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Stephen King - Rage
I'm reading all of Stephen King's fiction in publication order, and I've now reached the first of the Bachman books.
Rage is probably King's most notorious novel. It's been out of print for decades. It's about a teenager who brings a gun into school, shoots his teacher, and holds his class hostage, and through the 80s and 90s copies of it turned up in the lockers of real school shooters in the US. King asked his publisher to let it go out of print so that it couldn't inspire anyone else, which means it's now quite hard to get hold of.
This is my second time reading it. I first read it two years ago, and according to my reading spreadsheet I gave it a 6 out of 10. This time it's a 5. I couldn't remember anything about what I thought of it first time round, which is maybe a review in itself, so I dug out my reading journal from 2024. Here's what I wrote on the 13th of July:
Rage was good but not great. It doesn't read like King, probably due to being in first person, which is unusual for him, and in places it gets a bit incoherent and hard to follow. That may be intentional since we're in the head of a maniac who's decided to become a school shooter. There's something really unsettling about the way the other kids react to the shooting, in that they don't really react to it at all. They sit and talk with Charlie very casually, sharing stories about moments of sexual awakening. I guess there's some commentary on social attitudes post-Vietnam and the sexual revolution going on here that doesn't translate to the modern day, or at least I don't know enough about 1970s America to pick up on it.
I agree with past me. All of those thoughts came back to me this time too. I just liked it a little bit less (or I've become stricter with the way I rate things, I suppose).
King says in his introduction that as soon as he started publishing as Bachman he was getting letters asking if Bachman was really Stephen King. I don't think he's lying, but I can't believe anyone read Rage and thought "this reads like Stephen King". Maybe they noticed some superficial similarities with Carrie. The subject matter isn't a million miles away, since both are about angry, disaffected teenagers taking revenge on their school. But they're almost inverses of each other. Carrie builds towards its moment of violence, while Rage opens with the shooting and then goes flat. Tonally they couldn't be more different.
King started writing this in 1966, long before Carrie. He says it's not quite old enough for him to think of it as juvenilia, and he'd obviously reworked it by the time he tried to get it published in 1972, two years before Carrie came out. I think it's the blueprint for Carrie in a lot of ways.
What I found most interesting this time round is that King seems to have hidden little hints to his identity in the text. Early on there's a passage about Donald Westlake writing his Richard Stark books under a pseudonym, and I'm fairly sure that wasn't in the original draft. My evidence form this is scant; mainly it's that there's also a reference to John Travolta in here. Nobody knew who John Travolta was in 1966, and he wasn't much better known in 1972 either, so that has to be a later addition. And Travolta's second film role was, of course, in Carrie. I suspect King was mostly amusing himself. I can't imagine anyone in the 70s picking up on any of it, because stylistically this just doesn't feel like King. A lot of that comes down to the first-person narration, which he rarely uses, and which at this point he'd never used at all in his novels.
So did I enjoy it? Yes, sort of. It reads like juvenilia to me, whatever King says. It's very straightforward and very simple, and the situation never feels real. The characters don't talk or behave the way anyone would with a classmate standing at the front of the room holding a gun. Charlie is a deeply unpleasant protagonist. He's a bit like Carrie in that he's an outsider lashing out, except that he's also incredibly full of himself. He delivers long monologues to his captive audience about his life, his trauma, his sexual traumas. In places it reads like a violent Catcher In The Rye.
The attitudes to sex are hilarious, to be fair. There are several men in this book who are absolutely horrified by the very idea of oral sex, and I couldn't stop laughing at that.
It's my least favourite King novel of the read-through so far, though it's still good in places. You can see the strength of his prose here, even if it's a bit all over the place. But I don't really know what point Rage is trying to make, and if nobody had ever worked out that Bachman was King, I don't think his bibliography would be any weaker without it.
This is fine, but the fact that I needed my reading journal to remember what I thought of it two years ago says a lot. It's forgettable, and I don't think it earns or deserves its notoriety.
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Stephen King - The Shining
I'm reading all of Stephen King's fiction in publication order.
