Enter Ghost is a 2023 novel by Isabella Hammad, telling the story of Sonia Nasir, an actress of mixed Palestinian/Dutch ancestry, working in London. With her career and personal life at a crossroads, she visits family in Haifa, Israel. Here she meets a theatre director, who persuades her to get involved with a local production of Hamlet.

Hamlet famously recruits a group of players to portray the crime that he suspects his uncle Claudius of committing – murdering his father and then marrying his widowed mother in a scheme to usurp the throne of Denmark. Hamlet tells his actors that the purpose of a play is ‘to hold as ‘twere the mirror up to nature’.

Mirrors are a thing in Enter Ghost. Sonia mentions them a number of times – in a late night scene when she mistakes a reflection of herself for an intruder, and in the climactic performance of Hamlet, when stress seems to provoke an out of body experience. A mirror reflects you back to yourself without judgement, showing rather than telling, like a good play or novel. But, while a mirror does not judge, nether does it flatter.

Enter Ghost refuses to come to a verdict or ‘take sides’ in the Israeli Palestinian conflict. While apparently told from a Palestinian perspective, we have a clear idea of the social soup which lies beneath the false certainties of national or racial badges. Reading about a person of Dutch Palestinian descent, brought up in London, hassled at a checkpoint by an Israeli soldier who turns out to be from Leeds, you begin to wonder how people find it within themselves to become so bitterly divided. And yet, while the book declines to pass judgement, it does serve to hold up the sort of pitiless mirror that refuses to allow anyone the luxury of fooling themselves. The story culminates with the performance of Hamlet, where a group of Israeli soldiers arrive and then lurk with unknown intent. Are they here to shut the play down? Instead they watch, as Hamlet stages the performance in which he hopes his uncle Claudius will see his own misdemeanours. ‘The play’s the thing in which to catch the conscience of the King,’ Hamlet declares. The soldiers are not judged but they are invited to judge themselves. On this occasion at least, they seem to take the point, and withdraw.

Enter Ghost is more about ideas than action, but there is still excitement, tension and emotion. In particular, I found the production of Hamlet, with the soldiers hovering close by, to be very powerful. This is not an ‘issue’ novel, but neither is it escapism. It really finds a balance between a novel that takes you away, and a relevant book that engages with the world we live in. Enter Ghost is fully deserving of its various prize nominations. Highly recommend.

White Noise is a 1985 novel by Don DeLillo. It describes a period of crisis in the life of Jack Gladney, an American professor, working at a pleasant college campus in the small town of Blacksmith.

The first part of the book describes Jack’s daily life, his work as a leading exponent of Hitler studies, and his home life with his wife, and array of children and stepchildren.

All trouble seems to happen far from the College-on-the-Hill, disasters watched on television, terrible histories studied in rooms beside leafy quadrangles – until an accident at a nearby railway depot involving a cloud of toxic gas, changes Jack’s perspective.

White Noise is about the numerous problems we face in looking at things. At one extreme, there’s low brow news media, and prescient scenes showing rumour and disinformation accompanying the gas cloud crisis. Meanwhile, at the academic end of the scale, we’re asked how a subject like Hitler can be meaningfully studied in a tranquil college environment. An inability to understand the world extends from National Enquirer readers to academics.

In trying to review this book I kept coming back to the idea of ‘the most photographed barn in America’ which is supposed to stand picturesquely in the countryside near The College-on-the-Hill. Jack Gladney and one of his colleagues, comment on the fact that it’s impossible to see this barn for what it is, framed now as America’s most photographed. A book review is similar. White Noise might not be the most reviewed book in America, but it is relatively famous, establishing Don DeLillo’s reputation as a successful writer, winning a place on Time Magazine’s list of best modern novels. A book is tricky to review when it kind of pulls the rug out from under your efforts – suggesting that the more a book is reviewed the less likely we are to really see it – the weight of its reputation changing how we react.

Is this review pointless? I’m in two minds. Considering White Noise was written in 1985, the portrayal of misinformation spreading during the gas cloud crisis did feel forward looking. But the book was for me unnecessarily negative in suggesting that there was no reliable information anywhere. This was misleading in itself. We could include books of biting satire like White Noise in the misinformation category, since satire involves exaggeration, and exaggeration means distortion. Giving in to the idea that reliable information does not exist means accepting truth as whatever gets the most traction on the internet. Still, I don’t want to be negative myself. I did find White Noise an interesting book. It is certainly worth reading as an expression of concerns about trust in information – but I do think it could be seen as an illustration of the problem, as well as a commentary on it.

