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Fiction
A tragicomic triumph
The Bee Sting
Paul Murray
The Bee Sting Paul Murray
A tragicomic triumph
Clocking in at more than 600 pages, Paul Murray’s Booker shortlisted novel is the story of a well-to-do Irish family in financial, emotional and existential trouble: Dickie Barnes, who has taken over his father’s car showroom; his wife Imelda, a local beauty; daughter Cassie, preparing for university; and 12-year-old son PJ. The after-effects of the financial crash have crippled the motor business, and now that the money and the good times have run out Dickie hides away in local woods, building a shelter against the collapse of civilisation while Imelda furiously eBays their possessions. Cassie fears for her future; PJ fears divorce. We see the same few months through the eyes of each in turn, during floods and drought, as slow‑building ecological disaster parallels the family’s own unfolding apocalypse.
Murray is exploring the way families can always sense the emotional temperature, even if they don’t know where the fire is coming from. He is brilliant on fathers and sons, sibling rivalry, grief, self-sabotage and self-denial, as well as the terrible weakness humans have for magical thinking, not least in regard to the climate crisis. He can also create a laugh-out-loud moment from a buttock tattoo or the simple sentence, “He said he was thinking of only listening to Angolan music from now on.”
The Bee Sting draws on Irish folklore about a traveller taken in by fairy folk to their great hall of riches under the hill, only to wake many years later in a cold, unfamiliar world where everything they knew and loved has passed away. He uses it as a figure for the unsustainable mania of the Celtic tiger, for the piercing nostalgia surrounding lost youth, for the vanishing of illusions and shared fairytales that allowed this particular family to function. Toward the book’s end, Imelda thinks back to the horrors of her chaotic childhood, the past she can never escape, all that has brought her, second by irrevocable second, to this present moment. “You would give anything to go back to it anything.” You won’t read a sadder, truer, funnier novel this year.
Art
Beauty and the beast
Monsters
Claire Dederer
Monsters Claire Dederer
Beauty and the beast
Is it OK to love a film, a book or a painting if its maker turns out to be a bad person? Not just lovable aw-shucks everyday bad, the sort who forgets to pick the kids up because he or she is too busy making art, but someone whose behaviour is immoral, illegal or both? A monster, in fact.
This is the dilemma that Claire Dederer addresses in this exhilarating, gnarly inquiry into the business of separating the author’s repugnant life from his or her magnificent work. It is hardly a new topic – in the middle of the last century, the proponents of New Criticism were arguing about what they called the “biographical fallacy” and duly concluding that the critic should set aside an artist’s life and concentrate on their work alone. But then, Dederer points out tartly, they would say that, wouldn’t they? As mostly elite white men, these critics were naturally inclined to hand out free passes to others for the kind of bad behaviour with which they were themselves on intimate terms – parental absence, alcoholic indulgence and that impregnable self-regard that inflicts collateral damage on everyone else.
Seventy years on, and the problem of what to do about great art by horrible people has roared back, taking on slightly different flavours in this age of #MeToo and social media “cancellation”. The impulse to farm out the decision to an external authority sounds hopelessly naive – but then, asks Dederer, isn’t there something equally ridiculous about thinking that whether we choose to enjoy a particular piece of art or not is going to change anything? That we might be able to ameliorate the harm of Polanski’s violation of a schoolgirl or Picasso burning the face of his “muse” Françoise Gilot with a cigarette?
Far more productive, she suggests, is for us to start being honest about our own monstrosity. Indeed, she believes that until we accept our own capacity for bad behaviour then we are stuck in the worst of all worlds – denying ourselves the satisfaction of consuming art that moves us in ways we don’t quite understand yet failing to get to grips with why we keep returning to it.
Literature
The history of a genre
The Life of Crime
Martin Edwards
The Life of Crime Martin Edwards
The history of a genre
In the introduction to this literary history, crime novelist Martin Edwards admits to being daunted by the scale of the challenge he set himself: “any attempt to write a single-volume survey of crime writing that purports to be both comprehensive and definitive is doomed to fail, even if the book is the size of a breeze block”. The result is not quite a breeze block of a book, but it is still 700 pages long. Nevertheless, despite its length this is a wonderfully readable book, packed with insights into what is probably the most popular genre of fiction.