I've read this before but long enough ago that I didn't remember much of it. I'm not really a fan of Kubrick's film version - I'm not much of a Kubrick fan at all,.truth be told - and I remember liking the book more than the film.
That's still true, but of King's first three novels this is my least favourite. There's something off with the pacing here, and I found it to be a bit of a slog in places. There are sections in the final act where it's very dull at the point when things should be ramping up, and I never really cared about what was happening all that much. Usually when King is getting lost in the weeds of his stories I enjoy the trip anyway, because I generally find his prose very readable and compelling, but this is a little slow and stilted, hampered by some jarring perspective shifts and clumsy language in places.
That's not to say I don't think this is a good book. It is, and it's still fun to see King exploring similar themes in his early work. There are hints of an interest in the psychogeography of buildings and ideas about 'stone tapes' in 'Salem's Lot that are never fully explored, and The Shining mines that seam thoroughly. It's just a little clumsy in places, and it also feels like King isn't letting himself lean into the area where he shines the most (if you'll excuse the phrasing there) - namely, the psychology of small towns and the mundane horrors beneath insulat communities. And, of course, he's very clearly grappling with his own alcoholism here, and King working out his personal problems on the page is something that will feature heavily in his later work.
I'm glad I revisited this but there's a reason I haven't re-read it again before now. I'm a long way away from getting to Doctor Sleep, but I'll be interested to see if I still think it's better than The Shining when I finally get to it.
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Mary Lawson - Solace In Winter
I received an ARC of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.
Mary Lawson's 2021 novel A Town Called Solace was one of my favourites from that year's Booker Prize longlist, but it's not a book I thought needed a sequel. When I heard that Lawson was returning to the town with Solace In Winter I was a little sceptical that this might be a direct sequel (though her other novels, set in the fictional town of Struan, aren't directly linked, so I don't know why I was suddenly worried about this) but that isn't the case, and there's no need to have read A Town Called Solace before this. As it is, this is a gorgeous standalone novel that I think serves as a very good introduction to Lawson's work if you're not already familiar with her. And, given that the Booker judges saw fit to award M John Harrison with something of a legacy award this year - a well deserved legacy award, but a legacy award nonetheless - and given that Lawson is 80 years old and has been longlisted for the Booker twice but has never won it, I wonder if this might be a very early contender for next year's prize.
I'm a big fan of books where people retreat to remote, inhospitable places to retire/find themselves/start a new life/flee something/etc. Favourites include books like The Shipping News, Stone Yard Devotional, and The Land In Winter, and I'm delighted to now be able to add Solace In Winter to that list, because I loved this.
Solace In Winter follows a small cast of characters in the 1960s. Chris is an American student who has been called up to serve in Vietnam and flees north to avoid the draft; Jack is an elderly resident of Solace, a lonely widower who is seeing out his retirement in seclusion; Ellie is a nurse, dissatisfied with her life and marriage, whose life ends up entwined with the two of them. I won't say any more about what brings the three of them together in order to avoid spoilers, other than to say that it's all very organic. The perspective moves back and forth between these three characters, and I initially wasn't really sure what purpose Ellie's perspective served here. The book starts out really exploring the relationship between Jack and Chris and their own personal situations, and Ellie's chapters felt a little superfluous. But part of the magic of Solace In Winter is how Lawson very deftly changes what the book is beneath your feet without you noticing it, and by the end it was Ellie's chapters that felt the most vital and important to me.
Lawson has always done an excellent job of capturing complex, emotionally rich characters, and she's at the top of her game here. My sympathies towards these characters and my opinions of them shifted dramatically from scene to scene, and at all times they feel real and alive and completely justified in their actions, even when I was mentally screaming at them to make literally any other decision.
This is a cosy, comforting read that's perfect for winter, but that warmth is concealing a jagged heart of ice that pokes through when you least expect it. It all seems like it's heading towards a nice, warm, happy ending for everyone - and it some senses it does - but without any major spoilers we must not forget that all cops are bastards, and the end that we actually get is bittersweet, tinged with regret and pain and the grief of what could have been if only things could be different.
