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.’

The Guest is beautifully written mediation on the nature of security in 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.

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.

The Bee Sting is a novel by Paul Murray, shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize. Set mostly in a small Irish town not far from Dublin, it unravels the tangled history of the Barnes family, who have enjoyed decades of wealth and local influence, thanks to their VW dealership. Now, leaner times have arrived.

There is much looking to the past in The Bee Sting, and I’ll start with some personal nostalgia the book provoked in me. Believe it or not this involves the TV show Friends. Fairly early in my read through, I recalled the moment where Monica, squeakily indignant about something or other, causes Chandler to advise her, ‘only dogs can hear you now’.

Let me explain.

We begin in the present day, focusing on teenager Cass Barnes and her relationship dramas. For a few months, she has a boyfriend called Rowan, who, though no Oscar Wilde, does occasionally come out with some interesting facts. One of his observations involves dogs and their sense of smell. Dogs have a hugely better sense of smell than humans, which, as Rowan points out, would make their perception of past and future different to ours.

‘They must have a whole different understanding of time, because for them the past is literally still around. When a dog looks at the world it must see all these presences gradually fading out. Like a sky full of contrails.’

You could say the perspective of The Bee Sting is like that of Rowan’s dogs. In fittingly freeform writing which might lack full stops, or muddle together first, second and third person narration, things do not simply start and finish. Past hurts linger, hidden aspects of personality re-emerge, eccentric ladies with psychic abilities see events in advance, like a dog picking up a scent long before their human owners are aware of anything.

I pondered on this doggy outlook. Rowan thinks it’s a good thing, because from a scent-centric point of view, the nice times in our lives tend to stay with us for longer. There are also suggestions throughout the book that looser perception might make us more tolerant and collaborative. I thought this an interesting idea, but I did have some reservations. If you are taking dogs as a model, then forgive me if I come over as a canine pedantic, but they are pack animals just like humans. Their floaty, nasal insights don’t stop them snarling at each other and engaging in doggy violence. A lost owner is lost, even if their scent lingers. A bereft dog is still bereft. And as for the suggestion that thinking in terms of the olfactory, might give a pointer towards more openness and collaboration, well there’s the irony that a dog’s sense of smell is often involved in territorial marking. Picky? What can I tell you. The dog thing, which serves as a template for much of The Bee Sting, didn’t quite work for me.

Still I got the point. And there’s also the fact that dog perception isn’t simply held up as a standard we humans should aim for. When psychic Rose foresees bad things happening, these premonitions are characteristically marked by the appearance of a ferocious-looking black dog. Dogs are presented as ambivalent, both helpful and frightening. Maybe The Bee Sting, in the way of good novels, is not writing some kind of prescription for how we should see the world. It’s more a picture to be looked at from different angles. Seeing things in less defined terms is useful, until the potential for confusion brings its own problems.

I started out wondering if this was a book with a message that only dogs could hear, but ended up feeling that The Bee Sting could find an appreciative human audience. Though its central idea might be a bit of a stretch, generally speaking it’s a woof from me

The Shipping News by Annie Proulx, is a Pulitzer Prize winning novel, published in 1993. Set initially in a small New York State town, it tells the story of Quoyle, a young man struggling to make a living as a reporter at the Mockingburg Record. Quoyle’s life is beset by a series of disasters – the suicide of his uncaring parents, marriage to a sociopathic woman who tries to sell their young daughters, before she dies in a car crash while fleeing to Florida with her latest boyfriend. Quoyle is used to enduring bad treatment, but even he is reeling. An aunt persuades him to make a new start in Newfoundland, ancestral home of the Quoyle family. He gets a job with The Gammy Bird, a local Newfoundland paper, writing up car crashes and shipping news. On this shaky basis, a better life begins to come together in a harsh but beautiful place.

Summarised like this, the events of Quoyle’s life sound gothically newsworthy, the sort of thing his newspaper bosses would love. To the man himself, he simply endures a series of horrible setbacks. Quoyle doesn’t have the confidence to believe his life deserves attention. And yet here we are reading about him. Will he come to believe that his story has value?

