BOOK REVIEW: A Writer's Opinion

 Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Piranesi is the second novel I have read by Susanna Clarke, which means I have read most of her published novels! Following the spectacular success of her magnificent epic Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which was made into what I thought was an excellent TV adaptation (though I know others disagree), Clarke produced a collection of stories (The Ladies of Grace Adieu) based roughly in the same pseudo-regency world she’d created, but then she spent a long time ‘retired’ from the world due to illness. She returned triumphantly with Piranesi, which was nominated for several prizes including the Women’s Prize in 2021.   

The fact that Clarke has been herself isolated from the world for an extended period of time due to ill-health makes it no surprise that her new novel is about isolation, solitude and loneliness. What is a surprise is that it is so different from Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which was written in a genre-breaking style The Guardian referred to as ‘magical archaism’ – a kind of historical fiction/fairytale hybrid, with notes of Austin, Thackerey and Swift, laid over an atmospheric and compelling fantasy world that seemed simultaneously excitingly innovative and satisfyingly familiar. I was a definite fan of that book, in all its complex, wordy strangeness, but whenever I have picked it up to re-read, I have found myself stalling very quickly.

            Piranesi, by contrast, is short and pared down in its style. I had downloaded it onto my Kindle some months ago but was reluctant to start reading, expecting it to be like Strange & Norrell, but in fact once I started reading it I found it utterly compelling and bewitching. Clarke is the real deal when it comes to literary talent. Whatever you think about fantasy, I defy anyone to claim that Susanna Clarke can’t write absolutely beautifully. Her writing gives me the same deep thrill that works by David Mitchell and Kate Atkinson often do, though she is quite distinctive (and clearly versatile). It is true that the theme of fantastical ‘other worlds’ existing somewhere mysteriously alongside our own mundane world is common to all her work, but the world she creates in Piranesi is spectacularly imaginative and quite different from what I have read before.

            I don’t want to risk giving away the plot of the book as one of the things that makes it so gripping is the mystery of Piranesi’s identity. Piranesi is not the central character’s real name and I have read many reviews which suggest the name comes from an engraver with that name who was famed for his images of complex prison-worlds. I am sure this is true to some extent though I remember listening to Clarke interviewed on a radio programme soon after the novel was published and she was vague about the inspiration for the character’s name. The novel’s Piranesi is the story’s narrator, and we meet him when he lives in a peculiarly entrancing world consisting of a vast labyrinth of interconnected rooms full of staircases, vestibules, and a huge array of statuary – statues of all sizes depicting all manner of creatures both real and mythical, and in particular all manner of humans. These rooms are considered by Piranesi to be the entire world as he believes he has never seen anything beyond them. The lower storeys of this building are underwater and the tides flood some floors regularly; the higher storeys are in the clouds. The only living creatures Piranesi comes across are the sea creatures he fishes and forages, a multitude of birds, and The Other, a mysterious figure whom he considers to be his friend but who he only sees once a week. Piranesi lives in this world entirely alone except for his brief weekly meetings with The Other, living off seaweed and seafood, recording his experiences in a series of journals, conducting surveys of the halls for The Other.

Piranesi is an expert on this weird environment, and he also loves and reveres it. Part of Clarke’s genius lies in the way she can make dry academic elements, such as bibliographies and indexes, seem completely fascinating. The increasing sense that Piranesi is an unreliable narrator, not because he is lying but because he doesn’t know the truth, is both unsettling and intriguing. His feelings of loyalty towards The Other, for example, highlight his naivete. He is an oddly innocent character, and also an oddly admirable one – uncomplaining, honourable, intelligent. He also seems surprisingly content with a life which by normal standards seems desperately tragic.

The world Clarke creates has any number of metaphorical interpretations, and one strength of the story is that Clarke never explains or makes explicit its purpose, source or function. It simply exists, though it is not a simple thing – it seems to interact with the minds which inhabit it, causing Piranesi to lose his memory of how he came to be there and even of his own identity. And this is not a straightforward tale of someone’s possible escape from a cruel prison: Piranesi is deeply ambivalent about leaving the place. The novel examines academic arrogance, human kindness and cruelty, the interface between the real and the fantastical, and the nature of solitude, belonging, ritual and worship.

I was captivated by this book and I know it will stay with me for a long time. It’s beauty, its imagination, its characterisation – all are utterly compelling in themselves, beyond even the excellence of the plot. It is both simple and complex, both uplifting and depressing, and it is always thought-provoking. I would recommend it to anyone who likes both fantasy and literary fiction, and who likes intelligent writing that is also crystal-clear and a thing of beauty in itself.