Rabbit Run, published in 1960, established its author, John Updike, as a major American novelist. The novel tells the story of Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, a former high-school basketball star, who finds himself in his mid-twenties, marooned in a mundane marriage and a boring sales job. We follow him for three months as he struggles to transcend the limits of his life in Brewer, Pennsylvania – which in practical terms means leaving his pregnant wife, getting his girlfriend pregnant, going back to his wife after she has a baby, and facing eventual domestic tragedy, caused in part by his flaky carry on.

The book, while consisting of the most intimate and closely observed details of human behaviour, has a detached tone. We float above events, seeing them from the perspective of different characters, sometimes switching viewpoint over the space of a paragraph. Although this could be confusing, I did see it as fitting to the story. Harry tries to rise above ordinary life that drags on him. The narrative style reflects Harry’s aspiration. Maybe he would like to be an omniscient author, up above events, describing them in the present tense, like John Updike.

So is Harry’s quest valid, given all the hurt it causes? About half way through Rabbit Run, we get an example of a man who has actually succeeded in leaving the mundane aspects of life behind. Jack Eccles is a young priest who is trying to help Harry repair his marriage. Unsure of what to do, Eccles goes to his boss, Fritz Kruppenbach, for advice. The ‘advice’ Eccles receives is to leave tedious, worldly complications to work out for themselves. The job of Church ministers is not to involve themselves in the ridiculous business of parishioner’s lives, but to demonstrate faith, as it exists above humanity’s petty affairs. Kruppenbach is smug and aloof, only serving to demonstrate that standing above life is not attractive, not something that anyone would reasonably seek to achieve. Eccles storms out of the meeting and continues his best efforts to help Harry. And good for him, you think. Now, mundane details look different. This is where true meaning and compassion can be found. Incidentally, the name Eccles serves as a reference to Ecclesiastes, a story in the Old Testament, where the narrator famously declares that ‘all is vanity’ in human affairs, and people should enjoy the simple pleasures of daily life, which are a gift from God.

I think the book continues to be relevant today as a commentary on efforts, both ancient and modern, to rise above everyday concerns. Traditional methods are represented by the book’s various religious characters. In a more modern vein, I’ve read that Updike wrote Rabbit Run partly as a reaction to Kerouac’s On The Road, where self-involved young people drive around America, searching for themselves, with no thought for those they leave behind. Rabbit himself tries an ‘on the road’ escape early in the book, after walking out on his wife. He drives all night, gets lost, buys some fuel and ends up right back where he started the following morning.

Rabbit Run expresses a desire to transcend ordinary life, while also suggesting – in the manner of Ecclesiastes – that the only meaningful escape available to us lies in ordinary things. In the end Rabbit Run does not promise any kind of silly nirvana, but it does suggest a more liberating and interesting way of looking at the non-nirvana in which we spend our days.

The Guest is a 2023 novel by Emma Cline. It tells the story of a young woman called Alex, a hustler trading on her looks. As the story opens, she’s about as close as she’s going to get to settling down, playing the role of dutiful girlfriend to Simon, a wealthy older man. They live at his house in a smart, Long Island beach resort, until a moment of unguarded exuberance at a party has Simon asking Alex to leave.

I soon abandoned my initial assumption that The Guest would be something like Pretty Woman. Do you remember that scene in Pretty Woman, where Edward mistakes Vivienne’s innocent flossing for drug taking? In The Guest there is no innocent flossing. And while Pretty Woman ends with Vivienne winning her rich man, The Guest starts with the rich man dumping the girl. Ejected from his house, she wanders around the local area, surviving on her wits, hoping for a reconciliation at Simon’s traditional Labor Day party five days hence.

I really enjoyed this book but found it hard to review – as in to describe what I liked about it. I was engrossed, as if reading a thriller, every page a cliffhanger. And yet this tension could arise from Alex milling about at boring, pretentious parties, causing very minor damage to valuable paintings, sitting in restaurants telling various men what they want to hear, pretending to be different women depending on the context in which she finds herself.

Maybe I found this book hard to write about, because a review seeks to tie a book down, while Alex, as a character, seeks to escape such a fate.

In her wandering on Long Island she adopts all kinds of roles as part of her little scams. Student girl, rich girl, respectable young lady, child minder, femme fatale. She wants the security of any of these roles but instinctively does not want to become marooned in them, as she was whilst living her seemingly perfect life with Simon. In reality that idyll involved lonely days on the beach while her middle-aged boyfriend pursued an obsessive exercise regime and worked long hours in his home office.

