For the last thirty years, the London Review of Books has published an annual diary by the English writer and dramatist Alan Bennett. It has become, to Bennett’s likely dismay, a comforting tradition. With seasonal regularity, readers can turn from political, literary, or historical matters to the quotidian reflections of a modest, humorous observer who notices everything, from the robin nesting in his London garden to Tony Blair’s shopworn sincerity. Not that it was ever Bennett’s intention — as a writer at least — to be so fondly regarded. A butcher’s son from grimy Leeds who has long cast a cold eye on England and the English, he did not set out to become a national treasure. Yet he is mistaken for one, and for common property, all the time. In a Suffolk post office, for example, he reports ” . . . an ancient customer recognizes me and shakes me so firmly by the hand it’s like being caught in a mangle. ‘Say something whimsical,’ he commands.”

Bennett’s readers, understandably, have similar expectations. Fondly recalling The Uncommon Reader, his 2007 novella in which Queen Elizabeth ditches duty for books, The Lady in the Van, or the comic masterpieces in Bennett’s 2002 volume The Laying On of Hands, you turn with a smile to Keeping On Keeping On, a collection of diaries and essays from 2010 to 2015. Never mind Bennett’s disclaimer: “Diaries involve waste with much of what one records perhaps of posthumous interest but tedious to read and often bad-tempered.” Still, he concedes, “Nothing is ever quite so bad that one can’t write it down.” And while the dozen or so essays here are illuminating — ranging from a eulogy for movie director John Schlesinger to introductions to various Bennett plays — it is Bennett’s daily preoccupations that hold us. The death of friends, the depredations of old age, the class system, pseudo-patriotism, doublespeak: all are illuminated in entries that carry Bennett’s voice — dry, measured, confiding — as he meanders from sandwich making to literary reflections and from present to past. His impeccable craft, as ever, is disguised as casualness. On March 24, 2011, for example, when Elizabeth Taylor dies he recalls that ” . . . at the Savoy c. 1971 she perched briefly on my knee, though why I can’t now remember. A solid woman she was wearing The Diamond and was (not in consequence) quite a hefty burden so I was relieved when she stood up.” The scene is flanked by musings on Philip Larkin and Flannery O’Connor and by Bennett’s objection to Lockheed Martin, “basically an arms manufacturer,” carrying out the British census. A few weeks later, contemplating Margaret Thatcher’s burial (“The Funeral”), he observes that she was “a mirthless bully and should have been buried, as once upon time monarchs used to be, in the depths of the night.” In a typical year, he notes on March 31st, “Jehovah’s Witnesses blitz the street and when they ring I lie on the floor until the coast is clear;” on April 21st, “I go out with my pail of salt and water looking for slugs;” and on May 3rd, contemplating the Mail on Sunday’s outing of a sexual philanderer, confesses that “if the Mail chose to target Heinrich Himmler I would tend to be on his side.”

Whatever the mood or subject, the precision and restraint of Bennett’s language, its mildness, creates a sense of polite intimacy. We accompany him and his life’s companion, Rupert Thomas, to their civil partnership ceremony; to the funerals of friends; on visits to Europe and the U.S.; into museums and country churches. And into the medical netherworld. Most memorably, as he faces surgery on April 22, 2008, Bennett and his fellow patients “are told to take a pillow with us so, clad in our hospital gowns and each clutching our pillow, we walk in single file behind the nurse across the bridge above the atrium that leads to the surgical wing. We look like medieval penitents on our way to public humiliation.” He cannot believe that he is seventy-three, that he is eighty, that he is going deaf. (“Landscapes” not “Ramsgate”) and imagines, after a fall, “that in the future there is going to be more of this.”

Bennett is rarely somber; his wit is too keen. But the tone here is more subdued than in his previous prose collections Untold Stories and Writing Home. The past seems closer and the present shakier. “It’s getting near the day of Dad’s death,” he writes on a July day in Yorkshire, ” . . . we pick some flowers from the garden and put them on the grave . . . Think of Mam and Dad standing there smiling and think also of Anne next door whose chest is bad and has to go for an X-ray on Monday.” Through it all there is reading, writing, overseeing a production of The Habit of Art, his play about W. H. Auden and Benjamin Britten, and observing the filming of The Lady in the Van with Maggie Smith. And there is England: dear, degraded, and as sharply revealed as ever. “My first play (when I was aged thirty-four) was a lament for an England that has gone,” Bennett concedes, adding that “my last play (aged seventy-nine) was still waving the same handkerchief.” And the eye of this comic master remains as accurately trained on himself. On October 18, 2005, for example, he notices that “Robert Hanks, the radio critic of the Independent, remarks that personally he can have too much of Alan Bennett. I wonder how he thinks I feel.”

