Tom Lake is Ann Patchett’s 2023 novel about a Michigan cherry farmer. When the pandemic denies the farm its usual workers, Lara Nelson’s grown up daughters return to help out with cherry harvesting. Lara passes the time talking about her short-lived, youthful acting career, and a love affair with an actor who went on to become famous.

Initially I have to admit to finding the novel bemusing. Lara’s account of her past, in polished prose with formal layout of dialogue, did not suggest somebody telling a story to people listening. It was a jolt to emerge from what felt like a novel, to find myself on a cherry farm, required to believe that the preceding section had been a story told while fruit picking. Did Lara have different voices for different characters, like Bernard Cribbins on Jackanory; or, in a more up to date analogy, Stephen Fry doing his thing for Audible? Even though it took a while, I did come to an accommodation with this not very believable narrative style. If the book felt artificial at times, it was very good at showing how reality and artifice tend to hang together. For example, we see good acting achieved by people not trying too hard to act, or people in real life putting on the brave face necessary for skirting over unpleasant realities.

The idea of something real and substantial co-existing with shaky illusion, leads me to what I found the most interesting aspect of Tom Lake – the idea of security. Acting and farming seem very different, one a lot of airy pretence, the other rooted down in the soil. But they are actually similar in both being highly insecure professions. An actor never knows where the next job is coming from, while a farmer is at the mercy of weather and market forces. In Tom Lake, the worlds of acting and farming are fittingly brought together when the characters make reference to Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard – a play about a lovely nineteenth century cherry orchard on the verge of being swept away by change. And yet in the twenty first century, here we are, still in a cherry orchard. We get plenty of insight into cherries as large scale agri-business, which doesn’t make the fragile orchard less lovely or enduring.

At one point, Lara’s husband, Joe muses on the worst year he can remember for the local farming community :

‘Ninety-five was the year that wiped people out. All summer long it was perfect – the perfect temperatures, the perfect amount of rain, not a single blight on any tree on any farm. The crop was huge, like nothing anyone had seen in decades, and the price went through the floor.’

The perfect year was a disaster, which means that difficult years have their own compensating security.

So shifting sands can offer solid ground. This novel, like all novels, is a concoction of pretence, but it can still offer something substantial. Despite its obvious artifice, I ended up enjoying and admiring Tom Lake. It was thematically intricate and cerebral, but also easy-going, comforting, optimistic, a reassuring book for uncertain times.

Brave New World, published in 1932, is Aldous Huxley’s famous vision of a dark, future society, where, ironically, everyone is happy and fulfilled.

Let’s get one thing out of the way first. I don’t like Aldous Huxley’s writing style. He tends to stuff his paragraphs with redundant or repeated words. Look at how many times ‘the’ is repeated on the first page. And, from many possible examples, look at this passage, describing Brave New World residents visiting a ‘savage reservation’.

…their faces inhuman with daubing of scarlet, black and ochre, two Indians came running along the path. Their black hair was braided with fox fur and red flannel. Cloaks of turkey feathers fluttered from their shoulders; huge feather diadems exploded gaudily round their heads. With every step they took came the clink and rattle of their silver bracelets, their heavy necklaces of bone and turquoise beads. They came on without a word, running quietly in their deer skin moccasins’

Seven repetitions of ‘their’ in four sentences.

Right, I’ve got that off my chest.

So, after looking at how he says things, let’s turn to what Huxley is saying. Brave New World describes a society where government control has ended family life. Human reproduction is a factory process, engineering individuals with different intelligence levels to happily fit into a hierarchy of employment. Sex is a recreational activity. Society conditions people to enjoy easy-going, promiscuous relationships, whilst rarely feeling loneliness, or unhappiness. A drug called soma, a kind of alcohol, LSD amalgam, shorn of unpleasant side effects, acts to support eternal contentment in the present moment, without past regrets, or future hopes.

Some aspects of this society made sense to me as a possible scenario. Some did not. The bits that did not mainly concerned the idea of creating individuals with different abilities. Huxley seems to see ability as a very fixed quantity, which can be decanted in greater or lesser amounts into people. This didn’t seem true to life, in the present, or future. As just a brief nod to the real complexities involved, you could think of chaotic individuals with epsilon competence, enjoying alpha-plus confidence, who reach the heights of government. Sometimes it’s not how good you are, it’s how good you think you are that counts. Ability is too diffuse a thing to conveniently measure out.