I think it's fairly clear that I adored this book, and I absolutely recommend it. It's also prompted me to pick up A Town Called Solace again, which I haven't read since it was longlisted for the Booker, and to also finally pick up The Other Side Of The Bridge, which I've somehow never got around to reading.
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Stephen King - 'Salem's Lot
I'm reading all of Stephen King's fiction in publication order.
It's been 14 years since the first (and only) time that I read 'Salem's Lot. I can date it pretty precisely, because I was re-reading The Dark Tower in the wake of the publication of The Wind Through The Keyhole and decided I should read the novels that link to that series. I remember enjoying it at the time, but it's long enough ago that I don't remember any of the details of the book, so this felt like a first read all over again.
Carrie may by King's first novel, but I'd argue that this is the first Stephen King Novel. Carrie feels like a longer version of the short fiction King had been publishing at the beginning of his career; 'Salem's Lot feels like a Proper Novel, and feels much more like the books that follow it in terms of its scope, tone, and themes. I don't remember reading the introduction last time I read this book, but King's statement that he wanted to take Dracula and the EC Comics of his childhood and turn them into a Moby Dick-esque Great American Novel really does ring true. You can see the ambition on the page here.
I've always been impressed by King's ability to take a very large cast of characters and make them all feel vital, even when some of them are people who only appear for a scene or two. He's excellent at putting us into the psychology of a small town by putting us in the heads of its residents. He's also really good at showing us the impact of a big event by building a mosaic of different perspectives. There are a few montage-esque chapters here that work really, really well.
This isn't a perfect novel. King's tendency to just follow the story rather than plotting often leads to threads getting dropped or forgotten about, and that's certainly the case here. The novel really sets up the Marsten House as a significant location, almost an emblem of the evil that grips this town, and it feels like a missed trick to not have the book climax there. Instead it ends up functioning as something of a red herring, in a way that feels messy rather than planned and satisfying. Similarly there's the lose end of what happened to Larry Crockett, and what leverage Straker and Barlow had over him initially, that's discarded partway through the book.
They're small quibbles, though, and I liked this a lot. It's really fun to see some threads here that King will pull on again, too. I feel like the DNA of IT is in this book (and maybe the house on Neibolt Street is King making up for not letting the Marsten House shine in the way he wanted it to). Similarly I feel like the antiques shop that Steamer and Barlow open - another thread that never really goes anywhere - very obviously becomes the base material for Needful Things later in King's career.
Is this a masterpiece? I'd say not. But it's a very good book, and I think it's fair to say that it's had as much impact on late-20th and 21st century vampire stories as Dracula ever did. I don't think we get things like 30 Days Of Night, John Carpenter's Vampires, From Dusk Til Dawn, or Let The Right One In without 'Salem's Lot.
Next stop, The Shining.
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Carrie - Stephen King
I'm reading all of Stephen King's fiction in publication order, starting with Carrie. I know there's someone out there already typing a comment to tell me that King published plenty of short fiction before Carrie came out. I'm aware of that. A lot of it was collected later in books like Night Shift and Skeleton Crew, and I'll read those stories when I get to the collections. The stuff that predates Carrie and has never been collected I'm going to try to track down. Much of it is juvenilia, and King has resisted having it republished in the past, so it's not easy to get hold of. If and when I find it I'll read it and write about it here too. The plan is to stick to publication order as closely as I can, but we'll see how that goes.
With Mike Flanagan's adaptation out recently, Carrie felt like the obvious place to start anyway. It's been at least fifteen years since I last read it and I couldn't remember much of it. Goodreads tells me I gave it three stars, though I've no idea what system I was using back then. I have a very in-depth way of rating books these days, and I think it would still land somewhere around a three, maybe a three and a half. I enjoyed it, and I got a lot out of it. I think I liked it more this time than last, but I can't really remember last time, so who knows.
