Atonement is an Ian McEwan novel from 2001, shortlisted for the Booker Prize that year. The initial scenes take place at a country house in 1935. Briony Tallis, a young girl with a talent for writing, witnesses the beginning of a love affair between her elder sister Cecilia, and Robbie, the clever son of a family servant. She misinterprets what she sees, which leads to misunderstandings, accusations and disastrous consequences. Events are then picked up five years later in 1940, around the time of the Dunkirk evacuation. Finally there is a short postscript where Briony on her 77th birthday looks back at the book she has written about Cecilia and Robbie.

You can read Atonement in two ways, first as a good story, a who-dunnit, a powerful page turner, particularly in the 1940 sections; or as fancy, multi-layered, self-referential work about novels, their history, limitations and potentials.

Which would we prefer? One sounds entertaining. The other sounds interesting but hard work. Maybe one doesn’t exclude the other. Atonement seems to link them together in Briony’s own writing efforts. In 1940, she submits a story based on Cecilia and Robbie, to Horizon magazine. She writes this in Virginia Woolf mode, adopting a trendy stream of consciousness style, eschewing the artificial conventions of plot. But then we get the more traditional entertaining approach when Briony sees that her story gains realism and authenticity once she accepts that her behaviour in 1935 had cause and effect. You could say these events became more real once they have plot, rather than floating around in their own disconnected universe. They also become more readable.

Novels are a fiction, a distortion, intrinsically misleading. Life is not arranged like a novel, and yet life does involve plot-like cause and effect, deception and efforts to reveal hidden secrets. I came to see plot as both an artificial device, and a reflection of reality. Maybe that’s the atonement novels in general have to make. They have to take their artificial nature, their entertainment value, and atone for it with the truth. This one does that very well.

Orbital is a novel by Samantha Harvey, published in November 2023. It describes one day in the life of a fictional crew aboard the International Space Station, orbiting Earth at 17,000 miles an hour, moving through sixteen dawns and nightfalls.

The International Space Station is a highly technical piece of equipment. Let me suggest a parallel – Orbital is a highly technical piece of writing. I think it fitting we take off an inspection panel marked ‘Danger – Fiction Technique’ and have a look at some of the workings.

After reading articles by the excellent Emma Darwin, I have recently been thinking about an aspect of writing known as psychic distance. This sounds like some kind of new age spiritual practice, but it’s actually a description of how close a reader feels to the characters they are reading about. Are we looking at them from the outside, or are we actually in their heads? Writing tutor John Gardner breaks down the spectrum of distance as follows:

1. It was winter of the year 1853. A large man stepped out of a doorway.

2. Henry J. Warburton had never much cared for snowstorms.

3. Henry hated snowstorms.

4. God how he hated these damn snowstorms.

5. Snow. Under your collar, down inside your shoes, freezing and plugging up your miserable soul.

The idea is, with each step, a reader goes further and further into the head of Henry J. Warburton. We go from an omnipotent author telling us about him, to shivering along with Warburton in the snow.

Interestingly, Orbital is mostly at number 1 in this scheme. The ISS floats over Earth just as the writing style floats over its subject. Occasionally we plunge down to number 5, like a capsule engaged in a flaming re-entry. But generally we float with great peace and wonder, hundreds of miles high, at number 1. There is no plot to speak of. Our desire to read on does not come from identifying with a particular character and wondering what will happen to them. We are above such things. This is very unusual for a novel, and allows for some remarkable descriptions of Earth, space and humanity. Not confined to the point of view of a single character, it’s possible to drift about the universe.

The price for this lies in reduced involvement. We can go anywhere but maybe care less when we get there. Is it a price worth paying?

Consider this. When I was little I wanted to be an astronaut. One day I was hunched in the back seat of a Cortina with my two brothers, on a long journey to Swansea to see our grandparents. We had been driving for hours. Everything was scratchy and crowded. It suddenly struck me that astronauts would feel like this. There were three of us, just as there would be three crew on an Apollo mission, trapped in a similar amount of space. Why does our experience of travel always have to be so cramped? Orbital is very much about this sort of contradiction. The book has a great feeling of floating freedom, but also takes us into the narrow, metal tunnels full of kit, clothes, laundry, miscellaneous luggage, and jumbled electronics that make up the ISS. We explore space through the medium of claustrophobia, experiencing the endlessness of the universe through one short day, travelling on a vast journey that goes nowhere, orbiting around the same but constantly changing Earth. These ironies seem to be part of all our journeys, through space or otherwise. This writer makes the best of the limits of her approach, like children accept a Cortina, or astronauts accept a capsule, to get to Swansea or the moon. It is a simple truth that limits ironically make exploration possible, no matter what sort of journey you take, earth-bound or space-bound, real or literary.

Anyway, that’s enough work for today. Let’s put the inspection panel back on, and go down to the observation cupola and enjoy the wonderful view.

Y/N is a novel by Esther Yi, published in 2023, appearing in a number of best of year lists – Time Magazine, The New Yorker, Cosmopolitan.

The narrator of the story is an unnamed young woman living in Berlin. She hangs out with a cool student crowd, but her job is writing advertising copy for a brand of canned artichoke hearts. One night the narrator’s flatmate takes her to see a Korean boy band. The members are all named after heavenly bodies. They come over as an odd amalgam of children’s entertainers and earnest, bardic philosophers. While the narrator is determined to be snooty and disdainful, the performance leads to obsession with one of the singing and dancing boys – known as Moon.

You might say that the band is its own brand of canned heart, manufacturing love for its fans. The narrator turns her copywriting talents towards writing fan fiction involving the band. The central character in her stories is called Y/N, denoting an empty space where the reader can place themselves. Y/N stands for ‘your name’. As her obsession cranks up, the narrator abandons her job and travels to Korea in a desperate, ambivalent search for Moon.

You could say that the book spins itself around the contradictions inherent in the idea of love. Sometimes Y/N presents love as a spiritual concept, the sort of thing associated with religions, where a god loves everyone. The feeling here is of something universal, transcending boundaries. There is much of this in Y/N as the narrator attempts to go beyond the limits of her mundane life through her love of Moon. By contrast there is the practical sense of love as it works between actual people. Now we find that love is something very specific, focusing on a person who will be there for you, rather than gadding about with all the others. Veering towards the universal in a practical context might cause a lot of upset. This conception of love can be characterised not by big, sweeping generalities, but by things at the small end of the emotional scale – familiarity, routine, domesticity, making a home that serves as protection from a big, lonely world.

How the same word can be used to describe such opposing states is quite something. Around this conundrum Y/N centres itself, deriving much humour and interest from the collision of incompatibilities, all struggling to be part of the same thing.

Y/N is funny, bizarre, and beautifully written in a surprising, off-kilter style. It’s emotional and thoughtful, detached and involving, funny, tragic, grand, puncturing of pomposities. I loved it – and I use that phrase advisedly.