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Ruins, Child - Giada Scodelaro
There are some books that you read and love and want to press into people's hands, and then you get to the end and realise you have absolutely no idea how to talk about them. Ruins, Child by Giada Scodelaro is one of those books. It's been a few days since I finished this and I'm still not really sure what I actually read, but I know that I loved it. If you've read Helen of Nowhere from this year's Booker longlist and got on with it, I think you'll get on with this too. If you hated it, give this one a wide berth.
The first time I saw Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain was at a midnight 35mm screening, the fourth or fifth film of an all-nighter. I was exhausted, half-awake, in that liminal dream-logic state you fall into after too many hours in a cinema seat. The film started and I had no idea what I was looking at. Just this onslaught of images and feeling that my brain wasn't ready to process. I sat there thinking, I don't know what this is, I don't know what I'm watching, but I know I love it and I want more of it. The opening pages of Ruins, Child did a similar thing to me. I was swept up in the language and the imagery and at no point did I ever figure out what it meant.
I've been reading more poetry this year, and one of the things it's taught me is how to stop trying to extract meaning from text that doesn't want to give it up, and just sit with what it makes you feel instead. That's the only way in with this book. It's very much a prose poem: opaque, shifting, nebulous, impossible to pin down. It's a mosaic of images that put me in mind of Han Smith's Portraits At The Palace Of Creativity and Wreckong or Jenny Offill's Weather, and it would sit very comfortably on a Goldsmiths Prize shortlist. It's taking the shape of the novel and asking whether it has to keep working the way it's always worked.
If I had to say what it's actually about, I'd say maybe community? Perhaps femininity, in all the different forms it takes. Race, and specifically Blackness. Voyeurism, too, particularly in the first section, where we watch a group of people watching another group of people, as though they're being directed in a film, which reminded me a lot of Quentin Dupiex's Rubber but without the humour. It felt like commentary on how inherently voyeuristic the act of reading is, but also on how voyeuristic community itself can be. We watch our neighbours and think we know them, but there are huge stretches of their lives we're never given access to. It felt like the book was in conversation with the idea of community, maybe even the myth of it, but all of it happens behind a curtain. You have to reach for meaning here, and it doesn't come easily.
Parts of it drift from prose poem into outright verse, which I loved. It slips between forms constantly, surreal and fragmented, refusing to be pinned down at any point. I still don't really know how to review it, or talk about it in any coherent way. I just know I loved it. If you're someone who enjoys experimental prose, novels that push at what the form is even for, I think you'll get a lot out of this one.
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The Disappearers - Marlon James
This is what AIDS is after all, isn't it? One long set of disappearing acts. First is watching the friends and family disappear. Second act is when people try to disappear you. Third act is watching your body vanish from itself and wondering where the fuck you going, piece by piece, until all of you gone. I swear to God, at one point I used to think people with AIDS just evaporate. If there is a fourth act, it's when everybody erased you name as if you were never born in the first place.
I received an advanced reading copy of The Disappearers from the team at Hamish Hamilton and Penguin UK, which I'm very grateful for.
This is the last book on this year's Booker Prize longlist that I've read, and I don't really know where to start when it comes to reviewing jt. There's so much going on in The Disappearers that trying to summarise it feels like a fool's errand. It's a book about queerness. It's a book about Blackness. It's a book about the long shadow British and American colonialism left over Jamaica, and about the way British and American cultural hegemony still shapes queer spaces and ideas of race and gayness even now. It's about masculinity, rage, justice, revenge. I could keep going. There's simply too much packed into this novel for me to do it justice in a review.
For the first 200 pages I thought this was going to be my favourite book on the whole longlist. It felt like the thing all the other books had been circling around thematically and emotionally without quite landing on. Those 200 pages are an absolute shotgun blast of violence and hatred and aggression, some of it turned outward, some of it turned in on itself. It reads like a scream. It's one of the most gripping opening sections I've read in a long time, and it is very difficult material. It's violent, it's explicit, and it does not let you look away from any of it.
