“An Impossibly Complex System”: Maggie Shipstead’s “Great Circle”

It has for some time now been fashionable to suggest that writing big books is unfashionable. Grand narrative is not, according to this shibboleth, en vogue; the saga, the epic, the sweeping story, is a preference of a bygone age. Every time one of these sorts of book pops up, then, it is posited as going against this notional grain.

But this cliché is demonstrably untrue. The dominant narratives of our time are all megatexts, entire worlds whose stories are expanded outwards constantly: the Marvel Cinematic and Star Wars Universes are the obvious examples, but modern media’s taste for adapting and re-adapting makes this ever more the case: from Lord of the Rings to The Wheel of Time, big books are once more not just fashionable but the default.

This isn’t just a genre or cinematic phenomenon, however. In the literary world, too, the big book – if it ever went away – is now once more common, and among the most popular example of the form. Hilary Mantel has won the Booker Prize twice for doorstop novels with a spread of decades; Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries was intricately plotted and expansive; from Could Atlas on, David Mitchell has cobbled all his novels into a megatext. All three of these writers have been adapted for television; surely Paul Auster’s shortlisted alternate histories of 4321 will also get their time.

The appearance of Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle on this year’s shortlist, then, is not the oddity that some reviewers might suggest it to be. In the New York Times, Lyn Steger Strong suggests that, “At a moment when so many novels seem invested in subverting form, Great Circle follows in a long tradition of Big Sweeping Narratives”; as I’ve argued, Great Circle is part of a zeitgeist, not running against it; but Steger Strong gets other things right: “it’s at the level of the sentence and the scene, the small but unforgettable salient detail, that books finally succeed or fail,” she writes, subtly suggesting that the novel’s greatest achievements are not in the execution of its breadth, but in its many solitary moments of depth.

Certainly the novel is discursive, and much of it is concerned with plot, with stuff happening: ships are wrecked, cars are crashed, the Lindberghs spy on Germany, Amelia Earhart goes missing; wars happen, lovers love, people die. The novel’s two main strands – one following the life of an Earhart-ish figure named Marian Graves, who goes missing in 1950, the other focusing on Hadley Baxter, a Hollywood startlet who takes a last chance to save her career by playing Graves in a movie of her life – are constantly interspersed with the stories of other characters, families, localities, nations. The earliest event described in the novel happens 15,000 years ago. Shipstead is not afraid of scope.

Amid all this, the novel’s length – around 600 large pages – is the way it works enough human-level detail into proceedings to make us care. Marian and Hadley alike struggle through worlds not set up to make life easy for them; they, along with many other women in the novel, suffer sexual assault and abuse, but – like all the other women in the novel – they also persevere. Marian’s story is told in the third-person, Hadley’s in the first – but both connect, albeit in very different ways (perhaps Marian’s as tragic-comic, Hadley’s as comi-tragic). They include a rich cast of secondary characters, and a repeatedly euphonic set of recurring motifs.

From sea-going vessels to flight, complicated romances to the perils of public opinion, the relationship of small things to larger is the critical theme of the novel. For one new mother, “the horro of the birth had merged with the horror of the war” (p. 24); for another the movement is in another direction, all the ambition of “her labour […] almost forgotten to make back what had been spent” (p. 135). Ultimately, the novel moves through a world in which “ungovernable forces come to roost inside heroic human bodies or are shrunk down and carted around in vials and briefcases” (p. 107).

The great circle of the novel’s title is the circumference of the cut side of a sphere’s perfect half, “the largest circle that can be drawn on a sphere” (p. 3). This emphasises the interrelatedness of everything in the novel, the mirror images and fitted echoes that structure its often baggy storytelling. Characters from one narrative show up in another, older and with messages from the past; the editorial choices of Marian’s biographers, and in turn the director of the movies made of those books, reflect and refract the realities of her life; Marian’s heroism – but also the facts of her quotidian existence – inspire and enhance Hadley.

A recurring concept in the novel is that of bravery: Marian is routinely described as courageous, but as a pilot she is trained to be “safe, not brave”. Another character is accused of cowardice when he acts to save two children, even imprisoned for it; on Hadley’s social media it feels, in the face of the legion of trolls online, bold even to post a photo. In the ambivalent way it treats courage – is it selfish to be bold? – the novel offers a complex treatment of an issue many of its characters are seeking to reduce to an over-simplistic core. The central figure of Marian – literally and unexplainably absent at the heart of her own story – offers a fulcrum around which they gather. To them, she is a cipher; to Shipstead’s reader she is anything but.

At one point, Hadley expresses scepticism about a biography of Marian: “it was trying to force Marian to be something – someone – more familiar and reassuring than she actually was” (p. 257). Certainly in its capacity for granular detail as well as sweep, Great Circle creates in Marian the figure of a real human being, complex and difficult. But I’m also less sure that the novel creates truly strange human beings; it reads much as one might imagine a book of this sort to read, like Sunnyside by Glen David Gold or Life After Life by Kate Atkinson: episodic and wise, informed by history but also willing to take liberties with it. This novel, too, could rather easily be adapted – perhaps into a Netflix limited series. It is not unfamiliar.

That expresses my experience of reading Great Circle in a nutshell: for all its imaginative sympathy, roving focus and layered themes, it didn’t feel like a transformative novel. Throughout Great Circle, characters try in various ways to take flight; it closes with one of them “held aloft by pure possibility, as though she were about to see everything” (p. 589); the novel tries to evoke that feeling whilst also compensating for the distance height provides with copious on-the-ground detail. I’m not sure it quite achieves the right balance here, and ultimately the novel felt to me rather more firmly anchored than it might have been – even, perhaps, a tad leaden.

That being the case, which of the shortlisted novels should win this evening? I’ve not yet written about Richard Powers’ Bewilderment here – that review will be appearing soon (ETA: here, in fact!) – but, spoilers, I don’t think it should win … yet it’s possible, in its capturing of the COP26 moment of existential dread, that it might do. The best book on the shortlist – as opposed to its most relevant – is, however, Damon Galgut’s The Promise. Like Great Circle, it achieves breadth; but like Bewilderment it also has focus. It is neither reductively aphoristic like Patricia Lockwood’s novel nor overly abstract like Anuk Arudpragasam’s. Perhaps for me it’s biggest rival is Nadifa Mohamed’s The Fortune Men – but Galgut, I think, not just avoids Mohamed’s structural issues but has written a novel which is entirely without seams. Indeed, I’m not sure the contest is even especially close: The Promise is the finest novel of these six by some margin. Good luck to it tonight.

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“All Of Us Fighting Over Crumbs”: Nadifa Mohamed “The Fortune Men”

The English novel (as distinct from the novel-in-English, which has thanks to American literature in particular long been better served in this regard) has only a relatively recent tradition of the social novel that focuses on race. Notable exceptions such as Eliot’s Daniel Deronda aside, it is only really in the twenty-first century that the novels of England have considered the experiences of people not of the imagined “ethnic majority”: from Hanif Kureishi to Zadie Smith, a generation of writers who came of age at either end of the 1990s heralded a movement which has created much of the best literature in England of the past twenty years. Sunjeev Sahota, Taiye Selsasi, Mohsin Hamid and Diana Evans have all in recent years produced memorable and successful novels which have focused on elements of English society which were entirely invisible in much of the work most prominent even as recently as the 1980s (in, for example, the work of Amis, Barnes, Byatt, Drabble et al).

This has immeasurably enriched English literature, and it is notable that these are the writers which have managed for the most part to keep authors of the British Isles in the Booker shortlist now that the panel is able to select novels from across the English-speaking world, rather than from the rather hokey notionality of the “Commonwealth”. Nadifa Mohamed’s The Fortune Men is an extremely good example of the form. Somali-born, and resident in Britain since the age of four, Mohamed’s capturing of the 1950s Wales in which the novel is set is pitch-perfect, as evocative a work of historical fiction as Sarah Waters might ever manage; but her depiction of the Somali community in Cardiff at that time is also fierce and full, notable for its controlled but unmistakable elucidation of the impossible injustices that were contained within a Tiger Bay replete with cultural diversity even as the authorities sought to maintain a ruthlessly genteel majoritarianism.

