Best of the books: May and June

I've been a bit busy lately, for which I apologise. (Wait, no, what am I saying? I don't apologise. I'm becoming too British.)

Anyway, I've been editing and reading and working and so on, and I haven't had any time to blog about it. So, while I've got a brief free weekend (there are only ten other things I should be doing, it's fine), here's a round up of my best-of-the-best recent reads.

The Abominables by Eva Ibbotson

I have a lot of favourite authors. Eva Ibbotson is one of them. But I don't think any other authors have affected the way I live my life more than she has. Ibbotson's main characters are not just good, they're nice, on a really micro level. They move worms off hot pavements, forgive the foibles of unsuitable family members and are kind to weird old people even though they smell a bit funny, and as a child I decided (god help me) that this was how I wanted to lead my life.

Of course, being an Eva Ibbotson heroine is impossible, because it involves essentially becoming Eco-Jesus, but I tried, and to a large extent I'm still trying. I rescue snails from the paths of cars. I chase after people who have dropped small items of baggage. And it's all because of Eva Ibbotson's books.

So I put off reading The Abominables for quite a while, because finishing it meant that I would have read the final words of my guru. And then I finally did read it, and I cried a little bit because it was so lovely.

It's all about a family of Himalayan Yetis who are discovered by a determined Edwardian lady. She teaches them to be kind and polite to all things (they are vegetarians, but still carefully say "sorry," to their food before they eat it), and that's fine for a while - until they're forced to go out into the modern world and seek their fortunes. The rest of the plot is all just classic Eva Ibbotson, with some especially lovely asides about death and how important enjoying life is even though you know it's finite. As a swan song, it's perfect - and as a story it's pretty great as well. Bless her.

4 stars.


The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

Of course this one was going to be in here. I went to see his RSL lecture on it (oh yes, Warwick English professors who refused to supervise my dissertation on Gaiman because he wrote 'comix'. My proposed subject got a gig at the RSL being interviewed by Claire Armitstead. And A. S. Byatt reviewed his book. I hope you feel really bad now), and one of the best things he said as part of the talk (although there were a lot of them) was that the only real difference between adults' and children's fiction is that in adult fiction you get to leave in the boring bits.

Unfortunately, that doesn't really apply here, because there are no boring bits in The Ocean at the End of the Lane. It's certainly an adult book rather than one for kids in that it's about how adults remember childhood, but what Gaiman does is pick you up and slam you back into his seven-year-old protagonist's mind.

Ocean is full of the joy of small things, like the way food tastes and the way it feels to run through a a secret overgrown path at the bottom of the garden. But there's also a lot of the everyday nastiness that is so much a part of childhood. Ocean describes how it feels to be small, to be ignored, to be punished unjustly and to be powerless to right that wrong. And then, of course, because this is a Gaiman novel, it's also full of the most amazing flights of imagination - an evil nanny from another dimension, a field that grows kittens, an ocean that can fit into a bucket. The Ocean at the End of the Lane is beautiful and terrifying and incredibly poignant because of how fundamentally real it is, and it's the kind of book that adults should be glad that they're being sold.

5 stars.


Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan

So, this is just one of the best books ever. A reimagining of the Snow White and Rose Red fairytale (and a lot more besides, I spotted Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Rumpelstiltskin and Red Riding Hood and I'm guessing there are more), it does things that I've never seen before in the genre and it's written so well that even her descriptions of furniture sent shivers down my spine.

This book isn't just about fairy tales. It reminds you of why people need fairy tales in the first place - as shield, as consolation, to make sense out of a senseless universe. It's full of magic, but magic used in a way that perfectly expresses some seriously deep truths about human emotions. It's also not afraid to deal with some of the darkest parts of human nature with the kind of rough black humour that's both astonishingly daring and oddly beautiful. Its brand of justice is shockingly, juicily, dreadfully well done (there is a scene at the end of the book so vivid that I read the whole thing with my mouth quite literally hanging open in shock) - ferocious enough to make you cheer, and nasty enough for your higher brain to be horrified at how you're reacting.

Like all the best fantasies, every part of this book is real, and I just can't praise it enough.

5 stars.

Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell

Like The Ocean at the End of the Lane, this isn't really a book for teenagers. It's a book about being a teenager. That's not to say that teenagers wouldn't love it. They would! But Eleanor & Park is a quirky love story very much about remembering what it's like to be in your teens. It's about falling in love for the first time, and about all the sweetness and confusion and total insecurity you feel when that happens to you.

Eleanor and Park themselves are two wonderfully off-beat and realistic protagonists who subtly play with the conventions of male and female romantic leads, and it's important to appreciate how rare this is. There are so many impossible, Ayn Rand-style people in literature at the moment, especially in YA - heroines who can't manage to eat a whole lettuce leaf and but then manage to roundhouse kick five fully grown men while wearing a ball gown, for example - but Eleanor and Park, characters who in most novels would be 'too' fat and 'too' thin and 'too' weird and 'too' crazily dressed,  manage here to find very true love in each other. It's the most delicious antidote to all the romance novel nonsense that's out there. And did I mention that Eleanor and Park fall in love through the medium of comic books? Brilliant.