Just before Simon tells her to leave, Alex goes for a swim. Caught in a current, exhausted by futile, splashy efforts, she saves herself by giving up and drifting. This happens to deliver her into safer waters. Alex staggers out of the sea, onto a beach populated by people having a vaguely summery time, unaware that a life and death crisis had just occurred.

This sums up the book really, the combination of peace and danger in one scene. Life at Simon’s house was a lost Eden, and a hazardous quicksand of boredom and loneliness. Any of the other roles into which Alex dips her toe during the book might offer security, or become a trap to be escaped. In the end the security she seeks and the danger she flees are combined. There is a kind of peace in The Guest, like the misleading tranquility of a billionaire’s mansion:

‘So much effort and noise required to create this landscape, a landscape meant to evoke peace and quiet. The appearance of calm demanded an endless campaign of violent intervention.’

I really enjoyed The Guest, beautifully written, compelling and reflective on the nature of security, in a lugubrious corner of a dangerous world. Bravo.

The Corrections is a Jonathan Franzen novel from 2001, winner of awards and much critical praise. It tells the story of the Midwestern Lambert family – Alfred Lambert, a railway engineer, his wife Enid, and their children. The narrative moves between each main character, and between the family’s past, and turn of the millennium present. The sprawling story focuses on Enid’s efforts to persuade her adult children to return home for ‘one last Christmas’.

Correction is the process of righting things that are wrong. So, did The Corrections win awards for suggesting solutions to problems? That would be a no. Do I recommend you read this book because it will help you with shortcomings in your life? Once again, the answer is no. Like good fiction in general it won’t really correct anything. So why would I recommend you read it? Here’s why.

About half way through the book, during a section describing the Lambert siblings’ childhood, there is a long account of a terrible family meal. Alfred has just returned from a trip inspecting a decrepit railway network that his own efficient railway network is looking to buy. He gets back home and all the things that make him a brilliant railway engineer – practical competence, analytical lack of emotion, self discipline, decisiveness – metamorphose into the rather scary characteristics of an overbearing, stubborn figure trying, and failing, to be a good husband and father. Life has so many different scenarios and sets of circumstances. Whales are wonderful at swimming in the ocean, not so good if they ever had to live on land. Does that mean a whale is a good or bad creature? Does life allow for such judgements when it poses such varied challenges, requiring different attributes?

Anyhow, the family meal – Alfred, Enid, and their two young boys Chip and Gary sit down to a meal of liver and bacon, with a root vegetable called rutabaga. Gary eats with relish, proclaiming the food delicious. Meanwhile poor Chip, who seems to have some kind of food issue, can barely even look at the mess on his plate.

The book is like that meal, presenting people and their lives not as disgusting on one hand, or delicious on the other, but somehow both at the same time. It’s not even as simple as saying the characters are a mixture of good and bad. They are both of those things, to the exclusion of the other, depending on circumstances, or from the angle you look at them. That’s the irony of The Corrections. Deficiencies to correct, and qualities to celebrate, are never clearly defined.

This contradiction is explored in a long, painful and funny book, as Enid Lambert tries to persuade her grown up children to come back home and enjoy that one last Christmas. There is an end-of-an-era feeling, as we follow Albert and Enid into old age. But we also feel there are no straight forward answers and neat endings to problems. There is no last Christmas in this vague situation. There will always be another.

The Corrections is non judgemental in a judgemental age. Whether you consider this neutral quality good or bad is up to you. But I would ask this question – would you prefer a book that provided a final correction, or another Christmas?

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.

Politics On the Edge is a political memoir by Rory Stewart, published in September 2023.

I don’t usually go in for political memoir, but I recall Rory Stewart taking part in the Conservative Party leadership contest in 2019. He struck me as an interesting person, an unusual combination of insider – Eton, Oxford, the Army, diplomatic service – and outsider, an uneasy presence in a sleazy political world, personified – caricatured might be a better word – by Boris Johnson.

Perhaps I avoid political biography because I feel it likely to be an extension of the author’s predisposition to campaign for their policy, or party. To adapt a quote often used to describe the difference between politics and academia – ‘political memoir is statement above argument, a good novel is argument above statement’. Instinctively, I seem to be an argument above statement person.

But I do see that statement people are more likely to do things, rather than just read about them.