The novel’s central figure is Mahmood Mattan, a former sailor who has, in order to stay near his estranged Welsh wife and their children, adopted a more stationary life at the edges of the maritime economy: a fixer, odd-job man, gambler and even would-be rake, he adopts – even when he cannot afford – the trappings of dandyism in an attempt to break out of the subordinate role it is demanded he assume, even as his activity is essential to maintaining the luxury of his betters. In this, he is no different to anyone else in the polyglot community of Tiger Bay, where “everyone [is] bending the law a little to make life easier”: after all, the law was not made for them. Still, Mohamed doesn’t make him relatable or likeable per se – his view of women is not entirely enlightened (he tells his mother-in-law that he will “kill [his wife] dead if he saw her with another man” [p. 77]); his obstreperous arrogance can be frustrating; he makes some poor choices. But Mohamed also encourages and achieves an intense empathy for Mattan’s positionality, the relationship with authority and wider society that is is not chosen by but forced upon him.

Mattan’s reckoning with his situation is complex. Early on, he visits the Employment Exchange in an attempt to obtain some regular – and respectable – work. Given his experience as a boilerman on sea-going vessels, he is an ideal heavy industry man. But there is a problem. “There is one foundry job here,” the woman behind Counter 4 tells him “but I don’t think you will be suitable.” She leaves “the rest unsaid”, and Mattan “meets her gaze, swallows a bitter smile” (p. 23). Proper work – factory work – is for white men, of course. Mahmood knows, too, what those white men think of him: “‘The blacks take our jobs and take our women.’ They talk like that in all the papers, and say it to your face if they’re feeling bold” (p. 231). This knowledge he learned on leaving Somalia, on the various vessels on which he found work: “the ship revealed to him the gulf between the life he had been living in Africa and the world beyond” (pp. 232).

On the other hand, Mattan labours under the belief – the hope, the delusion? – that he can join this other world, become part of the world of privilege that exists in another sphere to the land of his birth. With his clothes and his Welsh wife, he believes himself to be achieving a toe-hold in this new world – but he soon comes to understand that in fact such entrance is denied to him, that so-called tolerance is always conditional. “Isn’t this what the world is like?” he reflects late in the novel while looking at a chequers board. “With countries and seas instead of black and white squares, the white man spread all over, the black man picked off wherever he might be and left to eke out a life on the fringes if the board” (p. 321). Mattan ruminates in a cell on death row, awaiting his execution for a crime he did not commit – but one for which he has been convicted by, of course, an all-white jury.

All this is based on a true story. Only one name has been changed – that of the murder victim, the Jewish shopkeeper Lily Volpert, here referred to as Violet Volacki. This understandable delicateness somewhat informs those of the novel’s passages – common in its first half, rarer as it proceeds – that focus first on Violet and then on her sister, Diana, and and niece, Grace. These sections are sometimes overly polite, somehow less incisive or as deeply characterised as those which revolve around Mattan; Violet is defined by work, Diana by grief. Compare this with the layered depiction even of the secondary characters in Mattan’s chapters – Laura, who is “using black men knives to hurt herself with” (p. 76), or Mattan’s benefactor, Berlin, who from his seafront bar “struggles to keep old worlds alive; friends, lovers, even children seem to deliquesce when he turns his back” (p. 39); it is little wonder that the Volecki sections reduce in number until they cease to insert themselves into Mattan’s narrative.

This may or may not be a missed opportunity, but it certainly makes the novel a little bumpy in its structure. So, too, does the switch to scripted dialogue when the narrative moves to the trial of Mattan for Volacki’s murder, on the basis of mere circumstantial evidence and – of course – racist suspicion. The sudden shift from prose to transcript feels unnecessary, and works against the novel’s otherwise ever-present imaginative sympathy. This is a pity, since an exploration of why the diversity of Tiger bay does not help Mattan would have immeasurably deepened this section of the novel: “They have a West Indian, a Welshman, an Arab, a Maltese, an Indian, a Jew, almost the League of Nations accusing him” (p. 210); Mattan has no friends even among those who are also subject to arbitrary authority. “YOU WOULD NOT HANG A DOG ON HER EVIDENCE,” rages Mattan of one of his accusers, and yet there is no stopping a prosecution case which seems paper-thin.

Mattan is blamed even for this. “You seem to be forgetting your own role in this debacle,” his defence lawyer tells him. “[You] came across as belligerent and shifty” (p. 307). What other choice would a man in Mattan’s position, falsely accused and asked absurd questions based on the testimony of malicious accusers, have? It is the corner into which he has been knowingly forced. Some of the novel’s most poetic moments come when Mattan first adopts and then rejects Islam as a consoling influence in prison; ultimately he can find no satisfactory explanation, not justice, in his situation. “They’re doing this because they haven’t broken me,” he ultimately decides. “If I had lost my mind and sat weeping in my own shit, maybe then they’d be happy to send me to a madhouse” (p. 361). Reader, Mattan is not sent to the madhouse; he instead goes to a gallows hidden behind his own wardrobe.

The Fortune Men espouses a cold anger – its rage is incisive for its patience. If the novel might have been even more focused – if it makes a few mis-steps here or there in its attempts to encompass its case – then it nevertheless remains an unusual and challenging mixture of conviction and conditionality, a novel clear as to what it thinks but also open to the complexity of real life. Real life, indeed, is its subject: not the myth of Britain, but the reality of its locaity’s “post-colonial” experiences, the truth of its various communities and the reckonings that they require. For the Booker to be able to shortlist a novel such as this – which is not just critically about but of Britain – is a sign itself that writers such as Mohamed are, slowly, but with undeterred diligence, having their desired effect.

Albums of 2020

Everyone’s habits – not just for listening, but I’d imagine for almost everything – had to shift this year, and I don’t suppose mine were any different. I discover new music, dinosaur that I am, through record stores, live shows and conversations with other musicians … all of which were in short supply this year. That left me relying at least in part, and as in so many walks of life during 2020, on algorithms. I confess I also listened to older music more – the comfort of the familiar, and perhaps the past, was often welcome this year.

Nevertheless, I think 2020 was actually an extremely good year for new music – the best in some time, perhaps. Some musicians completed projects they hadn’t dreamed of at the start of the year (Dan Bern’s Quarantine Me); others released more albums than usual (Taylor Swift, with both Folklore and Evermore); still others brought forward releases – though some, of course delayed them. I’ve enjoyed music this year from Charley Crockett and Calexico, Fiona Apple and Sturgill Simpson; Pharis and Jason Romero, Phoebe Bridgers and Darlingside, beabadoobee and Bob Dylan.

But this year more than any other, the five albums that stand out are – though, I’d naturally argue, musically outstanding and often sharply innovative – primarily those which gave me most joy, that afforded the most catharsis or escape. And these are they – the albums I’ll take with me from this strangest of years.

Laura Marling – Song For Our Daughter

Originally slated for release in August, Marling brought forward this album – releasing it digitally in April – in an attempt to “provide some sense of union”. She deserves a medal. This album and its songs – from wonderful opener ‘Alexandra’ to evocative closer ‘For You’ – offered real rays of light for me during that first, queasily uncertain period of lockdown here in the UK. Not only is Song For Our Daughter a thorough-going gift in context, though; in content, too, it is easily the best album Marling has produced since I Speak Because I Can, and it may be the best of her career: melodic but also subtle, full of lyrical cleverness without being over-wrought. It is a proper album for the ages. Most importantly, though, it was an album for this one. I’ll be forever grateful to it.

Waxahatchee – St Cloud

In an interview for BBC 6 Music in the summer, Phoebe Bridgers called this sinuous, sly record her album of the pandemic: it came at just the right time in the US to soundtrack Bridgers’ stay-at-home period, and Katie Crutchfield’s wry, witty songwriting – backed unerringly by a unique harmonic palette and taste for phrasing – gave me as close to an arms-raising moment as I reached in 2020. This is an anthemic LP for anti-anthemic times, and in ‘Can’t Do Much’ it might boast my song of the year. This is the album I’ll continue most to associate with 2020, I think – for better and, perhaps, for worse.

Thundercat – It Is What It Is

While we’re on the subject of wit and wily humour, Thundercat’s resplendent LP has been under-accounted for in year’s best lists – for reasons I can’t figure. Made up mostly of short, but symphonic, snatches of song, from its samples to its collaborators this is an expertly curated tour through Thundercat’s innately fascinating blend of jazz, hip-hop, funk and soul. Stephen Lee Brunner’s background as a bassist is in full evidence in many of these grooves; but his excellences as a lyricist should also not be in doubt – ‘Black Qualls’, ‘Dragonball Durag’ and ‘King of the Hill’, for example, are all pitch-perfect mini-dramas. Beautiful vocals, lush-but-spare arrangements, a wickedly brief run-time and some of the most glorious transitions since of Montreal in their pomp – it’s all here. Give it the Grammy, already.