4.5 stars

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

A Monster Calls has basically become my case-in-point when I go off on one of my love-rants about the power of children's fiction to address serious issues in ways that adult fiction sometimes can't manage. It's a heartbreaking discussion about the way it feels to lose a parent ... but it's equally, and just as literally, about the way it feels to have an actual, real monster turn up in your garden.

There are no metaphors in this book. Conor's mother is dying of cancer. A monster comes to his window every night to tell him stories. And both of these parts of his life are portrayed as equally real.

The kids' version is terrifyingly illustrated by Jim Kay - no matter your age, you must not make the mistake of buying the version of this book without pictures - and all in all it's one of the most frightening and heartbreaking things that I've ever read.

5 stars.


Skellig by David Almond

I never read this as a child. I was always afraid of it for some reason. I think I thought Skellig sounded creepy. I was totally right, he is creepy - but wonderfully creepy, and I know my childhood self would have loved this book. Oops.

The plot is exceedingly strange. A little boy called Michael finds a man called Skellig living in his garage. Although it's never directly explained, Skellig pretty obviously a fallen angel who's just given up on life. What he's done is never mentioned, and it doesn't really matter - the point is that he's a bit dirty, a bit tainted, but (although he doesn't realise it) still very much worth loving.

Michael is having a very difficult time himself. He's got a baby sister who was born prematurely, parents who are totally focused on her, and a new house that's basically an overgrown dump. Michael is lonely and confused, but when he discovers Skellig he's suddenly given a purpose. Then he meets strange, lovely Mina, who's homeschooled and who believes in the wonderfulness of the world, and she shows him what he needs to do to save Skellig. That all sounds kind of hokey, doesn't it? Believe me, it's not - instead it's beautifully presented, perfectly paced and totally unsentimental.

4.5 stars

Review - Lud-in-the-Mist

How has it taken me so long to write this post? I don't know. I could probably blame essay madness: currently the entire rational part of my brain is busy trying to prove that the cure for vampirism in ladies is marriage and a good bit of pregnancy (you think I'm joking, don't you? I'm not joking), and I need to use all of the rest of my mental powers just to perform basic tasks like eating and watching 4OD.

Also, in the last week I've resigned my Litro internship (leaving behind me a blog about endings, a blog about recreational drugs and a blog about my lizard Watson) and started one at the British Museum Press, which is extremely interesting but also quite time consuming.

But anyway - no excuses, really. Life happened, I read Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees, and then it refused to magically write a review about itself. I think that was very unfair of it. I'm going to have to dock it half a star for being so lazy and just write my own.

First impressions first: I violently hate my edition's cover. I hate it so much. By some trick of the mind, whenever I look at it from far away, or upside down, or just without paying much attention, all I can see is a squashed sad panda, decorated with ribbons. I don't know who commissioned that excrescence of a drawing, but they should take mandatory retirement, effective immediately. Luckily, I didn't choose the book because of its cover, otherwise I'd never have read it.

Actually, I have to thank Neil Gaiman for leading me to this book. It featured on a list he made of his top ten books of all time (which now, of course, I can't find). I was attracted by the title (Lud-in-the-Mist. What is it? Who is it? Why does it sound so interesting?), but mainly by Neil Gaiman, who not only can do no wrong as far as books are concerned (I'll leave the life choices out of it), but also used to hang around with Diana Wynne Jones, who is my Number One Top Writer Person Ever. So I had to give Lud-in-the-Mist a try.

Now, don't worry if you don't know who Hope Mirrlees is. I'd never heard of her either - until I saw the Gaiman list, after which point she began to turn up everywhere. She was born in 1887, went to Cambridge, became friends with a lot of modernist writers (she actually appears fleetingly in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas as well as, more recently, The Children's Book) and wrote three books in the 1920s, the most famous of which was Lud-in-the-Mist.

So that's Hope Mirrlees.

On to Lud-in-the-Mist itself. It's all about a town of 'ordinary' people who live on the borders of Fairyland, but never visit because they're too afraid of what they might find - until one guy decides to go. Sound familiar? If you've ever read Neil Gaiman's Stardust, you'll know what I'm talking about. The two books share not just a basic scenario but a tone - sort of old-world-with-a-wink, slightly naughty and very clever. I'm not suggesting that Gaiman's stealing at all, just that he's obviously hugely indebted to Mirrlees. Now that I've read Lud-in-the-Mist I realise that Stardust is essentially a loving homage to a book that's influenced his imagination enormously.

