books
Among Others by Jo Walton. Novel about an unhappy girl at boarding school who reads a lot of science fiction. It's realism does fantasy, or fantasy does realism, because the boarding school stint follows the death of her twin in a magical battle against their witch mother, and every now and then Mor talks to fairies. It's basically the sequel to a book which doesn't exist, which I kind of like, but which does give the book a particular kind of balance that's almost off-balance. I liked this, I didn't especially like the narrator but she has a distinct identity and tone. She has a particular history and background, and you can see how it makes her who she is. I liked the way magic works in this book. The narrator uses the example that if you were waiting at a bus stop and magically conjured up a bus, the bus wouldn't really have appeared out of nowhere; it would have a history that you had also conjured, it would already have been making its way towards you by the time you created it, and you would be responsible for the change you made to the lives of all the people who had got on it. Basically it struck a chord because I never wish I could bend the universe with my will so much as when I'm waiting for buses. The thing I wasn't so sure about regarding the magic was the fact that you're not supposed to use it; Mor feels very guilty whenever she uses it to find herself friends or something and in the end she decides never to use it again. This never quite works for me in fantasy, when it's clear both that magic is part of the world the author created, and that having created it, they find magic completely extraneous and something that should be put aside so that the world can be as if there was no magic. I think it should be part of your job to find a way in which the world can work with magic.
The other thing about the magic in this book is that a lot of readers never understood that it was supposed to be real outside Mor's mind. I would never have known it was real if I hadn't first read the author clarifying that it was, and being unhappily baffled that the novel seemed like that to so many readers. I'm glad I did, because I would always have been anticipating a rather dull overwrought psychological drama twist, but it is interesting and rather odd that Walton never realised how it was coming across. Everything about the magic fits in so well to Mor's grief and family drama and loneliness. There's a particular bit where Mor's aunts, who are witches in a rather Diana Wynne Jones psychological manipulation way, try to make her have her ears pierced, and Mor suddenly realises that they're witches and that ear piercing takes away your magic. It's far too silly a magical rule to suddenly toss in to a moment of anger and defensiveness and fright and expect us to understand as existing separately from those emotions. The only other person apart from Mor's sister and mother who are reported as seeing anything magical is a boy who is clearly desperate to see something. If you know how you're supposed to read it, then you can just take the psychological stuff as making the magic more personal, but things would get a bit odd if you didn't know. Other stuff: there's a moment where Mor's father, who she hardly knows, tries to have sex with her -- I kind of got her reaction to it, but not so much that it's never referenced again. And it's very much a book about the need to read, which is rather nice even though it's primarily very genre-specific.
The Professor of Poetry by Grace McCleen. Elizabeth Stone, a middle-aged English professor, has health problems and goes back to Oxford to do research and relive her days as an overwrought undergraduate with a crush on her tutor. This is all very idficcy, about tension and release, living and not-living. It is also basically Black Swan. Uptight, mentally unstable woman puts herself through the wringer trying to please her ~unconventional~ artistic mentor. She manages somehow, in her student days, after incredible suffering, to squeeze out genius essays after all the signs point to failure. Her adult life is a wild goose chase for the transformative achievement of talent. In the end she doesn't achieve a great work to make it all worthwhile and she's probably dying of a brain tumour, but she does get it together with her old tutor. Like Black Swan, it's hokey, but does manage to convince you that you really don't want to be this character. The male character is purest cookie-cutter, and there are too many sentences like this:
Past and future coexisted cordially in the rock faces below the house and in the seabed, which were laden with irilobites, asteriacites, ammonites, belemnites -- tribes who had paid for the ungodliness with extinction, yet petrified, were beautiful, encrusted, entombed, inlaid, overlaid -- and if you looked out to sea and were inclined to believe in universal entropy, the future winked gnomically from the dawn of the world, foretelling the subsumption of all that was in the very element from which it arose, in mile upon mile of uninterrupted water.
This needs an earnest reader.
Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein. WWII adventure story about spies and the Resistance and interrogation and so on. Perhaps most of all I liked the narration stuff. It's very hard, I think, to sell the idea that the first-person narrative is a real response to events around the character, happening in real time, and the first section of this works better for me than anything else I can remember. It makes the narrative unreliable in a way that doesn't make you feel the author played a cheap trick on you -- Julie turns out to be more like the person she writes herself as in her story than the person she writes herself writing. It makes sense, and yet I wasn't sure I had the right to expect it until it happened. And the meeting your best friend being like falling in love stuff was so nice. And the book just does the dashing stuff and the heart-rending stuff so efficiently, I think; it would be so usual, to read a story that had so much potential and feel cheated, but for me Wein just does what it says on the tin.
Esther Waters by George Moore. Late Victorian novel about a servant girl who has an illegitimate baby, and struggles with heartless employers, before finally marrying a bookie, before finally ending up where she began. The author wanted to write a book where the poor girl actually keeps her baby and tries to manage, rather than conveniently losing it somehow or letting equally convenient nice rich people adopt it, and I have felt the lack of that kind of book too. I thought this would be a rather heavy-going Hardy knock-off, and was pleasantly surprised. I thought it was actually quite beautiful. It's a meeting point between naturalism and modernism; the portrayal of London in particular feels modernist because reminiscent of Mrs Dalloway. There's something about individuals in relation to crowds that Moore is good at. The novel feels very filmic. The tone was right: squalidness was present but not overplayed, so that it felt much more like real experience than most "Look at these miserable lives" book.
The Young Ones by Diana Tutton. This was interesting for the contrast between its mode and the subject matter. It's a harmless, average 1959 middlebrow friends, family and relationships type book, except the family drama and romance depicted is all about incest. The narrator is trying to get on with her life, occasionally wondering whether or not she should marry a long-term admirer, while her younger brother and sister get married. The family thinks the youngest sister is adopted, and when Julie and Ned get together the narrator is fairly repulsed, but ultimately tries to get over it. Then it turns out Julie is actually their real sister, but by that time she and Ned have got too used to the idea of getting married, and go ahead and do it anyway, after much turmoil, waiting for great-aunts who know the truth to die, and begging their sister to keep quiet. Being apparently a doormat, she does. In the end the marriage fails. There's a bit where Julie rhapsodises to her sister about her first time having sex with their brother, and it is just all so odd. It's by far the most genuinely off-putting and nauseating thing I have ever read about incest. Was also quite interested by the 1959-ness of the book; in some ways it's quite an odd mix of modern and old-fashioned, particularly with regard to women. And not getting married in church or believing in God at least a little bit is still quite a big deal.