RATING: Piranesi *****

Key:
*****      highly recommended - a 'must-read'
****         good - well worth taking the time to read
***           ok - will help to pass the time in a boring situation
**            not very good -  just about readable but flawed
*             not recommended - boring, offensive, badly-written or deeply flawed in some other way

         

 

Thoughts from the bunker

 

Wobbly in white

Brides are supposed to wear white frilly frocks and a veil, and carry flowers. It’s virtually the law. But when you’re 57, five foot two inches tall, and basically spherical, any sort of floor-length frock in ivory lace makes onlookers inevitably think of tea cosies and those antimacassars old ladies throw over the backs of their settees.

As for the symbolism of white, I’m just not going there. Suffice it to say, I’m no maiden.

A shorter kind of wedding dress would be more suitable for a Town Hall ceremony in winter (I’m thinking of the weather – I can just imagine me saying my vows while everyone stares at the filthy wet tidemark round the hem of my long dress, not to mention the half-torn veil wrapped tightly round my neck and twisted into my hair by the Yorkshire gale-force wind that will inevitably be blowing on 21 December), but a shorter dress would reveal the extensive eczema rash on my legs. This is just one of the many surprises middle-age has sprung on me (along with hot flushes, a nasty temper and an unanticipated tolerance for Jensen Ackles). The eczema doesn’t itch, and is completely non-contagious, but my lower legs and feet look like they’ve been splashed with dark-pink paint and have the texture of sandpaper in places. I don’t want to reveal such shins in public as I find it hurtful seeing people wince and shy away (obviously thinking I have leprosy or scrofula), even if it is just in my imagination.

So a trouser suit is looking like the best option. But even then, I’ll look like a grossly inflated Sandy Toksvig, with glasses. 

You see, I’m just not losing weight fast enough.

As you know, I've shed some of my excess fat, having been diagnosed as pre-diabetic last year, but it’s such a slow process. In the past, my various weight-loss regimes have quickly resulted in a steady but noticeable decline in poundage. However, this time the weight-loss doesn’t seem to be actually visible to the human eye. A friend who hasn’t seen me for a few months recently said she could tell I’d lost weight – but the evidence she cited (that my neck and face looked saggier, basically – she put it more diplomatically than that, but I knew what she meant) wasn’t particularly uplifting! I’m also losing weight in fits and starts: my weight constantly fluctuates and the downward trajectory has a very shallow slope.

People often assume that fat people have no idea about good nutrition. However, like every person who has ever been on a diet, I know precisely what I should be eating. If you want to know how many calories there are in any given food item, ask a fat person. We’re experts. I rarely eat fast-food – it must be twenty-odd years since I had a Macdonalds or a KFC chicken fillet burger. We are both good cooks and we generally cook our meals from scratch using fresh veg, farm-shop meat, and good quality fish. We cook with olive oil, have embraced the joy of kale, eat small quantities of fresh fruit daily, drink semi-skimmed milk, try to stick to three modest meals a day. I try to eat several portions of fish a week, despite P being allergic to fish which means cooking two separate meals each time. I’ve cut back a lot on my consumption of bread and bread-products, and I’ve started changing the way I cook things to reduce my intake of fat and sugar. For instance, I’m now making fat-free scrambled egg in the microwave – it tastes like rubber, but, hey, it's low calorie. We’re buying reduced-sugar chilli sauce, reduced-fat cheese and coleslaw, and I’m cutting back significantly on my mango chutney habit (honestly, if left to my own devices I could happily eat mango chutney with EVERY meal).

But the problem is that, though I’m cutting down on my daily food intake most days, and doing more exercise, I do tend to allow myself one or two treats at the weekend. As many of you know, I’ve been going through a baking phase in recent weeks, but most of what I bake is given away to family members or put in the freezer. I only eat a small quantity of it myself which is a kind of masochism I realise makes people think I've lost my marbles. Since lockdown ended, we've started going out for lunch at the weekend to nice cafes that have tempting cakes and scones displayed in arcane ways designed to make them appeal to our inner glutton, and I am finding it increasingly difficult to ignore their siren call. And P does a great bacon, brie and cranberry baguette which he perfected during the first lockdown and which I find impossible to resist, to the point where I have now put a formal ban on having brie in the house. We went to my sister’s for a barbecue last weekend and she had a bowl of nachos and dips open on a table in front of me! I defy anyone to resist the lure of crisps with creamy dips. Pringles are the worst – I have long suspected that they are impregnated with class A drugs, they are so addictive. I just don’t buy these things at home because they are too easy and irresistible to eat once opened.

