It felt at times as if 2023 was a year in which pop music mattered to the mainstream in a way it hasn’t for a little while: Taylor Swift’s Eras tour led to her being Time‘s person of the year, and to innumerable think pieces and op-eds about her artistic, economic and cultural significance; The Beatles released their last song, and if the hoop-la around it could not compete with their previous reunion in the 1990s, the event’s cut-through was still remarkable for a band that had last played a show together nearly seventy years ago. Pop had cut-through this year, in other words; it wasn’t just background music.
But neither of those banner events involved an album, and pop today is driven more than at any time since the Beatles’ own heyday by the single. Albums can sometimes feel almost a legacy format, and the artists who put most effort into them often feel as if they are illuminating manuscripts in the age of Gutenberg. For all that, however, 2023 also seemed to me a moment of real creativity in the pop album, in which its long-standing sibling ‘& rock’, fell definitively by the wayside: even at Glastonbury, that last redoubt of the ageing rocker, changes were being rung, with Gabriels, Ezra Collective and Rina Sawayamaeasily its highlights. (They all had albums out this year, too.)
Whatever popular music is now and might be in future, it has shaken off something of the past – and with Eras, as so often, Swift herself seems to sense that almost intuitively, shrugging off the weight of her previous two decades’ work as she recasts herself for the next – to be more self-confident, and more votal, than it has felt in some time. I can’t claim my favourite five albums of the year best showcase this vitality; but they’re blummin’ good nonetheless.
Jaimie Branch – Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die (World War)
I begin the countdown with sadness, though, since this incredible record is posthumous – we will hear no more new music from Branch, who died in August at just 39 years old. This album makes almost painfully clear what a loss this really is: Branch’s trumpet here sits amid often close to a cacophony of other intoxicating, roiling, joyful sounds; and yet always cuts through, always leads the way, always excites. A virtuoso unafraid of melody, and a jazz artists committed to accessibility, Branch created in this record a testament for the ages as to what vision aligned with vitality can achieve: it is fun to listen to this album, even as it is also so obviously musically complex, rewarding and progressive. There aren’t many records, still, that I hit play on and feel better from the first note; in 2023, this one entered that pantheon.
Blake Mills – Jelly Road
It’s pretty unusual for two largely instrumental albums to make it into my top five, but here’s 2023’s second. I’m not alone in this, either: instrumental music has, in the age of Spotify playlists and WFH, really been having a moment. Mills’s offering is more plangent than Branch’s, less sonically expansive – it has a dusty, almost 1970s aesthetic – but his virtuosity is no less on show, yet is equally contextualised within a set of compositions which are generous to the listener. For all its folk and Americana stylings, Jelly Road is if anything more adventurous than the on-the-face-of-it more avant-garde Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die (World War): there are moments of real shift here, of note choice and song structure that genuinely wrong-foot the listener, but in a way so pleasing and interesting that they act not as tricks but hooks. That’s a rare achievement, and the album succeeds in making its play on almost every track.
Caroline Polachek – Desire, I Want to Turn Into You
It is extremely hard not to get a little lost in this album, which seems to consist of hit singles from start to finish, but also to be populated exclusively by art rock that only nerdy kids with turntables will want to listen to. Polachek sets out not just to inhabit desire but to make the listener also feel it, almost as an abstraction (the album’s title is also its project). She achieves this partly by incredibly lush-yet-angular production which invites and yet also rejects attention, somehow both visceral and clinical all at once. But she also keeps us guessing, beguiled, with superbly bold musical flourishes that on any other album – on almost any other album – would simply come off as gauche or bathetic (I’m thinking of the bagpipes, why does this album have bagpipes?). Grungy and yet pristine, disco-ready and yet also somehow indubitably of the art-house, this is an album which keeps giving, within which we keep finding things to want.
Jenny Lewis – Joy Y’All
I’m not sure Lewis is capable of making an album I don’t love, but Joy’All was such a gift this year. In a year that often, as I’ve found myself arguing above, championed difficulty – or at the very least sought to make accessibility new again – Joy’All just wanted to have a good time. That’s not to say this record is straightforward – Lewis is nothing if not a surprising lyricist, a songwriter who builds stories from left-field details. But, after the almost epic soundscapes of her previous album, On The Line, the emphasis here is on warmer, more intimate instrumentation and production. A lot of this has to do with the influence of producer Dave Cobb, whose work very often helps artists sound at their most down-home But it was also a conscious response by Lewis to pandemic isolation: Joy’All is an album that knows there’s A Lot going on right outside the door, but contrives while we’re inside with it to comfort us. This is one of music’s great comforts, even primary functions. I’m not sure any album this year made me feel as if it was an old friend in quite so effective a fashion.
Mitski – The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We
There’s a moment very early on here, in the record’s first track, when Mitski sings, solo against a simply strummed acoustic guitar, the words “feels like family” – and suddenly, without warning, a choir turns up to answer her: “family” they sing, and then immediately disappear again. This sort of manoeuvre is typical of Mitski, who in her career so far has skipped across and over genres as if she barely notices them, as if the handbrake-turns don’t send her sickly. In some ways the most straightforward album on this list – Mitski inhabits the torch-song troubadour vibe pretty reliably – but that isn’t to say it doesn’t make ground, adding orchestral swirls and soundtrack-like sweep to proceedings in a way that deepens and expands what are, ultimately, eleven beautiful – even, whisper it, timeless – songs. And for all of the sound and fury and shock of the new, that’s what everyone’s aiming for, right? Here’s the bull’s-eye.
I’ve been reading and writing about the Women’s Prize shortlist for some years now, and in many ways I’ve come to look forward to it more than the Booker. If it comes without the hoop-la and posh bingo paraphernalia that makes watching that prize such fun – and so instructive – then the Women’s Prize uses its slightly less inspected position to bemore interesting. Consistently, its shortlists try new things, craft statements or annual themes, find new writers or direct readers’ attention to new subject matter or styles for fiction. Honestly, it often points the way; the Booker usually catches up. (The Goldsmith’s just sits to one side, eyeing everything else haughtily.)
This year’s shortlist is no different: it features debut novelists and previous winners, contemporary dramas and historical fiction; it has fantasy and granularity, tragedy and farce. Its debut novelists – Louise Kennedy, Priscilla Morris and Jacqueline Crooks – sit alongside the heavier hitters – Barbara Kingsolver and Maggie O’Farrell – without any sense of intimidation or inferiority. The wildcard, Laline Paull, with her novel told from the point of view of some dolphins, fits in between the two groups without any awkwardness. In short, the shortlist is of the highest possible quality – prize-watchers say this all the time as a way to hedge their bets, but I think this year it is sincerely true to say that any of these novels could be the winner.
Connective themes emerge, too. Violence against women and girls is a particular motif, with each of these novels including vividly described instances, and Crooks’s Fire Rush, O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait and Paull’s Pod proving especially affecting. Social decay, too, is prevalent throughout the novels, a sense of bonds breaking and ties fraying: here the stand-outs are Kennedy’s Trespasses, Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead and Morris’s Black Butterflies. These echoes and calls-and-response despite the novels’ broad disparity in subject matter and setting: from Paull’s under-water setting to Kennedy’s 1970s Northern Ireland, Kingsolver’s refiguring of David Copperfield to late-twentieth-century Appalachia, we proceed from a besieged Sarajevo in Black Butterflies to a resplendent Renaissance Florence in The Marriage Portrait, and wind up in London, Bristol and Jamaica inthe heady Fire Rush. There is real scope of experience here, and yet also – and instructively – a shared humanity.
Kingsolver’s novel is the largest in terms of pages, but perhaps the narrowest in terms of perspective. I am not, in must be said, the best person to whom you might try to sell a Dickens tribute novel: I am not a fan of the great man, a literary blind spot of mine that many of my fellow bibliophiles cannot forgive. But! What Kingsolver does here is uncanny: all the punning name-changes, the precise-but-wobbly tracking of the original’s plot, the shifting of the theme of wealth’s corrupting influence to one of substance abuse’s corrosive effect on those whom wealth forgets; all of this is extremely well-turned and compellingly written. Demon Copperhead himself (this is a nickname for a red-headed boy named Damon – Kingsolver is forced at times to stretch) is the novel’s great strength: his voice never falters, his aphoristic style rooted, as far as I experienced it, so firmly in a thorough ventriloquising of the Appalachian idiom that no amount of well-turned phrases or sage insights – “Leaving your family’s land would be liking moving out of your own body” (p. 102) – prevents the novel from feeling wholly, entirely – improbably – authentically.
The novel is an attempt to be a better Hillbilly Elegy. It’s sympathy for its protagonists leads it towards an understanding of why their left-behindness equals both an openness to opiates and to Trump but also no excuse or explanation for ignorance. Her Appalachians are venal and virtuous, foolish and wise; few have nothing to commend them (as in the original novel, only its villains – ahem, Stoner in its first half and U-Haul in its second – are without redemptive qualities). The novel ends ambiguously, with the American cliché of lighting out for the coast, almost as if it does not wish to – knows it cannot – explain or encapsulate its own capacious eventfulness. But this also leaves it with a curiously soft moral centre compared to, say, Trespasses, in which Louise Kennedy sketches an illicit affair between to an older Protestant barrister, Michael, and a younger Catholic schoolteacher, Cushla, in the increasingly bitter and divided Northern Ireland of the 1970s. This novel is spare with Kingsolver’s is expansive, focuses where the Demon Copperhead bloats with intent. Its supporting cast are almost cameos, but beautifully drawn for all that – indeed, the way in which they pass through and around the intensity of the central romance pays dividends later, when Cushla realises that more attention paid to them may have been wise.