Courtney Marie Andrews – Old Flowers

This one’s tricky. As old-fashioned a country break-up album as you can imagine, Old Flowers is replete with crystalline songwriting and utterly luminous vocal performances – record opener ‘Burlap String’ is improbably good on both counts. But, like the rest of the album, it is almost unseemly in its sadness. This year, it wasn’t always the right time to listen to so acute a record about loss; but you’ll search long and hard to find so lovingly put-together an album this year, so complete a statement, so beautiful a thing. It’s glorious. It draws you to it despite how miserable it threatens to make you feel at a time when you don’t need any particular help to feel doomy. And yet, like all good break-up albums, at the flickering heart of the matter is love – is hope. It takes your breath away.

John Craigie – Asterisk The Universe

Whatever raised a smile in 2020 had to work hard to do so. But in this, perhaps his most rounded release to date, folksinger John Craigie applied a lightness of touch that got under your defences easily – and left you smiling. Mostly, this is thanks to Craigie’s raconteur spirit, on which he has built his growing reputation amongst the Americana cognoscenti. But there’s more here than a troubadour with a guitar – some properly catchy arrangements and some very tasteful production really lift the material to the next level. If ‘Can’t Do Much’ is my song of the year, it has strong competition from ‘Don’t Deny’; and my lyric of the year? “I always wanted to be a healer and give out medicine / I was too dumb to be a doctor so I do this.” In 2020, the hierarchy between these two healers might have been in greater relief than usual; but both, in their own ways, mattered.

“I’m In An Alien Country Without Rules”: Angie Cruz’s “Dominicana”

What a curious time it is in which to read novels as if they matter. The shortlist for this year’s Women’s Prize has been overtaken almost entirely by events: these six books demand more attention than many readers will have been able in this chaotic year to muster. In spring, I went through a period myself in which I was unable to read a great deal of anything, much less a series of demanding fictions. That I have now managed to reach a place where I can devote time and focus to books is a token of privilege more than it is any sort of personal victory. From pandemics to protests, much of what is currently vital is taking place far beyond the pages of literature.

In many ways, too, Dominicana by Angie Cruz is the quietest, the most unassuming, of any of the six novels in contention. Its first-person protagonist, Ana Canción, is aware from very early on that “a ravenous world waits outside”, but for much of the novel she spends her life in a series of aggressively closed environments: first the strict family home she grows up in, and then the small New York apartment in which she finds herself when she marries at 15 a migrant worker in his thirties, Juan Ruiz. In both contexts her behaviour is closely monitored and controlled – in the Dominican Republic by a mother for whom she is primarily “the ticket for all of [the family] to eventually go to America”, and in the US by Juan himself, for whom she is, on her arrival in the city, “now a wife [… who has] duties”.

I was reminded repeatedly while reading this novel of the work of Miriam Toews, and in particular of her Irma Voth (2011). Toews has solved the problem of passivity: her narrators and protagonists are done-to rather than doing, but they remain magnetic presences. Similarly, despite being the narrator of Dominicana, Ana is its most passive presence, a teenage girl of whom much is asked – and yet to whom little is given. Almost the entire novel drifts by before she does anything for herself, since she has been conditioned to expect only to serve the community.

In Toews’ work, too, women are most often expected merely to play their part – work only to actualise the needs of the community which grips them, rather than form anything like a symbiotic, mutually beneficial, relationship with it or anyone else. Cruz’s novel adds to Toews’ almost peerless evocations of claustrophobic control  the experience of the immigrant (in Irma Voth, the Mennonite protagonist has left their native Canada to hide from the modern world in rural Mexico, but this isn’t quite the same journey made by the desperate-but-enterprising migrants of Dominicana). “How in the world does anyone say good-bye to everyone they love, everything they know?” Ana asks herself at one point; the answer is simple: no one can. Dominicana is a novel of loss, and of accommodation to it.

The gains promised by economic migration – in the Canción family home, “Money [ … and] papers [… are] always the main subject” – turn out by contrast to be thin. “In September,” Ana is told by Juan, “you’ll go to a secretarial school so you can learn how to type. And you’ll work at my friend’s agency. Don’t you worry, everything’s been decided.” This isn’t the freedom New York was meant to embody – and in the absence of everything she has ever known, Ana feels in fact more imprisoned than ever. When Juan takes by degrees to domestic abuse – “A slap’s one thing, a dent in the wall another, but choking?” – Ana’s situation feels untenable, and yet is entirely inescapable. A nurse at the local pregnancy clinic slips Ana a leaflet featuring “a photograph of a woman with a busted lip and a black eye filled with panic”, but with her non-existent English and total lack of support networks beyond Juan’s circle, Ana is at a loss as to what to do with it; in the event, Juan finds the leaflet, and is sent into another rage by it.

Ana accommodates herself, too, to this. But as time goes by, she becomes more comfortable with the city –  fire alarm, a police siren, a bus halting at its stop … at first they were so loud, […] but now they sound as pleasant as the radio” – and also with the idea of agency (“Puffer fish can kill you if you eat them, yet some people take the risk and die”); she begins as affair with Juan’s brother, César, who helps her begin to earn some money of her own, which she hides in a ceramic doll. Ultimately, however – and here Cruz surely deliberately wrong-foots the reader – Ana chooses her family, and breaks it off with César. Doubling down on settling in, Ana invites her mother to live with her and Juan in New York, locking herself further into the pretence that is her marriage. When her mother arrives, she too seems underwhelmed: “She had wanted New York. She has pushed for it. So this is New York, she says with a weak smile.” The dream pulls along the dreamer.

This is a novel that constantly threatens to broaden out beyond Ana’s perspective – Dominican politics plays an important role in the book, driving many of its events although Ana remains only dimly aware of how, and her apartment sits in the middle of a part of New York, Washington Heights, that is full of stories similar and complementary to her own – but Cruz, for better or worse, sticks to the limited first-person (admittedly cheating every now and then, with Ana suggesting she’s over-heard something or pieced scenes together from gossip). This means that Dominicana lacks of the polyphony of Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other – and in its mission to add warp, weft and detail to our understanding of the immigrant experience this feels a shame. There’s also something else going on here, though. When I read Evaristo’s novel after it was included on last year’s Booker shortlist, I wondered if it didn’t offer a “Radio 4-friendly version of British blackness”; I think Dominicana offers in its level of detail and intimacy a less comfortable vision of the minority experience. In an afterword, Cruz explains that Dominicana is a version of her own mother’s life, the sort of story which, “although common, [is] rarely represented in the mainstream narratives available to us.” In this aim, Dominicana succeeds.

Still, in the year since Girl, Woman, Other won the Booker (alongside, unnecessarily, Margaret Attwood’s The Testaments), evidence has been ample that what I thought of as that novel’s “soft-centredness” will strike many, many others as radical and even alienating: the conversation is not as advanced, well distributed or as nuanced as any criticism of Evaristo’s novel as “pulling its preaching punches” seems willing to acknowledge. This brings me back to my privilege as a reader: perhaps only someone in a happy position would suggest that Girl, Woman, Other needed to be more. Given, then, the ambition of Evaristo’s novel elsewhere, and the clear canniness of its approach, it must be a leading contender for the Women’s Prize, too; if Mantel remains the bookie’s favourite for her star-quality, I might suggest that the plague-novel Hamnet beats out The Mirror & the Light by dint of the latter avoiding many of the faults with the former that Colin Burrow identified  in his nevertheless generous LRB review. Let it be between Evaristo and O’Farrell, then – either novel seems a fiction well tuned to our times … which might at least allow us all to accept or believe that, even in days such as these, reading novels might still matter.

“It’s Like A Mirror”: Maggie O’Farrell’s “Hamnet”

In one way, Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet has not, in its effort to win the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction, chosen its moment well: a historical novel set in the sixteenth century, it must defeat Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror & The Light in its own Tudorbethan sub-category before even having a hope of triumphing in the tournament proper. It’s not that the novels’ approaches to the period are entirely similar – O’Farrell does not restrict herself to the third-person limited, and she opts for the economical over the encyclopaedic – but equally, and beyond the jerkins and the ruffs, they certainly share a lyrical, empathetic approach to the Tudors that inevitably situates them side-by-side on a shortlist.

