Friday Five: Books Read in January

1. The Chimney Sweeper's Boy by Barbara Vine (Viking) - When Gerald Candless, a critically acclaimed author dies, his daughter, Sarah, is asked to write a memoir of her beloved father. As she starts to research his childhood and origins – i.e. his life before she was born – she soon discovers multiple discrepancies in the narrative. There follows a domestic investigation into family secrets that might make a man change his name and adopt an entirely new persona. The secrets are often to cover historic scandals, such as illegitimacy, unwed mothers, class distinctions and homosexuality, which would not raise an eyebrow today. Like PD James or Robert Goddard, Barbara Vine writes literary suspense novels where the characters are more engaging the plot, and the themes are apparent from the start. Rather than racing to the end to find out whodunnit, the reader spends time with the characters wondering how they feel and what they are going to do about it.
2. Treacle Walker by Alan Garner (4th Estate) - This short and pithy fantasy was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022. Using the language of folklore and myth, it imbues trees, birds, stones and bogs with specific meanings, as linguistic word play heightens the fairytale elements of the power of nature and the land. Young Joe, trying to make sense of his world, meets the rag and bone man, Treacle Walker, who leads him through mirror worlds and comics that come alive with characters such as Stonehenge Kit, the Ancient Brit, who fights Whizzy the Wicked Wizard and his chums the Brit Bashers. Hiding behind antiquated and poetically nonsensical language that calls to mind Dylan Thomas, Gertrude Stein, Roald Dahl and Lewis Carol, Garner explores the world of modern politics, environmental crises and whether or not to 'correct' neurodiversity with medication. For a short work, it has received a lot of attention with very mixed reviews - many American critics found it 'boring', 'not easy or accessible' and are frustrated by its lack of linear narrative, which is like catnip to me.
3. Eric by Terry Pratchett (Gollanz) - When feeling down or overwhelmed, I find Terry Pratchett reliable in cheering me up and relaxing me. Of course I read the books in order, but for some reason I missed this one out - it may be the fact that the title consisted of the crossed out Faust replaced by the name Eric. Eric is a teenage boy who is seeking world domination, and intimate relations with beautiful women. He manages to hack into the demon world (full of endless meetings, memos and policy statements) but unfortunately for him, he summons up the ineffective Rincewind (last seen in Sourcery). It's a welcome return from the hapless chap and his savage but loyal luggage. Rincewind still has glaring gaps in his knowledge (quantum mechanics are 'people who repair quantums, I suppose') but he is still making valiant attempts to save humanity and, more importantly, stay alive. Chortles aplenty.
4. The Diversity Gap by Bethaney B. Wilkinson (Harper Collins Leadership) - The subtitle of this book is Where good intentions meet true cultural change, where the diversity in question is mainly race-related. It offers suggestions of how to make meaningful progress rather than simply ticking boxes or attempting to improve the public image. These things take time, involve actually listening to people, welcoming all opinions (especially uncomfortable ones), believing in the experience  and perception of others, paying people for their 'diversity leadership' (informal as well as formal), and sharing power. The last one seems particularly difficult to accomplish as leadership roles tend to be filled by the dominant cultural vision who want to hoard the power of decision-making to themselves and conduct projects their way, claiming it as a kind of perfectionism as if that were a good thing. The author uses corporate jargon and marketing speak, and repeats phrases immediately in bold as if they were giving a TED talk for the hard of understanding. Despite this being extremely off-putting, they do make some good points. “If we focus on questions related to diversifying teams, but fail to ask questions about sharing power, we miss the mark.”
5. Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton (Granta) - Eleanor Catton was the youngest winner of the Booker Prize with the longest book in 2013 (The Luminaries). She clearly has talent, and she displays it again here in Birnam Wood. It's quite a lengthy novel (423 pages) and there is a lot of exposition, with the balance too much in favour of tell rather than show. Birnam Wood is the name of a renegade group who want to take back the land for common ownership and guerrilla gardening. The members make strange bedfellows with a billionaire who made his money in drone technology and says he wants to build a doomsday bunker but will let them use the land above ground and even finance their project. One former member of the group, feeling jilted by the organisation in its current form and desperate to make a name for himself in investigative journalism, decides to dig a little deeper. Of course there are Shakespearean parallels - powerful ambition is ultimately destructive, there is an integral struggle over whether it is better to be right or rich, innocent casualties accumulate, and 'Birnam Wood was going to a better form of camouflage than he had ever dreamed'. None of this should be a spoiler, unless you've never read/ seen/ heard of Macbeth, in which case, it's a spoiler for that too. Lengthy debates about patriarchy, economics, nationalism, identity politics, intersectionality and capitalism - 'Didn’t we already solve that one?' - are reminiscent of those earnest down-the-pub conversations we used to have as students. Despite the cleverly-designed cover, not everything is black and white. 
6. A Bird in the Hand by Ann Cleeves (Pan Books) - The author of the books on which the series Vera and Shetland are based, Ann Cleeves wrote the first in this George and Molly Palmer-Jones series in 1986. The couple in question are retired, happy to travel the British Isles birdwatching, and solving the murders which invariably occur. George used to work at the Home Office (doing secret business), is good with details and has bouts of depression; Molly is a retired social worker who is good at listening and brings out the best in people. Naturally, they make a great couple. Both are restless with their current life and enjoy a new challenge. When a birdwatcher is found dead on a marsh with his head bashed in and his binoculars still around his neck, it is a great surprise to everyone in the small community because everyone loved him. Or did they? Of course, they didn’t, as this is an old-style mystery and secrets soon come to light complete with multiple suspects, red herrings, precise timings of the murder, poison pen letters, and suspicious alibis. 
7. Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan (Canongate) - This is not a book about trout. It is a cult classic that is part commentary on American society, part surreal absurdism, and part hallucinogenic travel memoir where the pictures from the trip (in every sense of the word) are not yet developed. First published in 1967, the book is whimsical in the way that it captures a moment in time, referring to undeveloped photographs as "in suspension now like seeds in a package." Short chapters, oddly specific similes and a total disregard for character development or narrative arc, mark it as a work of post-modernism that deconstructs itself, talks about its own front cover, writes and receives letters and is an item for sale at The Cleveland Wrecking Yard where it is sold by the foot length. Brautigan is the slightly more obscure favourite of the boys in college who also read Kerouac, Kesey , Burroughs and Vonnegut, which should indicate to a potential reader whether they will like him or not. 
8. The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith (W.W. Norton & Company) - This novel was filmed in 2015 (by Todd Haynes) as Carol starring Cate Blanchett as Carol and Rooney Mara as Therese. The fact that I can only remember Cate Blanchett is telling, as Carol is so wholly the focus of the novel that Therese is tantalisingly indistinct. Written in a world-weary glamourous style, it recalls the novels of Fitzgerald, Collette or Nabokov: everything is mentioned, but nothing is understood. Therese begins an infatuation with Carol which leads to a clandestine relationship - is it love, or is the much-older Carol toying with her affections to discard her like a plaything? As a set designer, Therese should be used to miniature worlds and deceptive appearances, yet she seems drawn into the dream as though Carol had some White Witch potential.