Edwards adopts a chronological approach, beginning in the 18th century with William Godwin’s The Adventures of Caleb Williams, the “first thriller about a manhunt” and the ancestor of such popular novels as John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps. He breaks his subject down into 55 succinct chapters, each adopting a biographical approach to the authors. The result is both pacey and entertaining, filled with amusing anecdotes.
Even the footnotes are worth reading for their illuminating asides about obscure fiction or historical figures, evidence of a mind that is overflowing with information about the genre. Edwards points out that the paperback edition has an additional 7,000 words of material and the reference in one note to Saltburn (“a Gothic black comedy”) reveals just how up-to-date it is.
There are stand-out chapters on Arthur Conan Doyle (who unfairly dismissed his own detective fiction as “a lower stratum of literary achievement”) and Agatha Christie. Incredibly, Edwards says that Christie’s first novel featuring Hercule Poirot (The Mysterious Affair at Styles, 1916) was the result of a bet with her sister, who said she couldn’t write a detective novel.
Crime fiction embraces many sub-genres to which whole books have been devoted, from detective stories (Raymond Chandler), police procedurals (Ed McBain) and thrillers (Alistair MacLean), to spy novels (Ian Fleming and John le Carré). Edwards devotes at least one chapter to each of these, exploring how each evolved and contributes to the genre as a whole. As throughout, he brings the fiction alive by drawing on the biographies of the authors.
This single-volume history of an immense and diverse genre is an impressive achievement and essential reading for serious fans of crime fiction.
Fiction
The fizz of first love
Bellies
Nicola Dinan
Bellies Nicola Dinan
The fizz of first love
In the opening chapters of Nicola Dinan’s debut novel, Ming, an intelligent young playwright from Kuala Lumpur, is seen from the perspective of adorably awkward Tom. They fall for each other at a British university, where Ming presents as a fey boy with an air of self-possession. But the lovers wake in bedsheets drenched from night sweats, a side effect of the citalopram prescribed for Ming’s OCD. Ming’s mother, and lodestar, died six years ago.
Tom learns about Ming’s vulnerabilities in fragments – which is much how Tom discovers himself. At its best, Bellies is as deep as it is chic, propelled by the good intentions dropped between different wavelengths, a sensitive study of the challenge of moving past judgment towards perception.
Fiction
The gang are back
The Last Devil to Die
Richard Osman
The Last Devil to Die Richard Osman
The gang are back
Elizabeth, Joyce, Ron and Ibrahim – the core members of Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club, and as another resident at their Coopers Chase retirement village puts it, the “cool kids” on the block – are back for a fourth outing in The Last Devil to Die. This time, they’re hoping for “a new project that moved at a gentler pace than usual. Something a bit less murdery”, perhaps. But Osman doesn’t disappoint: before long, Kuldesh, an old friend in the antiques business, has met his maker, and the gang are on the trail of a heroin importation hub and a killer. Everything is here that fans of the series have come to expect: humour, warmth, the confounding of expectations as these pensioners investigate. There’s also a deeper insight into the character of Ibrahim, who is fast becoming my favourite (sorry Joyce) – for his mission to have the Thursday Murder Club become carbon-neutral by 2030, if he could only stop laminating everything, and his past. Along with the laughs, there is grief, and an ending that is handled sensitively (I was weeping).