In another key way, however, Hamnet is the perfect novel for the moment – because it is a plague book. No one really knows what killed the only son of William Shakespeare – he is primarily remembered by his orthographic near-double, the Prince of Denmark. But O’Farrell has chosen to have him bitten by fleas, and in so doing  has written, quite without planning it of course, a novel that became in 2020 simultaneously rather too close to the bone and also unusually comforting.  We should all, of course, still be paying attention to the high politics and state-making with which Mantel concerns herself; but in 2020 much of our attentions have also turned inward. Hamnet speaks to the smaller world of the domestic space, riven by disease and shattered by grief, out of control and yet also the only unit left to us in making sense of events. “Every life has its kernel, its hub, its epicentre,” we read early on, “from which everything flows out, to which everything returns.” Hamnet is about that hub, where The Mirror & The Light is about – seeks to encompass – all its many spokes.

The novel begins with Hamnet running. He is, like most young boys, in persistent motion. At this particular moment, his family are nowhere to be seen, distracted by concern for his sister, Judith. Of course, this activity will end soon and the familial fretting will guiltily shift focus – and, equally naturally, the contrast is O’Farrell’s point. Also part of the purpose of the novel’s opening pages is sketching the geography of the very small world in which its events are set. When William eventually leaves for London and Southwark, we do not follow him; we instead stay in Stratford, and mostly on Henley Street – though occasionally we, like the characters, make the trip to the space of Shottery, where the Hathaways reside. This tight mise en scene offers O’Farrell the opportunity to paint the intimacy of the enclosed spaces in which most of the characters spend much of their time: the kitchen, the glover’s workshop, the bedchamber. The few streets of Stratford, too, become material in our reading the novel, and even a funeral procession to Holy Trinity is given the ballast of attractively quotidian detail.

By centring the novel in this way, its comparatively rather small stakes in fact come to matter a great deal – as of course they should. Hamnet isn’t really concerned with William except in his role as a father and husband; we spend most time with him early on, as a frustrated Latin master, and he becomes a mystery to us once he adopts the earring of the rakish playwright. The novel is, despite its title, in large part the story of his relationship with Anne – here known by her own insistence as Agnes. Agnes, the sister of the boys to whom William is assigned as Latin master, is given by O’Farrell the same gifts of human sympathy and understanding which are so often assigned to her husband; his self-actualisation becomes as much her project as his own. “She can look at a person and see right into their very soul,” he says of her, before London and Hamnet’s death drive wedges between them. “There is not a drop of harshness in her. She will take a person for who they are, not what they are not or ought to be.”

This comes as special relief to William, since his own father – the harsh glover, John – has no patience for his son’s sense of displacement, nor his apparent lack of interest in the practical trades to which John has devoted his life. Agnes, however, recognises that William “had more hidden away inside [him] than anyone else she’d ever met.” When William chooses to leave for London and not take his family with him, this hidden part bites the hand that has fed it. “It is evident to Agnes now … that her husband is split in two,” and duality feeds much of the rest of the novel: life and death, brother and sister, husband and wife, London and Stratford, sickness and health. Unusually, in doubleness the novel finds much not just of its conflict but also its consolation. In the novel’s denouement, for example, Agnes steals away to London, unbidden by her husband, to discover what his double life involves – adultery, probably, dissipation surely. But instead she attends the Globe, and sees a production of Hamlet, in which William plays the ghost of the young man’s father.

Her husband wrote these words, these exchanges, but what has any of this to do with their boy? … Why would her husband have done it? Why pretend that it means nothing to him, just a collection of letters? How could he thieve his name, then strip and flense it of all it embodies, discarding the very life it once contained? How could he take up his pen and write it on a page, breaking its connection with their son?

[… But] her husband has pulled off a manner of alchemy. He has found this boy, instructed him, shown him, how to speak, how to stand, how to lift his chin, like this, like that. He has rehearsed and primed and prepared him. He has written words for him to speak and to hear. She tries to imagine how her husband could have schooled him so exactly, so precisely, and how it might have felt when the boy got it right, when he first got the walk, that heartbreaking turn of the head.

[…] Hamlet, here, on this stage, is two people, the young man, alive, and the father, dread. […] He has taken his son’s death and made it his own; he has put himself in death’s clutches, resurrecting the boy in his place.

Having spent hundreds of pages, and in novel-time several years, with this family – who are in many ways historically, culturally, religiously distant from us – this passage, in which William at first has no idea his wife is present, is profoundly moving. This is because O’Farrell has picked apart the grief of the Shakespeares, the absence in their life that the plague has created. When Hamlet first dies from his sickness, which he has suffered while all the while his father is in London or travelling belatedly back, Agnes can barely believe it: “It is an impossible idea that her son, her child, her boy, the healthiest and most robust of her children, should, within days, sicken and die.” William, at first so distant as to see confoundingly unmoved, ultimately admits the same: “I am constantly wondering where he is,” he confides to her. “Where he has gone It is like a wheel ceaselessly turning at the back of my mind.” The complexity of this family, the doubleness of the individuals that make it up, the tight confines in which they share space, are laid bare – rent open, cast into chaos – by the random event of illness. Each member of the family must first identity, then acknowledge, then somehow accommodate, the knowledge that “[what] is given may be taken away, at any time. Cruelty and devastation wait for you around corners, inside coffers, behind doors: they can leap out at you at any moment, like a thief or brigand.” Hamnet is in part a book about how one family might do that.

Their pain is heightened by how arbitrary is Hamnet’s death. In a bravura passage, O’Farrell proposes sketches how, for “the pestilence to reach Warwickshire, England, in the summer of 1596, two events need to occur in the lives of two separate people, and then these two people need to meet” – but, in the telling, she makes clear how reductive even this emphasis upon chance proves to be. In fact, the necessary connections are even more rosicrucian and random. The two people are a Murano glassmaker and a cabin boy: the second contracts fleas from a monkey he plays with; the first is sick one day and his understudy fails to pack a shipment of beads safely, instead using rags the cabin boy’s fleas eventually migrate to onboard the vessel. When the beads are eventually delivered to Stratford-upon-Avon, as a result of yet more coincidence and hundreds of miles from Alexandria and Murano, a young boy dies. The almost improbable chain of events encourages fear – buboes send Stratford into cold shivers – and also, of course, superstition and foolishness: when a doctor arrives in a plague mask, Hamnet asks why he wears the strange device. “Because he this it will protect him,” Agnes explains. Will it? the boy responses. “His mother purses her lips, then shakes her head. ‘I don’t think so.'” But wear it he does.

All of this, needless to say, feels grimly relevant. But there is also a certain consolation in reading of plagues past, of quarantines and isolations and cumbersome prophylactics that – though terrifying then as now – also connect us to other human beings through shared experience and the empathy we can, with effort, practice in its presence. Hamnet adopts a laconic style that is never lachrymose or over-laden with pathos; but it is also deeply sad while finding room for hopes: of reconciliation, of memory, of love. I don’t think, in the quality of its execution or its clarity of vision, it has much in fact to fear from the mirror or the light.

“How We Might Channel All Of This Dread”: Jenny Offill’s “Weather”

If I was hoping that reading through the Women’s Prize shortlist might offer some timely distraction from the currently parlous state of the world beyond it, Jenny Offill’s Weather was here to ensure I had nowhere to hide. Narrated by a librarian convinced – like a monk awaiting the Viking horde – that the collapse of civilisation is fast approaching, I cannot imagine it will prove a comfortable read for anyone, much less someone – like me – who can’t quite shake the feeling that she might be right.

Weather reminded me of no book quite so much as Paul Kingsnorth’s Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, a volume of essays rather than fiction which adopts a fatalism about the planet’s predicament that proves hard to shake having completed it. “[S]uicide is protest,” Kingsnorth writes, “suicide is wilful disobedience” [p. 15], and one leaves the book with the sense he wishes that society could just put itself to sleep. Offill’s narrator, Lizzie, has achieved Kingsnorth’s certainty but not his equanimity: she is instead fixated on what she might do, not so much to prevent the collapse as mitigate it. “It is important to be on the alert for the ‘decisive moment,’ says the man next to me who is talking to his date. I agree. The only difference is that he is talking about twentieth-century photography and I am talking about twenty-first-century everything.”