If explicit sexual content isn't something you want in your fiction, this isn't the book for you. There's a huge amount of sex in here, and very little of it is the tidy, comfortable kind. It's messy, bloody, dirty, aggressive. There's a lot of non-consensual material woven through it too, sitting right alongside the violence, and it's often hard to tell where the line between consensual and non-consensual is. This feels like a response to the sanitisation of gay culture that we've seen in pop culture in recent years, gay sex and love cleansed and smoother over and repackaged to appeal to straight white women who have no idea what cruising is, who would be horrified to step inside a sauna, who have no idea what Polari is. This is unbridled, unfiltered, and unapologetic. The effect is that the book grabs you by the face and forces you to look. I was completely in its grip. James's control over his prose here is remarkable, and I loved being swept along by it.
Then the middle section arrives, and the rage is still present but the pace drops away. This is where the book started to feel like a lot, in a way that I think is entirely deliberate. It becomes a relentless, grinding tide of abuse that never lets up, and I think that's very much the point James is making about the queer experience, particularly the queer experience in Jamaica under the shadow of AIDS. Understanding that it's intentional didn't make it any easier to read, though, and I found myself worn down by it. It became a slog to get through, and however purposeful that slog is, I can only review the book by how it actually made me feel while reading it, and by the middle stretch I was exhausted.
The good news is that it recovers. The final 150 pages are every bit as urgent and visceral as the opening, and the book is absolutely worth pushing through the middle section for if you've got the stomach for the rest of it. This is not a comfortable book. It's not spicy or romanticised queer fiction smoothed out for easy consumption. There's a line partway through that stuck with me, where one character rails against "first world gays" who assume their national exceptionalism should be the model for how the rest of the world experiences queerness. That's not the central thesis of the novel, but it's very much present throughout, and it's part of why I've found this such a hard book to actually review.
As a white queer person, there's a great deal here that isn't mine to speak to, and I don't think I have any particular insight to offer on what the book is doing with Blackness and queerness together. What I can say is that I liked it, that the writing is excellent, and that it feels urgent in a way that matters right now. With the current rise of anti-queer and anti-trans sentiment across the UK and US, and the way that inevitably ripples outward into other countries through that same cultural hegemony the book is interrogating, this feels like an important book to have out in the world at this particular moment.
Ranking it against the rest of the longlist is difficult. Taken purely as a novel, that sagging middle section does knock the score down a little for me, so I've landed on an 8 out of 10. That puts it alongside a handful of other books from this year's Booker season that I've also scored an 8, but I think The Disappearers carries more weight and urgency than most of them, so it's going in third on my personal ranking, just behind my top two.
That's the last of this year's longlist ticked off. It's been a journey, with some really great books along the way, and The Disappearers is one of the strongest of the lot, even if it asked more of me as a reader than most. You may not find that middle stretch as gruelling as I did. If you do, stick with it. It's worth it.
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Switzy - Emma Cline
I received a digital proof of this from NetGalley, courtesy of the folks at Random House and Vintage, so thank you to them for that.
Switzy is the twelfth book from this year's Booker longlist that I've read, and it might be the one that's hit me hardest.
If you loved Helen of Nowhere, I think there's a good chance you'll love this too. If you hated it, you'll probably hate this one for a lot of the same reasons, because it's another slippery, experimental sort of novel that isn't interested in holding your hand.
We follow a man who is dying. He's got some kind of dementia, though the book never pins it down exactly, some sort of mental degeneration that's stripping away his grip on reality and his memories along with it. Time has become unreliable for him. He's on his way to a suicide clinic in Switzerland, and we're with him for the last couple of days of his life as he flies from the States to England and on to Switzerland, watching him try to reckon with what's coming while his own mind is actively falling apart underneath him.
We're locked entirely inside his head for this, which means we experience the slippage along with him. The prose moves between past and present, between what's real and what isn't, old films and half-remembered songs bleeding into his thoughts and cutting across them. One moment he's in one place, the next he's somewhere else entirely, and there's no warning before the jump. It's very disorientating to read.