As well as getting backwards influence from Gaiman, Lud-in-the-Mist reminded me enormously of Lord of the Rings - or at least the parts of it that are set in the Shire. If I had to describe Lud-in-the-Mist in four words, those words would be 'Hobbity, with a bite'. It's all very charming and mannered - the inhabitants of Lud-in-the-Mist (it's the name of the town as well as the book) go gallivanting about hunting moths and eating cheese like happy little hobbits, but underneath they're all a bit mean and spiteful and bad. I'm not sure there was a character that I actually liked - which is unusual, since I liked the book itself very much. It has a strong flavour of what would happen if Tolkien had a love child with Christina Rossetti: fairy-tale jollity but with a strong spike of nastiness behind it. At times it's actually down-and-out creepy, all the more so because of how simply the creep presented. People just turn around and casually say things like 'Excuse me, sir, you're going to die soon', or 'Do the dead bleed?' and then you get heart palpitations and have to take a reading break.

We must not look at goblin men,

We must not buy their fruits:

Who knows upon what soil they fed

Their hungry thirsty roots?

Unusually for me, because I think that a lot of influence doesn't much matter, I'd say that if you haven't read Rossetti's Goblin Market you're really going to miss a lot of what Mirrlees is doing. (Side note: if you haven't read Goblin Market, you've got to. That's an order. It's an amazing poem and basically a top-notch fantasy story in and of itself).

The plot of Lud-in-the-Mist revolves around the illegal import of fairy fruit into Lud - if you know your Rossetti, you'll understand what a bad thing that's considered to be. The fruit, like Rossetti's goblin fruit, makes its human eater go mad with longing for Fairyland - which is against the law, since, after a revolution against Fairy, the inhabitants of Lud are supposed to be keeping things strictly anti-magical temptation.

As in all the best fantasy, Mirrlees is intensely logical when it comes to the details of her made-up world, and the result is that you're absolutely sold on the factuality of the fiction she's created. She's given Lud a history, economy and mythology so close - and yet so far - from turn-of-the-century rural England that it's like reading a particularly clever spot-the-difference picture. As a physical place, Lud feels entirely comfortable and relatable - and then Mirrlees pulls the rug out from under your feet with a single detail that makes you realise how utterly alien Lud is to your own experience. At one point, for example, she has a character look out over the countryside and see its old oak trees, thick hedgerows, gentle rivers and blue cows.

Yes, blue cows. Because Lud is next to Fairyland, and in Fairyland all the cows are blue, and over hundreds and hundreds of years there's been quite a lot of interbreeding of livestock - the result being blue cows in Lud. Even though everything from Fairyland is taboo in modern Lud, fairy influences have crept into its everyday life- people swear with fairy swearwords, for example, and sing fairy folksongs, without really being aware of what they're doing. It's all so brilliantly imagined and beautifully described (it looked absolutely lovely in my head) that the world of Lud jumps into life right off the page at you and hangs around in your head long after you've finished reading.

I do think the real virtue of Lud-in-the-Mist is Mirrlees's imagination. It's got a sweet but slightly inconsequential plot that's somewhat oddly resolved, and it does sometimes suffer from over-quaintness of metaphor. But her idea is so bloody great that I forgive her all of her small failures of execution. It's absolutely outstanding fantasy, and it deserves to be on top ten lists everywhere.

You know I liked a book if I recommend it to people, and so far I've told five friends about Lud-in-the-Mist and successfully lent it to one. Which I'm now regretting, because I want it back. It's that rare mix of incredibly comfortable and oddly upsetting, and I think I need to read it again.

Or maybe twice more.

4 stars.

Review - There But For The

Last November, in a flush of A. S. Byatt-induced excitement, I recommended my grandmother Angels and Insects. This was well-intentioned but (I realise now) a grave and awful error, because now whenever I communicate with her she asks me to tell her about something else just as amazing and I have nothing to say. Sad but true: it's been over four months since I've read any new fiction that I thought was really exceptional. All the good stuff has been required reading for my course (which proves that an English Literature MA has some use after all).

But - at long, long last- I think I've finally found something that approaches (even if it doesn't entirely reach) real excellence.

Just in time, because I was beginning to lose hope.

There But For The (no, I haven't missed a word, that's really the title) is the newest novel by Ali Smith, a writer who has previous form for being pretty great. My favourite thing by her is a novella she did for the Canongate Myths series called Boy Meets Girl, a retelling of the story from Ovid's Metamorphoses about a girl who problematically falls in love with another girl and then gets turned into a man by the gods so that they can get married. If that sounds like something the Republicans might approve of, don't worry. Ali Smith's version definitely isn't.

The basic premise of There But For The, in as far as it has one and isn't just a tenuously connected group of short stories (which I think is what it really is) is as follows. A man is invited to dinner at the house of people he doesn't know. The people turn out to be objectionable asses. The man goes upstairs and locks himself into their spare room and refuses to come out ever again.

Beginning of story.

Don't worry, you'll never find out why the man, Miles, does this. What you will hear about are all the people whose lives - indirectly or directly - have been made subtly better by Miles's existance both before and during his voluntary-imprisonment episode. It's all extremely tangential, and you've got to be sharp to pick up the threads that link each part together. Honestly, there are some hints I didn't get, and they're still bugging me now (is the first short story actually real, and if so how? What happened to May's daughter? Is Mark actually being haunted?) but I think that might be what Ali Smith is trying to do. Life (she's saying) is a bit weird and lumpy and nonsensical but all the same it's fascinating, and everything you find out just leaves you wanting to know more.