This sense of overwhelm pervades the text, and is a large part of why it proves so difficult to experience. It is an effect that Lucy Ellman evoked in Ducks, Newburyport, but differently: in that novel, the anxious narrator’s flood of thoughts drowns the reader in concerns big and small, relevant and trivial, founded and unfounded:

stranger danger, buckram buildings, the fact that I just don’t get why anyone would do that, Pottersville, the fact that people in the food business could poison people too, every day, if they wanted to, but they hardly ever do, Grant township, the fact that some people in Illinois declared rivers and streams have a right to exist, a right to flourish, but that’s in Illinois […] the fact that officially Illinois, Michigan, Indiana and Ohio make up the Midwest, just those four states […]

And so on. In Ellman’s novel – which due to its stylistic choices is eight times the length of Offill’s – a culture in crisis is depicted through the consciousness of a single individual, and the manner in which it cannot contain all that it is being asked to hold in place. In Weather, on the other hand, Offill’s protagonist is far more successful in shaping her anxiety into a single frame, a complete – if uncomforting – understanding. I think this, more than anything else, is why the novel reminds me more of Kingsnorth’s essays than Ellman’s novel: because it curates itself. This isn’t entirely to the subject matter’s benefit.

“Have you read all of these?” Lizzie’s neigbour asks her upon seeing her apartment’s collection of books. She has, but it hasn’t really helped – yet the craft of the prose that presents Lizzie’s crisis can sometimes contrive in its smartness to make everything a little too pat. There is a sense that Offill knows this, and in Sylvia – a travelling lecturer whom Lizzie once studied with and whose PA she becomes in the course of the novel – Weather casts a quizzical eye at the profiteering certainty of environmentalist prophets. “If you think you are lost,” we read at one point, “beware bending the map.” Sylvia has no answers, particularly – “Nothing lasts forever is the conclusion reached” – and her lectures increasingly feel like another symptom of the crisis, rather than a cogent analysis of it. “I’m starting to understand why all those people want to go to Mars,” Lizzie remarks.

Despite this, Weather – in all its well edited concision – can seem a tad insistent, exclusive and even closed;  it is sometimes rather more certain than its narrator is meant in fact to be (“I wake to the sound of gunshots. Walnuts on the roof, Ben says”). Its signal is perhaps not sufficiently open to noise: “the impacts are going to be big,” Lizzie worries about the collapse – but the impacts are also going to be unpredictable. For Lizzie, however, they are always imagined as some sort of doomsday action flick: “one day I have to run to catch he bus. I am so out of breath when I get there that I know in a flash all my preparations for the apocalypse are doomed. I will die early and ignobly.” I was a fan of Offill’s previous novel, Dept. of Speculation precisely because it constantly risked seeming preachy – but in its structural play always managed to achieve polyvalence. I’m not sure Weather quite manages the same trick.

In fairness, this is a novel about a woman’s inability to identify which events are catastrophic and which are not. “There is a period after every disaster in which people wander around trying to figure out if it is truly a disaster,” she muses at one point. “Disaster psychologists use the term ‘milling’ to describe most people’s default actions when they find themselves in a frightening situation.” Weather is a novel of milling: Lizzie worries about leaving her job, about having an affair, about leaving her husband Ben, about going on a day trip to Washington DC, about Sylvia; but nothing actually happens. She is milling – but perhaps so too is the culture that sits around her, that it is her professional calling to categorise and catalogue. In that sense, Weather is a novel of our time, murkily certain of the likelihood of collapse and also ill-equipped to imagine or encompass it. We are all of us milling.

The Women’s Prize for Fiction: “Ordinary People” and “An American Marriage”

When Tayari Jones’ An American Marriage was announced last night as the winner of this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction, I’m not proud to report that my heart sank a little. Jones’ novel is a worthy one – it anatomises the impact of unjust incarceration upon African-American communities at a time when members of that demographic are being imprisoned at a rate five times greater than that of the white population – and it comes with endorsements from Barack Obama and the National Book Award, for which it was shortlisted.

The question, though, must be why An American Marriage had, for all its garlands (and positive blurbs take up the first four pages of its paperback edition), until last night failed to win any other award. Having read it alongside the other examination of modern matrimony on the Women’s Prize shortlist, Diana Evans’ Ordinary People, the answer to this question seems to lie in the absences at the heart of An American Marriage – its pulled punches, its partial moralities. Jones has written an emotive polemic, but that doesn’t necessarily make it a complete novel. Granting it the Women’s Prize feels like something of a missed opportunity, then – and, alas, that’s why my heart sank when this well-intentioned book was given recognition which will no doubt expand the reach of its important message.

Readers of my previous reviews of works from the shortlist will know that I believe Anna Burns’s Milkman to be its best entry; they’ll also be aware that I’m also an admirer of Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls. It seems to me that, in terms of psychological depth and sophistication of prose style, Evans’ novel comes closest to the level set by these books than Jones’. The story of two distinct couples – Melissa and Michael and Damian and Stephanie – Ordinary People takes place in south London and its suburbs, opening on the night that Barack Obama was first elected US President. The diverse communities of a great world city come out in force to celebrate:

There were parties all over the city that night, in Dalston, Kilburn, Brixton and Bow. Traffic sped back and forth over the Thames so that from far above the river was blackness crossed by dashing streams of light. [p. 3]

If that last sentence reads a little too on-the-nose to you, then Ordinary People will routinely hit that button. This is a novel that shares its title with a John Legend song, and isn’t so cool-for-school that one of its main characters, ostensibly in his thirties, doesn’t walk around listening to the album from which that song is taken, Get Lifted, on repeat and as a set of waypoints for his emotional life. This is a novel in which the effects of post-natal depression and relationship breakdown are embodied in a haunted house.  It is a novel in which two best friends from university – Michael and Damian – reach late youth or early middle age frustrated and forlorn, and come into inevitable conflict as a result. It isn’t, in other words, always terribly subtle or surprising.

That said, Ordinary People is never melodramatic, and it might be. That post-Obama setting is coloured for the reader, of course, with the knowledge that the moment of dawn the novel’s characters experience is temporary. The shadow of Trump does not cross the novel’s pages except in our own experience of it, but it is nevertheless present. The celebration that opens the novel is all shiny and superficial – “he wore lose black jeans with a sleak grey shirt … [she] a mauve skilk dress with flashing boho hem” [p. 3] – and the rest of the novel unravels all this into a messy, but ultimately quotidian, reality:

Marriage, it was all about the kids. He himself had accepted this a long time ago, that children claim the love, they change it, they drink it, they offer it back to you in a sticky cup and it never quite tastes the same. The romantic love from which they sprang becomes an old dishevelled garden visited on rare occasions fuelled by wine and spurts of spontaneity, and the bigger, family love is where the bloom and freshness lie. [p. 128]

Both couples in the novel – one married, the other not – are acted upon by this entropy. Neither member of either relationship comes out of the book with our admiration for them entirely intact. On one level, by the close of Ordinary People the stakes have been proven to be rather low – no one has died, and each individual has a functioning relationship with all of the others – but by the same token the novel paints a convincing portrait of emotional lives that are sometimes solipsistic, sometimes noble – often foolish, often kind – and which therefore rather resemble our own. This is a genuinely novelistic project, and Diana Evans emerges from these pages as a sort of latter-day Jane Austen.

Jones’ novel often feels to be the opposite of Evans’, for all they share. Instead of four main characters, An American Marriage has three. But their interiorities and inter-relationships are again key. The difference is that Jones strains for portent where Evans does not, and fails to achieve complexity where Evans arrives at nuance. An American Marriage begins with a koan of an opening sentence – “There are two kinds of people in the world, those who leave home, and those who don’t” [p. 3] – and never quite leaves behind this sort of incomplete simplism, this insistent dogmatism (or this bargain-basement irony – ultimately the character speaking here cannot escape his past). Partly, this is because one of its three narrators, Roy, is a lot less sophisticated than he thinks he is – he holds consistently archaic views, particularly about women and a man’s role in “supporting” them, which he never acknowledges or abandons – but it’s also because the novel’s seamless surface itself works against the application of any cross-grain.

Roy meets an artist, Celestial, while he is at college – the first of his family to make it that far. They start a relationship which seems to the reader almost comically ill-suited, in which from day one Roy admits that he “liked the ladies … a little flirtation” [p. 10], and yet in which we are asked to invest heavily: “Celestial and me are something Hollywood never imagined,” Roy protests too much [p. 11]. But the pair are rapidly separated when Roy is imprisoned for a rape committed while Celestial knows he was with her. “When something happens that eclipses the imaginable,” Celestial writes to Roy using the rather fattened prose that characterises every narrator in the novel, “it changes a person” [p. 41]. Inevitably, Celestial and Roy grow more and more distant. The issue here, of course, is that they were never especially close prior to Roy’s incarceration, and in this manner their separation isn’t something to mourn – their relationship would likely have also been lost had Roy remained free.