Trespasses is extremely, perhaps even deterministically, well composed. The novel begins many of its chapters with short snippets of news bulletins about escalating deaths and explosions (“two men have been arrested in south Down in connection with an arms cache” [p. 69], “A twenty-year-old man was shot dead in an ongoing feud between the INLA and the Official IRA” [p. 234]) that barely touch the daily lives of its characters until it does – nameless individuals who lose their lives anonymously, save for in their own intensely-experienced corners of a world shared but not always consciously. Black Butterflies seeks to achieve similar, but with a much clearer and yet somehow more diffuse focus on the violence that introduces upon its protagonist’s world. The structure here is less telegaphed, but is still shaped around the experience of one person. Zora, an artist and tutor with a family and a comfortable lifestyle, sees her entire existence upended and destroyed by the randomised acts of war that begin first to pepper and then come to define her community. It is the siege of Sarajevo, and before long communities are split while individuals retain personal loyalties, parts of apartment blocks are open to the elements, and first communications then power and then food become impossible memories of a better past. The black butterflies of the title is charred paper – and other material – falling from the sky to symbolise all that is now gone, incinerated by fire.
The novel ends with Zora’s escape, her rescue, from the city – like Demon Copperhead, it can find no other way out of the horror than the individual good fortune of removal from it – but its ever more claustrophobic pages have left the reader with a vividly vicarious sense of all she has been through, and from which she cannot truly extricate herself. We share her knowledge of the people she has left behind, and an uncertainty about “their continuations – and ends” (p. 271). In this, the novel established a communal tragedy which is communicated via random survival but which is also indelible. This theme of a doomed shared ecology also defines Pod, albeit far more explicitly. That said, if Trespasses does not quite capture the magic of Anna Burns’s similarly-themed Milkman, then Pod does not manage the same dizzying invention as Paull’s own The Bees (both comparators were themselves shortlisted for the Women’s Prize). This is largely due to Pod‘s less controlled voice: told, like The Bees, from the point of view of a non-human character, Pod separates from its forebear by widening the number of its point-of-view characters – it also features Google, a dolphin escaped from a military project, a Wrasse and a Remora fish, as alongside its primary protagonist, the female dolphin Ea – and instead of broadening the novel’s scope this choice emphasises its artificiality.
In the course of the novel, Ea discovers herself – her song, since begins the novel unable to vocalise in the way of her people – but is also raped and captured, traded and degraded, largely by a patriarchal tribe of dolphins from whom her own more egalitarian grouping split years before (that the former group chant their name – TUR-SI-OPS, TUR-SI-OPS – constantly suggests to us that her dolphins are also rather flatly analogous to the MAGA faithful: “These people must be stupid to be so easily roused to a rabble” [p. 157]). Ea’s experiences are appropriately hard to read, and almost more harrowing – or at least and alas more striking – for its unusual marine contexts, and as in The Bees Paull demonstrates her talent for depicting violence in a way which never risks glamorising it. Nevertheless, the novel never quite coheres – its occasional intrusions of the human world, its climate politics, its mournful whales, its fairytale quality … all these are present and suggestive but also each under-explored. The novel doesn’t quote afford itself enough room.
Compare this with Fire Rush, which – appropriate for a novel so titled – proceeds at an intense pace. It has easily the most thriller-like plot on the shortlist, but equally the most propulsive and innovative prose, which captures every nuance and inflection of the many accents and patois through which it passes. A fictionalised account of the author’s own life, Fire Rush begins – and persists – in underground music clubs, as members of London’s Black community escape from the oppressive apparatus of the state – or Babylon, as they know it – each weekend in rhythms of their own making. This fragile refuge is quickly broken by police informants, emerging drugs gangs, and social tension – even as many of its characters, chief among them the pugnacious elder Lego, see the dangers to which the younger generations are increasingly subject. The protagonist, Yamaye, has happiness snatched from her when the good man she is dating and with whom she is planning a future, Moose, is mudered by the police while in custody. From here she spirals downwards, falling in with Monassa and his dangerous Bristol gang, before discovering truths about her family history and finding sanctuary – but also revenge – in her ancestral home of Jamaica.
As in Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring, in Fire Rush the duppies and other spirits of the Obeah belief system are immanent: if not quite material in the way they might be in a fully science fictional or fantastical novel, they are (as the ogbanje of Igbo belief are in Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater) a sort of agent of change and challenge, community and continuity. Through dub music as through Obeah ritual, Yamaye communes with her ancestors – and this dialogue is crucial because in all other ways it has been made impossible by slavery, suppression and cultural erasure. “History?” scoffs one character. “Like we got any” (p. 241). The duppies and spirits aren’t mere metaphor – they are an insistence within the oppressor’s culture that the past will not be denied. “When we choke the life out of a man,” another character notes, “his spirit doesn’t disappear. It haunts us. A reverberation” (p. 229). Fire Rush – a term used by characters in the novel to describe the moment when repressed fury comes to the surface in search of vengeance – is a study in the damage wrought by historical and contemporary injustice both specific – the transatlantic slave trade – and, as in Demon Copperhead, in toto.
Yamaye – sometimes wise, sometimes foolish, sometimes quasi-holy, sometimes thoroughly material – is among the most complex and compelling characters on this shortlist. She is challenged in this preeminence perhaps only by Kingsolver’s Damon and O’Farrell’s Lucrezia, the protagonist of The Marriage Portrait, is a figure painted with almost overwrought pathos – but also in so flowing, detailed and sympathetic a way that the reader cannot help but come to feel as if they know her as they might a friend. We first meet her in he final hours of her life – no spoilers here, Lucrezia is an historical figure who indeed died at the age of 16 in 1561. She has just realised that her husband of not yet two years – Alfonso, Duke of Ferrera – intends to kill her (there remains debate about the historical truth of this long-rumoured homicide, but here O’Farrell takes it as read). Swiftly, however, we cycle back to before her birth, getting to know her steely mother, who navigates the patriarchy of Renaissance Florence with imperious, but ultimately selfish, surety. Every chapter or so, we return for a few pages to Lucrezia’s last hours, creeping – in the tradition of horror – towards a certain fate.
This is a cruel structure that places the infant Lucrezia, the toddler Lucrezia, the talented tween painter Lucrezia (tutored by Vasari), the rebellious thirteen-year-old Lucrezia, all in the shadow of her untimely death – her literal murder by the male forces that dictate her society. We meet her nurse, who manages to hide her charge’s menstruation for a full year in order to delay the fateful marriage; we meet her father, who bears no ill will against women (in fact the oppostion) but whose beliefs and actions are nevertheless dictated by a culture which does; and, of course, we meet Alfonso – a man who is frankly weak and contemptuous, but in whom is vested all the authority he otherwise lacks innately. Filling on the detail of this perfectly capturing early modern milieu is what some readers might experience as an over-reliance on metaphor: a tigress trapped in a cage, a bird that wants to fly, Lucrezia’s desire to ride a horse faster than a man, “with transgressive glee” (p. 3). These moments offer not so much subtext as oppressive example upon example of the walls that, almost invisibly, hem Lucrezia in (indeed, the fortress in which she dies is “a high-walled edifice of dark stone, flanked on one side by dense forest and on the other by a twisting meander of the Po river” (pp. 1-2). All this functions to create a novel that, though beautifully written, is also rather insistent – one that in doing this very effectively plants the reader in the impossible position of a noble early modern woman, but which to do so employs a series of literary effects that may tire the reader.
The Marriage Portrait is probably the most completely realised novel on the shortlist, in the sense of its unity and certainty of purpose. In doing one thing so well, however, it can sometimes feel, however resplendent its harmonies, a little one-note. It’s a little like Trespasses – the third of the shortlists front rank, I think – in this respect, albeit productively less spare and far more alive in its often beautiful details. Because O’Farrell has already won the Women’s Prize once, and recently, I think Fire Rush will and should win the Prize: it is, no doubt, a little more rough-edged a novel, its debut status brought into sharp relief by the finely-wrought qualities of the O’Farrell. But it’s also somehow wider and more vivid, energetic in its invention, and I’d like to see the Prize reward that.
When it’s hard to figure out which albums of a given year most stand out from the rest, is it because a year was uncommonly good, or is it because all of its records have bunched together in decent mediocrity? This year, I thought one reason I couldn’t quite tell might have been because I haven’t listened to as much new music – or perhaps haven’t listened sufficiently attentively. But looking back on the year to compile this annual pick of five, I also realise it’s because the year felt long. Albums I thought were released last year were actually, it turns out, as much a part of 2022 as albums that came much later.
This is a function of the year more broadly, I think: politically it has been long, with three Prime Ministers and an intensely reported war; personally, as Anna and I began to learn how to negotiate this latest stage of the COVID-19 pandemic, the year felt as if it had two uneven halves, one more and one somewhat less cautious; and, more generally, time is weird these days. Who knows when years or months or days begin or end? Regular clocks seem a pre-2020 thing.
Still, on review 2022 had much good music. Some previous members of these august “albums of” lists produced really great records: Calexico’s El Mirador continued their absurdly good recent spree; First Aid Kit’s Palomino should have brought a slump record after their remarkable run so far, and yet it proved another corker; Bill Callaghan returned to form with YTI⅃AƎЯ; Courtney Marie Andrews’ Loose Future was just beautiful; and so on. I’ve also recommended to others at various times in the year Cate Le Bon’s Pompeii, Harry Styles’ Harry’s House and Jenny Hval’s Classic Objects.
As I like to do, though, I’ve picked below albums which seem to me to do something new-ish, or at least strike me as being exciting. That’s not – as usual – to say these will be the records I listened to most in 2022, or will carry forward with most enthusiasm into 2023. But they are, for my money, the most interesting ones I’ve listened to all year – and that counts for a lot.
Kathryn Joseph – for you who are the wronged
I knew this one would be on my list from more or less the first play: it has such an atmosphere, a totalised mood which carries through from its first note without ever being boring. Joseph’s voice is both unerringly confident and somehow evocatively diaphanous; her songs are savage whilst also gentle. The album is perfect for driving through a city at night: plangent and calm whilst also seedily sinister; dark but studded constantly with brightness; somehow both slow and speedy. It’s neon searing starlight, a warm bubble in close proximity to dingy cold. It was released in February and is a perfect winter record – so catch it now, while it’s freshly relevant.
