Keyes’s sharp and funny My Favourite Mistake, a woman over 40 is thankfully now able to use her own voice, after so many years of merely living on the periphery of another person’s story. Rocky is a worthy member of this new and much-needed club, not just for her date of birth but also for her relatability. “And this may be the only reason we were put on this Earth,” Newman writes towards the end of the book. “To say to each other, I know how you feel. To say, Same.”
Perhaps this is why we write, too, and why a protagonist like Rocky is so necessary, because a whole generation will now be able to read this wise and exquisitely written story and say I know how you feel. They will say, Same.
Joanna Cannon
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History
Europe's edges
Borderlines
Lewis Baston
Borderlines Lewis Baston
Europe's edges
Lewis Baston begins his study of European borders by recalling a long coach journey with his parents in 1984, travelling from Britain to Austria. As they crossed the border between France and Germany, he can still remember his “feeling of awe”: he had entered a whole new country “without getting on a ferry or even getting out of my increasingly uncomfortable bus seat”. When the events of 2016 left Baston “bereft of political enthusiasm”, the election expert decided to indulge his “lifelong curiosity about land borders and ambiguous areas”, in the hope of finding a new way of viewing Europe and its future in an age of resurgent populist nationalism.
The result is a highly original and insightful book charting his “journeys of discovery” to and across European borders, from Ireland to Ukraine. He points out that “borders are not as old as we tend to believe”. Before 1914, there were few controls over the movement of people in Europe and passports were generally not necessary. However concrete borders may seem today, they all owe their existence “to the human imagination and its limitations”. Indeed, as Baston explains, many of them are “legacies of violent imperial power”.
But a border can be both a bridge and a door: a place of interchange and something that can be closed to prevent entry. The Estonian border is kept secure on the frontier with Russia, while the one with Latvia is open. Russia’s attack on Ukraine happened while Baston was writing and this serves as a reminder that sometimes a border has to be “a line to be fortified and defended”; for not every neighbour is a friend.
The land near borders includes people with different languages, religions and identities, and “borderers” often have an uneasy relationship with their national authorities. Border people have lived with “duality and ambiguity” all their lives and Baston argues that Europe has to learn lessons from them, if it is to avoid repeating the terrible mistakes of nationalism and authoritarianism. Indeed, their experiences reveal that being part of a nation is more complex than one is led to believe.
Baston’s “secret history of Europe”, told from the edges of its nations rather than capital cities, is the result of several years of travel and research. In “the borderlands of Europe” he discovers that multiculturalism has always been central to European history and that the lesson of the twentieth century is that national identity should be “civic and capacious” not “ethnic or monocultural”. Rich in history and memorable anecdotes, this is an ambitious and affectionate attempt to describe the glorious complexity and diversity of Europe.
PD Smith
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