The cruelty of it, and I think this is where the book really gets you, is that we're the ones carrying the memory he's lost. When he lands in a new moment with no context, he's almost at peace with it, because he gets to invent a new reality for himself on the spot. We don't get that comfort. We're the ones left holding what he's forgotten. One scene - or pair of scenes really, a scene and then a reprise - stands out to me, where he goes into an antiquarian bookshop to buy a gift for his grandson, then later finds the book sitting in his car and can't remember who it was for. He decides it must be for someone else entirely (an old school friend who wants nothing to do with him, who he has history with that he can't remember) and he's pleased with himself for having thought of them. It's a really nice moment of dramatic tension (irony?) where we're left feeling worse than he is because we know what's actually happened. There are some parallels here with the events of The Renovation, too, though in this case we occupy the place of that novel's narrator.
I don't want to unpack too much more of the plot here, because part of what makes Switzy work is going in without knowing much beyond the fact that it's going to be a heavy read and it's going to hollow you out emotionally. I finished it in bed and just had to sit there for a few minutes digesting it before I could sleep.
It's beautifully written, very poetic, subtly (forgetfully?) gay. There are a handful of books on this year's longlist wrestling with change, identity, masculinity, the way the future refuses to look like the past any more, but none of them do it as intimately or as personally as this one does. It's a quiet book, an intimate one, and it's gorgeous. This is apparently not much like Emma Cline's other work, but on the strength of this alone I need to go and read the rest of her back catalogue.
Read Switzy. If you already have, come and talk to me about it.
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John of John - Douglas Stuart
I almost didn't want to write this review. John of John has had a huge amount of hype attached to it for months now, and the people who love it seem to really love it. So it's not exactly fun to sit down and admit that I didn't get on with it. But I didn't. This is the eleventh book I've read from this year's Booker Prize longlist, and it's comfortably my least favourite of the lot.
I've been deciding which book to read next by picking them out of a cup at random, so it's just chance that I came to this one so late. If this had landed earlier in my journey through the longlist I think I'd have DNFed it. The only reason I didn't is that by the time I got to it I'd already read ten other longlisted books, and I've become sort of stubbornly committed to finishing all of them, whether I'm enjoying myself or not.
On paper this should have been an easy win for me. It's exactly the kind of book I usually love. We've got an isolated community that still does things the old way, and a main character who's left and come back and is wrestling with how much his own perspective has shifted in the meantime. It's about secrets, old grudges, small rivalries simmering away under the surface. It's about the weight of responsibility and obligation, tradition against modernity, the sacrifices you make for people you love. It's also super gay. This should have been an easy win.
It wasn't. I was deeply bored for most of this book, and getting through it felt like a slog at times. Once I hit the halfway mark I just wanted to be done with it, and it kept going anyway. That's a shame, because I can absolutely see why people love this. It slots into a long Booker Prize tradition of books about people practising a traditional craft or trade that's dying out, and that's a theme I really enjoy in fiction. (I might put together a little shortlist of Booker books about dying trades and crafts at some point, if only to make myself feel better about having slogged through this one.)
What let it down for me, more than anything, was the prose. I can see what Stuart is going for, a sort of meandering, lyrical tone, but for me it just slipped into tedium. I never really connected with any of the characters' voices, and worse, I couldn't distinguish between them. This is a book that shifts narrative perspective constantly, and not just chapter to chapter, either. You'll be reading from one character's point of view, and then the next paragraph you're suddenly in someone else's head, with no real signal that the switch has happened. I found it jarring and a little difficult to follow, because everyone sounds the same on the page. I kept having to stop and ask myself whose head I was even in. It felt like the book wanted the benefits of both third person omniscient and third person limited without ever properly committing to either, and for me that just didn't work.
I'm giving John of John a 4 out of 10, which is the lowest score I've given anything on this year's Booker longlist. That's still a positive score from me, for what it's worth. It means the book was fine. I don't think it's a bad book, and I don't hate it. It just didn't land for me, and I was bored more often than I wasn't, which isn't a feeling I enjoy having about a book I was genuinely excited to read.
I know a lot of people adore this one, and I'd love to know what worked for you if you were one of them, because right now I'm struggling to see what turned this into a 10 out of 10 read for so many people. You can't win them all, I suppose. Two books left on the longlist, and I'm looking forward to both of them a great deal more than I was looking forward to finishing this one.
