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Trust - Hernan Diaz
This is a reread. I first read Trust back in 2023 when it was longlisted for the Booker, and it went on to win the Pulitzer that same year, but somehow almost none of it stuck with me. I picked it back up because I've just started watching Succession and wanted something with a similar flavour of financiers and legacy and old money curdling into rot. Trust didn't really scratch that itch, as it turns out, but I'm very glad I went back to it anyway.
I'm not sure I can talk about this book without spoiling it, so consider this your warning if you haven't read it yet. What I will say up front is that I loved it and I recommend it without hesitation.
Trust is told in four parts, and each part corrects, or claims to correct, the one before it. It opens with a novel-within-the-novel about a financier and his wife, who falls ill and is shipped off to a Swiss sanatorium to die. The second part is an unfinished autobiography by a man called Andrew Beval, who we come to understand is the real person the first section's financier was based on. He's trying to set the record straight after that novel dragged his name and his wife's through the mud, but he's not a writer, and it shows. The manuscript is full of half-finished notes to himself, "expand this", "insert anecdote here", and by the end it's clear he never actually got there.
Those first two sections, despite making up roughly half the book, end up feeling a little like a prologue. The real meat of the novel is the third part, where we follow Ida, a woman hired by Beval to ghostwrite the autobiography he can't finish himself. She starts digging into his past, and into his wife's, trying to work out why the earlier novel offended him so badly that he had every copy pulped and tied its author into a contract that effectively ends his career. (We never get a clean answer to that, and that's one of the central puzzles in a novel that asks more questions than it answers.) And then the fourth part finally gives us Beval's wife, Mildred, through her own diaries, which you'd expect to be the section that sets everything straight. Instead it just opens up more questions.
It's a real puzzle box of a novel. There's a huge amount of reread potential packed into these four sections, because nobody in this book is telling you the truth, and the whole structure is built around that. The novelist in part one is, obviously, making things up, even if it's grounded in something real. Ida invents a new name and a new self to get the job in the first place, and is then given free rein to invent a voice for Beval because he can't find his own, and to invent parts of Mildred's life to shape her into whatever version suits him. Beval is fictionalising his own life because someone beat him to it and did a better job, and at one point he even repeats back a detail Ida made up about Mildred's childhood as though it's something that really happened. (Which it did, but to Ida, who stole from her own life when inventing Mildred. I could talk for hours about how that story about her memorising and reciting murder mysteries to her father and him pretending to attempt to solve them is basically the entire point of the novel but I won't). He can't tell fiction from truth in his own life any more, let alone on the page. And once you learn just how much power Mildred actually held, quite possibly the real architect of the whole fortune, you start to wonder how much of her own diary you can trust either.
By the time you reach Mildred's section you've had three hundred-odd pages of being trained not to believe a word anyone tells you, and then the book hands you a diary and more or less dares you to finally take something at face value.
I've spent the last hour or so reading around this book trying to work out how other people have talked about it, because it's a genuinely slippery thing to discuss, and I noticed nobody seemed to be picking up on a couple of details from Mildred's diary that I think are doing a lot of quiet work.
There's a small, throwaway moment where Mildred mentions reading Virginia Woolf's novel Flush, a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's dog, written from the dog's point of view. She says something like: it's wonderful, even if the dog's perspective is inconsistent, which she finds distracting, and that the dog's loving submission to its bedridden mistress is wonderfully suffocating. I think she's describing her own marriage there, whether she means to or not. She's spent the whole book looking like the dutiful, submissive wife while actually being the one holding the whole enterprise up. And Flush itself is Woolf attempting to write a consciousness she has no access to, guessing at an inner life from scraps of biography and filling the rest in with invention, wobbling in and out of consistency because there's no way to keep something like that stable. Which is exactly what every layer of Trust is doing. The first novelist guesses at Beval from secondhand information, presumably filtered through Mildred. Ida constructs her own Beval from the glimpses she's allowed and her own version of Mildred from whatever she can dig up, plus whatever she's projecting from her own life. And in a very real sense Mildred constructs Beval too, since she's the one who gave him the raw material his whole fortune and legacy were built on.