Black Country, New Road – Ants from Up There
Rousingly anthemic where Joseph is slyly gentle, this album is so energetic, warm and innovative that it finally wormed its way past my Brummie’s vague displeasure at the band’s insistence that their being named after a major arterial road of the mighty West Midlands is the result of mere chance, of a website mashing words randomly together. This southern insouciance can be forgiven, though, when the people committing it prove themselves to be the worthy heirs to Stornoway’s crown as the most unpredictably melodic songsmiths in (their respective corners of ) indie-pop. From “Chaos Space Marine” on, this album is full of twists and turns which surprise and entertain, without ever overwhelming what are often rather subtle songs. That’s not an easy balance to strike, and the band carry it off here as if it’s the easiest thing in the world. Cracking stuff.
Julia Jacklin – Pre Pleasure
From Beyoncé to Taylor Swift, 2022 seems like a particularly good year for pop – it felt vital again after a few years in its periodic doldrums. If Jacklin’s album isn’t exactly tilting for that kind of mainstream audience, it is nevertheless very much in the vein of the year’s descent into danceability. Literate and unafraid to go slow, the album also has moments of real pace and energy; in both moods it maintains an identity but also an accessibility which made it an instant favourite of mine … and which I think will earn Jacklin a serious platform for whatever she does next. That’s not to say this album is mainly interesting as juvenalia – this is Jacklin’s third record and is fully mature even as it proves to be a lot of fun. Rather, it is a statement and a calling card – a proper album with a beginning, middle and an end … but also signature standalone songs. Get it, it put “I Was Neon” on repeat, and become a lifelong fan.
Big Thief – Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You
Bear with me when I say this album almost didn’t make the cut. Why? Because it is so long. The album begins with “Change”, which comes across as a rousing Americana ballad and hits all my most predictable buttons. Adrianna Lenker’s vocals in particular create an instant connection with the listener: close to the ear, but also full of mystery. But this cues the listener in wrong: the gentle fireside stuff gives way immediately to the far more skewwhiff “Time Escaping”, and then to the half-ironic fiddle and mouth harp of “Spud Infinity”. At this point, the album still has an hour to go – and persist it does, in the way a true double-album might once have done, demanding attention and repeat listens. At first I found this meanderint But you know what? It rewards the detours. Return to Dragon New and you’ll find fresh stuff every time – a new song will jump out at you, a different shift or new lyric. There is as much here as in any Father John Misty album, and yet you don’t have to put up with him to get the gold. Make it your friend on a few long train journeys, or a couple of January nights. It’ll stay with you in more ways than one.
Julian Lage – View With A Room
Picking this one feels like a cop-out, because Lage really does not need my praise, or indeed anyone else’s. A child prodigy and a faculty member at Stanford in his teens, anything Lage puts out is going to be – musically, technically, theoretically – better than most anything any other musician can produce in a given year. But on View With A Room Lage is remarkably restrained and finds beauty in space rather than razzle-dazzle in virtuosity. Joined by his preternaturally sensitive drummer, Dave King, and unusually expressive bassist, Jorge Roeder, Lage might well here be placed in such fertile territory by the addition of a second guitarist, the peerless Bill Frisell (yeah, this album really is cheating). The result is a very human record, a collection of ten compositions that create texture out of the most careful and even simple threads. Everyone should listen to Lage; here he has made an album which will make them want to.
Sherlock Holmes is often characterised – wrongly, in this reader’s opinion – as cold and distant, or aloof and disdainful, or sometimes explicitly sociopathic. But in “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle,” which I read every Christmas Eve, we find all the evidence we need that he was in fact intensely social – or, at least, entirely embedded in the communities of his day. At Christmas more than most other times of the year, it’s worth noting Holmes’s reliance on, even fondness for, his fellow human beings.
When Watson arrives at 221B on the morning after Christmas to wish his friend the compliments of the season, the good doctor finds Holmes surrounded by newspapers. Later, when Holmes seeks to locate the erstwhile owner of the Christmas goose in whose crop a precious stone has been found, he rattles off without pause a long list of Victorian London’s many periodicals. He characterises the problem at hand, after all, as “one of those whimsical little incidents which will happen when you have four million human beings all jostling each other within the space of a few square miles” – that is, the sort of thing that happens in the sort of place Sherlock Holmes chooses to live, and without which he would be lost. The newspapers, of course, were the means to record the happenings of this gathering of humanity; they were the best way to keep track of everything – and everyone.
Later in the story, on the trail of the source of the goose – whose owner, Henry Baker, has been compensated handsomely for information about its origin – Holmes and Watson find themselves first at a pub and then at a market. Might we find two better symbols of London conviviality, or of human exchange? The pub in particular is a community which offers its members service as well as solace: the goose came from a Christmas club managed by its landlord, which offered subscribers of slim means the guarantee of a fine festive fowl in exchange for a few pence each week. There is, here, such a thing as society – and a good thing it is, too.
I’ve written before about the significance of the story’s crescendo, in which Holmes – having uncovered the villain of the piece – allows him to go free, commuting his probable sentence by fiat. It’s easy to suggest this is an individualistic move – the assumption of total authority by Holmes without reference to the checks and balances of wider society. But Holmes is clear that in fact he trusts the system rather less than that – that it will not help the villain but make him worse – and in this sense Holmes is seeking to improve society, one person at a time, rather than circumventing it.
But there is a final note of emphasis. The story ends not with a bang but with a dinner, with Holmes and Watson sharing a Christmas meal in a toast to the season and to the innocent man they’ve saved (as well, of course, as the guilty man to whom they believe themselves to have offered redemption). Conviviality is the closing tone of the story, as well as its opening mood.
Merry Christmas to you – and, indeed, to all of us together.
When the winner of the Booker Prize was announced last week (it proved to be The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka, about which more shortly), I found myself in an unusual position of equanimity. In most years, I have a fairly strong view as to who should win – it’s evensometimesshared by the judges. But this year, the shortlist was of such unusual quality that I really couldn’t – didn’t want to – call it. When I attended, for the first time in a few years now, the Booker shortlist event at the Cheltenham Literature Festival on the Saturday before the ceremony, I was left feeling similarly: this really was a group of books, and a group of authors, which stood shoulder-to-shoulder.
So I decided to leave writing about the 2022 Booker Prize until after the winner emerged. Much of the joy in posh bingo, of course, is in guessing – or second-guessing – the winner. I’ve robbed myself of that this time, although I confess to a feeling of freedom from having done so: instead, I simply enjoyed each of these books. On the night, more or less any one of these titles might have been intoned by Neil MacGregor to a similar sense of satisfaction as the one I experienced when Karunatilaka took the microphone to speak for so long that the Radio 4 pips were forced to wait. It’s not often I feel this way; I aimed to savour it.
One of the questions I’ve asked myself since then, however, is why Karunatilaka was the name selected by the judges. Because in some ways, other than its consistency – perhaps as a function of its consistency – these books share rather little in common. MacGregor suggested, somewhat perfunctorily, that the six books “were all really about one question, and that is ‘what’s the importance of an individual life?’” I’m not sure what novel isn’t, ultimately, about that – the art-form’s fundamental aim, or at least trick, being to create the illusion of another’s consciousness on the page. For every book that takes a more political approach to self-hood – Percival Everett’s The Trees and NoViolet Bulawayo’s Glory chief amongst them – there are others – Alan Garner’s strange Treacle Walker and Elizabeth Strout’s charming Oh William! – that are, if asking this question in any explicit way at all, doing so very much sotto voce.
Instead, it feels to me as if the judges have simply sought books that achieve their own aims well – and perhaps smartly. Each of these books might be said to do something familiar, but in so creative a way as to spin the yarn anew. This often involved generic play. Arguably, however, it is only Karunatilaka that twines several yarns together – that is, his book does something new or notably characterful with a number of threads, and it may be this plate-spinning creative facility which let his book take a half-step further that the other five. It does the same thing as the other five books with the same level of success – but moreso.
Let me show my working.
I began my reading of this year’s shortlist with Treacle Walker, and this was entirely by accident: Waterstone’s much-publicised issues with inventory meant this slim novel was the only book available in the branch I visited in the days following the shortlist’s unveiling. It was a strange coincidence, however, since Garner’s novel was the last book to be written about my late colleague and friend, Maureen Kincaid Speller, who died around the time I was reading the shortlist and would I think have been tickled by Garner’s shortlisting at the venerable age of 87. I’m happy to report that her wonderful essay on the book is listed second only to the Prize’s own pages about the novel when one searches for ‘the meaning of Treacle Walker‘, and this is fitting: in this last long-form written piece of hers, Maureen came closer than any critic I have read so far to understanding this difficult novel in the round. Having edited the piece, I knew it well – and, as I read the book, I realised I had little more to say: “Treacle Walker is not a bad novel,” Maureen ultimately concluded, “but neither is it a work of towering genius.”
It is wonderfu to see Garner deservedly honoured by the Booker. Maureen’s ambivalence, though, captures something of the novel’s avowed inertness: it is remarkable for what it tries to do, and is impressive more in the terms of its formal play than the ends to which that is put. At Cheltenham, Garner was at pains to reject the idea he writes fantasy; “I write metaphor,” he insisted down the Zoom line from Cheshire, with such strength that he may as well have been in the room. We might be justified, then, to ask what the metaphor here is; and yet later in the same event Garner declared with equal confidence that, once the book leaves the writer’s hand, it is for the reader alone to interpret it. This might make for shaky metaphors, which tend to require concrete and agreed referents if they are to make sense. Perhaps in the place of such certainty, then, Treacle Walker scatters not metaphors but motifs: the word “daft” recurs continually, as if to draw attention to the ways in which we dismiss the ineffable of the everyday; Treacle Walker’s own rounds as a rag and bone man seem circular and repetitive (“Any rags! Pots for rags! Donkey stone!”); the plot is anchored to the cycles of the natural world, personified by the bog-person whom the protagonist, Joseph Coppock, must pinion again in place at the novel’s climax.
