So we know know that the Bailey’s Prize went, not entirely unexpectedly, to Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half Formed Thing. I loved that the prize went to a new novel that had difficulty finding a publisher. A Girl is a Half Formed Thing is a bleak, desperate novel that reads as though James Joyce turned feminist and discovered plot. I also love that my copy is the original Galley Beggars Press edition, because the prize is a triumph for Galley Beggars too, and a vindication for small presses everywhere. And it’s quite fun seeing The Guardian Review section falling over itself to applaud Eimear McBride, after its two-page hagiography of Donna Tartt just days before the result was announced. But enough. I’m not the only reader whose faith in book prizes has been restored by the result. Tartt got the Pulitzer, Adichie sold her film rights, Lahiri’s been on two major shortlists, Magee and Kent both had huge boosts for their debuts, and McBride won. Good call, Baileys Prize. Good call.
But bleak. So bleak. I had to reread Cold Comfort Farm and The Diary of a Provincial Lady before I could read anything else, which didn’t do much for my TBR pile (although they both do wonders for my spirits). When I did, it was Carys Bray’s A Song for Issy Bradley (Hutchinson, 19th June). Issy is the youngest child in a Mormon family and the novel is the story of the family recovering – or not recovering – from her death. It’s beautifully told and absorbing but its main attraction for me was the glimpse into the Mormon way of life. Eve Harris’ The Marrying of Chani Kaufmann, longlisted for the Man Booker prize last year, held a similar fascination.
Emily St John Mandel’s Station 11 is due out in September. Mandel is an American writer; Station 11 is her fourth published novel but the first to be published in the UK. As readers of The Ship will know (or will find out), I love speculative fiction. Not science fiction per se, but the kind of novels that push our current world to its very edges and examine the results. In Station 11, the characters’ relationships and the images of America at the end of civilisation are linked by a group of travelling players who perform Shakespeare as Shakespeare would once have been performed (I found myself thinking of Geoffrey Trease’s classic children’s novel A Cue for Treason); the idea alone is worth the price.
Maybe it was the thought of my childhood reading that sent me back to John Christopher. His Tripods trilogy made a huge impression on me when I was ten/eleven. In A Wrinkle in the Skin, the world’s been changed by a huge earthquake; in The Death of Grass, a mysterious virus is killing off all the grasses, including the cereal crops. Like John Wyndham, John Christopher was writing at a more confident time. The Triffids, the Kraken, the earthquake, even the virus, happen to humanity. Humanity doesn’t cause them, but triumphs over them. It’s a treat to revel in a world where, y’know, the good human beings are really super. But the casual misogyny (the novels were originally written in the 50s and 60s) jars horribly. We’re destroying the planet, but some things really are getting better.
I loved Katharine McMahon’s The Woman in the Picture (W&N, 3rd July); Laline Paull’s The Bees (out now) deserves all the accolades it’s had for sheer originality; every child in the land should own a copy of Katherine Rundell’s Rooftoppers (out now). And I finally read Wolf Hall. Enough said.
I really want to read Station 11 ( and The Ship obvs!) love dystopian fiction. I have read Issy too ….a great debut which I am planning to review soon . What did you think of WH ??
It was very, very long. I didn’t want to notice how long it is (Middlemarch is very, very short, as is Anna Karenina). But I did.
I thought of you when reading an interview with Emma Straub ( the vacationers). She said she has 4 copies of Middlemarch scattered about her house as you never know when you might need Dorothea. So true !!!