SO. I realised last year that I was procrastinating on posting my reviews on Goodreads because I was worried that authors would see them and even possibly respond to them, which seems to be a thing that happens there; I also, while I’m in a group that I like very much, am not a big fan of the general vibe on GR. So I decided that I would post any reviews I wrote of books by living authors on my blog instead. And then I still procrastinated on that, because I’m a procrastinator. So now I’m dumping all my relevant Q1 reviews here at once! Whatever!
The Rachel Incident, Caroline O’Donoghue, read 11.01.24
From listening to interviews with the author, it seems like this is the buzziest one of her books has ever been (I think it’s already been acquired for adaptation by Page Boy Productions). I’ve only read one of her earlier novels (Scenes of a Graphic Nature), but I have to say that, for me, that was the more interesting. This does deal with some meaty subjects, like reproductive rights and the GFC, but most of that gets overshadowed by interpersonal relationships in a way that I personally didn’t massively respond to. There’s definitely some rich territory in the friendships between straight women and gay men, but I felt like this only scratched the surface of that, and that James ended up being sidelined in favour of Rachel’s relationship with (the other James) Carey.
There’s a relatively dramatic inciting incident here, which—because of the present-day framing device—means that we learn the fate of a character before we ever really get to know them in the main narrative; maybe that’s not an issue in and of itself, but I felt like there was a lack of pay-off. In particular, we never learn of the emotional impact this has on James, which is—to me, at least—a lot more interesting than hearing about Rachel’s marriage and pregnancy. As with The Great Believers, I feel like there’s a trend of narratives about queer men being filtered through the perspective of straight women. I think it’s a lot more prevalent and problematic in narratives of the AIDS crisis, but this still put me in mind of that pattern.
Another thing that frankly rubbed me the wrong way was the depiction of Deenie: we’re told once or twice about how kind she is, but honestly, I’m not sure we ever see any evidence of that—actually, at one point we see her being very cruel. Then there’s a lot of stuff (because Rachel is a Tall Girl) about how petite Deenie is, and how that’s some kind of personal affront to Rachel. I understand that this reflects Rachel’s own self-image issues, except that she’s narrating from the position of being a woman in her early thirties who is more secure in herself, yet she never really unpacks this attitude. Look: I am a short AFAB person who has never, ever experienced the privileges this is supposed to confer on you (I have found it only makes me more physically vulnerable and prone to being infantilised, but hey, maybe I’m just ungrateful). Forgive me, but I find the whole “woe is me, I’m tall” thing extremely fucking tedious. I’m aware I’m bringing some baggage to this, but yeah, it bugged me.
Despite this being a pro-choice book with major queer characters, there’s also a weirdly natalist slant to the whole thing, in my view: there’s a comment about Deenie and Fred having to work hard not to be pitied for being childless, which I found deeply gross, and there’s a lot of emphasis on Rachel’s pregnancy in the framing device—and yes, I know, Deenie having trouble conceiving is a device to add drama to the abortion storyline, and Rachel’s later pregnancy is probably intended as a way of contrasting a wanted pregnancy with an unwanted one, and that’s all very well, but I just think there are better ways of creating dramatic irony than having a childless character be depicted as pathetic. It would surely not have been so hard to include a character who was happily childless (we are not made aware of whether James Devlin wants children or not—I guess we’re supposed to assume not).
I feel like I’m being really negative here, and I don’t enjoy leaving negative reviews that I think there’s any chance of the author actually reading, but I have to be honest about my feelings. So one last thing: I wasn’t mad keen on the presentation of bisexuality here. I’m the first person to say fuck respectability politics, and I don’t demand that bisexual characters be perfect moral bastions or anything, but given that O’Donoghue is not openly queer and has only ever—to my knowledge—talked about having relationships with men on the record, I feel like it’s fair to scrutinise this a little bit. Fred Byrne embodies an awful lot of negative bisexual stereotypes: cheating, lying, sneaking around; a lot of his problems seem to stem from his “sexual confusion”, or at least an inability to accept and embrace his own queerness. Yes, internalised homophobia is a real thing; yes, bisexual people are just as capable of cheating and lying as anyone else. But given the proliferation of harmful biphobic stereotypes in both straight and queer spaces, I feel like an author who presents as straight—and yet seems to be very invested in having queer main characters in her novels—could stand to be a little bit more thoughtful about how this all might come across.