However, other aspects of the Brave New World society did have a ring of truth. Control of relationships in the interests of authority was interesting, because this has happened historically. For example, there’s the idea of romantic love, which historians suggest was largely invented, or at least idealised, in medieval Europe, as a way for the Church to subdue family power. Family dynasties might want to make politic, arranged marriages in their long term interests. Romance, tends to set young love free, to make any choice it pleases. And young love is not well known for making sober assessments in the family interest. More recently in the UK we have seen a similar process in the use of inheritance tax, particularly after World War One. Aside from contributing a relatively small amount of money to the exchequer, inheritance tax acts to prevent families handing money down generations. This marked the real ending of aristocratic power in Britain, and the final consolidation of modern state government. So, it is true that authority has manipulated family relationships for political ends, and may continue to do so.

Also interesting is the Brave New World idea of happiness in not looking forward or back. There are, indeed, many modern health and spiritual movements – based around mindfulness or meditation for example – that emphasise living in the present moment. Alternative health, aside from its useful aspects, became a surprisingly problematic area during the pandemic, a breeding ground for covid conspiracies, which could extend to a denial that the illness existed. Carried to an extreme, you can imagine the rise of cold-hearted contentment in a drug-assisted present moment, past and future ignored, with people conditioned to believe that unhappiness and illness are not real.

Overall, Brave New World is a mixed bag, in some ways perceptive about human nature, in other ways not really seeming to understand people at all. And then there’s that writing style….

Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a novella by Truman Capote, published in 1958. A New York writer recalls a time living in his first apartment, setting out on his career with nothing more than a few sharpened pencils and a lot of youthful ambition. That humble apartment was special to him as a place where he could sit down and work on becoming the person he wanted to be.

The writer recounts his memories of Holly Golightly, a neighbour in the same apartment building. His efforts to create a new version of himself at his desk, mirror Holly’s much more exuberant adventures in the same direction. Holly’s uncompromising mission to be herself ironically involves pretending to be someone she’s not. Originally a country girl from Texas, Holly creates a party girl, socialite, Golightly persona, which feels more her than the Lulamae she used to be.

So we start to feel that being yourself often involves living as someone else. If you aspire to be, for example, a writer, you have to pretend to be a writer before actually becoming one. And even after making it, the initial faking tends to linger, maybe in an imposter syndrome. The ‘real’ writer often feels insecure, or a bit of a fraud, pursuing a precarious career with no sick pay or pension plans. Holly Golightly is also a fraud. Lulamea plays Holly Golightly with the kind of all-in method acting that any expensive American acting school would be proud of. But alongside this commitment, Miss Golightly remains a pretence, a fun game. Similarly, if you ever become a proper writer, labouring under deadlines and other mundane realities, Truman Capote seems to suggest that something playful and pretend should remain in your writing, helping it stay enjoyable for writer and reader. After all, a novel is a game of make-believe. Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a fascinating play, about ambition, disappointment, consummation, freedom and identity.

As for the quality of writing, from age eleven Truman Capote spent hours practising writing like other children practised violin. Breakfast at Tiffany’s is beautifully written. I can’t resist quoting a quick example. Here are a few lines from the end of the book, describing a storm, which might delay Holly’s final flight out of New York:

‘The sky was red Friday night, it thundered, and Saturday, departing day, the city swayed in a squall-like downpour. Sharks might have swum through the air, though it seemed improbable that a plane could penetrate it.’

There is so much in those two sentences – direct description of a storm, indirect suggestion of the dangers Holly faces, and maybe even a hidden reassurance. According to the rhyme, a red sky at night usually means the following day will be a nice one.

Reading Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a delight for shepherds, party girls, writers, pharmacy staff like me who want to be writers – anyone really.

Stalky and Co. by Rudyard Kipling, is a collection of stories set at a public school, preparing boys for either British military officer training, or imperial public service. Based on Kipling’s school days at Devon’s United Services College, the stories first appeared in magazines between 1897 and 1899, before publication as a book in 1899. A trio of pupils, Stalky, McTurk and Beetle, feature as the central characters.

This book, and Kipling in general, is somewhat controversial today. But it is interesting that Stalky and Co. was equally controversial when it was first published. Robert Buchanan in The Contemporary Review considered the book vulgar, brutal and savage. Henry James thought it deplorable, Somerset Maugham, odious. Harsh criticism also came from such luminaries as A.C. Benson, Edmund Wilson, and George Sampson, author of the Concise History of English Literature. These reactions do not reflect a once respectable, now outmoded book. It has never been respectable.