Settling in Newfoundland, Quoyle tries to get along. He covers a few dramatic stories, while personally leading a quiet life, looking after the children, renovating houses, going to the occasional riotous party, meeting Wavey, a young woman who seems to like him.

Quoyle’s life back in Mockingburg had been the stuff of tabloid headlines. His new girlfriend, Wavey, has herself escaped a potentially tabloid headline-grabbing relationship. Really their joint achievement in the end is not to become noteworthy in those garish terms, but to finally believe that they are both deserving of happiness. They don’t become the sort of people who might apparently be written about – but who wants that? Their non-story is better.

The Shipping News is a beautifully written novel, with much to say about the complex way stories work in our lives. In many ways we see the dark side of stories, the way they exaggerate, distort, and focus on the worst of humanity. But there is also a sense for the truth hidden in stories. For example, an imaginary white dog terrorises Quoyle’s daughter Bunny, appearing in her dreams, or in the shape of some random object she sees. Bunny makes drama out of nothing. And yet it is characteristic of The Shipping News that real and imaginary drama is hard to tell apart. Imaginary dogs take on something like reality when old Bill Pretty describes to Quoyle a myth linked to a dangerous rock on the Newfoundland coast, called the Komatik Dog.

“You come at it just right it looks for all the world like a big sled dog on the water, his head up looking around. They used to say that he was waiting for a wreck, that he’d come to life and swim out and swallow up the poor drowning people.”

While the story of the Komatik Dog is as fanciful as Bunny’s imaginary white dog, it reflects the real possibility of shipwreck. Silly, melodramatic stories need not be nonsense. They can hold a truth we would be wise to heed.

During the Christmas holidays of 1825, the Royal Institution organised a short programme of science lectures for young people. This became an annual event, which continues today. For the 1848 season, Michael Faraday gave a series of six talks called The Chemical History of a Candle. They were published in book form in 1861, soon after Faraday had repeated the series for Christmas 1860.

Ernest Hemingway once said that someone starting a book should write down the truest sentence they know and work out from there. In this beguiling series of lectures, with visual illustration from experiments involving heat, cold, balloons, explosion and implosion, Faraday explores the physics and chemistry of a candle, which he presents as a tiny model for more general processes. In effect, he follows Hemingway’s advice, taking a candle as the truest of things and working outwards. I now know that candle wax is what’s called a hydrocarbon, a substance consisting of hydrogen and carbon in combination. Lighting a candle wick causes the wax to melt and vaporise into a hot gas. This causes the hydrocarbons to start breaking down into their constituent parts of hydrogen and carbon, which are drawn up into the flame. Here they combine with oxygen in the air to produce water (hydrogen and oxygen) and carbon dioxide (carbon and oxygen). Candle combustion is basically the same as any combustion anywhere, including that driving life. As I write this review, and as you read it, we breath in atmospheric oxygen to fan our metabolic flame, breaking down food hydrocarbons to produce energy and heat, with water vapour and carbon dioxide as by-products, which we breathe out.

Faraday takes apart the process of candle burning, and the products that result, demonstrating many clever techniques of division. Fascinatingly though, Faraday doesn’t simply take things apart, but also shows them acting together as a whole. For example, he makes reference to nitrogen in the atmosphere, an abundant gas that actually suppresses burning. How does a fire suppressant gas contribute to the process of combustion? Well, an atmosphere of oxygen alone would produce an explosive, tinderbox world. Nitrogen alone would make it impossible to support the combustion that supports life. An atmosphere of oxygen existing alongside a larger proportion of nitrogen, allows a candle to burn in a controlled way for hours. I found myself considering life in these terms. There are many circumstances holding us back from shining our various lights, more problems than solutions no doubt. Although nitrogen is the dominant gas, in combination with a little oxygen, we have the chance to burn with a steady flame.

The lectures do invite this sort of thinking, the penultimate lecture encouraging the audience to consider themselves as candles and spread some illumination around.

This book was a delightful surprise. It turns out that a candle is one of the truest things I know.