I do find O’Donoghue’s prose very readable, but this really didn’t work for me anything like as much as her earlier novel. Still, it’s clearly found an enthusiastic audience.
Daisy Jones & The Six, Taylor Jenkins Reid, read 23.01.24
Something made me watch the first episode of the adaptation of this, and I really was not impressed (though realistically I’m probably going to end up watching it all anyway, just out of curiosity). But I saw that the audiobook was available on BorrowBox and decided to check it out.
I have to admit that I’ve been a bit resistant to Jenkins Reid’s work, because it gives off that kind of middlebrow, book club vibe that I’m a snob about. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo seems to be the one that I’ve heard the most about (still not a lot), and I’m pretty sure that’s queer; a combination of that and the fact that it really seemed to me, based on the trailer, that Sam Claflin’s character was gay made me think that this was a queer book. It was kind of jarring to get maybe halfway through and realise that this is actually a book about a heterosexual love triangle, which is honestly not something I have a lot of interest in. I also wasn’t all that convinced by the supposed central (forbidden) romance, which seems to pivot from enemies to almost-lovers a little bit too quickly. I didn’t really feel like I was given enough reason to care about the connection between these two people.
Another thing that didn’t work for me was the late reveal of the book-within-a-book’s authorship, a revelation that didn’t really meaningfully recontextualise anything for me. Maybe if I had the inclination to go all the way back to the beginning and listen through again, I would pick up on some things that read differently in light of that information, but I don’t think there’s anything major. I guess it allows for the inclusion of the note right at the end, and maybe that justifies it, but it felt a bit cheap to me.
All that said, I really liked the oral history conceit, and I thought that it mostly translated really well to the audiobook medium. I have to admit that I did sometimes lose track of who was talking—there are a lot of characters to remember as it is, and adding to that having to try and keep track of which voice represents which character (they sometimes introduce themselves, sometimes don’t) was not that straightforward for me. I was already struggling sometimes even when they did give their names. I think it’s probably fine to let some of the supporting characters blur together, though—their storylines aren’t that integral.
One thing that particularly impressed me, though I think there could have been more made of this, was the way that different people (usually Billy and Daisy) interpreted the same interaction in completely different ways, depending on their own hang-ups and insecurities. That struck me as being true to life and well-realised here.
I found this an engaging enough listen and a fun experiment with form, though I highly doubt that it’s going to linger in my mind for very long. I mean, watching the video for the 1997 live performance of ‘Silver Springs’ is infinitely more compelling and emotionally engaging than anything that happens here.
The Secret Commonwealth, Philip Pullman, read 16.03.24
I was a huge fan of His Dark Materials back in the day—I sobbed for hours after finished The Amber Spyglass—but I was underwhelmed by La Bella Sauvage (actually, I had been underwhelmed by Northern Lights at first too, so maybe this is a trend). That’s probably why, despite buying this pretty much as soon as it came out—and scoring a snazzy tote bag—I never got around to actually reading it. Recently, though, during a bout of illness which left my concentration span almost nonexistent and forced me to put my reading plans on pause, I discovered that this was available on BorrowBox and thought maybe it was time to give it a chance. I’m so glad I did.