Except, of course, that Celestial admits to having an abortion. “Yes, I get it,” snarls Roy in response. “Your body, your choice. All of that they taught you at Spelman College. Fine” [p. 52]. In this line and others (“I know that we had a choice, but really, we didn’t have a choice,” says Celestial [p. 55]), the novel posits a woman’s right to choose as a sort of tragedy, and this conservatism underlies the whole novel – and is the only force that Jones can call on in her attempt to convince us of the currency of Roy and Celestial’s marriage (we also learn, for example, that “you had to be married to cheat at all” [p. 11]). When Roy is released early, he arrives at Celestial’s home, where she is now living with their mutual friend Andre, as “a commanding stranger breathing hot on my neck” [p. 247]; while Celestial seems most concerned to be “ashamed of my body, five years older than when he last saw me this way” [p. 247], the reader is left perhaps expected to admire Roy’s restraint when he declares at the close of a scene suffused with incipient violence, “I could, but I won’t” [p. 249].

There is in all this a lot of class and gender politics at play, perhaps: Roy is from a hard-scrabble, dirt-poor background, brought up by a mother and step-father and entirely alien to the college environment in Atlanta where he meets Celestial, who is a native within it. Their conflicting expectations are par for this course. Similarly, the social conservatism of the Deep South that they both call home – “she’s a ‘southern woman’, not to be confused with a ‘southern bell'” Roy tells us of Celestial [p. 3] – would also be as conspicuous in its absence from the novel’s milieu as it is often is in its brutish presence. When Roy’s step-father bemoans that “back when I married Olive, marriage was so sacred that everyone aimed for a wife that was fresh” [p. 222], are we meant to perceive Roy and Celestial as a generation making their difficult way out from under oppressive and repressive expectations, or as one that has abandoned them to its cost? Jones is never quite clear.

Perhaps this enforcement of norms is the real violence done to Roy and Celestial in the course of the novel. Early on, middle-class respectability applies at least the veneer of a civilised feminisation on Roy; prison has him demanding of his estranged wife, “Why can’t you talk to me like I’m a man?” [p. 268] The way in which wider society looks at Roy – at any young black man – and sees not his achievements and effort, but only his race, results in an arrested development across the community:

“That’s really the main thing about being in prison. Too many men in one place. You’re stuck in their knowing that there is a world full of women who are putting out flowers, making things nice, civilizing the whole planet. But there I was stuck in a cage like an animal with a bunch of other animals.” [p. 274]

But this gender essentialism is itself destructive, is itself part of the problem. In other words, by promulgating precisely the problematic motifs that it situates as corrosive, An American Marriage contributes to the injustices it depicts. The novel is a simple story with a clear through-line, if sometimes over-heated prose and an imbalanced structure. It offers a clarity of vision. But in achieving that leanness, in foregrounding its single and singular message, the novel cartoonishly replicates the cultures that conspire against its characters.

In Ordinary People, Michael considers how best to raise awareness of race in his children. “Those words, blackness, black people, whiteness, they were crude, contagious. The children would be infected by them, dragged also into this prison, this malady, this towering preoccupation, robbed also of a love for canyons, for particular lights” [p. 233]. An American Marriage makes an emotive plea, and many have responded to its clarion call; but it isn’t a terrible well-formed novel, and in that sense the Women’s Prize has missed a trick. Despite all my admiration for what Obama referred to as Jones’ “moving portrayal of the effects of a wrongful conviction”, that’s why my heart reluctantly sank a little last night. But one hopes, of course, that Jones’ success will help contribute to real change.

The Women’s Prize for Fiction: “Milkman” and “My Sister, The Serial Killer”

I was happier about literary prizes than I’ve been for a long time when Anna Burns’s Milkman won the Booker Prize last year. I was thrilled when Paul Beatty’s The Sellout won, too; but there was something about Milkman‘s idiosyncrasy and humility – about, dare I whisper it, the people it chose as its subjects – which had led me to assume it might be over-looked in favour of something splashier. That the judges got the call so right in the teeth of my low expectations was a surprise especially sweet.

You’d expect me, then, to advocate for the novel also to win the Women’s Prize – and, on the basis of the five shortlisted novels I have so far read, indeed I will. I called it “magnetic”, “expansive” and “special” in my review of it last year, and my opinion has not changed. Indeed, in one of those critical tests of a novel, Milkman has only expanded in my imagination since. Having already won the Booker might I suppose count against its chances in the current contest; but if the Booker judges can respond to literary quality regardless of extraneous considerations why can’t the panel awarding the Women’s Prize? Milkman is a novel to remember when few of these are published; it’s a tough year for its rivals.

In this way, it’s really unfair on Oyinkan Braithwaite to twin her debut novel, My Sister, the Serial Killer, with Burns’s. Where Burns’s novel is dense and immersive, Braithwaite’s is flip and self-aware; where Milkman aims for poetry, My Sister, the Serial Killer – though Braithwaite i sperhaps  best known as a poet – aims for Ellroy-ian conscision. That said, both books are powered first by a very strong sense of place and secondly by violence, and its consequences on intimate social relationships. They are in this sense closely related to one another, one as tragedy and the other as farce.

Braithwaite’s narrator is Korede, a senior nurse at a Lagos hospital, who lives with her younger – and much more beautiful – sister, Ayoola, and their mother, in a large mansion in a prosperous suburb of Nigeria’s most populous city. We learn early on that the women have inherited the house from Korede and Ayoola’s father, a presence who hovers in the backdrop of the narrative as a malevolent, impatient ghost. More viscerally violent at first blush, however, is Ayoola herself. The reader first meets her when she calls Korede to the scene of a murder:

“We need to move the body,” I tell her.

“Are you angry at me?”

Perhaps a normal person would be angry, but what I feel now is a pressing need to dispose of the body. When I got here, we carried him to the boot of my car, so that I was free to scrub and mop without having to countenance his cold stare. [p. 3]

This is the third time Korede has cleaned up for her homicidal sibling. Ayoola’s narcissism is total. In that “are you angry with me” we see a sociopathic self-involvement that never leaves her: “How was your trip?” Korede asks Ayoola upon her return from vacation mid-way through the novel. Her response: “It was fine … except … he died” [p. 126]. Despite this, Korede acts as an accessory for her sister largely without question. At first, we think this is because the elder sister is a stickler for order, for cleanliness, for forcing everything into a proper place. When Ayoola calls her at the start of the novel Korede:

had laid everything out on the tray in preparation [for dinner] – the fork was to the left of the place, the knife to the right. I folded the napkin into the shape of a crown and placed it at the center of the plate. The movie was paused at the beginning credits and the oven timer had just rung. [p. 3]

But over time the novel attempts to ask deeper questions, leaning less queasily on the half-baked “explanation” of OCD. Most significantly, Braithwaite begins to revolve around questions of culpability. “Ayoola never strikes unless provoked,” Korede tells us [p. 129], but we never really see this – leading us either to believe that Korede is deluding herself, or that the provocation is less immediate, less obvious, than mere physical threat. “You never knew with men,” Korede says at one point, “they wanted what they wanted when they wanted it” [p. 8]; the two sisters exist within a patriarchal structure made clearest by the hospital hierarchy, in which nurses are women and doctors, their bosses, all men.

One of the doctors, the handsome Tade, becomes infatuated with Ayoola – much to the besotted Korede’s disappointment – and the story attempts to persuade us in this love triangle that the sisters might betray each other. Ultimately, however, it is made entirely clear that this will not happen: “Ayoola is inconsiderate and selfish and reckless, but her welfare is and always has been my responsibility” [p. 122]. All this ends, of course, in yet more violence. The lack of true psychological depth in these characters, however, leaves us as detached as Ayoola, who is barely touched by murder and conspiracy:

“You’re not the only one suffering, you know. You act like you are carrying this big thing all by yourself, but I worry, too.”

“Do you? ‘Cause the other day, you were singing ‘I Believe I Can Fly’.”

Ayoola shrugs. “It’s a good song.” [p. 105]

Perhaps this is the point. One of the novel’s targets is the superficiality of social media culture: the disappearance of one of Ayoola’s victms is within weeks “trumped by conversations about which country’s jollof rice is better” [p. 86]. But the novel also wants to make something of the corruption at the heart of Nigerian law enforcement – Korede routinely has to grease the palms of various state functionaries – and features a sub-plot about abuse and its effects on the abused. The novel’s handicap is its lightness: it feels unable truly to grapple with the questions it raises, like an Instagram snap hung in the Louvre.

