- The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard (Virago Modern Classics) - Written in 1980, this is widely regarded as a 20th-century Australian classic, which follows the lives of orphaned sisters, Grace and Caroline Bell after they emigrate to post-WWII England. Grace settles for a seemigly safe marriage whereas Caro flirts with drama and excitement, risking flouting convention and playing with the feelings of the steadfast Ted Trice. As he courts her hopelessly and steadfastly there are echoes of The Great Gatsby or Atonement - secrets are kept and revealed only at the end, although passing allusions are dropped casually at the beginning. The language is both clever and confounding, with enigmatic characters, captivating anecdotes and time-shifting chronolgy. It is relatively slow paced and heavy going; the omniscient observer's voice is both remote and entertaining, with nods to Austen that feel vertiginously out of period. People are not who we, or they, think they are. “Men go through life telling
themselves a moment must come when they will show what they’re made of. And the
moment comes, and they do show. And they spend the rest of their days
explaining that it was neither the moment nor the true self.” According to reviews, many people prefer the novel on the second reading, and it is a bold author who delivers information in such a metered-out way that challenges their reader to have another attempt at understanding or deciphering their work.
- The Trees by Percival Everett (Text Publishing) - This
contemporary novel of rage, violence and vengeance is underpinned with
supernatural Gothic undertones, like Get Out or other Jordan Peele films, suggesting it could be coming to a screen sometime soon. In Money, Mississippi, a person shows up dead, mutilated and next to a second corpse; a disfigured Black man who mysteriously resembles Emmett Till (who was lynched in Money in 1955). As this pattern is repeated across the country, it soon transpires that all the white folk brutally murdered have ties to historical
racism. Mama
Z, an old blind woman with more than a whiff of voodoo magic about her, keeps files of all "nearly every person lynched in this country since 1913". The stories are depressingly similar as scholar, Damon Thruff, understands when he comes to transcibe them. With bold, unflinching prose, Everett is demanding a reckoning for those names who have been unspoken and the crimes that have gone unavenged.
- Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner (Vintage) - Sadie Smith (not her real name) is an intriguing protagonist, as is any female main character who isn't particularly likeable and doesn't try to be. She is a spy who infiltrates environmental activist groups with a world-weary nochalance targeted at middle-class drop-outs and fashionable protestors. So far; so Elisabeth Moss in The Veil. Sadie's latest mission is to infiltrate a radical farming co-op in the South of France and uncover anarchic tactics (with licence to plant them if they don't exist). The story is interwoven with anthropological lectures from the group's mentor, Bruno, which he sends by email from a cave. The novel explores the dichotomy between the collective and the individual through contemporary and pre-historic references and symbols. Unreliable narrators are not to everyone's taste, but are to be expected in espionage thrillers, especially ones shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
- Destruction was My Beatrice: Dada and the Unmaking of the Twentieth Century by Jed Rasula (Basic Books) - Dada is a movement that is difficult to explain, indeed some refute that it is a movement at all. The closest I can come to a definition, after reading this book, is that it is a sort of punk for art. Rasula follows the concept of Dada through several different countries, people and iterations rather than as a straightforward chronology. Names are familiar: Hugo Ball; Tristan Tzara; Hans Arp; Marcel Duchamp; Piet Mondrian; Kurt Schwitters, but none are authorities, and Dada left a trail of influence on modernist artforms, protest pampleteering, installation sculpture, statement architecture, literary theory and music (David Bowie and John Lennon were proponents). From artists who created fountains from urinals to poets who deconstructed language, and dancers who remained static and confined in cardboard on stage, Dada was "a state of mind, an attitude, a posture donned for an occasion." One could argue it was also an affection of intellectuals avoiding the First World War by holing up in an neutral country. I read it to help me understand Tom Stoppard's Travesties; I'm not sure it did.