It's a really strong debut, which won't surprise anyone. The story is very simple: Carrie gets bullied at school, she takes her revenge, she burns the town down. There's not a lot going on plot-wise. What I love is the way King takes that skeletal structure and fleshes it out with news reports, articles and interviews with the commission investigating events after the fact. All of this material looks back from the future, trying to make sense of what happened and what it meant for Chamberlain and the world at large. Flanagan gets this right in his version, and it's something that's been missing from other adaptations. As great as Brian De Palma's film is, none of that wider context makes it in, and I think it's exactly the material that gives the book its resonance. Later in his career King gets very good at portraying small, tight-knit towns and the psychology of the people in them, and you can see the beginnings of that here in the way Chamberlain reacts in those interviews and police reports.
Sticking with structure, I also love the decision to show us prom from two angles. First we see it from the outside, in the way people experience it and react to it and talk about it afterwards. Then we jump back in time, get inside Carrie's head, and live through it with her. I loved getting to witness it twice. The Carrie of the book is also much angrier than the Carrie of any of the films.
I don't think King gets enough credit for the way he captures his characters' interiority. Even with the really awful ones, the racist, aggressive, sexually violent men who turn up throughout his work and who are here too, we get a real sense of who they are. We don't sympathise with them, because they're horrible, but we can understand them, and that's a real strength.
He doesn't have much of a reputation as a prose stylist, and he's said himself that he has a tin ear for language. But I've always loved his storytelling voice. There's a rhythm to it that I just sink into, and that's present even this early. He also does some interesting stylistic things that he rarely gets credit for. The narrative is constantly interrupted by characters' thoughts in parentheses, physically breaking the flow of the sentences, as though those thoughts are running alongside what's happening on the surface. He does this a lot, but I'd forgotten it goes all the way back to his debut. It's really effective, and if I had to pin down what makes King's prose feel like King, it's one of the first things I'd point to.
In On Writing King talks about how every important moment in Carrie is marked by blood, and how he went back through while redrafting and deliberately added it in. I don't think I noticed that the first time round, but having read On Writing a few times since, it's impossible to miss now. He's hammering that theme home. Blood keeps appearing, over and over, and every time it does you know something significant is about to happen. Then the climax finally arrives, Carrie gets the pig's blood dumped over her, and she makes the whole town bleed in return. It's so simple, but it works brilliantly.
Towards the end, someone in one of the interviews asks what happens if there are others like her. A lot of King fans have a bad habit of trying to tie everything back to The Dark Tower. I'm a big Dark Tower fan. I love the series, the interconnectedness of it and its metatextual nature. But not every book King has written needs to be wired into it. Flanagan seems to be trying to link Carrie to the Dark Tower with his new series, and that's not a decision I necessarily agree with. Carrie isn't connected to the Dark Tower, and it isn't connected to the Derry setting that becomes so important later either. I'll accept, though, that the nugget of a bigger idea is here. People with telekinetic powers running unchecked, people who've been othered and mistreated by society and who use their abilities to take revenge on those who hurt them: that's a theme King comes back to again and again. One of my favourite things about reading an author across their whole career is spotting those resonances, and it's fun to see one turn up right at the start.
So yes, a really strong debut. I enjoyed seeing so many of the themes and stylistic tics that King will spend the rest of his career refining show up already, and beyond all that it's just a fun, satisfying read. I don't know how long this project is going to take me, but Carrie is a great place to start.
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What Am I, A Deer? - Polly Barton
What Am I, A Deer? is on this year's Goldsmiths Prize shortlist, and it's the third book from the list that I've read. The team at Fitzcarraldo were kind enough to send me a copy, which I'm very grateful for.
This is Polly Barton's debut novel, but she's far from a new writer. She's a translator, and I've read a couple of her translations already - Spring Garden and Butter - and thought they were both really good. So it was nice to finally read something that's entirely her own.
I'm really into fiction written by translators that deals with the act of translation. There have been a handful of these in recent years, a sort of tiny micro-genre, and I've enjoyed every one of them. This one goes straight onto that list.