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The Shadow of the Object - Chloe Aridjis
The Shadow of the Object by Chloe Aridjis is the tenth book I've read from this year's Booker Prize longlist, and at this point I don't think I can talk about any of these books in isolation any more. The longlist feels really cohesive this year, in a way I don't think I've noticed before, with the same handful of preoccupations turning up again and again across wildly different books.
For me this one sits alongside May We Feed The King, The Renovators, and even The Vivisectors. All of them are books that are obsessed with the past, and with the way the past keeps bleeding into the present, refusing to stay where it's supposed to. There's a longing running through this longlist too, a kind of ache for some enchantment or magic that used to exist and doesn't any more. It's wistful. Almost nostalgic, but not quite, because nostalgia implies a kind of comfort and this doesn't offer that.
Longing is really the word at the forefront of my mind with The Shadow of the Object. Longing for connection, longing for something more, longing for enchantment. I'm aware I've used that word twice now, but you'll just have to allow it.
All the way through I kept waiting for it to tip over into magic realism. There's a texture to the prose that makes you feel like something fantastical is about to happen on the next page, some rupture in the ordinary world. It never quite does, though. This isn't a book that wants to give you the fantastic as spectacle. It's a book about finding the fantastic already sitting inside the mundane, if you know how to look for it. Objects here get charged with the energy of the people who owned them, carrying their histories around inside them long after the people themselves are gone.
It feels hauntological. It's a book about loss, about desire, about the slow work of coming to terms with your own mortality and the fact that there's no route back to the past, however much you might want one. All you can do is keep moving forward into whatever's next.
I haven't seen a huge amount of chatter about this one yet, which is a shame, because I loved it and I'd really like to talk to someone about it. I'm giving it an 8 out of 10, and I liked it slightly more than Helen of Nowhere, which was my other 8. That knocks Helen of Nowhere down a spot on my personal rankings, with The Shadow of the Object sliding into third.
So where that leaves things: my current top five are All Them Dogs, May We Feed The King, The Shadow of the Object, Helen of Nowhere, and The Renovators. I've still got John of John, Switzy, and The Disappearers left to go, so it'll be interesting to see whether this ranking survives contact with the rest of the list.
If you've read The Shadow of the Object, please tell me. I want to talk about it.
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The Palm House - Gwendoline Riley
Something that's struck me about a few of the books on this year's Booker Prize longlist is how they feel plucked out of a different era of fiction entirely. Missouri Williams is clearly going for an 18th century Gothic vibe with The Vivisectors, and M. John Harrison's The End Of Everything reminded me, when I reviewed it, of early 90s New Weird. The Palm House gave me a similar sensation, except here it felt like a classic Booker Prize literary novel, the sort of thing that could have slotted comfortably onto shelves in the 80s or 90s alongside Graham Swift or Julian Barnes. That's not a criticism at all, I love those books, and this felt very familiar in the best possible way. It felt like the sort of lit fic I grew up reading. I haven't read any Riley before, so I've no idea whether that familiarity is typical of her work or something she was doing deliberately here.
What I took from the book is that it's largely about finding comfort in friends, in familiarity, in shared history. A lot of the other books on this longlist are preoccupied with disillusionment, loneliness, and people drifting apart from one another. The Palm House is different. The characters here are deeply connected, and most of what we learn about that connection comes through their shared past, the things they've been through together. It reads like a comfort read, which sounds like an odd thing to say about a newly-published novel, but that's the impression I came away with. It felt like a book I'd already read before, in the sense that it was instantly familiar rather than derivative. Riley achieves that partly through how well the characters know each other, and partly through her prose, which is gorgeous. An absolute joy to read, this one.
That said, if you hated the men in Helen Of Nowhere, you're going to loathe some of the men in this book. Some of the worst men on the entire longlist turn up here, and yet the book still manages to feel hopeful in spite of them. There's a genuinely difficult scene fairly early on, where the narrator, as a teenager, is raped by an older celebrity who's spent time grooming her. It's uncomfortable, it comes out of nowhere, and it's not an easy read. But even with that sitting in the book, The Palm House never tips over into despair. There's a fury about men simmering under the surface of the whole thing, a sort of barely restrained fed-upness, but it never overwhelms the narrator or takes away her sense of self.