I would suggest that Stalky and Co. might offend now, and when it was published, because it is actually an unflinching portrayal of the contradictions that lurk beneath proper facades.

A ‘good’ pupil at the Stalky school would play cricket, follow the rules, respect authority. There is more than a suggestion that this attitude simply puts boys on a production line, carrying them to a likely death on a foreign field. One master objects to an old boy of the school describing to current pupils the violent end of another old boy during battle. That sort of thing is undermining of morality and good order. You can’t have boys realising what they are signing up for. It might stop them working towards the goals their teachers set for them.

And then there’s all the contradictions involved in a school aiming to produce leaders, while thrashing its students into respectful obedience. One story focuses on a group of boys who are always late for breakfast. Their punishment is to do military drill with an old army veteran. Ironically, this is the only example of actual military activity that goes on here. When a visiting general suggests that the school should have a cadet corp, it is these naughty drill boys who are the only pupils ready to form such a group. And the corp leader is the naughtiest boy of all, Stalky himself. It is Stalky who eventually translates his years of sneaky, frequently vile, school pranks into an highly respectable army career, where tactics of deception and deflection win the day with minimum risk to life, especially his own.

And these ironies around respectability extend to the book’s language – my favourite aspect of Stalky and Co. The dialogue is a complete mishmash of highfalutin Latin, French, quotes from classic authors, and low-brow, local Devon dialect. Stalky and his followers mix all of this language indiscriminately together in an exuberant teenage slang. It’s like the approach the headmaster takes in supporting Beetle’s obvious literary talents, giving him the run of his library, recommending nothing and prohibiting nothing. This is a good training in not being too ready to classify writing into easy categories of respectable or unworthy. Yes, Henry James, Somerset Maugham and people who write fancy histories of English Literature are all correct in their judgements of Stalky and Co. And yet… good writing is often not proper at its heart. It does tend to challenge assumptions in an uncomfortable way. That’s what Stalky and Co. does. I admired it.

Darkness at Noon, published in 1940, is Arthur Koestler’s famous novel based on the events of Stalin’s 1930s purge of supposed enemies of the Soviet state. Millions of ordinary people suffered in this terrible episode, as did important figures in the Soviet government. For the famous there were show trials prosecuting trumped up charges, seeking someone to blame for the fact that socialist utopia had yet to arrive. Darkness at Noon describes the fate of a fictional government official following his arrest.

Do novels change the world? Not often. But maybe this one did.

Koestler wrote the book in France during difficult circumstances at the outbreak of World War Two. An upbringing in Austria, and a history as a Communist sympathising journalist, caused the French to imprison him in an internment camp for undesirable aliens. Koestler’s girlfriend at the time, the young artist Daphne Hardy, managed to get the Darkness at Noon manuscript, written in German, back to London, where Jonathan Cape published her English translation. After the war, the book became a massive bestseller. The Nobel Prize-winning writer Francois Mauriac claimed that record breaking French sales led to the Communist Party losing the French general election of 1946. In the UK, it appears that the Information Research Department, a branch of the British Foreign Office responsible for covert propaganda, purchased thousands of copies to boost the book’s profile, and distributed foreign language editions through embassies.

This is quite a revelation for me. I had always assumed that good novels tend to be unsuitable for propaganda purposes, characteristically dealing with shades of grey rather than the black and white of political slogans. And yet here we have a classic novel which the British government used in covert propaganda campaigns. So, what is this book like?

Nikolai Rubashov, one of the original architects of his country’s communist revolution decades previously, reflects on his life following arrest. Rubashov’s thoughts deal with all kinds of political and moral complications, but his basic insight is clear – he considers too much clarity of purpose in politics as potentially dangerous. Problems arise when people seek, or are promised, a final outcome so wonderful that any means become acceptable in achieving it. Now, this isn’t a spoiler, but if someone is arrested by secret police, charged with plotting the overthrow of a ruthless political regime, and interrogated by fanatics looking to find a scapegoat for social problems, then it’s pretty clear how things are going to end. But by the time you finish Darkness at Noon you’re thinking that happy endings are positively unhealthy anyway, since they encourage ruthless means to reach them. Reassurance comes from the fact that Rubashov finally sees the advantages of not living life in terms of fairytale happy ever-afters.