There are a lot of things we no longer buy, in fact. Biscuits, for instance. Before I started dieting, I never really liked biscuits much. I could definitely take or leave them. Now I'm cutting out such things, a humble pack of chocolate digestives or even plain rich tea fingers have become a torment worthy of Dante's inferno. So we now buy only biscuits I hate (basically, shortbread, Jammy Dodgers, Bourbons, Fig Rolls, Custard Creams, Jaffa Cakes), and they are kept in a sealed plastic box just for visitors. Putting things inside boxes, preferably with other boxes on top, is a great way of stopping me nibbling as I am also famously lazy. 

And, yes, before you say anything, I know virtually everyone in the world loves Jaffa Cakes but – though I like both orange and chocolate individually – I hate them in combination. I don’t think citrus fruit goes well with chocolate – I draw your attention to those hideous lime-and-chocolate-flavoured boiled sweets South Yorkshire grandads always seemed to have in their pockets in the 1970s (I think it was a local by-law).

My exercise programme keeps stalling due to injuries and fibromyalgia pain, though I’m still battling on. Most days, I do twenty mins of yoga and about an hour of gentle aerobics. Or I go for a walk, though the hay fever is making the walks unpleasant. It’s no fun sneezing constantly and getting a blocked nose, itchy throat and watering eyes, and it’s no fun for my friends either – I mean, no one likes listening to their walking companion snorting and grunting like a feral pig, and people quickly grow weary of holding my arm so I don't walk into trees while rubbing my itchy eyes. One reason I opted for a winter wedding was to avoid hay fever season. However, I’m also allergic to dust so, if the Town Hall is dusty, I can forget about looking elegant and dignified on my wedding day. 

So, my efforts to get into shape for the wedding are so far not achieving much – except irritation, frustration and stress. I just don't seem to have the necessary level of will-power to be a proper grown-up. One evening soon, P is going to find me sitting on the kitchen floor in the middle of the night, wearing an old net curtain with a doily on my head  - Jaffa Cakes in one hand, custard creams in the other, face covered in jam - moaning ‘Come to me, my precious!’…

NB: Nothing says 'Congratulations on your wedding' like a crate of Mango Chutney.

UPDATE ON RECENT PUBLICATION

 My story 'Tattoo' was accepted by Makarelle for publication later in the summer.

I have had poems accepted by Jaden and Failbetter.

My story 'Seahouses' was accepted by Bandit for publication in Summer.

My poem 'Rattled' appeared in English Review in April.

Two of my poems, 'Buttercups' and 'A Walk Beside The Canal', were published in POTB in the spring.

A poem of mine appeared on 'The Haar' section of Lydia Popowich's literary blog 'The Purple Hermit' on the theme 'Under The Mask'.

Thoughts from The Bunker

 'You can tell she's a poet...'

Many people who know me are surprised to discover that I've made my living for several decades as an English teacher, and that I'm a published writer.

You see, I’m not very impressive, verbally.

            Firstly, there’s my voice. It’s unreliable and doesn’t always emerge with quite the power or melodiousness I would ideally desire, particularly if I’m nervous or it’s hay fever season. It can sound, quite randomly, thin and nasal, squeaky, croaky, harsh or too deep. I’m not saying it’s a voice that’s weird enough to make me memorable (being a female Joe Pasquale or that supermarket manager in the sitcom Superstore could be quite useful on occasion). But my vocal apparatus doesn’t have the dulcet tones I would like it to have.

            Also, I have a self-conscious accent. I was brought up in a very working-class neighbourhood and attended a very bog-standard comprehensive. At my school, being academically clever was not a route to popularity and only three things saved me from being a bully-magnet: a) my spooky ability to fade into the background; b) the fact that I had as little respect for most of my teachers or for school rules as any of the less academic pupils; and c) my refusal to modify my regional accent. In fact, for a while, in my late teens, it actually grew broader and more expletive-filled due to a particularly ‘local’ boyfriend.