We follow a young woman, a literary translator, who ends up working for a games company in Frankfurt doing localisation work. While she's there we watch her get to know the people and the culture, and try to settle into a new life in a country where she doesn't really speak the language and doesn't feel like she fits. The book slips back and forth between past and present, and it's told in an almost stream-of-consciousness style that I found really engaging. It put me right inside the narrator's head, and inside her emotions.
When I first opened this I found it pretty intimidating. The first page is one big wall of text, and my first thought was: where the fuck are the paragraph breaks? What the hell is going on here? It's not often that a book intimidates me. It took me back to studying modernism at uni, ploughing through things like Finnegans Wake and Mrs Dalloway and The Death of Virgil, and for a second I wondered what I'd got myself into.
It does have paragraph breaks, you'll be pleased to know. And it's actually a very approachable book. It's nicely written, it's really funny in places, and it's practically a rom-com. But it also does some interesting things with form, and that's what I enjoyed most about it.
There are no real chapters. Instead the text is broken up every so often by song titles and lyrics (at one point it's Lana Del Rey's Hope Is A Dangerous Thing For A Woman Like Me To Have), and these almost function as chapter breaks. Almost, but not quite. Sometimes they mark a stopping point in the narrative, and things change straight after them. Other times they just interrupt, and the story carries on as if nothing happened.
I found that really effective. To me it seemed to be pointing at the way we narrativise our own lives, poking at the artifice of fiction and the whole idea of chapters. Your life doesn't really have chapters. You can look back and pick out the moments where things changed, the thresholds you stepped through, the landmarks that shape the story you tell yourself about who you are. But when you're actually living them they're just another moment. Nothing seems to be changing at the time.
It felt to me like a companion piece, or maybe a counterpoint, to Vincenzo Latronico's Perfection, which I also loved and which also happens to be published by Fitzcarraldo. Both are about very modern people trying to work out how to live in the modern world while cut off from home, whether that's their country, their language, or the people they know and love. But where Perfection leans into the alienation and loneliness of the digital age, What Am I, A Deer? is much more interested in connection, and specifically the small, mundane, personal kind. There's a big emphasis on karaoke, of all things, as a way of connecting with people that cuts across language and class and nationality. I loved that.
To be fair to it, any book I read from the Goldsmiths shortlist this year was always going to suffer a bit, because I read The Rouse first and loved it so much. But I really, really enjoyed this. It's exactly my kind of novel, and I'm looking forward to seeing what Polly Barton does next.
Thanks again to Fitzcarraldo for the copy. If you've read this I'd love to hear what you thought, and if you haven't, I think you should give it a go.
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The Rouse - China Miéville
I can't remember the last time I got to the end of a book and thought "that was a masterpiece". I feel pretty comfortable saying it about The Rouse, though. It's certainly a landmark work, and it's China Miéville's magnum opus. Everything he's been doing since King Rat and Perdido Street Station has been pointing towards this book. It wraps up the thematic threads from all of his previous work and bundles them together into one surprisingly digestible slab of a novel.
I'm going to try to write about this without spoilers, which is harder than it sounds with a book this size. I did a short series of reading vlogs on TikTok while I was reading it, and those do contain some spoilers, so if you want more in-depth discussion of what actually happens they might be worth a look. With the caveat that I was reacting in real time and hadn't had a chance to sit with it and digest it properly.
The Rouse follows two characters separated by time. Maur is a mother who has lost her son and is looking for an explanation of what happened to him. Twenty years earlier, Allardyce is a newly recruited army squaddie who finds himself wrapped up in black ops. We follow both of them over decades as they get pulled, from different angles, into the same conspiracy.
Miéville is playing with form here, and with structure. As his protagonists delve further into the conspiracy that's consuming them, that consumption (that obsession, really) is reflected in the prose. Early on it's very grounded. It's rich and descriptive and we get a real sense of the time and place we're in. Miéville has always been brilliant at evoking place, cities especially. New Crobuzon comes alive in the opening of Perdido Street Station and stays a character throughout the whole novel, and it's a presence in The Scar and Iron Council even though neither of those takes place entirely within the city. That quality is here at the start of The Rouse.