There's a loose plot here, but the plot isn't really the point. Most chapters read more like standalone vignettes, little tales and anecdotes pulled from Laura's life, and together they build up a picture of who she is: the people around her, the events that have shaped her, what she wants, what she's achieving. As I said, it all felt very familiar, like something I'd read or heard before, but in a comforting way rather than a stale one. Of everything on the longlist, this was the one that felt most relaxing to read, and it stands in fairly stark opposition to a lot of the angrier, more disillusioned books on the list this year. There's still anger here, but the disillusionment has gone, and what's left is a sense of hope, built out of the comfort and strength that friends and family can provide.
Overall this feels like a standout on the longlist, not because it's better than everything else necessarily, but because it feels different. It's still dealing with a lot of the same territory as the rest of the list, ideas about masculinity chief among them, but it comes at those ideas from a completely different angle, and I appreciated that a great deal. Would definitely recommend giving it a go.
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All Them Dogs - Djamel White
I'm not going to bury the lede here - I've just read my favourite book of the year so far. All Them Dogs is getting a 9 out of 10 from me, and it's gone straight to the top of my Booker longlist rankings. This is the eighth book from the longlist that I've made my way through this year, and it's the best of the lot.
I always love it when the Booker recognises genre fiction, and when I'm working through the longlist I like to give myself a palate cleanser between books, especially after something heavy. I'd just finished Missouri Williams' The Vivisectors and was gearing up for exactly that kind of reset but decided to jump into another Booker read instead. It turns out the Booker judges had prepared a cleanse for me.
All Them Dogs is a proper thriller, and it wouldn't look at all out of place on a CWA Daggers longlist. The Daggers work retrospectively, so anything published this year will be up for consideration next year, and I would be very surprised if this doesn't get a nod when that rolls around.
I sometimes find the books I love the most are the hardest to write about. There's less friction, less to pick at, because I just tore through it and had a brilliant time. So let me just say plainly that the writing is excellent. The prose is taut, tight, snappy, and paced in a way that makes it a proper page-turner. I read it fast and I loved every page of it.
I really loved the version of queer masculinity on display here. It's common for queerness in men to be written as soft, feminine, or androgynous, and there's nothing wrong with that at all, but it's rare to see something hyper-masculine and aggressive get the same treatment. I want to be clear that this isn't aspirational stuff. The men in this book are awful, violent bastards. But there's something refreshing about awful, violent, gay bastards, and about the fact that their queerness isn't the point of the book. It's just a fact about them, presented the same way it would be if they were straight, and I really appreciated that.
I grew up under Section 28, working out my own sexuality with basically no representation like this anywhere near me. I'm sure books like this existed back then and I just never came across them, but it would have meant a lot to see this kind of queer masculinity on the page as a teenager. I'm glad it exists now.
It's gripping, it's funny, it's tragic, it's sad, it's violent. It's everything I want out of a thriller, and it's easily my book of the year so far.
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Black Bag - Luke Kennard
I will not be surprised if Black Bag wins the Booker Prize this year.
This was the book on the longlist I was least excited to pick up, the sixth one I've read so far, but enough people had told me how much fun they were having with it that I made an effort to go in with an open mind. I didn't want my preconceptions to colour the whole experience before I'd even opened it. I wanted to be pleasantly surprised. And for the first hundred pages or so, that's exactly what happened.
I put up a post the other day gushing about the opening paragraph, and I stand by it - it might be the strongest opening on the longlist so far. The prose is snappy and stylish, frequently funny in a way that never seems to be straining for the laugh, and the narrator is very likeable to begin with. The whole milieu of dinner party mysteries and shambolic amateur theatre he's tangled up in is a fun, strange little world to spend time in, and the scenario with the black bag itself is compellingly weird. I was locked in. I was ready to have a proper good time with this.
At one point Black Bag sits through a lecture where someone observes that people only really remember the first ten percent and the last ten percent of a talk. If the same were true of novels, I'd be sat here telling you this was one of my favourite reads of the year. The first hundred pages are great. The last thirty are good. Unfortunately novels don't work like lectures, and I can't say the same for the hundred pages sandwiched in between, where the book lost me almost completely. I was seriously weighing up DNFing it around the halfway point. I'd become bored, increasingly fed up with the main character, and I had the distinct sense that nothing was happening - that the book was just spinning its wheels and going on and on with itself.
