What I read: November

Burning Angel and other stories - Lawrence Osbourne

There’s a lot of ground covered in these stories – from England to Hong Kong to Indonesia – with each story opening in a wildly different setting. And yet they all depict people in places where they perhaps shouldn’t be, places or situations in which they don’t belong. There’s a linguist, who, whilst attempting to be the first to record the indigenous Citak language, becomes a useful pawn for the missionary family with whom she is staying, a group of 7th Day Adventists who have forcibly rooted themselves in the centre of this community. There’s the psychologist, who begins spending more and more time with her patient, the American banker in Hong Kong who accepts a mysterious job offer so he can keep his penthouse view.

There was plenty of promise embedded in each of these stories – but unfortunately most of them failed to live up to it - they never seemed to see their point through to the end. Osbourne sets up  some interesting discussions around power, control and belonging but really fails to push them to the edges. The final, titular, story was the strongest for me but it’s still a collection which left me slightly disappointed.

Cat’s Eye - Margaret Atwood

If Elaine focuses hard enough, she can make herself faint. For a few precious minutes, the horrors of school can be escaped, until consciousness returns, along with Cordelia.

Cat’s Eye flickers between the present and the past: Elaine is a painter, returning to Toronto, her childhood home, for a retrospective exhibition of her work. Beneath the surface of the city though, is a separate map of memories. Elaine is haunted by her childhood friend and bully, Cordelia. She seems to be forever chasing multiple figures of Cordelia - the cruel child she once was, the faded young woman she became. Atwood delves deep into female friendship and how the scars from childhood stretch and grow with us as we age. She examines how it feels to be lonely, to not fit in as you are supposed to. Every time I read Atwood, I’m reminded why she’s been critically acclaimed for so long. Her descriptions of Elaine’s childhood are moving and evocative, and she paints such a vivid image of the world in which Elaine grows up, from the marbles in the playground to her brother’s comic book collection.

I don’t want to give away too much of the plot but the interesting push and pull of power and pain between Cordelia and Elaine continues throughout their shared history. Elaine’s paintings are directly linked to the Toronto she grew up in and returning to the city brings up conflicting emotions for her. Atwood touches on themes of art and motherhood as well, on being a female artist and what that space looks like at this time (the book was published in 1988).

This has made me more determined to read through as much of Atwood’s work as I can get my hands on - her books have such depth to them yet are never lose their readability. On to the next…

Of The Flesh

Made up of 18 different horror stories, all from different authors, this is a strong collection (with a great cover). I picked this up because it featured stories from some of my favourite writers, including Mariana Enríquez, Michel Faber, and Evie Wyld but it was nice to discover some names that were new to me, and having different authors throughout stopped this collection from feeling repetitive. There’s even a comic strip horror story, which was fun to read.

The stories are roughly grouped by being examples of “modern horror” and you will find a good range across the book: there’s a boy who works down in the mines in Bolivia and becomes fascinated by the creature who watches over them, a child who is told he must eat his vegetables to feed the broccoli eel who wriggles in his stomach, a lone female hiker who learns of the spirit that haunts the woods.

Although the book is certainly creepy, it’s not the scariest, most horrifying thing I’ve read. But that said, that sense of discomfort can be hard to build up over a limited word count. I think for sheer unease, I would recommend Enríquez’s collection The Dangers of Smoking in Bed over this, but I did enjoy having that mix of storytelling, styles and setting across all the tales in Of The Flesh.

Death Valley - Melissa Broder

Where to go when your father is lying in a hospital bed after a car crash? Why not the empty expanse of Death Valley, the great arid plain of the desert? At least this is what the narrator of Death Valley decides, driving from Los Angeles and checking into a Best Western room under the loose guise of research for her next book. And so begins this surreal story of talking rocks and vanishing cactuses that you can slip inside. Written in Broder’s typical dry, funny prose, this dives into grief and relationships, all with a strange, magical spin.

I’m not a big surrealist fiction fan, so this wasn’t one for me from the outset, but I think Broder’s narrative style also meant I struggled to connect with the character. This humorous, dead pan writing keeps you slightly at arms-length. I also thought the book felt repetitive at times - there is a lot of desert in this, which is famously predictable and unchanging. This is the third of Broder’s novels I’ve read now, and whilst I have preferred her others, I think that she’s perhaps not the writer for me.

Intermezzo - Sally Rooney

Now this is a book I really have the Faber marketing team to thank for reading this month. I wasn’t actually going to buy Intermezzo. But then the marketing campaign kicked in and I felt itchy to read it. There’s nothing like the fear of missing out to take you down to the bookshop.

Intermezzo cracks open a new relationship for Rooney - that of siblings. Ivan and Peter are 10 years apart and grieving the recent loss of their father. Peter, the eldest, is a lawyer. He is desperately frustrating and rigid at times. The chapters told from his perspective are made up of short, almost clipped sentences. There is a harshness to them but, once within their flow, also a propulsive rhythm. Ivan, at 22, is softer than his brother - he’s a professional chess player, with a strangely compelling awkwardness about him. Ivan meets the older Margaret at one of his chess events - she is drawn to the quiet pull of him and they begin spending weekends together, building a relationship they keep from the rest of the world. Peter’s romantic affairs are more entangled. He is seeing Naomi, a younger college student but has remained close with his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, who ended their relationship after suffering a debilitating accident. I would say it is the female characters who fall slightly flat in Intermezzo. There is a lot of the men talking and the women listening and whilst I felt Rooney could have fleshed out these characters more, it didn’t stop me from enjoying the novel.

Intermezzo is an exploration of love and grief in their many forms and I simply really enjoyed reading this. Interspersed amongst the plot are these delicate moments of connection and happiness and intimacy that you really savour as you stumble across them. Ivan’s story and watching that relationship gently unfold was the part that I was most drawn to. I also think it’s the first book of Rooney’s that really made me appreciate her craft and just how strong she is as a writer. I’m glad I picked this up.

Stone Yard Devotional - Charlotte Wood

Plagues of mice, a dead nun’s bones and a remote convent might sound like the setting for a tale of horror, but Stone Yard Devotional is a quiet and powerful novel. Any horror here is more subtle - sometimes it is gently existential, other times it is a short, sharp shard of discomfort. Things are where they shouldn’t be - bones are laid in the living room, mice pour out of the seat of a car. But it never feels gratuitous or silly and Wood weaves into these moments an exploration of much bigger and deeper questions.

The book begins with the narrator joining a retreat held at a convent - her days open up with silence, the steady routine of the nun’s way of life calling to something in her. So she moves in forever, shutting the door on her job and her marriage to join this small, isolated community. Not through any illusions of discovering religion, just for a simple desire to escape.

But the world has a way of reminding you of all its wrongs. In a plague of ironically biblical proportions, driven by drought, mice descend upon the town - they swarm through the pages of the book; as a reader, you can almost hear them, almost see the dart of their tail out of the corner of your eye. And amongst all this, the convent has some visitors, one alive and unwelcome, one long dead.

Twisting at the heart of Stone Yard Devotional are questions of morality: What does it take to be a good person? Can you forgive yourself for the harm you have put out into the world? And when the world is falling apart around you, is it a sin to simply retreat?

This is a book filled with quiet grief - both personal and on a deeper, more wide-reaching level. The narrator often writes memories of her mother - you can feel her aching at this loss and even now, later in her life, looking back at her mother’s example, trying to learn what it means to be a good person.

This is the third book I’ve read from the 2024 Booker Shortlist (you can see a quick summary of my thoughts on Creation Lake and Orbital on my TikTok) and I think my favourite so far. It’s thoughtful and interesting, unique and powerful.