But as Maur and Allardyce become more obsessed, more wrapped up in the conspiracy, they begin to lose their grip on reality, on time, on meaning. And all of that slips away from the prose too. There are sections where we're given nothing but dialogue and metaphor and euphemism that isn't grounded in anything at all. It's slippery and weird and hard to hold on to, and it puts us in exactly the same headspace as the characters. Time, geography, meaning: it all comes unmoored, for everyone in the book and for us as readers.
If you're the kind of person who doesn't like ambiguity, you're probably not going to enjoy this, and that's fine. If you want answers, if you want the weirdness in your books to make sense and be explained, if you love a good magic system or hard SF and don't have much patience for unanswered questions, this isn't the book for you. There are very few answers here. There are just questions that point towards more questions. That's very much by design. Over 1,300 pages Miéville inducts us into the same mystery that consumes his protagonists. He's gesturing towards a deeper truth, a secret waiting to be uncovered, and asking whether we want to know more.
I did. When I reached the end my immediate reaction was to turn back to the beginning and start again, to see what I'd missed and to start piecing things together. The last time a book did that to me was House of Leaves. I got obsessed with the footnotes, especially the references to other texts, and started writing down every book it mentioned, looking each one up to see if it was real, and then reading the ones that were. Until I realised what a ridiculous thing that was to be doing. That's the sort of obsession The Rouse inspired in me.
It's a book about conspiracy theory. It's a book about truth and knowledge and not knowing, about mystery. And because it's a Miéville book it's also about colonialism and empire, about the violence of language and culture, and about how colonialism changes everything about a culture, right down to how it thinks about and approaches death.
It's obviously a brick. But I never once felt like I was reading a huge book. The pacing is great, and the structure is very rhythmic. Given the themes, I'd go as far as calling it ritualistic, and I think that's part of the mystery the book is trying to stir up in you. Because of the way it's paced and put together, it felt like reading a taut 300-page thriller rather than a sprawling 1,300-page generational novel.
There's nothing else I've read that's like this. It's the first book I've picked up from this year's Goldsmiths Prize shortlist, and I honestly don't know how the rest of the shortlist is going to stand up to it. I feel bad for whatever I read next.
If you're already a fan of Miéville I think you're going to love this. It's maybe not the best place to start if you're new to his work. But if you're craving a big book, something to really sink into and spend a long time with, pick up The Rouse. As of right now it's my book of the year. It's that good.
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China Miéville - Embassytown
I've had this book on my shelf since it was first published. I actually stared reading it then and DNFd at around 50%. I remember thinking that while I enjoyed Miéville's prose - I always enjoy his prose - I didn't really understand what was going on at all. The language was slippery and the concepts and images were too big and weird for me to properly envision.
15 years later my tastes have expanded and changed, and with the release of The Rouse I figured I should revisit the only Miéville novel I haven't yet read. I got through it this time, but I definitely sympathise with my past self.
This was a difficult read, and one of those books that makes me think that maybe I'm not quite smart enough for what it's doing. That's sort of how I felt about M. John Harrison's The End Of Everything, too, and having now read this I'm even more steadfast in my belief that The End Of Everything feels like a throwback to the 2010's New Weird movement.
I remember being at university studying English Literature and having to take some Language modules, too, specifically around the philosophy of language and through that, Structuralism and Post-Structuralism. I was always interested in it, always felt like I could sort of sense what those thinkers were grasping at, but could never quite make it all slot together for myself mentally. I felt intellectually invigorated but also completely inferior. That's how I felt reading Embassytown, and while I can appreciate it for what it is, I'm very confident that I didn't fully understand it at all. And because I didn't fully understand it, the middle section of the novel - where I put it down 15 years ago - was once again a bit of a slog.
I know that this is a very highly regarded book and that a lot of people call it their favourite Miéville. I'm glad I finally read it. But for me it didn't quite land, and I'm still convinced that The City & the city is his best work. Of course, I still have The Rouse to read next, so that may well change.