The relationship the narrator strikes up with Justine, a professor at the university where he's working, is the part that really did it in for me. I simply didn't buy that this successful, attractive woman would spend her afternoons in the office grinding away against a black leather bag with a man she'd never met sealed inside it. It didn't ring true, and it read to me like a strange bit of male wish fulfilment - a fantasy of getting all the benefits of a relationship with a powerful, desirable woman without doing any of the work of actually building one. If that's meant as satire, it didn't land for me. It just felt like juvenile wank material, frankly, and I was bored and more than a little irritated for a solid two hundred pages because of it.
Sunk cost is genuinely the only reason I didn't put this down. And it's more than a little ironic that one of the lectures Black Bag sits through, right around the book's midpoint, is specifically about the sunk cost fallacy. I can't decide whether Luke Kennard knew exactly how much of a slog the middle of his own book is and decided to have a laugh at the reader's expense, or whether that's me reading too much into a coincidence. Either way, it's a strange thing to put in a book that then tests your resolve to keep reading it.
I didn't hate this. The opening is excellent and the ending is genuinely enjoyable, but the highs aren't high enough to drag the sagging middle up to their level, and the overall impression I'm left with is that this is just fine. Aggressively fine, even. I think this lands around a five out of ten for me, which currently puts it at the bottom of my Booker longlist ranking.
The silver lining is that the Booker has a habit of alternating - some years I love the winner, some years the book I liked least of the lot takes it home, and it tends to go back and forth between those two. I'm in a fallow year this year, where I expect the book o hate most to win. Going by that pattern, and given how strong the rest of the longlist has been so far, this might well be exactly the kind of book that wins this year. So if nothing else disappoints me the way this did, you're probably looking at the Booker winner.
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Helen of Nowhere - Makenna Goodman
Helen of Nowhere is the fifth book on this year's Booker Prize longlist that I've read, and it's easily the strangest reading experience I've had this year. I read it twice within about twelve hours. Once on my Kindle one evening, finishing it off in the morning before immediately getting onto the bus into town to buy a physical copy, after which I read the whole thing again on the way home.
The whole experience reminded me of the first time I read Rachel Cusk's Parade. Not because the books are similar in any obvious way, but because of the specific feeling I was left with. I got to the end of Parade and thought, I loved that, that was really good, please do not ask me to explain a single thing that happened in it. That's exactly where I am with Helen of Nowhere. It's such a strange, singular novel that I feel like I need someone else to sit me down and explain it to me, and even having loved it, I'm not convinced I understood very much of it at all. What I do know is that I love having it rattling around in my head, taking up space, making me turn it over and over. That's a rare and valuable feeling to get from a book.
I don't think I've hated a point-of-view character as viscerally as I hated Man, the narrator here. The only other one that really comes close is Humbert Humbert in Lolita, which happens to be one of my favourite books in the world. HH is a monster, and spending time inside his head as he justifies his own behaviour to himself is deeply unpleasant. Being inside Man's head, especially in the opening chapter, felt much the same. He's not a good person. He's a prick, frankly, and being forced to sit with him for those early pages felt almost punitive. What kept me there, though, is that Makenna Goodman's prose is so strong, so controlled, that I never once considered putting the book down. And the rest of the novel does something really satisfying with that discomfort of the opening chapter, spending the following pages taking Man apart, exposing the gap between the person he is and the person he thinks he is.
I don't really know how to talk about this book properly, so I'm going to keep this shorter than I'd like. I liked it a lot. I'm giving it an 8 out of 10, which puts it in second place on my Booker longlist ranking so far this year, even though I can't articulate why with any real confidence. Maybe once I've read it a third time I'll have found the language for it. Watch this space, I suppose.
(I followed this video up with a second one in which I tried to explain what the book is actually about, so I'll post a write-up of that here for posterity/completion, too.)
I got a question after my last post that I want to try and actually answer - what is Helen of Nowhere about? It's a good question. It's also, I think, a slightly meaningless one. If you're the kind of reader who needs plot to hang onto, you're not going to find much of it here, and I'd say that upfront before you go anywhere near this book. This is exactly the sort of novel people are talking when they talk disparagingly about lit fic. But I'll do my best to actually describe what happens in it, for what that's worth.