These recursive patterns gesture at the concept of eternity, and Treacle Walker, in its simultaneous timelessness and fixedness, seems to ask where we all sit in deep time, what that scale of existence might mean and how it might affect us. It achieves this by what is a quite captivating harnessing of the fable form, and a repurposing of language that makes a quite demotic voice feel mysterious and difficult:
“You do not have the Words.”
“What words?”
“The Wiords that give you leave.”
“What ‘leave’?”
“To command,” said Treacle Walker.
“What are they?”
“Who knows?”
(Treacle Walker, p. 105)
If this suggests the novel can be frustrating, then so it can be. Much plainer in its approach – yet rather similar in its atmosphere – is Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, itself a bold title for a novella which is almost a short story. Set in the 1980s in rural Ireland, the novella nonetheless feels as curiously out-of-time as Coppock’s stone house in Treacle Walker: with its nuns and villages, rural poverty and dark winter nights, the story is as much one of the eighteenth century as the twentieth. This, perhaps, is part of Keegan’s point: hers is a story about the Magdalen laundries, the last of which was closed in 1996 and yet the morality of which feels as medieval as a bog-person. Keegan’s protagonist, Bill Furlong, is an average man in an average village, scraping together enough money this Christmas for a small gift for both of his two daughters, and enjoying a companionable marriage with his wife, Eileen. “The years don’t slow down as they pass,” they tell each other as they spend their evenings negotiating the hardships of life out of the earshot of their children.
Whispers and secrets are the manner in which life is done in the small town of New Ross, where Bill was brought up by a wealthy Protestant woman – an outcast in the community as a result of he religion, but therefore also free of the strictures of its self-policed morality – after his biological mother became pregnant with him as an unmarried teenager. The omerta on the reality of all this is complete, and Bill proceeds through life with a great absence at the centre of his self-knowledge: “Surely some local knew who his father was – everyone had a father – and it didn’t seem likely that someone hadn’t ever said a word about it” (p. 21). On the edge of town, meanwhile, is a nunnery into the centre of which few, too, are admitted; when Bill finds himself there to delivery a last-minute Christmas delivery of lumber to fuel the nuns’ winter, he for reasons obscure to himself forces past the invisible barriers and unspoken codes of conduct to find a girl locked in a coal-shed. Something, he realises, is wrong.
If Treacle Walker holds back its meaning, then, Small Things Like These pushes its characters past the point of discovery – and asks moral questions of their new knowledge. The novella ends hopefully – although frankly also in a way that feels as if this is in truth the prologue to a novel, not the thing itself – and Furlong emerges as something of a hero. In doing something about and with his knowledge – “was there any point in being alive without helping one another?” (p. 108) – he places, too, a demand upon the reader. The novella reads like a sentimental Christmas story of the sort Dickens might have recognised; but in placing women at its centre, and asking questions not of its fictional characters but those who read them, it eschews the settled moralities of the happy ending to probe deeper into the whys and hows of unspoken injustice.
This is the project, too, of Percival Everett’s The Trees – but here it is writ large and gaudily, in a grand guignol horror-comedy in which the ghost of Emmett Till, apparently for real but in actuality in figurative spirit, returns to avenge not just his lynching but all racist murder. In the town of Money, Mississippi, the descendants of Till’s murderers are being themselves murdered – and at the scene lies the body of a beaten Black man that resembles Till himself … and springs unexplainably free from the morgue each time it is collected by the police. When first the Mississippi and then the Federal Bureau of Investigation become involved in the spiralling sequence of cases, The Trees expands what is often a laugh-out-loud satire of white supremacy outwards to an entire society that is – it seems – about to be submerged by a refusal any longer to let injustice go unspoken or unpunished, to avenge crimes in which “no suspects were identified … [no one] was arrested … [and no one] cared” (p. 177).
What lifts the novel is its wonderful characterisation. A satire can so easily fall back on types, but here Everett’s sympathy extends to characters sketched with such deep economy that they become almost instantly known to us – and make the often absurd cycle of events in the novel feel weighted with real significance. Critically, too, despite the comical names – Mr Pick L. Dill, three friends name Ho, Chi and Minh – Everett makes clear by contrast that the reality of racism is as quotidian as the Furlongs’ trusty old Rayburn: when Ed, one of the two Black MBI detectives assigned to Money, is “charged with learning as much about the four White victims [of the revenge killings] as possible”, he realises that “the three men and one woman were so unremarkable that there was little to uncover” (p. 184). In one scene, a character sings “Strange Fruit”, that song of lynching that begins in the “southern trees”; this, too, is a story about the trees from which Black men hang in America – and they are plentiful and everywhere. Ed believes the motel where Martin Luther King Jr. was shot should not be a museum – because “It’s just a motel. That’s what it is. That’s all it is” (p. 276). There’s nothing remarkable about it; it’s just another tree.
In its fierce moral clarity and absolute commitment to its own form of generic play, The Trees was for me one of the best reading experiences on the shortlist: it’s a page-turner with philosophical complexity, a rare mix which demonstrates considerable technical skill that is worn extremely lightly. The same could be said of Elizabeth Strout’s Oh William!, a novel which begs to be read in a single sitting and which one gets to know as one might a friend. Its narrator, Lucy Barton, has featured in several of Strout’s previous novels, and her voice is captured here with beautiful and convincing attention to detail; but she’s not quite the novel’s focus. Instead, her first husband – the William of the title – comes into focus as a selfishly charming lost old man. When his third wife leaves him and takes their daughter, Lucy – despite having just lost her second husband, and while she subsumes her grief for him into caring for others – is called upon to usher William through a road-trip he has decided to take in order to understand, Furlong-like, his childhood: he has, he has discovered, a sister he never knew.
Lucy’s apparent lack of self-esteem – she places others before herself, is always surprised when people praise the writing she makes an excellent living from, rarely eats, and feels routinely subordinate and inferior to others – is captured in this novel with a rare, transparent obliviousness. Barton – of course! – cannot see herself as others clearly do. At one point, William – a flawed man who is a serial philanderer, and yet is never quite the villain of the piece – is permitted to tell Lucy some home-truths about her own methods of drawing attention to herself – “you are always hungry because you never eat anything – and so everything becomes about getting Lucy something to eat” (p. 146) – he demonstrates an insight into others that Lucy lacks. He also begins his journey of self-discovery – “You’re no more self-absorbed than any of us,” he tells her, tacitly admitting his own narcissism (p. 153) – which culminates in, ultimately, his feeling that he does not, in fact, need to meet his long-lost sister. “We are all mythologies,” Lucy realises. “We are all mysteries, is what I mean” (p. 237).
In some ways, all this makes Oh William! the most Bookerish book on this list: middle-class people on voyages of self-discovery, a writer on a road trip, neurosis attached to human experience. We’ve read this book before. But Strout lashes it to a buddy movie, and injects a glug of Frasier-like farce for good measure. Oh William! is such fun not because of the lessons it teaches its characters – but because of all the ways in which we are shown just how much they need to learn them. On another level entirely, this is exactly what happens in NoViolent Bulawayo’s Glory – itself a Booker-ish book, given that its author was also shortlisted for their previous novel. But here the resemblances end: Glory is a big novel, an allegory – not a metaphor – for Zimbabwe in its post-Mugabe years. It adopts the conceit of Orwell’s Animal Farm – all of its characters are non-human, from the crocodile who stands in Emmerson Mnangagwa to the goat who appears a third of the way through and proves the novel’s heroine – and adds an episodic approach, proceeding in chapters split into tiny, page-long sections. This enables it to cover a lot of ground quickly, and break off from its state-of-the-nation omniscience to focus where necessary on individuals and vignettes. In so doing, it shows us how broken across how many axes the political system of its nation of Jidada is, to ensure we understand how crucial it is to repair it.
This makes it an extremely noisy novel: one can hear the elephants trumpet, the zebras stampede. Bulawayo squeezes George Floyd into this story of Zimbabwe; she brings in apartheid South Africa and twenty-first-century social media; we proceed through quite Byzantine inner-circle politics and take part in the politics of the crowd. All this can be overwhelming, but perhaps in the ways it was meant to be: chaos is the primary effect of much of what happens in Glory, a novel which excoriates the destructive will-to-power of men – for it is mostly men, and their misogyny is am important element of the novel – who presume to rule. Despite this breadth, however, the novel is often at its best when it takes time to skewer with pin-point accuracy one or other particularity. Here is the Old Horse – the novel’s Mugabe figure – on his vision of leadership:
I’m not going anywhere! Because me, I was Jidada’s leader almost forty years ago, and I was Jidada’s leader thirty years ago, and twenty years ago, and ten years ago! Because I was Jidada’s leader yesterday, and I am Jidada’s leader today, and I will be Jidada’s leader when?” the Father of the Nation invited, ears now cocked at the square.
“Tomorrow and Forever!!!” Jidada Square thundered in celebration of the Old Horse’s endless rule.
(Glory, p. 16)
The strongman’s egotism – and the effect of it on their public – has rarely been so vividly summarised. “Our future was plundered and pillaged by the deposed tyrant while we were in our mothers’ bellies,” a classroom of children sneer at one point, and in this line the novel’s recurrently rapier-like moral seriousness is sharpened to an effective point. The novel ends – like Keegan’s – on a note of plangent hope. If the novel can sometimes strain to raise its voice above its own tumult, that may be one of the intended effects of its remarkable fusing of anthropomorphic fable with an immersed account of populist despotism – again, here is a book which picks an unusual lane and practically speeds down it.