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Wackenhyrst - Michelle Paver
This has been sitting on my bookshelf for years and I don't know why it's taken me so long to get around to picking it up, but today I decided to sit down and read it in one go. It's very fun and I'm not mad about that decision at all.
Paver is very good at low-key, slightly creepy horror (see Dark Matter and Thin Air for more), and she's excellent at epistolary horror. She does a really good job of capturing the voice of characters in their correspondence and diaries, and I really enjoyed how she blended that with traditional narrative here.
Tonally this felt a little young in places - not quite YA, but maybe New Adult? I wasn't expecting that and it took a little getting used to but it also made for a very easy, quick read. This is a good slow burn full of surprises that builds to a very satisfying conclusion, and I respect that there's no attempt to answer all the questions or tie everything up in a neat little bow.
This was fun.
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Totem - Jo Baring
I received a free review copy of this book from the publisher.
One of my goals this year has been to read more non-fiction. It's actually one of my goals every year, and every year I fail at it, so I was grateful when the team at Canongate sent me a copy of Totem by Jo Baring. It's billed as an accessible, story-led journey into the heart of sculpture, and it's out now in the UK, with a US release following on November 3rd.
I should say up front that I don't really know how to review non-fiction. I don't read enough of it to know what I'm supposed to be assessing, or what "working" even looks like for a book like this. So take everything that follows with that caveat attached. I enjoyed reading Totem, but I didn't get quite as much out of it as I'd hoped, and I can't really tell you whether that's a flaw in the book or a flaw in my own expectations going in.
Baring says in the introduction that this isn't meant to be a history of sculpture. Instead it's a journey meant to "illuminate and inspire", and on those terms I think it does succeed. Each chapter opens with a specific sculpture that Baring has travelled to see in person, and from there she unpacks how it came to exist, what the artist was trying to do, and tries to thread all of that into a broader philosophy of sculpture as a form. That philosophy keeps circling back to the word "totem" itself, and Baring spends a fair amount of time digging into its origins and how quickly it became a near-universal term across languages once it entered the lexicon.
That's also the book's biggest weakness for me. The constant return to the word totem started to feel less like a motif the book naturally arrives at and more like a hindrance it's been dragging along the whole way. The chapters themselves are interesting and the writing is good, but every time Baring pulls it back to that word I got the distinct sense she'd gone into the project with the answer already decided, and was shaping the narrative to fit it rather than letting it emerge. The whole discussion never quite landed for me. It felt like it was reaching for a profundity that wasn't really there, as though there had to be something mystical about why this particular word caught on so widely, and the book almost undermines itself in that reach.
None of which stopped me enjoying it. I'm not sure I came away having learned a huge amount about sculpture as an art form, but I was exposed to a lot of work I'd never have encountered otherwise. I had no idea there's a sculpture park in Yorkshire I can just go and visit, for instance, and on that front the book more than did its job.
I do wish it had photographs. It's beautifully illustrated by Julia Ashe, full of pencil sketches and renderings of the pieces Baring discusses, but for me they never quite conveyed the actual impact of the artworks. I ended up Googling most of them as I read, just so I could see photos rather than sketches. I understand there are probably rights and licensing reasons behind going the illustrative route instead of photography, but it left the book feeling a little lacking in a place where I really wanted it to deliver. Good as the illustrations are, they can't quite stand in for something that's so physical and concrete in the real world.
The real success of the book, for me, is that it changed how I look at the handful of sculptures I already know. I kept thinking about Mary's Shell by Stephen Broadbent in Cleveleys, and about Jaume Plensa's Carmela in Barcelona, which I've seen more than once and always try to seek out when I'm there. I feel like I appreciate what both of those pieces are trying to do a little more now, and that alone made the book worth reading.
So I don't really know how to review non-fiction, but there are my thoughts on Totem. If the subject appeals to you at all, I'd say pick it up. It's also left me primed to want to read more on the subject, though that might just be the ADHD sniffing out a new special interest. If anyone knows of other good books on sculpture, send them my way.