Granted, her portrayal isn't perfect. Smith has an annoying unwillingness to use speech marks like a normal (English language using) human being, and (more importantly) at times she gets far too wrapped up in a desire to be Relevant to Modern Life. Like most attempts, this just feels like somebody trying too hard to be serious and not managing it. At one point, for example, she has her characters talk about remote-controlled toy-sized drones that can kill you. Yes, yes, very horrifying, but the scene doesn't actually do anything as far as the novel is concerned. It's just there, being lazily right-on and making the reader feel smug about how much better they are than the idiot characters who think it's a good idea.

However, in the main I think Smith writes excellently, and it's the charm and drive of her writing style that carries There But For The along. She's got a flair for describing the weird in everyday life, and where I think Smith's particularly brilliant is the way she writes children. Her kids are alert, smart and casually bizarre in the way that actual children have. Children in books tend to be either tiny, unnerving adults or lisping poppets, whereas in real life they are like the little girl I saw on my way to Tesco's yesterday, who was running along shouting "CHEERS! CHEERS! CHEERS! GRAARGH!" to each of the lions on the underpass mural. Smith's children enjoy things like accessorising tiaras with combat trousers, hearing facts about medieval martyrdoms and standing on their hands while singing nonsense rhymes about the universe. In other words, they're normally abnormal, and it's incredibly refreshing.

As I've said, Ali Smith's more of a short story woman, and you can tell. There But For The's only real flaw in my eyes was its complete and utter lack of any kind of resolution. It began, stuff happened, more stuff happened and then it stopped. The situations she creates are so interesting, and her characters are so empathetic (the Bayoudes, especially, are wonderful), that for a while I seriously considered going over to Ali Smith's house, breaking in and rooting around under her bed to see if she'd left any more bits of story lying about.

What I'm trying to say is: I liked this book. After all the dodgy stuff I've been wading through lately, this one was delightful. It was charming, intriguing and a very smooth and engrossing read, and when I finished it I wished it had been twice as long. However, (just in case, in a mystical twist of the universe, Ali Smith happens to be reading this) a sequel would do just as well.

4 stars.

Review - Flaubert's Parrot

Oh readers, I am tired. As the wise man never said, but should have, if you fly to another country for 24 hours, and then immediately get on a train to the Midlands for another 24 hours, do not expect, when you finally get back to London, to be able to do anything more meaningful than sit and stare blankly at the wall. This week I had things to do and people to see, and I ended up just lying in a prone position and reading all 500 pages of Tipping the Velvet, because it was near me and I couldn't move and it turned out that my brain needed an enormous helping of delicious faux-Victorian literary comfort food to recover itself properly.

Whilst I was on my travels, though, I read something that (to continue the food metaphor) was not so much bountifully delicious as thin and sandy and requiring a lot of mental digestion. Flaubert's Parrot is by Julian 'Arthur and George' Barnes, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1984 and appears on the (accursed) 1001 Books list. It is a book with pedigree, and from the very first page you can tell that it is going to be Very Clever.

To be fair to it, I think it required the kind of attention and brain-power that, at that particular moment in time, I wasn't able to give, and so it merely left me feeling Very Confused Indeed.

I have to admit, I thought Flaubert's Parrot was actually going to be about a parrot. Obviously, I am not postmodern enough. Fool that I was, expecting a linear story with a single viewpoint to the narrative! Actually, it's a clipped up and deconstructed let-me-dazzle-you-with-my-playful-erudition quasi-biography of Gustave Flaubert, author of Madame Bovary and also other less famous books.

Every chapter is presented differently - one's Flaubert's key dates done three ways, for example, and another's his life from the perspective of his mistress. The title comes from the fact that Gustave not only enjoyed comparing himself to animals, but may or may not have owned (or borrowed) a parrot, which may or may not now be on display in a museum, and may, in fact, be more than one parrot, which may (or may not) be in itself an amusing story. Julian Barnes thinks it is. I'm not so sure.

I think I found this book so difficult to like because of an early and never remedied failure to care about either Flaubert or his parrot(s). I suspect that Flaubert's Parrot would have worked an awful lot better had I come to it knowing anything at all about Gustave Flaubert apart from the fact that he wrote Madame Bovary. The reader (I think) is meant to experience a delighted recognition - ah! Flaubert, that old rogue! I never knew he liked camels/ wrote about soup/ went to Egypt! How jolly! - whereas all I experienced was a low-level but persistant annoyance and a general sense that I was Missing Important Jokes.

Flaubert's Parrot is one of those books in which an academic makes snippy, sniping in-jokes about other academics. This tends to either work beautifully (see: Possession) or go horribly, horribly wrong (see: most other books with this plot device). In this case, I think it went the way of the latter option. True, there are some good digs at critics who are needless nitpickers (I've read far too many articles like the 'What Colour are Emma Bovary's Eyes?' one he takes the rip out of), but the general effect is both elitist and oddly stressful. There's a particularly mad chapter where the narrator frantically defends Flaubert's honour as a writer against the (theoretically) hostile reader - but since I don't know anything about Flaubert, I personally don't have any complaints to raise against him. So why (I wondered) am I being yelled at? The whole project, in fact, comes over (or at least it did to me) as being just a little too cranky to be fun, too much of some random dude riding his weird little hobby horse all over my brain.