Which brings us to the novel that races simultaneously down several streets somehow all at once, Shehan Karunatilaka’s winning The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. As in Elif Shafak’s 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World, shortlisted for the Booker in 2019, this novel begins with its protagonist already dead. What follows is a ghost-story-cum-spy-thriller-cum-noir-mystery-cum-horror-novel. It takes in Sri Lanka’s destructively complex politics of the 1980s, neocolonialism and neoliberalism, queer culture and homophobia. At its heart is the eponymous Maali Almeida character, who is given the titular seven moons to track down his murderer and come to terms with all he has left behind. Almeida was a photographer, taking shots of events many would rather not have recorded, and the secret of his death seems to lie in the box of prints that sit beneath his bed; but in reality it also and at least equally lies in the knotty interpersonal dynamics of his messy – because persecuted – private life. He and every other character negotiate the painful and impossible realities of 1980s Sri Lanka, negotiating between the Tamil Tigers and the Marxist revolutionaries, the Indian peacekeepers and the American spooks, the gangsters and the politicians and the charities and NGOs. It’s as if Dashiell Hammett met Gabriel García Márquez and decided to write with the fury of Arundhati Roy.
The novel is written in the second-person, in what I think may be its least successful – but alas most persistent – feature. The intention, of course, is to involve the reader more directly in events which may be unfamiliar and indeed unintelligible to them (in one of the novel’s many efforts to build bridges between cultures as well as genres, early on we read a note left by Maali for an American visitor to Sri Lanka, which describes – and perhaps, though I lack the insight to confirm this, flattens into false balance – the country’s various factions). But, as so often, the second person instead because a sort of barrier between the reader and the narrator, its accusatory call flattening into a “who, me?” response. At one point, we are told, “The house in Bambalapitiya was owned by your father’s mother, left to your father’s sister, and given to your father’s first wife after the divorce. You, the first wife’s son, few up here”; but of course this is all about Maali, and we know that. The elision never quite occurs, leaving the “yous” a little marooned.
Despite this, however, the novel excels:it builds worlds like Treacle Walker, allegorises politics like Glory, demands moral action like Keegan and enacts self-discovery like Strout; most importantly, it extrudes injustice from a society’s tumult like Everett. And it does all of this in several modes at once, in the style of Graham Greene at one minute and by channeling Marlon James in the next. We swerve from violence to tenderness in a couple of pages, from torture chambers to music venues … and yet always we return to characters we care about, and in whose personal lives ultimately lie the answers to this (literally and figuratively) multi-dimensional story.
I’ll be honest: had I written this piece before the announcement, and without really knowing or especially caring which of these six fine novels won, I might have suggested The Trees would tip it. I think it is probably more consistently – and finely – written, and it feels especially well-honed, perhaps well edited. But, as soon as Karunatilaka’s name was called out by MacGregor, I understood – and agreed with – the judges’ contrary reasonings. Were The Seven Moons of Maali Almedia a genre novel – and it nearly is – the critic would write of its “world-building”, the remarkable manner in which it creates its every milieu and reflects the rules not just for the profusion of forces that it depicts as tearing at the seams of its Sri Lanka, but the ones which govern its ghost-world, too: the novel has at least two worlds, and inhabits both equally; several modes, and does each justice; and many tones – each of which holds its own. It is the 2022 shortlist in microcosm – not to be read apart from or above the other five books, but perhaps in summary of them. That’s a worthy winner – and a good year for fiction.
Edward Docx has probably written the definitive statement on the departure of Boris Johnson from Number 10 – certainly the one of highest literary quality. There is little more to say. Nevertheless, I find myself reflecting on the last few words I wrote of my own about Johnson, back in June of 2019: “Boris Johnson isn’t funny; he has become Britain’s Ragnarök personified. We’re all revolutionaries now.” What did I mean by that, and has Johnson’s perhaps surprisingly short time in office held true to my initial understanding of it?
In some ways, Johnson’s premiership was blown almost entirely off course. Within months – really, weeks – of his commanding victory over Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn in the early general election he called in December 2019, SARS-CoV-2 upended everything. Lockdowns, social distancing, vaccines, the whole sad shebang of those dread days: there are those who argue Johnson’s government did too little as the virus spread, and those who argue it did too much; but undeniably whatever it did was not planned. There was no strategy at Number 10 for the coronavirus pandemic, no grand policy or comprehensive framework. (Of course, there should have been – officials during David Cameron’s first government had modelled a coronavirus pandemic, but succeeding Tory administrations had done nothing to learn the lessons or prepare for the real thing.) “Events, dear boy, events” a offer a convenient excuse for every failed prime minister; in Johnson’s case the weasel words are writ especially large – he wasn’t given a chance, his supporters say, he had to deal with so much.
The flip side of this, however, is that the absence of a plan – the gaping hole at the heart of the Johnson administration where a governing intelligence should have been – wasamong the most predictable things about its approach to office. Whatever else might have happened to a government led by Boris Johnson – in the alternative universe where a bat did not bite a pangolin – is ultimately immaterial. The inability to engage with policy detail, the refusal to describe reality rather than fantasy, the reliance on phrase-making over governance: all these existed in Johnson before coronavirus, and they would have found their expression, too, in every other imaginable circumstance. The sense of muddling-through that his government increasingly gave off – the improvised policy announcements, the dramatic u-turns, the repeated scandals – was not a bug of the pandemic years but a feature of Johnson’s very being, if not of his raison d’être then certainly of his joie de vivre. The Conservative Party turned to him because he seemed, in the dog days of 2019’s Brexit-fractured spring, to offer a means of cutting a Gordian knot, an anti-political solution to politics’ own dysfunction – unconventional, of course, and high-risk, but an exit nevertheless.
What this lazy conclusion failed to consider was that anti-politics is itself the dysfunction. The impasse of the indicative votes and all the rest had been reached because of the unconventional risk-raking of one B. Johnson: his devil-may-care approach to public discourse had led directly to the impossible expectations of first the referendum campaign and then the negotiations with the EU which followed the vote to leave. Johnson muddled through the EU debate, waving fish in market squares and parroting nonsense about Turkey and migration, in the way he has done since the 1990s – when as the Telegraph’s Brussels correspondence he confected and withdrew stories on a daily basis, heedless of longer-term consequences in search of shorter-term hits. This approach had led the Conservative Party down the very dead-end from which Johnson seemed the only escape. Famously, one definition of madness is doing the same thing again and again and each time expecting a different response.
This tragi-comedy of errors led the country, then, to the position in which it found itself in February of 2020: adrift, rudderless, with a head of state happily boasting about shaking hands with the clinically vulnerable. The Micawberish sense of exceptionalism – that something will come up because it must for a man like Johnson – led to the dismissal of television pictures of overwhelmed Italian hospitals, of the lockdowns being put in place in East Asia, of the expressions on the faces of the government’s own scientific advisors. Even were we to adopt a Spectatorish scepticism of COVID policy, these delays led inevitably to the need for more pronounced responses. Both sides should agree that opportunities were missed by a government that had never intended to be especially organised or effective.
And this was the nature of Britain’s Ragnarök, the one I declared in June 2019. I didn’t argue that Johnson himself was the armageddon in toto; rather, I suggested he was its personification. The great tumult in which the British found – find – themselves was the consequence of their collective assumption of a fundamental unseriousness. One might track this as far back as the sofa government of a complacent New Labour, or perhaps more immediately to the heralding of Cameron and George Osborne’s nonsense argument for austerity – that a nation-state is like a household, and must prioritise paying down its debt. This was always simplism, an at-the-time unusually glib political argument; and yet it was reported, and accepted, as fact. To come closer to the present age, one might situate the British people’s resignation from responsibility in the 2014 European Parliament elections, when Nigel Farage’s UKIP won more seats than any of the major parties. Perhaps it was in our reaction to that consequence of low turn-out: first Cameron’s promise of, then the electorate’s apparent enthusiasm for, a referendum on EU membership at a time when wages were stagnating, the banking crisis was barely over, and threats foreign and domestic were proliferating. Some will point to the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader, other’s Jo Swinson’s bizarre tenure at the helm of the Liberal Democrats; Change UK, Douglas Carswell, GB News – all have offered their own absurdities. We might say that the moment the scale tipped into full farce was the referendum campaign itself, or the nonsense that followed it, or the result of the 2017 General election which did for the authority of Cameron’s successor, the unpleasant yet nonetheless disproportionately maligned Theresa May. Perhaps the coup de grace was the ascension of Johnson himself, his illegal prorogation of parliament, his eighty-seat majority, Dominic Cummings’ trip to Barnard Castle … any of these moments might be said to be the prime example of a nation which no longer cared. The truth is that an unseriousness in politics built up over time, by degrees and unnoticed; but it ultimately had severe consequences.
Johnson’s rapid fall from grace – from eighty-seat colossus in January 2020 to yesterday’s man by June 2022 – is in this sense not a surprise but an inevitability. Unseriousness can only persist for so long; ultimately it will have to face facts. The pandemic was an all-pervading phenomenon that affected everyone. It touched the lives of every voter and non-voter in the UK – in the world. Quite aside from its macroeconomic impacts, in particular the pandemic’s early mismanagement in the UK cost the lives of elderly loved ones in unprotected nursing homes; later, the government’s dithering cost people their Christmases at short notice; and, finally, the insouciance of its most senior figures offended the natural sense of justice shared by almost everyone. The bread and circuses of an unserious politics was insufficient to the task of muddling through such a crisis – no chimeric “oven-ready deal” or three-word slogan or smirking apology was sufficient, because this stuff suddenly mattered. As Michael Lewis has noted in The Fifth Risk, electorates in the modern West ordinarily underestimate the benefits of good government, ignore or never learn about the positive impacts on our lives made by state institutions. “The United States government,” for example, “managed a portfolio of risks that no private person, or corporation, was able to manage” (The Fifth Risk, p. 23). It is easy to take for granted that things will be OK until they are not. It is easy to be breezy when the wind is still.