Structurally, it's something like a prose poem in six acts. In the first act we're introduced to Man, a professor, a writer, an arsehole. He's the kind of mediocre straight white man of a certain age who is deeply threatened by women he perceives as less talented than him but who are nonetheless as successful, or more successful, than he is. We spend several pages entirely inside his head as he talks about his career, his wife, and what an awful piece of shit he is, more or less without any self-awareness.
In the second act we move, presumably, to the same Man (it's hard to be certain) as he's shown around a house by Realtor. The house belonged to a woman called Helen, who has died, or is in assisted living, or something else entirely; she isn't there, and we never quite find out why. As Man and Realtor talk, she shares stories from Helen's life, stories about the house, and those stories slowly start to warp Man's sense of himself. His past, his failed marriage, his career, the world around him, all of it starts to shift under these anecdotes, and new possibilities start to open up for him that he clearly hadn't considered before.
The acts that follow keep rearranging the furniture. We hear from Wife. We hear from Man and Wife together. We hear from Helen herself. And with every section it gets a little more surreal, a little harder to hold onto. By the final act we're back with Man and Wife, and Man appears to have changed in some fundamental ways. He seems to have developed something like respect, or need, for a woman he'd spent the entire first act dismissing as a former student unworthy of his professional regard. Or maybe he's been turned into a dog. Or maybe he's been in hell the entire time and just didn't realise it. Or maybe Helen is some kind of Circe figure, and she's turned Man into a dog as punishment for being an unimaginable piece of shit. Honestly, I don't know.
That's the true answer, in the end: I have no idea what Helen of Nowhere is about. But it's really good, and it's really worth reading, and I suspect that not knowing is a large part of the point.
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The Renovation - Kenan Orhan
The Booker really does love a migrant novel. It has an excellent track record of recognising writers in diaspora, and it particularly seems to gravitate towards books about grieving a homeland, or a culture, that still exists but that you can no longer go back to. This sits very firmly within that tradition. It's a very Booker Prize book. I know the committee likes to insist you can never spot a Booker book until it's already been longlisted, but this is one of those cases where, if you'd handed it to me five months ago with no context at all, I'd have told you it had Booker longlist written all over it.
I really liked this one. It's surreal and slippery in the way it moves, but it never loses its grip on real, grounded human emotion, on the complexity of grief and pain and suffering. What I appreciated most is that it understands something true, which is that even in the middle of pain, even when everything is bad, people still find the humour in it. There's a lot of very subtle, very dark comedy running through this book, the kind that makes you question whether you're actually allowed to be enjoying yourself given how bleak everything around you has become.
The strongest thread for me was the parallel Orhan draws between the narrator's retreat into the Turkish prison that appears, unexplained, through the door of her bedroom, and her father's retreat into Alzheimer's. It's a lovely piece of mirroring. He's losing his memories of life in Turkey, of the reasons the family had to leave for Italy in the first place, of his life more generally, while she's retreating further and further into her own memories of a land she's lost and can't return to. Two people moving away from each other in opposite directions, essentially, but for the same reason.
The writing is gorgeous. This is a short book, but it took me several days to get through because I kept stopping just to sit with sentences and make sure I was giving them the attention they deserved. It's surreal, faintly Kafkaesque in places, sad and funny in the same breath. It's a book about grief, about Alzheimer's, about diaspora, about fascism. There's an enormous amount packed into a small space, and I suspect this is one that will only get richer on a reread.
It absolutely deserves its spot on the longlist, and I wouldn't be remotely surprised to see it make the shortlist, though I should caveat that with the fact I've only read a third of this year's list so far, so take that prediction for what it's worth.
As I said in an earlier Booker review I'm rating these books out of 10 even though that's not normally something I do, just to help me figure out my own shortlist. I'm giving this a strong 7 out of 10. When I wrote about Elizabeth Strout's The Things We Never Say, I said I'd more or less talked myself into an 8, but having now read The Renovation, I've settled that book back down to a 7. This is also a 7, but a firmer one, enough to knock The Things We Never Say into third place on my little leaderboard.