Actually, the narrator's slightly more interesting than I just made him sound. Geoffrey Braithwaite - a Flaubert enthusiast/maniac, of course - starts off seeming like he's just going to be a Julian Barnes avatar, an older middle aged white man who's a bit lonely and pedantic. But, just like in Arthur and George, Barnes pulls a smart little identity trick, and who Geoffrey is, and why he's writing about Flaubert at all, turns out to be, to some extent, the point of the book. I admit, it's clever, and when I finally got it I looked back on what I'd just read in an entirely different way.

But all the same, my overall impression of Flaubert's Parrot was of something far too clever-clever for its own good. I came out of it feeling, not that I was friends with Flaubert, but that Geoffrey Braithwaite was, and that Geoffrey Braithwaite was slightly crazy.

Not one to read lightly.

2.5 stars.

Review - The Virgin in the Garden

'"Happy birthday," said Bird, "Happy me!"'

When I was a fledgeling, one of my favourite picture books was Bird's Birthday, which I liked because it was about me. (By the same token, I hated 'Who Killed Cock Robin' and 'The North Wind Shall Blow', because they were about me being shot and freezing to death respectively). Bird's Birthday, though, was about a bird who - you guessed it - had a birthday. My favourite part was the beginning, when the bird, excited about the upcoming day, went around for a week 'mentioning things in a casual way, like presents a bird most preferred.'

I tell you this because today is my happy birthday. I am 24, which is the same age Franz Muller was when he maybe killed Mr Briggs, and one year younger than Tea Obrecht was when she won the Orange Prize OH MY GOD WHAT HAVE I DONE WITH MY LIFE.

To console me, though, I got an awful lot of books, which will keep me in reviews for months, or at least weeks. And here for you, while I get on and read them, is a review of one of my Christmas pile, A. S. Byatt's The Virgin in the Garden.

You know how I love A. S. Byatt. I thought, after the whitewash of fabulousness that was Possession, The Children's Book, Ragnarok and Angels and Insects, she could do no wrong. But even great writers have to have a few years where they're a bit wobbly, and it seems like Byatt's dodgy training wheels book is The Virgin in the Garden. To be fair, she was 42 when she wrote it, which I suppose leaves me with a few more years before I have to turn out that masterpiece, and also to be fair, when I say it's dodgy what I mean is that it's not practically perfect in every way. I have high standards when it comes to my Byatts.

Set in 1953 in The North, it's the story of some people putting on a play in honour of Queen Elizabeth's coronation. Somehow, when I first read the synopsis, I managed to swap the 9 and the 5 round in my head, so I thought it was set in 1593 and about Liz I instead of II. I had a very confusing fifty pages of reading before I realised my elementary mistake. I suspect, actually, that Byatt is trying to make a 1953/1593 connection - the play in question is a flowery verse tribute to Elizabethan drama, and there are lots of slightly forced literary jokes about virgins and queens and so on. Everyone involved in the pageant runs about in bodices, sleeping with each other under bushes and considering the Alexandrine verse form, while there's an exceedingly weird sub-plot involving two people who think they're summoning demons. The whole thing is trying very hard to be riotous, and I suppose it is, in a studied way. It's certainly weird and it's even, about half of the time, fairly interesting - and yet there are ways that The Virgin in the Garden never quite works.

You can see the ways Byatt's going to excel in future, and to an extent already does - the minute attention to detail, the big, beautiful language, engrossing family relationships and a precisely described historic moment. But all the same, she's not quite there yet. For all that there are beautiful bits, the writing can be clumpy and overdone, and the light touch of her literary references in things like Possession fees, in this book, more like being beaten over the head with Shakespeare in a fat leather binding. In one party scene, for example, an unwelcome guest is compared to the character de Flores (he's the murder victim in Middleton's The Changeling, which I only know because I studied it at university). Yes, well done A. S. Byatt, very clever reference, top marks for being literary, but only about 2% of your readers are going to get it and the other 98% are just going to wonder who the hell that is and if it's about sex.

The humour, too, isn't as light and smart as in Byatt's later work. She's obviously in a phase where she's TRYING TO BE FUNNY, and the result is strange and ponderous, like bad Iris Murdoch. Actually, there's a distinct Murdochy flavour to The Virgin in the Garden, especially the demonic world-soul sub-plot, which could have been lifted wholesale from The Philosopher's Pupil. People spend a lot of time perched on bits of landscape, having odd philosophical discussions about sex and glaring at each other. Partly as a result of all those wordy words I spent a lot of the novel wondering whether or not I actually liked the characters enough to be reading 500 pages about their lives. The Potters, the family group that The Virgin in the Garden centres on, are all just a bit... unpleasant. Sure, some of them are that mix of objectionable-but-ultimately-loveable that makes for a well-rounded character, but some I just wanted to strangle and have done with it. Patriarch Bill Potter, especially, is a creation so absolutely infuriating that I frequently found myself wanting to rend his head from his shoulders and then jump up and down on it in an iambic rhythm.