Fiction
A wickedly funny publishing thriller
Yellowface
Rebecca F Kuang
Yellowface Rebecca F Kuang
A wickedly funny publishing thriller
Rebecca F Kuang has followed her bestselling “dark academia” novel Babel with a zeitgeisty thriller set in the world of publishing that tells the tale of two young novelists in Washington DC. There’s Athena Liu, a critical and commercial darling who has just signed a deal with Netflix, and green-eyed frenemy Juniper Hayward, whose debut has already been forgotten, the paperback publication axed owing to poor sales. The novel starts with the pair toasting Athena’s success in her ritzy apartment after a night on the town; Juniper, our narrator, is choking down her resentment when, suddenly, Athena is literally – and fatally – choking on a homemade pancake…
It’s a freak accident whose sheer unbelievability sounds the keynote for a novel circling the slipperiness of truth, but most of all it gets the motor running on the novel’s plot, a brazen literary heist. Athena had just shown Juniper her secret new manuscript – an epic novel about the Chinese workers recruited by the British army in the first world war, drafted on a typewriter (“no Word backups, no Google Docs, no Scrivener”, which is to say, no plot holes here, OK?). In the subsequent blur of events, from 911 call to tear-stained Uber ride home, Juniper spirits away the stack of pages then just can’t help publishing it under her own name, rebranded as June Song (Song being her middle name, given by her hippy mother).
Yellowface is often wickedly funny: Juniper stakes her entire sense of self on the fallacy that she wrote Athena’s novel, yet also privately exults when critics find fault with it (she always knew Athena was a hack). But there’s deeper comedy, too. Juniper’s ill-gotten gains mean she can give up – wait for it – ghost-writing college application essays; and in one scene, she twigs that her agent is bullshitting her over the phone about Chinese politics because she’s reading the same Wikipedia entry as him at exactly the same time. Everyone’s bluffing, Kuang seems to say, and in its deepest implications Yellowface ultimately posits any creative act as a pilfering of one sort or another. Or have I just been Juniper-pilled and fallen for her sob story? It’s the knife edge on which this clever and entertaining send-up leaves you poised.
Fiction
Art or porn?
Penance
Eliza Clark
Penance Eliza Clark
Art or porn?
When Eliza Clark’s debut novel came out with an indie publisher in 2020, nobody imagined that her second would be among the most eagerly awaited of 2023. Her rise from obscurity to literary celebrity began when fans on TikTok made Boy Parts a cult hit. It was complete when, a few months ago, Granta magazine named the 29-year-old author one of the UK’s best 20 novelists under the age of 40.
Penance, which – though it won’t appeal to all tastes – is a work of show-stopping formal mastery and penetrating intelligence. Whereas most contemporary novels feel like variations on a few fashionable themes, Newcastle-born Clark seems oblivious to the latest metropolitan literary preoccupations. How many writers, for instance, would set their much-heralded new work in the unglamorous leave-voting northern town of “Crow-on-Sea”? It’s here that, a bogus foreword informs us, the action of the book we’re about to read – Penance by true-crime journalist Alec Carelli – takes place.
Carelli has settled in Crow, we learn, to investigate the torture and murder of 16-year-old Joan Wilson at the hands of three girls – Dolly, Violet and Angelica – from her school. Initially the crime drew little media interest, most likely because it took place on the night of the 2016 Brexit referendum. But three years later the “true-crime industrial complex” is turning its attention to Crow, spying a new opportunity to exploit human suffering for entertainment that’s “tailored to our basest instincts”. By contrast, Carelli hopes to “do something worthy”, intending to honour Crow and its still-grieving community by writing about the town as much as the crime itself.
Penance is a bravura exercise in mimicry, pitch-perfect whether it’s ventriloquising journalism or online message boards.
Nature
Buried stories
Why Women Grow
Alice Vincent
Why Women Grow Alice Vincent
Buried stories
According to Alice Vincent, women have always gardened but their stories have usually been buried: “we have silently made the world more beautiful, too often without acknowledgement”. Through interviews with nearly fifty women who have found solace and fulfilment in gardening, as well as her own life experiences, journalist and self-taught gardener Vincent explores the many reasons why “women turn to the land in order to bloom”.
Some of the women she talked to have found that creating a beautiful space can help with depression, loss, or grief. For Marchelle, originally from Trinidad, gardening was about finding somewhere that nurtured her: “It came from wanting to be mothered now that I was a mother, and not having ready access to my mother.” For Vincent herself – who in the course of the book describes her attempts to cultivate a small garden in south London – it is about defining her own womanhood.