Britain’s Ragnarök, then, was a titanic clash not between twilit gods but between fantasy and reality, between the rhetoric of politics and the truth of the challenges faced by a twenty-first century polity. The winter crisis in which the UK now finds itself means that the greatest cheerleader of “Boris and Brexit,” the Daily Telegraph, must paint increasingly rococo pictures of our apocalyptic fates should we not roll back a left-wing consensus that last won an election in 2005; David Frost, the man who negotiated Johnon’s much-vaunted deal, and thus left Northern Ireland adrift from the rest of the UK, must write columns in the nation’s second-most bewildered organ, the Daily Mail, and deliver lectures about how the deal which won his former master’s majority is rubbish; and, of course, the great herald of unseriousness, Boris The Clown, must be ushered off stage, protesting all the while that he’d have gotten away with it, too, had it not been for those pesky kids. Unseriousness is suddenly – and evidently – ineffective.
Johnson’s most committed supporters will remain loyal – acolytes always do. They have ensured that his successor, Liz Truss, is locked into defending him and his record while pushing in a Hayekian direction with which the statist Johnson’s disappointed hard-right backers will be more comfortable. Like his trite old hero Churchill, Johnson will seek to write his own history, repeating that trifecta of triumphs – the vaccine that every Western nation in the world has now delivered to its populations, the support for Ukraine that it is hard to imagine any post-war British Prime Minister would not have offered in exactly the same way, the breaking of the Brexit impasse which has, as even Frost admits, has led only to another – until they seem, through dumb repetition, like verities. But despite these efforts, he will be remembered as less like Churchill and as at best more like Eden, a man superficially judged to be made for office who in practice rapidly squandered his popularity and at key moments acted in bad faith. Ultimately, the wiser heads in his party know this, could see it inthepolls – and it is why they evicted him from office. They are, though, yet to wrest back control of their party from the ERG clique that has now been unseriously calling the shots for the best part of a decade – and thus we are to be subjected to an ideological experiment in which taxes will be cut, regulation cut back, and energy policy once more upended, all at a time of acute discomfort for millions.
It is a sign of how perilous the next phase of Britain’s Ragnarök will be that even the billionaire Thatcherite Rishi Sunak – a studiedly bland politician remarkable mostly for his emptiness – seems the centrist in the face of this fresh Tory prescription. For twelve years now, the party of Peel has treated the country primarily as an expression of – and a canvas for – its own neuroses. Unseriousness proved for some time a good distraction from its own intellectual bankruptcy. Johnson may be the personification of that approach – but the Conservative leadership contest which followed his fall – replete with wish fulfilment but in dire need of solutions – represented its apogee. COVID was the moment the spell of this nonsense broke; but this winter’s cost of living crisis will likely be the trial by fire that tempers whatever alternative to it we may yet be able to adopt. Truss may prove up to this task, and in her abandonment of the Cameron-Osborne orthodoxy, or her unafraid explanation of a non-redistributive tax policy to Laura Kuenssberg yesterday, she is certainly attempting to ring the changes; but on the same show the comedian Joe Lycett made much hay with the idea that her vague assurances should in the present context be taken at all seriously – and others closer to the new PM agree. As the British summer limps away, someone might remind Truss that a key event in Ragnarök is the “great winter”, which in the legend puts an end to all life. Such, perhaps, are the wages of clowning.
In a year when there was a lot to keep track of – and in which I began working on another album of my own – music was most often a source of comfort as much as new experiences. This meant a lot of play for old favourites – Fleet Foxes, Fiona Apple, Iron & Wine – and getting more closely acquainted with hold-overs from 2020 – Charley Crockett, Kris Drever, beabadoobee.
This did something of a disservice to poor old 2021, however, since musically it was a pretty progressive year, even if much else about it felt weirdly cyclical. St Vincent released Daddy’s Home, her best album since her last one (everything Annie puts out belongs on that year’s top-five, but let’s accept this and pretend she waived her nomination); Villagers returned with a really interesting record which made demands on the listener while also being an obvious extension of Conor O’Brien’s well-established mien; and Teleman released an EP so full of life it may as well have been an album (but wasn’t). More locally, new releases from Sam Draisey, Howard Sinclair and John Napier were welcome filips of grassroots creativity.
But my traditional quintet of “best” albums this year reflect a combination of my gratitude for new music and my need for comfort. All of these records fulfil the usual criteria I set for these lists – that they do something different, whether for genre or artist or something else. But they’re all also pretty convivial, all told – they focus on songwriting and for the most part approach that practice fairly straightforwardly. This wasn’t conscious on my part, but that’s how the five records below looked to me once assembled. Your mileage may vary – you should listen to all of them and make your own mind up, of course.
The Staves – Good Woman
Now this is a smart record. It is both instantly welcoming and subtly sly in its innovation, quietly twisty in a way that doesn’t announce itself. The Staves might have previously answered to the description twee, even smug – the accusation would have been unfair, but their debut album in particular and even their work with Justin Vernon mixed pastoral and indie in a way that listeners in bad faith might easily have lampooned. Good Woman, though, is a properly mature work which incorporates its influences, and the sisters’ skills, in ways both seamless and productive. This is a record to put on and live with, a warm fire on an autumn’s evening.
Sierra Ferrell – Long Time Coming
If Good Woman is quiet but clever, Long Time Coming is loud but charming. Its honky-tonk instrumentation is never less than tasteful, but the country twang here isn’t exactly sanded off – if anything, the edges are given ample room to catch you. Some of Ferrell’s long-term fans have disliked this album for filling in the spaces of these songs, which Ferrell usually performs solo or with one or two other musicians. But I think the approach really works to emphasise both the attitude of Ferrell’s songwriting and the clarity and quality of her voice. These are country standards in waiting, and yet they are also sufficiently contemporary in their approach that they do not read as pastiche or museum-piece. Difficult balancing act, that; quality record, this.
Nubiyan Twist – Freedom Fables
If there’s a wild card on this list, Freedom Fables is it: Afro-Jazz heavy on improvisation, it doesn’t quite hit the songwriting bill that most of these other records slot into easily. But musically this LP really struck me: not only is it properly joyous, it also avoids the pitfalls of its concept with a fixed focus on musical structure, an unceasing commitment to keeping the core of a song clear throughout (compare this with an act like Sons of Kemet, who take their songs far more brutally through a wringer of abstract deconstruction). Given the range of influences here – from dub to Ghanain pop – this sense of focus is a really impressive achievement, especially when aligned to the album’s trademark sense of fun.
Orla Gartland – Woman On The Internet
This album might include my favourite examples of pure songwriting all year: both “You’re Not Special, Babe” and “Codependency” are as arch and knowing as the album’s title (Gartland was discovered via her YouTube covers videos) – but they also share its sense of fun, and its absence of self-importance. Given these are also vital songs with a sense of urgency, this speaks to Gartland’s rare skill in turning a phrase both witty and musical. And the melodies and arrangements here are a real thing: very often on records this smart, a production choice is made to focus on the words, and if the singer is always the centre here she is never the only focus – or rather, her focus is on songs understood holistically, as little hybrids of lyric and tune. This album more than any other on the list made me excited about songwriting again. Don’t take this sort of gift for granted.
Self Esteem – Prioritise Pleasure
She’s not “Rebecca from Slow Club” anymore. Don’t get me wrong: I’m a particular fan of that duo’s 2011 LP Paradise, but Self Esteem – and this record in particular – is another thing entirely, and yet despite its impressive experimentation and provocation it has caught the zeitgeist and appeared on any number of 2021 “best of” lists. From the title track to “I’m Fine”, “I Do This All The Time” to “How Can I Help You”, this is songwriting without fear (or indeed favour), with bags of humour but also entirely earned seriousness of purpose. It isn’t afraid of making the listener uncomfortable, yet also wants them to dance; it faces down any number of cultural and musical shibboleths and yet somehow crafts instantly accessible tunes. It’s blummin’ alchemy, this record, and it is something else. 2021 was a year indeed.
In a quick exchange of tweets the other day, I reflected with some fellow amateur Sherlockians on the close of “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle”, that Holmesian adventure I read every Christmas Eve.
It struck us that the story ends in a far more perfunctory manner than do many of its adaptations, most obviously the Granada version with the peerless Jeremy Brett. In that iteration of the story, Holmes is persuaded – after some brief cajoling by Watson – to go out of his way to ensure the release of John Horner, the man wrongly accused of the crime that the great detective has just solved. The scene is touching in its seasonality: as the snow floats downwards, an innocent man emerges from a forbidding Victorian jail to embrace his wife and young children. In this telling, Holmes’s yuletide triumph is to save this family from disgrace and penury. Merry Christmas to all!
In the original story, however, this isn’t quite what happens. In fact, Holmes is fairly perfunctory about the fate of the wrongly accused, relying on the true thief’s promise not to testify: “If Horner were in danger it would be another thing, but this fellow will not appear against him, and the case must collapse.” Anyway, moving on: it’s wildfowl for supper. Holmes’s Christmas gift here is really to himself – the satisfaction of a case well solved – and to the perpetrator of the crime, who is allowed to leave 221B a free man, on the proviso that he flees the country. Horner is left rather on the hook, in what modern readers can find an unsatisfactory resolution – particularly at Christmas.
In a recent episode of the excellent However Improbable podcast, Marisa and Sarah also pause over this moment, and have some fun expanding on Holmes’s curious politics: he is simultaneously anti-establishment, berating the deficiencies of the police, but also fundamentally conservative, never acting in anything like an activist or revolutionary capacity. The crime is solved, and the miscarriage of justice is a sort of second-order event. In this, Holmes is a common type of the English gentry – the genteel bohemian, at odds with society but also comfortably above it.
It occurred to me that in this the story is at odds with another Victorian Christmas staple, Dickens’ AChristmas Carol. This story is famously engaged with social issues, taking its own protagonist on a journey from active malevolence (as opposed to Holmes’ detached ambivalence) towards enlightened fellow-feeling with those less fortunate. Next to Ebeneezer Scrooge, Sherlock Holmes is in danger of seeming stubbornly complacent, a full forty years on from the Ghost of Christmas Future’s dire warnings.