The other thing that stuck with me is Mildred's fixation on church bells. She keeps coming back to this palindromic sequence of notes and wonders whether it's Big Ben, which points towards the Westminster Quarters, one of the most recognisable little arpeggios in Western music. She gives us the actual notes: D, F#, E, A, then reversed, A, E, F#, D. Except that's not the real Westminster Quarters, which actually run G#, F#, E, B.
Mildred is presented throughout the book as someone who lives and breathes music, who can identify a piece by ear without thinking. So why get this wrong? Is it just an error? Is it the cancer that's put her in that Swiss sanatorium starting to fog her mind? Or is it a deliberate little crack in the narrative, a wink telling you not to trust this section any more than the last three?
By the time you reach Mildred you've been primed by the whole structure of the book to expect her section to be the corrective, the source of truth that finally undercuts everything before it. And then you get there and realise she might be just as unreliable as everyone else. It's not that what she's telling you is wrong, exactly. It's that there is no true version of this story anywhere in the book. Every account, including her own diary, has been authored by someone with something to gain from how it reads.
I don't fully know how you're supposed to read this book, and I don't think I've worked it out even now, on a second go. I love how puzzling it is. I love that it refuses to hand you answers, and that every answer it does offer just opens up another question underneath it.
I don't have a tidy conclusion for this review, no broader point I'm building towards. I just think it's a fascinating novel and I had a lot to say about it.
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The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch
I have hugely misjudged Iris Murdoch.
For some reason I had this idea in my head that her fiction would be old-fashioned and stuffy, and I honestly couldn't tell you where that idea came from. I knew she'd won the Booker for The Sea, The Sea. I knew the covers of a lot of her books slap. None of that mattered, I'd already decided she wasn't going to be for me. So I picked up The Sea, The Sea expecting to have to push through it, and instead I loved it. I now need to sit with whatever bias I was carrying around about her work, because this is great, and I'm going to have to read more of her.
The novel follows Charles Arrowby, a retired actor who's moved to a coastal town to escape the noise of his old life. He's there to write his autobiography, and he very quickly discovers that writing an autobiography is a lot harder than he thought, not least because the life he's trying to leave behind keeps turning up on his doorstep. People from his past keep appearing in the village, no matter how far he's run. That's the setup, and I'm finding it quite hard to figure out how to talk about what happens next without spoiling it, so I'd recommend going in as blind as I did.
Charles Arrowby is not a nice man, no matter how badly he wants us to believe otherwise. He's vain, arrogant, convinced he's cleverer and more worldly than he actually is. He's an alcoholic. He's violent. He's a misogynist, and he doesn't see any of it in himself, he genuinely believes he's better than everyone around him. He's a brilliant portrait of what we'd now call toxic masculinity, and he's also one of the great unreliable narrators in fiction.
It becomes clear fairly early on that he's not telling us the whole truth, or rather he's telling us his version of it, the version he's convinced himself is true. I loved the moments where the mask slips, where you catch him being less smart and less impressive than he thinks he is, and I found myself laughing at those moments because he has absolutely no idea he's just shown himself up. It's very rare that I laugh aloud when reading a book, and this certainly isn't a "funny" novel, but it absolutely pulled a few audible chuckles out of me.
The book is structured as his attempted autobiography, made up of diary entries and letters, plus the letters written back to him. What's clever is that the book you're reading at the start is not the book you're reading by the end. Murdoch shifts the whole genre of the novel underneath you, and she does it so slowly that you don't clock it happening until it already has. Looking back you can trace exactly how you got from one to the other, but I couldn't tell you the moment it changed. There's a small part of me that still wants to read the book the opening chapters promised, but I'm more than happy with the book I actually got.