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As a source of harmless outrage, lists of the best books of the year can scarcely be bettered. In the first place, it is obvious that the choices are necessarily skewed toward what the choosers have read and any number of works of the hundreds of thousands published each year fall “dead born from the press,” never publicized, never reviewed. In the second place and more to the point: Tastes differ. This is where that heady feeling of indignation kicks in. Every year I writhe in exquisite umbrage at half the titles on the lists that begin to appear in this season. And so here, for your enjoyment, edification, or exasperation, is my own roster of the five best novels that I have read this year, wonderful books which appeal to my own particular taste.

Richard Mason’s Who Killed Piet Barol?  was a real surprise. I picked it up on an inexplicable whim—inexplicable because I had never heard of the author and, for some reason, was not scared off by the fell words “magic realism” used in a blurb on the jacket. The story is a very dark comedy of misapprehension, presumption, and bad faith set in South Africa just as the First World War breaks out in Europe. Most saliently, the Native Land Act of 1913 has gone into effect in the Union of South Africa, evicting native peoples from their land and opening it to white settlers. Piet Barol is a Dutch poser, adventurer, and furniture maker who sets off with two Xhosa guides into territory hitherto unexplored by Europeans. His hope is to find some fabled trees which he intends to turn into exotic furniture, thereby making his fortune. His guides and the Xhosa villagers they lead him to do not fully grasp his intentions and Barol, in his complacent, top-dog obliviousness and mounting greed, certainly does not understand their frame of reference. European and Africans see the world through incompatible cosmological lenses—a reality that is skillfully conjured by Mason and disastrously realized in the blundering relationship the characters have with each other. The results are comic and, ultimately, tragic. The aspect which might be called magical realism is, I guess, the attribution of what we may call human thoughts and emotions to animals and plants, instances of which, I must say, were some of my favorite parts of the novel—though I speak as one whose esteem for The Wind in the Willows has no bounds

I reviewed Who Killed Piet Barol? in February , at which time it was the best novel I had read in the year. As it happens, 2017, so dreadful in some ways, turned out to be an excellent year for novels. Sharing the top-five berth is Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13 which I also reviewed here. Although this book and Mason’s are as unlike as could be, both are almost as attentive to creatures of nature as they are to human beings. While Mason gives plants and animals emotions which could be ours—jealousy, spite, humiliation, wonder, dread, dismay—McGregor’s creatures are all business. Oblivious to human affairs, they cycle through the seasons, their activity a busy bustle alongside human affairs. Life in all nature—human, animal, plant—follows an eternal rhythm of impermanence: what is here today is gone tomorrow; and then the whole thing starts all over again. This implacable movement is both backdrop to and unspoken commentary on a tragedy: a 13-year-old girl has disappeared on a walk in England’s Peak District. Unexpectedly and brilliantly, what starts off as if it were a missing-girl thriller, gradually turns into a panoramic and completely engrossing detailing of the doings in an English village over many years, years that cover the corrosion of traditional economic and social arrangements by the forces of global capitalism. (Read a conversation with Jon McGregor and Maile Meloy here.)

The characters who tenant the pages of Arundhati Roy’s superb second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, are also, if more directly and brutally, affected by global forces, most especially by the “war on terror.” This construct has produced the rubric of the “security state,” under which governments have imposed increasingly authoritarian measures of control and fostered national paranoia. In India it has given momentum to ultra-Hinduism and license to “security” forces, a dismal situation that is both background and foreground in Roy’s novel. The plot has two main threads which are eventually united. The first is the story of Anjum, a transsexual (hijra), who has set up a house for outcasts and victims of “the new India” in a graveyard in New Delhi. The other, follows Tila, a woman whose love and tragedy are bound up with the brutal suppression of the secession movement in Kashmir. There is a large element of the political in this book and the erratic movement of its plot gives it a rackety feeling—but neither is detrimental as I see it. The back-and-forth, hither-and-yon nature of the plot is in perfect accord with the stitched-together, ramshackle lives of India’s underprivileged, which is to say, of the people who make up the book’s sympathetic characters. Roy infects us, as Dickens did, with a sense of festivity and fondness for her idiosyncratic creations. This is a huge novel, terrifying, wryly humorous, and moving, a story of vexed identity and the power of friendship. (Read our interview with Arundhati Roy.)

I could not get Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko out of my head for a very long time—and now it’s taken up residence again as I think how best to describe it. This is the story of four generations of a Korean family beginning in 1910, the year Japan annexed Korea. The arranged marriage between a fisherman and his wife, a boarding-house keeper, produces a daughter, Sunja, who is seduced at 16, by, Hansu, a married crime boss. She is saved from disgrace by Isak, a visiting clergyman, who marries her out of generosity and the two emigrate to Japan where Koreans are a despised and highly regulated underclass denied the rights of Japanese citizens. There the couple suffer the precariousness and vulnerability of the outsider, a situation worsened, as we will see, in times of war. Sunja gives birth to a son, Noa, and later, with Isak, another son, Mozasu. But Hansu, emanating power and an inkling of menace, is a presence in the background as he keeps an eye on his natural son. His machinations lend the story an element of the fairy tale, an unnerving one of hidden forces, sometimes beneficial and, ultimately, disastrous. This tremendous, many-stranded novel expands to include a large cast of fully-formed characters reaching into the 1980s. It is a historically rich, psychologically deep, and often heart-breaking story of four generations caught in the toils of ethnic identity.