Some mothers told Vincent they gardened to create somewhere to be outside with their children, while others wanted to have a verdant space that was solely theirs, a haven of peace away from family life. Kayla grows houseplants as part of a rehabilitation scheme for prisoners. Separated from her family, she has found it intensely rewarding: “These plants are like our babies. It is so, so satisfying.” Louise has chosen not to have children and has found gardening had a positive effect on her mood: “I think the nurturing side of me wants to invest in living things, but not people.”
This is a thoughtful and beautifully written book, full of insights into life and nature. Vincent weaves women’s garden stories together with the need to understand her own feelings about identity and the idea of motherhood. From her conversations and reading, she learns that gardening can indeed offer healing. But importantly it also makes us aware of the planet’s natural biological rhythms and how these are being disrupted by the growing impact of the climate crisis: nature also needs to heal. Gardening is, Vincent realises, a two-way relationship: “we have to offer some of ourselves to the land to reap the benefits.”
Fiction
Descent into dystopia
Prophet Song
Paul Lynch
Prophet Song Paul Lynch
Descent into dystopia
If there was ever a crucial book for our current times, it’s Paul Lynch’s Booker-winning Prophet Song. The Limerick-born author’s fifth novel imagines the Republic of Ireland slipping into totalitarianism after the rise of the rightwing National Alliance party which seizes total control in response to trade unionists lobbying for increased teachers’ wages. Civil liberties erode and civil war breaks out. Like a lobster in a boiling pot, people don’t realise their freedoms have been obliterated until it’s too late: “All your life you’ve been asleep, all of us sleeping and now the great waking begins.”
Lynch’s message is crystal clear: lives the world over are experiencing upheaval, violence, persecution. Prophet Song is a literary manifesto for empathy for those in need and a brilliant, haunting novel that should be placed into the hands of policymakers everywhere.
Fiction
A class act
The Late Americans
Brandon Taylor
The Late Americans Brandon Taylor
A class act
The stakes in Brandon Taylor’s fiction are always high – strikingly so, given these are campus novels. Lovers and gods are cruel; life’s beauty is dangerously close to being unbearable. Early on in The Late Americans, graduate student poet Seamus pictures his cohort as living in a dollhouse: “It was so easy to imagine the hands of some enormous and indifferent God prying the house open and squinting at them as they went about their lives … in an exhibit called The Late Americans.” Are our lives spectacles? And how can we continue to live when pain is both ubiquitous and mundane? The answer comes in bodily connection, but physical encounters may result merely in the transfer of pain.
The Late Americans assures and deepens Taylor’s position as one of the most accomplished, important novelists of his generation. He is undoubtedly on to something expansively new in his sense of what the contemporary novel can do.
Fiction
Double trouble in Greece
August Blue
Deborah Levy
August Blue Deborah Levy
Double trouble in Greece
From Dostoevsky to Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the doppelganger is among the delights of literature and film alike. In the case of Elsa M Anderson, an encounter with the doppelganger is the second staging post in a deeply Freudian fable of lost memory and severed selves. Elsa is a famous concert pianist who has come to Athens in the wake of a catastrophe. Three weeks earlier, she performed Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 2 in the Golden Hall in Vienna, lost her place in the music and walked off stage mid-performance, an unforgivable act. Now she is drifting around Europe, teaching the children of people wealthy enough to afford her services and trying to grapple with the mystery of who she really is.
Since the 1990s, Deborah Levy’s novels have combined a gauzy, episodic quality with pinpoint sensual detail drawn from peripatetic lives, crossing fluently between languages and national borders. Her style is full of gaps and sharp edges, circling around questions of gender and power, inheritance, autonomy and lack.
August Blue’s wistful, fabular quality is appealing, as are those aphoristic statements Levy is so skilled at dispensing: sly comments on contemporary power dynamics likewise in the process of changing into new and as yet uncertain forms: “It was always the same people making the same old”; “It had never occurred to her, she said, that she wasn’t valuable”; “Capitalism sold a flat white to me as if it were a cup of freedom.”
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