Ultimately, then, Braithwaite’s novel is insufficient to its purposes, and almost tasteless in its bathos. This is partly its project, but some of it also feels unintentional. When Korede is confront by the reality of her facilitating Ayoola – “There’s something wrong with her … but you? What’s your excuse? [p. 202] – she is taken aback, and in this the novel expects us to likewise be struck dumb, to pause for thought and reflect. But Korede and her milieu lacks the grist to feed this ruminative mill: in the midst of so much surface-skating, a few brief pages of flashback to a formative event doesn’t provide us with enough material for consideration; we are ultimately left with bromides such as, “Besides, no one is innocent in this world” [p. 169].

We might compare all this with lines from Milkman, a novel that also deals with abuse and its consequences, with violence and its forms, with unspoken structures and somehow unspeakable feelings, with how we live despite them:

Hard to define, this stalking, this predation, because it was piecemeal. A bit here, a bit there, maybe, maybe not, perhaps, don’t know. It was constant hints, symbolisms, misrepresentations, metaphors. [p. 181]

Or:

Whatever he had been and whatever he’d been called, he was gone, so I did what usually I did around death which was to forget all about it. The whole shambles – as in the old meaning of shambles, as in slaughterhouse, blood-house, meat market, business-as-usual – once again took hold. Deciding to miss my French night class, I put on my make-up and got ready to go to the club. [p. 305]

Or:

Do you stand strong? Do you bear witness, even if, in the process, you cause more suffering and prolonged humiliation for your son or your brother or your husband or your father? Or do you go away, back inside, abandoning your son or your brother or your husband or your father to these people? [p. 95]

Again: on the one hand, this is an unfair comparison. On the other, these two novels appear on the same shortlist for the same prize, and one is breezy and the other isn’t. One might ask how My Sister, the Serial Killer made it out of the longlist when Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater – also a novel about violence and identity but both demotic and deep – did not. That novel might have given Milkman a surer run for its money. But, as it is, Anna Burns is still out in front.

The Women’s Prize for Fiction: “Circe” and “The Silence of the Girls”

When The Song of Achilles was shortlisted for the Orange Prize in 2012, I was unconvinced, citing its “curiously uncomfortable balancing of Homer with Home and Away“. In doing so, I was perhaps among the “Fusty – and almost always male – critics [who] lamented the historical inaccuracies, the liberties taken with the text, the cliches” whom Alex Preston side-eyed in his review of Madeline Miller’s follow-up, Circe:

They missed the point that Miller was seeking to popularise stories that were first popular three millennia ago, employing the tools of the novelist to reveal new internal landscapes in these familiar tales. In her Circe, Miller has made a collage out of a variety of source materials – from Ovid to Homer to another lost epic, the Telegony – but the guiding instinct here is to re-present the classics from the perspective of the women involved in them, and to do so in a way that makes these age-old texts thrum with contemporary relevance. If you read this book expecting a masterpiece to rival the originals, you’ll be disappointed; Circe is, instead, a romp, an airy delight, a novel to be gobbled greedily in a single sitting.

In making the 2019 shortlist of the Orange’s successor, the Women’s Prize for Fiction, Miller finds herself up against a novel which might precisely fit Preston’s model for Circe‘s opposite. Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls is, like Circe and The Song of Achilles before it, a reimagining of Greek myth – in its case, of the story of the Iliad from the perspective of Briseis, the woman fought over to such catastrophic consequence by the general of the Greeks at Troy, Agamemnon, and his greatest warrior, Achilles. The Silence of the Girls is a much more avowedly literary affair than Circe; it more or less announces itself as an intended masterpiece that does not quail before the poetry of Homer. It exhibits contemporary relevance, to be sure, but it does so in its peculiar focus on the violence that suffuses both it and its source, rather than in its diction or attitude. Some have argued that Barker leans too heavily on the First World War – the setting for her career high, the Regeneration Trilogy – but Homer, too, likely depicted the Siege of Troy in terms more appropriate to his own time than the Bronze Age in which the events he depicts supposedly took place. Anachronism isn’t always a sin – if it achieves something.

If you were to assume, then, that I prefer Barker’s novel to Miller’s, you would alas be correct. Here’s a passage from early in Barker’s novel, when Briseis observes her city’s fresh conquerors – and her new captors – at close quarters:

What I remember most – apart from the awful, straining, wide-eyed terror of the first few days – is the curious mixture of riches and squalor. Achilles dined off gold plate, rested his feet in the evenings on a footstool inlaid with ivory, slept under bedcovers embroidered with gold and silver thread. Every morning, as he combed and braided his hair – and no girl ever dressed more carefully for her wedding day than Achilles for the battlefield – he checked the effect in a bronze mirror that must have been worth a king’s ransom. For all I know, it may have been a king’s ransom. And yet, if he needed a shit after dinner, he took a square of coarse cloth from a pile in the corner of the hall and set off to a latrine that stank to high heaven and was covered in a pelt of black buzzing flies. [Barker, p. 36]

And then here’s Miller, at a similarly early point in her own novel, describing the punishment of the rebellious Titan, Prometheus, by a servant of the Olympian overlord, Zeus, before a throng of terrified second-tier gods:

The Fury did not bother with a lecture. She was a goddess of torment and understood the eloquence of violence. The sound of the whip was a crack like oaken branches breaking. Prometheus’ shoulders jerked and a gash opened in his side long as my arm. All around me indrawn breaths hissed like water on hot rocks. The Fury lifted her lash again. Crack. A bloodied strip tore from his back. She began to carve in earnest, each blow falling on the next, peeling his flesh away in long lines that crossed and recrossed his skin. The only sound was the snap of the whop and Prometheus’ muffled, explosive breaths. The tendons stood out on his neck. Someone pushed at my back, trying for a better view. [Miller, p. 15]

I would contend that the first of these passages is supple and allusive, and the second insistent and demotic. I’d also suggest that Miller’s prose is repetitive and lingers on spectacle, where Barker’s is more expansive and yet simultaneously laconic. The Silence of the Girls reads lightly and yet sticks; Circe can be experienced as treacle-like at times, and perhaps consequently can often fail to move.

These comparisons I make only because a shortlist is a kind of competition, and demands that one situate texts side-by-side for the purpose of comparing their qualities. In truth, the two novels are doing such different things with their material that their disparate prose styles make more sense in context. Barker is writing a war story from the perspective of the civilians: Briseis becomes part of the Greek train that travels with and serves Agamemnon’s army, witnessing all manner of brutality and slaughter in the process. Miller’s novel is essentially a fantasy, taking seriously the existence of gods and monsters, and bestowing upon its eponymous sorceress real powers of magic and enchantment. Barker focuses tightly on a relatively defined set of events – those of the Trojan war and its surrounding conflicts; Miller’s novel takes place over centuries if not millennia, and mortal lifetimes pass by in the course of just a page or two. You would expect novels so separately constituted to adopt different styles, and in this context it is harder to judge Miller for some of her sicklier moments (“I had walked the earth for a hundred generations, yet I was still a child to myself” [Miller, p. 136]).

On the other hand, both novels are explicitly feminist retellings of Homeric material. Circe has been marketed as a retelling of the Odyssey, but in truth the part of the novel that deals with the events of Books 10 and 11 of Homer’s epic are a very small part of its length. Before then, it has dealt with Prometheus and Scylla, Minos and Daedalus; afterwards it dwells far more on Telemachus and Telegonus than it did on Odysseus and Poseidon. Nevertheless, it centres a female interiority within stories until recently rarely told from anything but a male point of view. The first episode we read of in Circe is the moment at which Oceanas turned to Helios and indicated a woman who had caught the latter’s eye: “My daughter Perse. She is yours if you want her” [Miller, p. 2]. This is how cheaply female life is valued in Circe’s world.

And in Briseis’s, too. At one point, Barker has her meet Helen, about whose enthusiasm for the loom it is said “that whenever Helen cut a thread in her weaving, a man died on the battlefield. She was responsible for every death” [Barker, p. 129]. Misogyny both marginalises and makes women so significant as to be morally responsible for male failings. Barker’s problem, however, is that she cannot prevent Achilles taking over her novel: his story is too expansive, too other-worldly, to be restrained within Briseis’s narrative. Later on in the novel, Barker finds herself writing chapters from his perspective, from the viewpoint of the rapist, the pillager: “He wants to go home – or what passes for home now Patroclus isn’t in it” we read [Barker, p. 228], just after Achilles’ great friend is killed on the battlefield while wearing the Greek hero’s armour, in a doomed attempt to rally troops Achilles had refused to lead. Barker seeks, then, to illicit our sympathies for Briseis’ abuser. This makes for a morally complex book, but also a lop-sided one: the first half of The Silence of the Girls is by far the most compelling, its intense allegiance with the female victims of war giving way in the second half to a more conventional heroic narrative.