Later, at university, and particularly when I moved to London, my South Yorkshire accent rubbed off to a great extent. You can’t live in a place for eleven years without the local speech patterns affecting you to some degree. It reached a point where, when we finally moved back up north and I took a job as Head of English at a local college, my new students told me I sounded ‘posh’. They were wrong and I can prove it: I was once asked for the time by a Scotsman on Sevenoaks railway station – all I said was ‘It’s ten to seven’ and, like Glasgow’s answer to Henry Higgins, he immediately responded: ‘Barnsley, right, hen?’. 

Anyway, these days my accent wobbles around a lot, depending on how I feel and who I’m talking to. It’s a nightmare when I’m faced with people from different ‘categories’ simultaneously – like when I used to talk to my very broad-accented sister on the phone while sitting in the living room of my genuinely posh landlady, or when I meet a new work colleague while out with an old school friend.

In addition to these flaws, I sometimes get tongue-tied, repeat things, mumble, get the giggles inappropriately, and occasionally manifest a mild stutter inherited from my dad. This is particularly pronounced when I am suffering from pre-menstrual – or, these days, post-menopausal – social awkwardness. Chatting to me must, at times, be like conversing with George VI (if he had a South Yorkshire accent and suffered from hot flushes).

 But it isn’t just the mechanics of pitch, tone and accent. It’s also the stuff I say. My partner often cuts me off at social gatherings just as I launch into an anecdote, which I assume is an act of mercy on behalf of the listeners (but which might, of course, actually be a chauvinistic impulse to shut the little woman up). You see, I constantly go off the point. I will begin by talking about labrador retrievers, veer off into a digression on house prices, do a quick u-turn into my opinions on the rising popularity of handicrafts during lockdown, segue into a diatribe against Boris Johnson, before ending with a description of the last time I saw the sea. Most people can’t be arsed to keep up, and who can blame them?

Another issue is that I do that ‘female-shortcut’ thing – if you’re a woman, you’ll almost certainly know what I mean. It involves referring to things, usually people, by an apparently random feature (a kind of synecdoche or metonym, I guess), and assuming your listener will understand. I used to work in an office with several other teachers, and I would often have conversations with my female colleagues that went like this:

‘I saw Spiky Hair this morning.’

‘Oh? Was he chewing his homework?’

‘No, he was with that tall woman - Three Earrings In One Ear, Teaches Drama. I expect you’ll get a visit soon. He was being told off.’

‘His problem is his mates. He hangs around with that girl – Red Face, Ripped Jeans…’

‘I know. And that awful lad – Skinny, Whiny, Skinhead?’

‘Yeah, he’s a real pain.’

As we chatted, the men in the office would stare at us in bemusement as if we were talking an obscure dialect of Middle-English.

            Then there is my propensity to simply go blank in the middle of conversations. I will be happily rolling along when suddenly I’ll experience ‘vocabulary blindness’:  ‘Oh, he was in that TV drama, you know, family on an island – no, not Swiss Family Robinson – novelist, zookeeper, mad sister…’.

And sometimes, even worse, I just coin new words.  Often ridiculous words. Often words I don’t notice immediately that I’ve invented. [I’m not alone in this. A friend of P’s (another woman, I’m afraid) once conflated ‘airhead’ and ‘space-cadet’, resulting in her referring to a gormless teenager as ‘a complete air cadet’. The same woman is also famous for claiming that ‘everything went ape-shaped’ – she was aiming for either ‘pear-shaped’ or ‘ape-shit’, but missed. So it’s not just me, ok?]

            Today, we were driving home from a shopping trip and I was giving P the benefit of my theory that car horns should be banned. This is a perfectly plausible theory, based on the fact that I can’t envisage any situation where a car horn would actually improve matters.

            ‘All horners do,’ I said, earnestly, ‘is to increase the base level of stress and irritation.’

            ‘Horners?’ he said.

            ‘Yes, people who are always horning.’

            This was followed by a moment’s silence, after which P, who was driving, burst out laughing and nearly wobbled into the wrong lane on the M1. It took me a few moments to realise what he found so funny.

            This is like when I once loudly instructed P, in a gift shop in Lyme Regis, to ‘Look at that pair of jugs’. Or recently when I told a fourteen year old male student that ‘dog’ could be used as a verb as well as a noun (I meant you could dog someone’s footsteps, not engage in the other kind of dogging). I just don’t hear myself…

            You can probably understand now why people are often surprised to learn that I’m a teacher and a writer.

And why I’m now worried about saying my vows out loud on my wedding day.