The animating ethics of A Christmas Carol are of course Christian. Conan Doyle, however, was, while writing “Blue Carbuncle”, a lapsed Catholic, an agnostic in search of a new faith. He had explored Mormonism (and fed much of what he’d learned into A Study in Scarlet), but abandoned it primarily because of his views on polygamy – and, importantly, also because he professed to have originally abandoned Catholicism to escape a priestly elite that in Mormonism he found in altered form retained. He was en route, of course, to his embrace of Spiritualism, but had yet to reach full conversion. In “Blue Carbuncle”, we find Holmes figured not as an intercessor between Horner and justice, powered by an almost evangelical zeal to do good; but as a man full of doubt in the judicial system – and yet unable to offer a wholly imagined alternative. This is an unresolved tension, but then perhaps this is a characteristic of the agnostic.
On one topic, however, let there be little doubt: this blog wishes everyone the very best of the holiday season. May we all feel the joy of a John Horner redeemed.
There was a moment late in Anuk Arudpragasam’s A Passage North when I experienced if not a revelation then certainly a realisation. It came as the novel’s protagonist, Krishnan – a young and bookish Tamil academic who knows Sri Lanka has been through trauma but who has been displaced from it both while studying in India and as a function of his wealth and status – is part of a rural funeral procession. As the mourners carry the bier holding the body towards the place where it will be burned, Krishnan looks out across the beautiful landscape of the deceased’s native Northern Province, and is in particular drawn by a beautiful body of water he feels he has seen before. I quote at length because, in this novel, style matters:
It was hard to say whether the lake had formed naturally or whether it was one of the man-made tanks constructed centuries ago by old kings and chieftains, tanks that had been around so long that they were now an intrinsic part of the ecology, but studying it as he continued walking, the water calm and waveless, lapping softly and peacefully upon its banks, the feeling grew in Krishnan that he’d been to this place before, that he’d walked across this same path and sat there by the banks of this same lake. There couldn’t have been many bodies of water this size in the northeast, he knew, and taking out his phone he tried to see if he could find the place on Google Maps, which was unhelpful since there was, he saw, no signal on his phone. He wondered whether it was possible he’d passed it on one of the visits he’d made to the district back when he was based in Jaffna, but he knew for certain that he’d never been to Rani’s village before, and couldn’t remember having spent much time in the general vicinity before either. He could ask one of the men in the procession for the name of the lake, but none of them seemed to be paying it any attention and it would have been out of place to ask in any case, he felt, especially when everyone seemed so lost in their own thoughts. (p. 237)
Out of context, no doubt, this passage lacks the flash of light I experienced when first reading it. But it comes at the end of a novel which emphasises the dilatory, and after a series of persistent – and lengthy – sidebars in which Krishnan occupied himself with a range of reveries which rarely, if ever, felt apropos of much at all. This passage is the first time that he acknowledges – as if he is himself experiencing a revelation about subjectivity – that his own preoccupations may not be central, that in fact everyone experiences the same uncontrolled streams of consciousness, the same uncertain and often inapposite enthusiasms, very similar senses of their own disjunctions. In the novel’s final pages, Krishnan reflects that “people also carried deeper, more clandestine trajectories inside their bodies … trajectories which were sometimes strong enough to push people in certain directions despite everything that took place on the surface of their lives” (p. 283). A Passage North’s exercise in disconnect, then, may well be its point.
A Passage North has an extremely simple plot. A woman who has until recently been the carer of Krishnan’s sick grandmother – herself having in her dotage retired to the countryside of her childhood – dies after falling into a well. Krishnan travels from Colombo to the Northern Province to represent the family. That’s it. That’s the book. The key element of the novel that is missing from this summary is Krishnan’s relationship with Anjum, a Sri Lankan activist whom he met during his student days in Delhi; he still mourns their break-up, and he is reading a new email from her when the news of Rani’s death reaches him. “He felt not so much sadness as a kind of embarrassment for the way the news had caught him, in the midst of his self-involved thoughts about Anjum’s email” (p. 14), and this tension between what Krishnan feels deserves his attention and what in fact is absorbing it persists throughout the novel.
Krishnan and Anjum’s romance was intense but brief, meeting in the faintly radical confines of student social spaces but drifting apart as Anjum’s activism proved to be rather more consistent than those of her peers – Krishnan’s included. Nevertheless, Krishnan pours over their short relationship, “the sterm beauty of her face and her distinctly southern darkness” (p. 105), seeking meaning and significance where perhaps there is none:
Falling in love, or what deserved to be called falling in love, he had realized that night, was not so much an emotional or psychological condition as an epistemological condition, a condition in which two people held hands and watched in silent amazement as the world around them was slowly unveiled … (p. 157)
There is a lot of this stuff, and it ultimately goes nowhere: “she was resistant to becoming too close to him” (p. 138). The ever-decreasing circles become tiresome because, short of that email at the opening of the novel, Anjum’s voice is entirely missing – she is an object only, a focus of attention rather than an attending entity herself. This might again be fitting – given that Krishnan’s student relationship proves really to be a proxy for his sense that he has not been sufficiently connected to or active in Sri Lanka’s civil war and its aftermaths, his knowledge that “some forms of violence could penetrate so deeply into the psyche that there was simply no question of fully recovering” and yet his absence of any such experiences of his own – but it remains undeniably recursive.
Still, Krishnan does little except reflect in this novel, which after all primarily takes place over the period of time he spends travelling – slowly, by train, with only himself for company – from Colombo to the Northern Province. Arudpragasam is often praised as a prose stylist (Peter Gordon in the Asian Review of Books: “what might feel affected or even tedious in the hands of a lesser writer becomes atmospheric in Arudpragasam’s extraordinary prose”); but for me his writing – in the curiously diffuse precision that is so often lauded by critics – fails really to grasp how humans truly think. Routinely throughout the book, Krishnan remembers texts or films or speeches that he first read or saw or heard years ago; he remembers them in perfect detail, his précis of one poem or another often lasting for many pages, his plot summaries of this or that epic or documentary offering granular detail which matches not the true nature of human recollection but Arudpragasam’s literary purpose at that juncture in the text. In particular Krishnan’s recollections of Sri Lankan literature certainly place A Passage North in important dialogue and relation with the culture its characters inhabit; but they only work to enhance, rather than illuminate, the feeling the novel creates – and which was for me only broken at the climactic funeral – that much of its contents is orthogonal to its matter.
If the violence of a civil war that has largely passed him by is what most animates Krishnan beneath the surface of his concerns that Rami’s death was a suicide and not an accident, or only one layer deeper his obsession with Anjum, then the implications for human beings of the sort of trauma it represents is the end-point of the novel’s philosophical journey.”Krishnan’s notion of the elderly had always been of people who accepted [their] condition” (p. 53), but in the figure of Rani – who fled the Northern Province to serve as a carer precisely to escape the war, and whose sons were killed in it – the true consequences of conflict are made flesh for him. Despite this, he still struggles to connect: Rani’s habit of chewing betel had been a response no doubt to everything she’d seen and lost during the war, but […] Rani was so different from them […] Krishnan found it hard to believe […] that their lives intersected in any substantial way at all (p. 72). Similarly, years earlier it took Anjum to show Krishnan how “years of being subject to these [male] gazes [had taught] women who lived in the capital […] to curb the movement of their own eyes” (p. 119) – that is, Krishnan finds it hard to see how people are shaped by experiences he does not himself share. But his solipsism – the novel’s bug – is a feature of the continuation of those experiences for others.
A Passage North is in this way an argument for presence in the world. It begins by propounding that “the present […] eludes us more and more as the years go by” (p. 5), but ends with Krishnan newly alive to focusing not on the lake on the horizon but the people around him. None of this is simple – “moments of violence [are] for some people were just as much a part of life as the moments of beauty [… and both limit] how far we [are] subsequently able to see” (p. 261) – but there remains in the novel a clear sense that some have more privilege than others – “those for whom coming and going wasn’t simply a matter of choice” (p. 191) – and that it is for those people to offer service to those with less. “The purpose of all the government’s demolition and renovation in the northeast had, of course, been to erase any memory that might spur the Tamil population back toward militarism” (p. 226); bearing witness has value and force.
Ultimately, however, I think the novel makes heavy weather of all this. Even reviews which are broadly positive about this “intensely introspective” novel – such as Tara K. Menon’s in the New York Times– note that “sometimes sentences strain under this heavy burden”. Arudpragasam is routinely compared to WG Sebald (here’s Nilanjana Roy doing this in the FT), but Sebald – while superficially adopting the same air of immersive reverie as is attempted here – is far less programmatic, his prose much less leading, his allusions always lighter. Much of this is because, I think, Sebald’s preference – albeit in Anthea Bell’s crystalline translation – for shorter words and tighter sub-clauses works against their container – those dilatory, drifting recollections. A body of water features, too, in Austerlitz:
And then, Austerlitz continued, somewhere beyond Frankfurt, when I entered the Rhine valley for the second time in my life, the sight of the Mäuseturm in the part of the river known as the Binger Loch revealed, with absolute certainty, why the tower in Lake Vyrnwy had always seemed to me so uncanny. I could not take my eyes off the great river Rhine flowing sluggishly along in the dusk, the apparently motionless barges lying low in the water, which almost lapped over their decks, the trees and bushes on the other bank, the fine cross-hatching of the vineyards, the stronger transverse lines of the walls supporting the terraces, the slate-grey rocks and ravines leading off sideways into what seemed to me a pre-historic and unexplored realm. While I was still under the spell of this landscape, to me a truly mythological one, said Austerlitz, the setting sun broke through the clouds, filled the entire valley with its radiance, and illuminated the heights on the other side where three gigantic chimneys towered into the sky at the place we were just passing, making the steep slopes on the eastern mountains look like hollow shells, mere camouflage for an underground industrial site covering many square miles. (Austerlitz, pp. 317-8)
The precision, the humour, the diction, the frame: I’d suggest that in every aspect Arudpragasam’s purported cover version of Sebald’s style is much the inferior. Indeed, I’m not at all sure the comparison does either writer any favour, and that Arudpragasam should be afford the courtesy of standing alone as a writer of much promise but as yet an under-developed sensibility. In this, I’d echo Marcel Theroux in the Guardian: “the detail and particularity of memorable fiction requires a form of wondering that is both deeper and less abstract than this.” I can see why the Booker jury felt that A Passage North, in its ambition, theme, subject and promise, deserved a place on the shortlist; I am much less sure that it should detain them for long when they meet to arrive at their winner.