Circe is a good deal more fixed on its female characters – the perspective never wavers, is always Circe’s own intimate first-person. She turns against her father when he calls her “trash” [p. 54]; enforces territorial restriction of rule upon Aeëtes, her arrogant brother whom she thanklessly brought up from an infant (“in Colchis you may work your will. But this is Aiaia” [p. 153]); she sympathises with the observant Penelope, whose ability to perceive an unjust world as it is becomes “an ugly weight upon your back” [p. 286]. Indeed, Circe is described at one point as “a god with a mortal voice” [p. 82], and her mixture of power and empathy becomes the backbone of a novel which suffers regularly from the longeurs dictated by its dilatory, episodic plot – a sort of greatest hits of Greek myth with little forward momentum. Even so, again it is men who come to define the close of the novel: Telemachus and Telegonus must come into their own, be given agency by their equally over-protective mothers – Odysseus’s two great loves, Penelope and Circe – more or less as the narrative climax of the book. “Telemachus has been a good son, longer than he should have been,” Penelope sighs pages from the end. “Now he must be his own” [p. 330]. It is ultimately the sons, not the mothers, who defy their beginnings to choose their own fates.

Both books, then, work to undermine themselves. But where Circe has little other than its tale of the under-privileged casting off the over-weening (and it is a part of the novel’s project, perhaps, not to limit this agency to women), The Silence of the Girls features so much warp and weft – the nihilist heroism of Achilles, the ersatz societies of stolen women, the bitterly won moral sense of Briseis herself – that, like ancient ruins resisting the ravages of time, parts of it remain, beautifully, standing. Circe is more traditional in the forms of its mythical retellings than either Barker’s novel or Miller’s debut – its only changes to the tales we know are always to make Circe seem more righteous, less culpable. Barker’s Briseis is instead rendered fully rounded, rescued from the flattened portrayal of Homer without having to conform to a whole new set of impossible standards.

Circe’s only and original sin is the transformation of the nymph Scylla into a monster, as punishment for stealing Circe’s beloved Glaucos from her (“I did it for pride and vain delusion” [p. 102]); all her other transformations of mortals – into various animals that meekly populate her island of exile – are seen to be acts of self-defence. Briseis, meanwhile, is a much more conflicted and conflicting being – and in this way she emerges more fully from the shadow cast by the men of her story: “Yes, there were times when I watched a young man die and remembered my prayers for vengeance. Did I regret those prayers? No” [p. 89]. This nuance, this uncertainty, better suits the intertextuality inherent in the kind of project both Barker and Miller undertake here. In this way, I’d argue, The Silence of the Girls is simply the richer text. Though I confess I’m bothered that this may just mean I’m fusty.

Albums of 2018

2018 was an unusually good year for new music. Janelle Monae, Courtney Barnett, Christine & The Queens; Kacey Musgraves, Julia Holter and Father John Misty: all released albums that were at the very least among the best of their careers. I also enjoyed new records from First Aid Kit and The Decemberists, Jackie Oates and my pal Amit Dattani. I didn’t even get around to listening to the latest from Cat Power, Arctic Monkeys or Darlingside – and in other years I can’t imagine I’d have said that.

So we were spoiled. I’ve stuck here, then, to albums I got to know particularly well – repeat listens always being a good sign for an album, but also offering the best position from which to rate a particular record’s quality. As usual, I’ve also tried to reward freshness or – dread word, this – originality, at the same time as being, as usual, hung up on melody and lyric as much as sonic palette or structural daring. With these caveats, and a re-emphasis of just how much good stuff was released this year, let’s have at the list.

U.S. Girls – In a Poem Unlimited

Meghan Remy is herself a U.S. girl, though she has lived in Toronto now for years, making idiosyncratic indie music under this joshing moniker for more than a decade. In a Poem Unlimited seemed to explode in a way none of her previous records have, and I think with good reason: it is much more than a solo offering, and a good deal angrier and grittier than what has come before. Recorded with more than a dozen musicians, the album feels like a collective effort, a sort of emotional mosaic expertly, and surely for the most part inadvertently, timed for maximum impact and relevance. “Why Do I Lose My Voice When I Have Something to Say?” asks one of the album’s songs; and the joy of In a Poem Unlimited is that, out of the darkness of its context and across eleven tracks surprisingly that are danceable for compositions also so thoughtful and vital, Remy and her collaborators find a voice so urgent and compelling.

Natalie Prass – The Future and the Past

Prass is the only artist on this list who has featured before on one of my end-of-year lists. In all honesty, I didn’t expect this latest record to better that self-titled 2015 debut. In some ways, it doesn’t – there was something crystalline and searing about that first record that doesn’t translate here. That said, the seductive simplicity of Natalie Prass would have been entirely beside the point on The Future and the Past, a record that is a great deal more expressive and expansive than its predecessor – and which deliberately and satisfyingly explodes the chanteuse pose that had threatened to imprison an artist a great deal more interesting than her production has previously allowed. From its avante-garde funk-n-soul stylings to its pro-choice politics, like In a Poem Unlimited Prass’s second album is a defiant call to arms – but it isn’t quite angry about the issues against which it rails; the album isn’t sanguine, exactly, but it is joyous and empowered … and, in a year in which many of us did not feel that way, The Future and the Past was the best kind of tonic.

Kyle Craft – Full Circle Nightmare

Seeming at times like the second coming of Ryan Adams (I know – even I’m not sure we need that), Louisiana native Craft’s second record is improbably mature for an album composed almost entirely of break-up songs. The Dylan influences are apparent from the cover art onwards, but are worn lightly and never hugged too close; the Father John Misty-style kiss-offs, though, occasionally grate. But there is an energy, lyricism and melodic touch at work here that has kept me coming back all year. Full Circle Nightmare is in many ways the least essential record on this list, but it also has songs like “The Rager” or “Exile Rag”, which feel to me already like classics of their kind. What elevates these tunes is their healthy self-awareness: the album’s first and second tracks, for example, segue into each other perfectly, knowingly emphasising their similarities whilst also making perfectly apparent their separation. This is fair-dinkum songcraft, and shouldn’t be too easily dismissed. Stick this on your turntable, or wait a few albums until Craft has written his masterpiece and you’re way behind the curve.

I’m With Her – See You Around

I’d wager that I’ve listened to this record more than any other this year – something about the mix of Sarah Jarosz, Aoife O’Donovan and Sarah Watkins conjures something properly special in the songs here collected. The trio has been working together for some time – they chose their name long before Hilary Clinton chose her 2016 campaign slogan – but this is their first album. Letting the collaboration marinate has done wonders for the music: it is supple and tender whilst being pin-point sharp and precisely structured. The songs are glorious – “Ain’t That Fine” or “Ryland (Under the Apple Tree)” might be my songs of the year – but the arrangements are something else, never less than what each tune requires and never a scintilla more. The record easily tops anything either member has done alone – and that’s saying something, given the quality of their output (even Watkins’ previous stint with Nickel Creek has a pretender to its crown here). Wise and gentle, silly and smart, See You Around is that new-best-friend of a record you’ve been waiting for – and which doesn’t come around all that often.

Anna Calvi – Hunter

Calvi has always been extremely highly regarded among the indie cognoscenti, and her live performances in particular have long boasted the sort of power we last saw from PJ Harvey in her prime (or from Annie Clark last week). But for my money Hunter is her first album to really hit its stride from the first note – and never let up. Sonically, it is a really potent mix of styles – more than any other record on this list, or all year, its melange is total, no one element of its sound easily discernible from another, achieving a seamless hybridity where lesser albums boasted in their stretch for diversity “the funk track” or “the electronic track”. Lyrically, it’s as incisive as Calvi has yet managed. But the album’s masterstroke is its melodic sense: though the record is full of sleazy sneering and gasping eroticism, its confrontational musicality never gets in the way of Calvi’s voice delivering crystal-clear tunes with perfect phrasing and canny cadence. This makes Hunter the total package, and Calvi now rivalled only by Janelle Monae and St. Vincent in the current art-pop firmament.