BOOK REVIEW: A writer's opinion

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

 The Midnight Library is my first taste of Matt Haig, a writer who has been recommended to me several times. I have read the odd interview, seen his novels being either raved about or huffily dismissed on Facebook, and they have popped up on reading lists on Goodreads. But, if I’m going to be very honest, I decided to read this novel because of its title. I mean, I was always going to be drawn to a title that combines my favourite time of day and a place that has always inspired feelings of escapism and comfort for me (once I overcome my dust allergy). 

   

I am particularly fond of fictional libraries (a result of said dust-allergy), my favourites being the library at Unseen University in Terry Pratchett’s wonderful Ankh-Morpork, and the library run by the Cheshire Cat in Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series.  Matt Haig’s ‘midnight library’ is more akin to the library in Death’s domain, in Pratchett’s Discworld novels, however, a place where human lives are being written and recorded as they play out.  In a quantum-theory-type variation on what Pratchett refers to as ‘the trousers of time’, Haig’s library contains all the possible lives of a single character, the wonderfully named Nora Seed, who enters this metaphorical/hallucinatory space while wobbling about on the edge of death after trying to commit suicide.

            Don’t let my mention of Pratchett mislead you. Haig’s novel is not a rollicking comic turn, though it is quietly amusing in places and it certainly shares some of Pratchett’s philosophy-lite concerns. Matt Haig has created his own niche-genre, a kind of hybrid between cosy-fantasy and the sort of writing that is often cruelly referred to as ‘chick-lit’ (all that means, in reality, is that it focuses on topics that narrow-minded people consider to be of sole interest to women, such as people’s emotional life, relationships, etc). From what I can gather from internet research, he specialises in coming up with one cool idea and pinning this to the heart of his stories, creating a set of psychologically-plausible characters in situations that could be termed ‘souped-up realism’.  Like John Wyndham, he has cornered the market in middle-class, middle-brow fantasy. 

            The Midnight Library might be a ‘real’ place, a figment of Nora’s imagination as she hovers between life and death, or a metaphorical construct fleshing out the basic idea that she learns to accept and embrace the life she already has rather than feeling like a failure and craving an alternative. The reader can interpret it as they wish. The novel clearly has a message – about self-acceptance, identity-formation, the nature of happiness, the nature of love – and the message is presented in a very direct and uncomplicated way.

            Most of the novel describes Nora’s various try-outs of alternative lives she might have had. What a deliciously appealing idea! Who wouldn’t want to try out a life where they didn’t marry their first boyfriend - or they won Masterchef - or they didn’t accidentally drop the winning lottery ticket into the sea in 1994? The Midnight Library contains an infinity of books, each of which contains a slightly different version of Nora’s life – a myriad of lives where she made slightly different decisions and followed slightly (or sometimes massively) different paths. The lives have to be ones which could conceivably happen, given Nora’s skillset and personality, and she can’t enter ones where she is already dead. Also, they don’t always turn out well. 

            Such a literary conceit requires a lot of patience from the reader so it is lucky for us that Nora is a talented musician, singer and songwriter, a potentially world-class swimmer, academically gifted, attractive, kind and clever. In fact, she has so much obvious potential (even before we discover the Midnight Library) that it is actually quite difficult to imagine that she is genuinely suicidal due to loneliness and a sense of abject failure. I guess this is Haig’s way of showing us that even gifted, likeable and attractive middle-class people can get depressed and try to kill themselves, and that’s not a bad message to highlight. It is also neatly convenient for the plot, of course, as a suicidal young woman who is plain, suffering from an incurable and unpreventable chronic illness, stupid and/or hateful, might not have been so easy to fit into what is, ultimately, an ‘uplift’ novel,  with added fantasy (which might just be all in Nora’s mind anyway).

I imagine that the book will appeal to many readers, and I enjoyed reading it – but now, only a week after I finished it, I can barely remember the details. It was a nicely-paced, pleasant read, a mildly rewarding way of entertaining yourself on a lazy afternoon in a deckchair, but not ultimately the sort of novel that would inspire me to rush out and buy his other books. But that doesn’t matter. Millions of other people apparently think Matt Haig is the bee’s knees, so he doesn’t need my support.

You can follow Matt Haig at: https://www.instagram.com/mattzhaig/

RATING: The Midnight Library ***

Key:
*****      highly recommended - a 'must-read'
****         good - well worth taking the time to read
***           ok - will help to pass the time in a boring situation
**            not very good -  just about readable but flawed
*             not recommended - boring, offensive, badly-written or deeply flawed in some other way