All the same, the fact that I didn't enjoy this as much as other Byatts I've read still means I liked it a hell of a lot more than about three quarters of novels in general. Apparently, it makes up the first in a quartet of novels. I decided on about page 100 I wasn't going to read the rest of them, but by page 500 I was cravenly searching Amazon for good used copies. Partly this is because The Virgin in the Garden doesn't end, as such, but just cuts off with some people sitting on a sofa and feeling gloomy, but despite myself I found myself pulled into the Potters' world. Damn Byatt and her tricksy ways! I really was going to 2.5 star this, but the fact that I do want more makes me reluctantly admit that it's probably a 3 star book at least. So, 3 stars it is. And I know what I'm going to be spending my birthday book tokens on.

3 stars.

Book review - Angels and Insects

Housekeeping first - my maiden blog for The Other Place is up, dealing sensitively with why Shakespeare, if he was alive in 2011, would be an internet troll. I hope you like it.

And now, on to your regularly scheduled review.

This year A. S. Byatt has come out of almost nowhere to become one of my favourite writers. For quite a while after I read Possession I was afraid to read anything else by her, in case she was only pretending to be amazing, but then I took the plunge with Ragnarok and then The Children's Book and it turns out that A. S. Byatt is always amazing, consistently so, until it's almost depressing. I think I've said this before, but the woman does not let up.

I'm not sure if I'm more in love with her style or the things she chooses to write about. She's got a fierce eye for colour and a weird, intricate turn of phrase that makes the reader really able to see the mad things she imagines - in the two stories that make up Angels and Insects, for example, we get a girl with a dress covered in live butterflies and a supernatural visitation from something like a giant glass vase on fire. She creates these fantastic pocket universes, boiling over with life, each of them full of stories within stories, and tiny little stories within those, like Victorian curiosity cabinets. There's so much to look at in her books, and so much to think about, too.

Byatt (who is interested in everything, almost exhaustingly so) likes to go both enormously big and incredibly small, just to keep you on your toes, and Angels and Insects manages to be about Natural Selection and an anthill, the whole of the Afterlife and a drawing-room seance. Byatt loves the Victorians  - for everything that was strange and wrong about them as much as for everything they did right - and (luckily for me) her idea of their greatest hits is very similar to my own. Animals and ghosts! Tennyson and ferocious jungles full of lurking wild beasts! Sex and death and really great dresses!

The two stories that make up Angels and Insects - 'Morpho Eugenia' and 'The Conjugal Angel' are two gorgeous pieces of Victoriana, but Victoriana with teeth. In 'Morpho Eugenia', about a naturalist who falls in love with his patron's whiter-than-white daughter, the characters aren't just compared to insects. In an undefinably creepy way they actually become them. Eugenia, object of William's affections, begins as a butterfly and then morphs into an enormous Queen of the Ants, with the house itself her anthill and all the other female characters her workers.

'The Conjugal Angel', meanwhile, tells the story of a medium and a seance, but a seance where the supernatural beings the characters call up are disgustingly real. Apart from the burning vase-creature, there's a ghost who appears to the medium in her room, 'his brows and lashes caked with clay', a nasty image that sticks in your head because it makes an uncomfortable amount of logical sense. If ghosts are a manifestation of the dead, and the dead are rotting away in the ground - well, you see where this is going. When the angel appears at the end of the story, it's not an attractive Biblical being but an unpleasantly literal representation of Plato's idea that each person is half of an eternal whole. One half of it is shiny and bird-like, and on the other -

On the other side, turned into the shadow, it was grey like wet clay, and formless, putting out stumps that were not arms, moving what was not a mouth in a thin whisper.

Nightmares for days.

There are plenty of stories like 'Morpho Eugenia' and 'The Conjugal Angel' written during the Victorian Era, or at least written about the same topics, but at the same time you won't find anything with quite the same slant to them. They're Victorian pastiches, sure, but at the same time they're a lot more than that. Byatt's adept at using Victorian writing styles, which is impressive enough, but you always know you're not just reading another Victorian novel. In Angels and Insects, Byatt has taken two not-particularly-original ideas and used her incredible imagination to turn them into stories that are both lively and unexpected. There are several twists in each tale that I won't spoil you for, but if you know your Victorians you'll be delighted and if you don't - well, you'll still be delighted.

Can I get an A. S. Byatt altar set up in this blog already?

4.5 stars.

Review - The Children's Book

As you may have heard, I am frantically trying to read half of the 1001 Books list before I turn 28. I had a cunning plan to steam through the list more quickly by reading the shortest books available to me.

Well, I got bored of that.

The Children's Book by A S Byatt may be part of the list, but it certainly is not short. At just over 600 pages it's beautifully chunky, and reading it reminded me that I really do like longer books. If it's done right, a big fat book gives you a satisfying sense of involvement in the world on offer, and you end up not only truly bothering about, but almost living alongside, the characters in it.