Darkness at Noon is an enthralling and powerful novel. The fact that it has nothing of the simple-minded political slogan about it, makes its case all the more persuasive – the case for viewing politics as the Greek philosopher Plutarch once described it:

They are wrong who think that politics is like an ocean voyage or a military campaign, something to be done with some particular end in view, something which leaves off as soon as that end is reached. It is not a public chore, to be got over with. It is a way of life. It is the life of a domesticated political and social creature who is born with a love for public life, with a desire for honour, with a feeling for his fellows; and it lasts as long as need be.

Another story on the 2023 Locus short story prize short list

The Goldfish Man is a short story by Maureen Mchugh which appeared in the March 2022 edition of Uncanny Magazine. The story is on the 2023 Locus Award short list for best short story.

Sima, a Los Angeles ceramicist, has fallen on hard times during the pandemic. Living in her car, Sima still manages to produce some pieces of work for sale, using the facilities at a local pottery business called Great Earth. Sima also receives help from a homeless man called Lane. He looks after her when she becomes ill, taking no notice of warnings to stay away and avoid infection. It seems that Lane is not worried about Earth diseases because he is not from Earth at all.

Sima assumes he’s delusional.

Once Sima recovers, Lane says he is leaving, with the suggestion that his destination is another planet or dimension, rather than, say, Las Vegas.

So, is Lane delusional or is he an alien?

The story is good at combining down-to-Earth and other worldly. Sima is a ceramicist, someone who uses Earth in her work. She designs complex, fret-worked double vases, so that a candle placed inside throws complex light patterns around a room. Yet these other-worldly light effects come from good solid Earth.

As well as a ceramicist, Sina is also in a sense an alien. All she had to do to become an alien is to lose her house. Lane could be an alien in the sense of being from another planet, but when you’re homeless you are a long way away from home, in your space ship Subaru hatchback.

A thoughtful story, nicely done

A couple of reviews of short stories nominated for the 2023 Locus short story prize.

The Monster in the Shape of a Boy is a short story by Hannah Yang. It appeared in the May 2022 edition of Apex Magazine, and reached the short list for the Locus 2023 short story prize.

The story is set in a village which has to deal with aggressive shape-shifting creatures. Sometimes people might find themselves having to kill monsters who look exactly like themselves. Young Peng finds this difficult, despite training from his father, Baba, a monster-slayer for hire. One day Peng meets a monster in the shape of himself but is unable to kill him. Baba has to step in.

Baba is not pleased. Peng is twelve now and should be doing his own slaying.

Intensive training follows, with Peng undertaking various gruesome tasks to toughen him up.

Then one day Peng faces another monster Peng. He is a different boy now. You get the feeling that Peng will fight. He is no longer the scaredy-cat he once was. But you also get the feeling that the anti-Peng has won, because the former, gentle Peng no longer exists. He has been consumed by the aggressive version of himself. It’s a bit like a political party in opposition making themselves more like the party in power to win votes – but then wondering if it’s worth it.

A nicely written story with an interesting circularity

The Grapes of Wrath is John Steinbeck’s novel about people displaced by economic and environmental collapse in the central United States during the 1930s. The book alternates chapters that describe the disaster as a whole, with chapters focusing on the struggles of a particular Oklahoma farming family. Driven off their land by drought and bank foreclosure, the Joads sell everything they can’t take with them, buy a car and make a hazardous journey to California, where they hope to find work, money and security.

The Grapes of Wrath has become a standard entry on best book lists, and a feature of American school syllabuses. Perhaps this is partly because Steinbeck wrote such a definitive story, echoing what storytelling was originally all about. In 1949, ten years after The Grapes of Wrath appeared, Joseph Campbell published The Hero With a Thousand Faces, presenting the history of storytelling as a kind of training for people who are about to face challenges. And a basic challenge in life is the process of leaving home and setting out on a journey into the big, wide world.

The Grapes of Wrath is a farming family Exodus, which closely follows an ancient pattern of stories about people leaving their home and heading towards a promised, and dangerous, land. There is a very interesting twist with this particular Exodus, however, and that lies with the character of Ma Joad. In a Joseph Campbell scenario, the typical hero is a young man. But as the Joads travel across America and then struggle to survive in California, it is Ma who holds the family together, organising everything and encouraging everyone on. Ma emerges as the leader, Pa becoming peripheral by contrast. I found it fascinating that someone who would not ordinarily have left home, who is the embodiment of home in many ways, becomes the person who stands up best to the perils of the journey. Ma really shows the complexity and subtlety of The Grapes of Wrath where home is not a fixed place, but a state of mind that goes with people on their journey.