Glancing at Goodreads reviews (always a great idea and not at all depressing), despite averaging out with a very respectable star rating, a lot of people hated this—and I think one of the major reasons is that it depicts an adult man in his early thirties who is in love with a young woman (also an adult) of about twenty, whom he has known for a long time and whom he taught when she was in her teens. Heaven forfend! Now listen—in real life, I might raise an eyebrow at this myself, though I also wouldn’t really think it was any of my business. But the people reacting to this like Philip Pullman is some kind of sex criminal really need to kill the cop in their head. These weird kids with their orthomania around sex and horror of even consensual or imaginary age gaps need to get a fucking grip, man. The pearl-clutching is particularly ridiculous for a couple of reasons: firstly, absolutely nothing sexual happens between Malcolm and Lyra in the course of this novel, and they are only even in the same room a couple of times. Secondly, the novel is so much richer and more ambitious that that—the romance is secondary at best, and there are so many more ideas to engage with if you have the capacity to get beyond a teased romance you find a bit icky. Grow up!
I will very quickly say at this point that the romance between Malcolm and Lyra isn’t particularly my cup of tea so far, and I am still pretty invested in her love for Will, hopeless though it probably is—but again, that is really not the point.
So: the point. Primarily, the theme of the novel is the role of imagination. Pullman has cited Philip Goff, and his book Galilieo’s Error, as an influence. Goff’s contention, as far as I understand it, is that a purely quantitative approach to science, which leaves out consciousness, is fundamentally flawed. As Bart Simpson once asked: “What is the mind? Is it just a system of impulses, or is it something tangible?”.
The problem of consciousness, of course, is a fairly vital question to wrestle with if you have created a world in which the mind, or soul, or at the very least some nameless aspect of the self which is invisible in our own world, is externalised and given material form. This novel is Pullman wrestling with that problem on the page. Fans of the original trilogy have always had questions about how daemons work, and while Pullman is not interested in answering all of them—he still refuses to engage with how daemons are “born”, as is his right—he does tackle many of them here. The twenty-year-old Lyra is not the one we once knew; she has become a staunch rationalist, despite living in a world in which magic patently exists, even flirting with the concept that daemons don’t exist. Pantalaimon, still smarting from what he perceives as her betrayal of him on the shores of the Land of the Dead, finally has enough and decides to set out on his own, to “look for her imagination”. A desolate Lyra goes after him, but Pan’s disappearance isn’t her only trouble—she’s beset by enemies on all sides. She also, though, discovers a number of unlikely allies, as it turns out that she isn’t the only person who has ever lost their daemon, and the person-daemon relationship is far more complicated than she ever knew.
This is a take on the world of Lyra written from a maturing and questioning point of view, not the surety of adolescence; this Lyra is uncertain, flawed, searching. It’s a critique of a purely rationalist worldview which does not allow for the importance of subjective experience or of imagination. It’s also, by the way, a deeply humane novel, which is obviously very concerned with the experiences of refugees and displaced people—and there are subplots about spy rings and religious leaders and a growing crisis in the supply chain of attar of roses. There’s a lot going on!
I can’t help but feel sad that this book doesn’t seem to have been embraced in the way I feel it deserves, and that some people have so many puritanical sexual hangups that they can’t see the far more important wisdom this book contains, and the far more pressing questions it asks.
Wolf Tower, Tanith Lee, read 24.03.24
I read this once as a kid, and it loomed incredibly large in my memory, but then my dad’s house was repossessed, and with it a lot of my childhood possessions—this book among them. I had forgotten what it was called and who it was by; just a few details remained. For years I struggled to find it again, and finally I did. I think I must have reread it as soon as I got hold of it again, so that would make this my third read.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what captured my imagination so much as a kid; I think it was, first and foremost, the romance, which I think struck me as quite subversive at the time. The dashing, handsome (blond) prince turns out to be a total washout, and the (dark-skinned) “bandit leader” is the real romantic hero. Having read a bit more widely now, perhaps it’s not as singular as I thought at the time, and perhaps the romance relies a bit too much on attraction and could be a bit better developed—but the sense of chemistry is definitely there. The world-building, while perhaps a bit basic as an adult reader (lots of Capitalised Nouns), is still intriguing and immersive, and Claidi is a compelling protagonist—not too good, and believably naive, but not selfish or stupid.
I’d like to read more Tanith Lee, as I know she was a very prolific writer and I’ve heard good things about her other work.
Panicky in the UK 