Last summer I read War and Peace (I enjoyed the Peace more than the War, and the beginning more than the end, and the whole thing an awful lot more than I thought I was going to), a Big Book if ever there was one. It took me almost a month, and I remember at one point feeling like I was just going to have to SET MYSELF ON FIRE if Nikolai didn't end up marrying Sonia. I'm still really bitter at Tolstoy about that one. But Tolstoy's dodgy romantic decisions aside, The Children's Book has that same sort of feeling about it - in it, Byatt has managed to create an English version of the big, all-engrossing, over-populated world of a Russian novel. Each one of the characters in The Children's Book - and there are many - have their own interesting, odd concerns and their own way of getting through life, and they're all a pleasure to spend time with.

I was put off reading this book for quite a while because my mother told me she hadn't really enjoyed it. the moral of this story is that I really need to learn to stop listening to my mother when she tells me she didn't like a book. Or rather, I need to remember to enquire whether or not the reason why she didn't like it had anything to do with the presence of myths, fairy tales, unrealistic creatures and/or any other fantasy elements, because my mother is a sensible woman with a generally very good taste in books, but things that are not real make her deeply nervous.

We don't really see eye to eye about this. In fact, I spent most of my childhood presenting her with fat bundles of paper and announcing, "I WROTE YOU A STORY! It's about this GIRL and she FALLS THROUGH A PORTAL INTO ANOTHER UNIVERSE and discovers an EVIL PLOT in a RUINED CASTLE and then she gets chased by VAMPIRE PRIESTS and they're just about to SHOOT HER IN THE FACE but she turns into a WERE-CAT so everything is all right in the end. Also there's a talking bear." It is to my mother's everlasting credit that she dutifully read every one of these stories and told me how lovely they were.

Anyway, I really do like fantasy in my literature, and (as always in these cases) the exact things that made my mother doubtful about The Children's Book made me completely fall in love with it. The Children's Book turns out to be all about the late-Victorian preoccupation with myth and fairy tale - the central character, Olive Wellwood, is an exceedingly E. Nesbit-y children's novelist who writes about little things hiding underground and people with animal heads and evil fairies at the bottom of the garden. I grew up with E. Nesbit's stories, although I was always a bit suspicious of them - I could never work out if they were meant to be twee or nasty - and it's obvious that Byatt did too, and felt the same way. Olive's stories are weird expressions of all the strange things lurking in the Victorian unconscious (my favourite), equal parts cute and horrible and of course, because this is A S Byatt, pitch-perfect reproductions of her chosen genre.

I deeply approve of the way A S Byatt has spent time thinking about fairy tales, and how they manage to affect the way people think about themselves, and even live their lives, no matter how grown-up and anchored in reality they think they are. Myths matter, to both individuals and countries, and that's what The Children's Book explores in a very interesting and non-intrusive way. At times it reads like a very nice political and cultural history lesson, but a history lesson told like a fairy tale ("And then the Fabians were born, and they were nice but hopeless, and they argued with the Imperialists and the Tories who meant well but were flawed"). I wish my highbrow cultural history books were like this, because then I might understand what they were getting at.

When it's not about stories, The Children's Book is about art, and particularly pots, which is something else that pleases me very much. My mother, when she wasn't reading my awful fantasy stories, was an art historian, and so I spent a lot of my childhood in various museums. I love it, therefore, when a writer takes the time to really look at and describe beautiful things.

And god, can A S Byatt describe beautiful things. She has a famously dirty literary feud going on with her sister Margaret Drabble (apparently they won't even appear at the same literary festival, so you have to pick one or the other), and after The Children's Book I sort of feel like I understand it from Margaret Drabble's point of view. If your sister was A S Byatt, wouldn't you want to just rip her head off out of sheer jealous spite? I know I would. I still sort of do and I'm not even related to her. How dare Byatt be able to use words like that? How can she be able to describe a pot so well that you want to reach out and touch it, and then on the same page write about a landscape so you feel like you've been there? That cow! She has too much talent and I want some of it.

This, for example, is Byatt's description of the first vase aspiring potter Philip sees when he arrives at the Wellwoods' house:

The light flowed round the surface, like clouds reflected in water. It was a watery pot. There was a vertical rhythm of rising stems, waterweeds, and a dashing horizontal rhythm of irregular clouds of black-brown wriggling commas, which turned out, inspected closely, to be lifelike tadpoles with translucent tails.... It rested on four dark green feet, which were coiled, scaled lizards. Or minor dragons, lying with closed eyes and resting snouts.

That's colour, movement, music, landscape, language and biological detail, all visually observed like she's making a scientific discovery, and it's all about a pot.