Underneath all the stuff about masculinity, fame, and loneliness, and underneath the fact that Charles Arrowby is just not a very nice person, there's a real undercurrent of queerness running through the book. Most of the men here are strongly hinted to be gay. This was published in 1978, a decade after homosexuality was decriminalised in the UK but a long way from equal rights, when there was still a serious social taboo attached to being gay. It's an odd thing to read now, having lived through what looks in hindsight like a bit of a golden age for queer acceptance, only to be watching those rights come under attack again, with the rhetoric in the UK getting worse by the year. There's something unsettling in seeing a glimpse of how things used to be, when people had to be secretive about who they were. None of this is to say Charles Arrowby's behaviour has anything to do with his queerness, to be clear, he's just a monster who happens to be a very funny and entertaining narrator.
I loved every second of reading this. It's a big book, but Murdoch's writing is so fresh that it never once felt like a slog. Her voice is incredibly strong and the pace ebbs and flows in a way that keeps you on your toes, long languid stretches where you just sit in the language and the world she's built, then sudden bursts where it moves with the urgency of a thriller. The worst thing a long book can do is get boring, and that never happened here. Even in the stretches where I had no idea where it was going, I trusted that Murdoch knew exactly what she was doing, and I was happy to go along for the ride.
Really recommend this one. I'm definitely going to be reading more Iris Murdoch.
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A Trade Of Blood - Robert Jackson Bennett
A Trade of Blood is the third book in Robert Jackson Bennett's Ana and Din series, and I think it's my favourite one yet, which is saying something because I loved both The Tainted Cup and A Drop of Corruption. I'm going to try and review this without spoilers, which is going to be difficult, because there's so much this book does well that I want to talk about in detail. It only came out yesterday, though, and it doesn't seem fair to ruin it for anyone who hasn't read it yet. If you have read it and fancy a proper spoilery chat, drop me a message, because I need to talk to someone about this.
The premise is simple on the surface. Ana and Din are called out to investigate a murder in a farming community ruled over by two ancestral families, one that raises crops and one that raises livestock. The son of one family has killed the daughter of the other. It's Romeo and Juliet by way of Yojimbo, and it's a brilliant springboard for everything that follows.
Bennett is an author who understands that fantasy is inherently political, and he uses that starting point to dig into the impact of agriculture on the land, on society, and on the people forced to work within systems built to produce our food. He wrestles with the morality of animal agriculture, and with the reality of slavery within agriculture, and he's not remotely coy about any of it. Something he does really well across this series is close each book with an author's note that drills into exactly what he was exploring, so there's never any doubt that the politics are intentional. I really love that about him. He's unapologetic about it.
There's a lot that works here, and it's hard to talk about specifics without spoiling things, but I'll do my best. One decision that pays off enormously is giving Din a partner for this investigation, someone he already has history with. It sounds like a small thing, but it fixes what I think was the biggest weakness of A Drop of Corruption for me, which was that Din so often felt alone in the world. Ana spends so much of her time cooped up working things out on her own that we rarely got to see Din out among people, and so we lost access to his read on the world and how he actually behaves in it. A Trade of Blood gives him a proper buddy-cop dynamic instead, and it lifts the whole book. We finally get to see a side of his personality that hasn't really had room to breathe before, and the result is a much more fully realised character.
The mystery itself is also the best-constructed of the three. There are twists and turns and surprises throughout, but it never feels like Bennett is hiding the ball. It's a fair mystery, one where you can make your own hypotheses along the way and actually feel like you're playing the same game the characters are. I love a crime novel that treats its reader like that, and Bennett does it better here than in either of the previous two books, presumably because he's now got two books' worth of practice at it.
And then there's just everything else. The world-building remains fascinating, particularly the strange, not-quite-magical biopunk fungal-grafting technology that underpins how this society actually functions. It's such a well-realised setting, full of characters who feel genuinely lived-in within it. The prose is a joy, too. I picked this up yesterday and finished it this morning, which tells you everything about how hard it is to put down.
Cannot recommend this series highly enough. Please, if you've read it, talk to me about it.
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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.