Politicians like to present themselves as doing stuff. Rory is an incredible doer. I could only watch in admiration as our man governed Afghan provinces, planned flood response and broadband provision in Cumbria, ran ministerial departments, administered billions of pounds of foreign aid, pursued measures to help the environment, and tried to improve the prison system. I was exhausted just reading about his activities. And yet… he always seems to feel that in whatever position he finds himself, the real power lies elsewhere. After Afghanistan, he becomes a Harvard academic, trying to influence government policy by sitting next to prominent politicians at dinner and giving them advice. Those efforts come to nothing. So he decides to become a politician himself. When it turns out that backbench MPs can do very little except vote as directed, he thinks being a minister of state, or a member of the Security Council might help. But the frustrations continue.

It is this ambivalence that makes Politics on the Edge more like a political novel than a memoir. There’s a pervasive sense of mystery about who actually has the power to do things. This made me think of War and Peace, no less, where Tolstoy presents Napoleon not as a powerful man, but as an individual at the centre of a vast web of circumstance bearing down upon him, which in effect means he has less control over his life than a humble foot soldier in his army.

Yes, there are statements of opinion in Politics On the Edge, about Brexit, prisons, foreign aid, colleagues who are impressive, others who are disastrous. But ironically for a political author who is such a doer, there is also a sense of argument coming above statement. Some reviewers have seen this as a weakness, judging Rory Stewart as appreciating problems but presenting no real answers. I don’t see it like that. This is a rare political book where someone in the business of statements, writes a book of conflicting arguments and leaves you to think about them. A life of manic activity builds to the crisis of the 2019 leadership contest, and a televised debate, where migraine-racked and out manoeuvred by cunning political snakes, Rory’s promising leadership bid falls apart. This is followed by a kind of meditative peace. The early sections of the book might make you feel that running provinces in Afghanistan and trying to become prime minister is the only worthwhile course in life. And, of course, there is much to be said for being active and getting involved. But the book’s conclusion has an acceptance that you can do everything and still end up doing nothing. No need to brood on not doing well enough, not making your choice of university, not making defence secretary, not becoming prime minister, not keeping up with the Kardashians. Life isn’t about that.

‘I read about the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, and The Tale of Genji, which makes me think about those Japanese councillors who retire from the court, to make gardens and prepare tea.’

Politics On the Edge is a compelling account of a particular moment in British political history, described by someone who was enough of an insider to take us in there, and enough of an outsider to stand back and show us what happened. The author is involved and doing, while also observing and thinking – a combination that makes for a fascinating book.

August Blue is a 2023 novel by Deborah Levy, book of the year according to the Guardian, Independent, and Time magazine. It tells the story of Elsa M. Anderson, a famous concert pianist who, mid-performance in Vienna, walks off stage, leaving behind the debilitating treadmill of what was meant to be a glamorous music career. Through her subsequent wanderings around Europe, she tries to come to terms with the relentless path on which her adoptive father/piano teacher had placed her at a very young age.

While pondering on Elsa’s odyssey, I happened to hear the Gary Jules version of Mad World by Tears for Fears. It struck me that if there were a literary version of Mad World then August Blue would be it. Like the song, the tone of the book is flat and peaceful, a peace that comes from exhaustion, rather than resolution. Any madness is not of the active kind, insufficient energy remaining for that. The atmosphere is one of passiveness and waiting. I found the book – in the words of Mad World – kind of funny and kind of sad. There are allusions to childhood angst, adoption, lack of parental love, ‘children waiting for the day they feel good’.

Does August Blue go anywhere or say anything? Maybe not. Perhaps it’s not interested anymore in getting up bright and early for the daily races. Elsa’s meandering thoughts sometimes focus on her interest in the choreographer Isadora Duncan – who considered a dance not worth dancing if words could explain what the performance was about. Dance is a movement that doesn’t go anywhere in the M25 sense. The same is true of August Blue. The book has the peace of an Antarctic explorer who, giving up on a desire to reach some arbitrary, ice-blasted point on a map, has decided to lie down in the snow. If there is a development through the book, it comes in the slow metamorphosis of Antarctic explorer’s snowy repose, into relaxed beach goer’s sunny repose. In this story, progress comes in giving up on progress, reaching a goal by escaping the daily races.

Blue August is a stylish book, beautifully written, atmospheric and affecting. Whether you read to relax, or to think about themes, write essays, or post reviews, this book has something for you.