The Grapes of Wrath is a universal story, expressed through a particular situation, brought to life with meticulous research. A deserved classic, relevant in times of upheaval when people are displaced and on the move, which is pretty much all the time

Catch 22, published in 1961, is Joseph Heller’s novel about American airmen flying bombing missions over Italy during World War Two.

In many ways this is a book about fear. There is much to be afraid of in Catch 22, most obviously having to climb into an aircraft and fly it over places where people on the ground are determined to shoot you down. Amazingly, not everyone is scared by this situation. While the book’s central character, Captain John Yossarian, is terrified every time he steps into an aircraft, other airmen seem quite relaxed in their work. Some actually enjoy themselves, and fly recklessly when they don’t have to, looking for additional thrills. Some are terrified by the thought of flying, but are alright when they are actually flying. Adding to this confusion are the scary accidents and illnesses that can happen to people on apparently safe, solid ground, all of which causes Yossarian at one point to think that getting through the average day is a bit like flying through gunfire over Bologna. The book portrays fear and threat as existing everywhere, skewed by varying individual perceptions of risk. Sometimes dangers are imagined, sometimes they are real. Danger results from both worrying too much, and too little.

The consideration of fear meant more to me than the satirical material – about corrupt military authority, or heartless capitalism – that the book is famous for. Take, for example, the Catch 22 after which the book is named. The Catch describes a weird logic trap that keeps airmen doing dangerous missions. They can be relieved from flying if stress has driven them mad. But if they say that stress has driven them mad and they can’t fly missions anymore, that means they are clearly sensible and sane – because who in their right mind would want to undertake hazardous bombing missions? And being sane, they will have to keep flying. It’s the people who keep flying without complaint who are really mad, but as they don’t ask to be grounded, they have to keep flying. So everyone keeps flying.

I was a bit suspicious of all this. It seemed more of a fancy literary device than a reflection of reality. Wondering how many people were actually relieved of duty for mental health reasons during World War Two, I did a search, and found figures quoted by the National WWII Museum in New Orleans, suggesting that roughly 40% of medical discharges for American military personnel during the war were due to psychological injury. So, the idea that someone could not be discharged for combat stress is not true. For me, the book’s satirical elements characteristically took a kernel of truth, and expanded it to less than truthful proportions.

Joseph Heller himself said that when he was serving as an airman during the war, he never had a bad officer. His real wartime experience did not reflect a situation where ruthless commanders would keep their men flying no matter what. He described his book as a satire of 1950s McCarthyism and the Cold War, rather than a reflection on the wrongs of military organisation during World War Two. That might be so, but, for me, bringing the Cold War into it doesn’t really make the idea of Catch 22 any more realistic. John Steinbeck said that in satire ‘you have to restrict the picture,’ and that’s what happens here.

I had mixed views on Catch 22. Nevertheless, I did admire its unexpected relevance to the mental heath and anxiety problems which have become more prominent in our own times. I would even go so far as to say the book could increase our understanding of these issues.

The Survivalists is Kashana Cauley’s 2023 novel about a young New York lawyer questioning her direction in life. She starts dating the owner of a coffee business, whose two housemates are survivalists – people who spend their time preparing for disasters and societal breakdown.

If you’re wanting a story where New York succumbs to something like a zombie virus, leading to chaotic scenes of soldiers barricading bridges, while choppers fly overhead, then this is not the book for you. The setting is a resolutely un-apocalyptic New York, where people struggle with jobs and relationships. Disaster would be easier to deal with if we all knew what it looked like. The survivalists described in the story spend their time preparing for what never seems to happen, while getting blindsided by unexpected developments. The book satirises the cliches of disaster, and undercuts our clumsy attempts to achieve security. People might prepare for life’s uncertainty by spending a fortune on going to law school in the hope of landing a secure job. That job might never materialise, leaving the law-school survivalist with debts they can’t pay. Going to law school is a bit like building a bunker in the back garden, designed for a nuclear war, but flooding in heavy rain.

The Survivalists is an interesting novel, often funny when the cliches of danger collide with the unpredictable challenges of real life. It’s also timely, exploring the concerns of an anxious age, confirming that while the ground beneath our feet is indeed wobbly, there is nothing to be gained by worrying about something that will probably never happen. I found The Survivalists a nuanced and oddly reassuring read.