I was a great admirer of Damon Galgut’s 2010 novel, In A Strange Room. At the time, some questioned whether the book – a sequence of three linked novellas (short stories, really – the novel as a whole was rather short, much less its constituent elements) – could properly be called a “novel”. This hoary old debate need not detain us – the pieces fitted together thematically, and shared a main character. The book was a novel, and a good one.
It did not, however, win the Booker Prize, for which it was shortlisted that year; perhaps the judges disagreed that the question of what a novel can be so easily resolved (though since the Booker rules avoid the word “novel” in favour of “long-form fiction”, perhaps they’ve found their own circumlocution). Certainly it was beaten out by a far more traditional novel, Howard Jacobson’s amusing – but ultimately surely minor – comedy, The Finkler Question. That Galgut now has his second chance, with his rather more novelly novel, The Promise, is reason for celebration.
The Promise, though, again splits itself across separated sections. Each about eighty pages long, the novel’s four parts focus in turn on a different protagonist, although in each case the through-narrative is far clearer and the support cast entirely shared. This, after all, is a family saga, although as is Galgut’s wont it is a pared-down saga, a pithy kind of epic tragedy. It is set across three or four decades of South Africa’s recent history, from the final years of apartheid through to the presidency of Jacob Zuma. Its focus, however, remains tightly on the Swart family, a white family with a grand house and a large-ish estate in the countryside outside Pretoria, “a big mish-mash of a place, twenty-four doors on the outside that have to be locked at night, one style stuck on another“ (p. 12). History passes around and through this house; its inhabitants don’t live the great events – “trouble in all the townships, it’s being muttered about everywhere” (p. 9) – but are carried along, almost unknowingly, in their wake.
The Swarts’ bigotry is of the banal kind. The eldest child of Manie and Rachel Swart, Anton, is in a last-flush-of-adolescence relationship with the daughter of an NNP government minister whom we later learn confessed to some awful deeds as part of Truth and Reconciliation; but the Swarts don’t involve themselves any more than that with matters of state. They simply squat on their land, heedless of their own absurdity, and of the frustrated humanity of the Black people who serve them – most especially Salome, who lives with her son Lukas in another house on the Swart lands.
The titular promise of Galgut’s novel is an agreement between Rachel and Manie, overheard by their third and youngest child, Amor, that Salome will be given ownership of her house upon Rachel’s death. It is in the aftermath of this event that the novel’s first part takes place: Amor is collected from her boarding school by Manie’s domineering sister, Tannie Marina, and returned to the Swart family home for a period of mourning and fractious family politics.
Religion is a recurring theme of the novel, and the first part’s principal drama is driven by Rachel’s return to her family faith, Judaism. Years ago, in order to marry Manie, she converted to his strict Dutch Reformed Protestantism, but, as the reality of her long illness became impossible to deny, she began to insist on a Jewish funeral. When Rachel’s family arrive at the house to ensure her wishes are met, they are not greeted amicably. This despite the fact that Manie’s faith is far from strong: he is a gambler and a philanderer, and long ago Rachel “judged him and found him greatly wanting” (p. 29), in one of the unsatisfying moments of absolution that litter the text. One person’s wishes, another’s desires: this tension, too, permeates the novel, and, when Amor tells Lukas that Salome’s house is now theirs (“It’s always been his house … what is the white girl talking about?” [p. 21]), the family’s competing wills are brought into even greater tension than they are over Rachel’s funeral service.
Anton takes up Amor’s insistence that Manie keep his promise while the middle child, Astrid, desperately – and with some vanity – seeks to make the peace. But Anton’s attempts are driven not by Amor’s sense of charity but by his pronounced vengeful streak. He has returned to the family home from a compulsory tour of duty with the South African army – he has recently shot a woman dead in a township, and is racked by a self-regarding guilt – and finds himself resentful of all the trappings of Afrikaner respectability. “This country! he exclaims. He’s not sure why the country is to blame, but he repeats it. This country!” (p. 66) Anton’s diffuse anger, his lack of willingness to name the problem, persists throughout the novel.
In this way, The Promise isn’t a broad satire of apartheid, or even an angry denunciation of white privilege. It is a novel of character, living with these white characters. It puts us inside their milieu rather than within the wider context of the well-known heroic story – “When Mandela appears in the green Springbok rugby jersey to give the cup to Francois Pienaar, well, that’s something” (p. 151) – and certainly not in the day-to-day experience of Black South Africans, who are as mysterious to the narrative as they are to the Swarts. In the novel’s second part, Manie follows Rachel to the grave (though as we learn in The Promise, “the dead are frequently unable to accept their condition,” and haunt us in myriad ways [p. 43]); the family reunite again, Anton from a long period in self-exile (“the surface closes over as if you were never gone” [p. 98]), Amor from a period of post-school travelling. Only Astrid has stayed put, wracked by an eating disorder but marrying and in some ways modelling the role expected of her: wife, mother, homemaker.
Apartheid, too, has gone, though its primary impact is that Manie lies next to a Black man in hospital: “we die right next to each other now, in intimate proximity” (p. 99). This equivocation over the story of South Africa, the value of its progress, is another of the novel’s unifying characteristics: The Promise isn’t the story of a victory, but of a series of contingencies. Amor knows that “one day she will have to answer” (p. 113) – for Manie’s promise, but perhaps also for everything else – while Anton is equally aware that “Holding on, holding out, [is] an old South African solution” (p. 95). Little is resolved, except for the fate of some land at the extremity of the Swart estate: Manie has been persuaded to leave it to the Dutch Reformed Church that Anton so despises, and the minister of the congregation, Alwyn Simmers, is the most viciously filleted of all Galgut’s characters: “he’s a pastor these days, peddling a softer line in salvation to his customers, ahem, that is to say, his flock, so that everyone benefits” (p. 120). He is a knowing hypocrite; the Swarts are simply oblivious.
Both obliviousness and salvation come to be key focuses of the novel in its third part, in which Astrid – now in a second marriage while having an affair with an ANC politician (she “always used to find blacks unattractive, but she’s noticed lately that they’ve started to carry themselves more confidently” [p. 169]) – attends a Catholic confessional and her priest refuses her immediate absolution (again, holding on and holding out). The reader is by now conditioned to expect the title of each section to feature the name of the person whose death will be its focus, and so Astrid’s passing is not a surprise – but its violence is shocking, and its suddenness seriously disconcerting. The family again regroup, with the omniscient narrator once more skipping preternaturally fluid between them. The novel’s voice is a rare feat of prose. Sometimes, in moments of telling and equally supple slippage, it adopts first-person pronouns briefly to ground the narrative in a sense of self; at others, it explains away supposed structural defects or lapses of attentions – “the conversation takes place in the garden behind the church … [no,] more likely it happens inside” [p. 186] – in ways that both add a pleasing wryness and emphasises the novel’s conditionality. It is capable, then, of reintroducing us to characters and developing them at the same time. Anton is now the family patriarch, Amor a nurse on an HIV ward – and now they discuss once more Manie’s promise. Its keeping is again deferred, the Swarts’ knee-jerk insistence on their land much like Astrid’s need for absolution: “like a furnace that consumes whatever you throw into it and requires more” (p. 171).
Anton has become man who “appreciates it when people do their suffering offstage, out of sight” (p. 191), and this leaves he and Amor “on opposite sides”– but of what he can’t quite say: “what that division is, and where it lies … [there is] no answer to that” (p. 206). In the Catholic priest’s sermon, however, is the clue: “we are in exile, among the seed of Cain,” he tells the congregation, while reflecting privately that “he can’t entirely quell the unpleasant thought, which has stayed with him, of what he failed to do. Much easier to blame Cain!” (p. 216) All of this refusal to grasp the nettle – that he “can see the right action and will not perform it” (p. 242) – tortures Anton as it tortures South Africa, and the novel’s fourth and final part is named after him. We know, then, what his fate will be – but it is Amor’s which is most interesting. The novel has posited her as a sort of martyr, working off her sin by ministering AIDS patients; but when she finally goes to Salome’s tiny, almost ruined, house and gives to her and Lukas the deeds, she is treated only to anger. “My mother was supposed to get this house a long time back,” the now middle-aged Lukas sneers. “Thirty years ago! Instead she got lies and promises. And you did nothing” (p. 285). Amor, the ANC politician having an affair with Astrid, the churches: none have done anything. Even the token reparation which has been established in the characters’ minds throughout the novel as the crucial act of atonement cannot make up for this. “Three fucked up rooms with a broken roof. And we must be grateful?”
Anton’s wife Desirée – his teenage lover and the daughter of the “morally repugnant” NPP minister – has a close friend (Anton thinks a lover) named Moti. He is a new-agey sort of yoga instructor, a motivational speaker with a line in vapid self-fulfilment. When, attacked by a drunk and angry husband, he intones righteously, “Aggression ultimately hurts the aggressor,” the reader might agree that this is on a certain true – but that it is also partial. Anton – a morally bankrupt character, but also an unerringly insightful one, tortured by his ability to understand but his refusal to know – snaps back, “I don’t know, I find the object of aggression suffers more” (p. 243). Everyone in The Promise suffers, but Lukas and Salome most of all – and only in its last pages do they even think to take the chance to express that. In this way, The Promise – a remarkably subtle, coherent, composed and balanced a novel – is not about the Swarts at all, but about the consequences of their solipsism. “Oh, I can deal with the tragedy,” Anton groans at one point (p. 245), “it’s the farce I can’t handle.”
@Number 71 