But Byatt isn't all delicate intricate descriptions. The Children's Book sweeps about, through  five different (but interlocking) families and several decades, which include some very unpleasant historical moments. When I reviewed Ragnarok I said that Byatt seems to enjoy writing about nastiness as much as she does beauty, and you can see the same thing in The Children's Book - it's Grimm's toothy, gory fairytales that she's most influenced by here, and when we get to World War I at the end, characters get shot in the face and drowned in the mud with gleeful abandon. You care about Byatt's characters, and you can tell that she does too, but she isn't afraid of bumping them off, and I think that's a mark of a really good writer.

And, in case you couldn't tell, I think that A S Byatt is a really good writer. She's clever, she's bold, she's beautiful and (most importantly) she's a pleasure to read. She doesn't rub how ridiculously smart she is in your face (which is not to say that you don't realise it. But at least she's not being rude about it). Ah, I loved this. And when I finished it I hit 17.78% completion of the 2010 list.

I've still got a way to go.

4.5 stars.

Review - Ragnarok by A.S Byatt

One of the greatest things about my job is the access we get to proof copies of new books months before they are actually published. Although I have to admit that most of them are unmitigated drivel and/or Norwegian crime novels with strap lines along the lines of SHE HAS NO ARMS OR LEGS ANY MORE, BUT... SHE'LL NEVER GIVE IN, from time to time we do score big.

Which is the explanation for why I have just finished reading the newest addition to Canongate's Myths series, Ragnarok by A.S Byatt. (Bear in mind that what I've read, and what I'm reviewing, is the advance proof, so there may be changes in it between now and the release - nothing I quote is final.)

When it arrived it caused a slightly undignified fight between me and one of the people I work with, which I lost because he is older and more muscular. I suppose this is apt, since Norse mythology is full of people gleefully hitting each other over the head with things (one of the reasons why I like it so much). In fact, Norse mythology is so great that I'm always surprised at the raw deal it gets, comparitively. The Greeks and the Egyptians seem to be seen as the fun, sexy, zeitgeisty gods who do interesting things and so get cool book and movie projects, while the Norse gods are just stuck out there in the cultural wilderness, hitting each other over the head with things. There definitely are not enough good English retellings of Norse myth, and so the fact that someone as great as A.S Byatt has decided to do something about it is brilliant. And, as far as actually retelling the myths goes, Ragnarok is pretty damn brilliant.

It's beautiful, lively, vivid writing like big bold jewellry, full of nasty, gorgeous images and with exactly the right rhythm to it. When the gods go to bind Fenrir:

Heimdall, the herald, who guarded the high gate of Asgard, could hear the grass grow on the earth, and the wool springing from the hide of the sheep. He could hear the wolf's blood pounding and pumping, he could hear his pelt expanding.

And from the description of Yggdrasil:

Pools formed in the pits where the branches forked; moss sprouted; bright tree-frogs swam in the pools, laid delicate eggs and gulped in jerking and spiralling wormlings. Birds sang at the twigs' ends and built nests of all kinds - clay cup, hairy bag, soft hay-lined bowl, hidden in holes in the bark. All over its surface the tree was scraped and scavenged, bored and gnawed, minced and mashed.

Byatt clearly loves the stories she's telling, and she's had a lot of enjoyment putting her own spin on them. She tells us that Loki's her favourite (which I really approve of her for) and the best parts of Ragnarok come when she's describing the sheer fun Loki and his children have just being chaotic, messing around, ruining the universe a bit because they enjoy it. The Norse myths are nasty stories with a nasty ending, and it's the casual bloodthirstiness of it all that Byatt's so good at. Seriously, for her retelling of the myths themselves I can't praise her highly enough.

However, I do think there's a slight problem with the whole Myths thing as a whole. The series itself seems to be a great idea in theory that tends in practice to be a bit hit and miss, quality-wise, since what it does is give the individual authors a lot of scope to think that Their Interpretations Matter, which in turn means that they are highly likely to go off on a mad little rant about whatever cultural bee they have in their bonnet. Jeanette Winterson, for example, did a retelling of the Atlas myth that was half lovely and half a weirdly personal screed about what a nasty sweaty rapist Hercules was.

To a lesser extent, Ragnarok falls victim to the same awkward issues. Byatt is telling her myths through, and interspersed with, the experiences of a little girl (who is very clearly A.S Byatt in awful disguise) growing up in the countryside during World War Two, as she's taught about Christianity in school and learns about the Norse pantheon from a book at home. In writing about her life, Byatt gets caught up in two horribly overdone plot tropes: one, that this is The First Child In The World To Discover Atheism, and the other, that the natural world she lives in is Dying Because Of The Greed And Foolishness Of Mankind. It's funny, because I am quite environmentally conscious and atheistic myself, but seeing these two themes crop up again and again in books makes me annoyed. It just feels like rather smug preaching to the choir - most people who read the kind of books that contain these themes are going to automatically agree with the views they express, and so really there's nothing remotely daring or thought-provoking about including them.

Having said that, though, I really did love Ragnarok. It was an absolute pleasure to read and it'll be a total geeky delight for everyone who's even vaguely interested in Norse mythology. As far as I'm concerned, when it's released on the 8th of September, you should all leap into your vehicles, drive to Blackwell's bookshop and purchase it at once.

4 stars.