In this country, the last objects of unexamined, reflex misogyny by right-thinking people are nuns. They live in the liberal imagination as twentieth-century sadists and termagants, a monstrous regiment of virgins who took out their (obvious) sexual frustration on innocent children. It is a vision entertained most robustly by people who have never actually had any dealings with them and for this reason, Alice McDermott’s The Ninth Hour might be considered required reading. At its heart are the Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor, ministering in these pages to the ailing and feeble of working-class Brooklyn of the first part of the twentieth century. They perform their duties and tasks with differing degrees of toleration and, indeed, live together with stoic forbearance, but the notion of sacrifice is central—and central in a way that is scarcely conceivable to most people now. The nuns take Annie, the widow of a suicide, and her daughter, Sally, under their protection. The girl grows up doted upon by them and infected by a self-dramatizing desire to become a nun herself—a fantasy that cannot outlive a bruising encounter with the reality of the human condition and, to put it as the nuns might, man’s (and woman’s) fallen state. Unlike, Sally, the nuns suck it up and get the job done in a hands-on way, in contrast also, we see, to the puffed-up parish priest who takes a greater interest in his dinner than the plight of a girl being molested at home. There are wonderful scenes of work in this book, the most thrilling (to me) amounts to a paean to the art of laundering clothes. This is a great and subtle novel—whose plot I leave you to discover. I do notice that it is, for no reason I know, the only one of my top five to be set in this country. I reviewed it here.

 

 

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Every author has a story beyond the one that they put down on paper. The Barnes & Noble Podcast goes between the lines with today’s most interesting writers, exploring what inspires them, what confounds them, and what they were thinking when they wrote the books we’re talking about.

In this episode, NBC news correspondent Katy Tur joins Jim Mustich to talk about her experience on the Trump campaign trail in 2016 — including her frequent role as a target of the future President’s taunts — as chronicled in her recent book Unbelievable: My Front Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History. She tells us about how as a foreign correspondent she “fell face first” into an unlikely job covering what would become one of the most astonishing, exhausting, and consequential events in American political history.

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Called “Disgraceful,” “third-rate,” and “not nice” by Donald Trump, NBC News correspondent Katy Tur reported on—and took flak from—the most captivating and volatile presidential candidate in American history. Tur lived out of a suitcase for a year and a half, following Trump around the country, powered by packets of peanut butter and kept clean with dry shampoo. She visited forty states with the candidate, made more than 3,800 live television reports, and tried to endure a gazillion loops of Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer”—a Trump rally playlist staple.

From day 1 to day 500, Tur documented Trump’s inconsistencies, fact-checked his falsities, and called him out on his lies. In return, Trump repeatedly singled Tur out. He tried to charm her, intimidate her, and shame her. At one point, he got a crowd so riled up against Tur, Secret Service agents had to walk her to her car.

None of it worked. Facts are stubborn. So was Tur. She was part of the first women-led politics team in the history of network news. The Boys on the Bus became the Girls on the Plane. But the circus remained. Through all the long nights, wild scoops, naked chauvinism, dodgy staffers, and fevered debates, no one had a better view than Tur.

Unbelievable is her darkly comic, fascinatingly bizarre, and often scary story of how America sent a former reality show host to the White House. It’s also the story of what it was like for Tur to be there as it happened, inside a no-rules world where reporters were spat on, demeaned, and discredited. Tur was a foreign correspondent who came home to her most foreign story of all. Unbelievable is a must-read for anyone who still wakes up and wonders, Is this real life?

Like this podcast? Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher to discover intriguing new conversations every week.

 

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Some novelists produce like clockwork: every year or three, a new work ripens and is ready for the harvest. But there are many whose output can’t be resolved against a calendar. Consider the famous case of Thomas Pynchon, who fell silent (at novel lengths, anyway) for seventeen years between Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) and Vineland (1990). William Gaddis took twenty years to leap from The Recognitions (1955) to JR (1975). After Catch-22 (1961), Joseph Heller made readers wait thirteen years until releasing Something Happened (1974). In these cases, and many others, you just can’t rush quality.

The exceptionally gifted John Crowley has published his work at a respectable pace — twelve novels in forty-two years since his first, The Deep, in 1975. But there have been sizable time gaps between some, such as the seven-year wait between the third and fourth books of the Ægypt Cycle. So news that he would debut a new novel just one year after we saw The Chemical Wedding: by Christian Rosencreutz: A Romance in Eight Days by Johann Valentin Andreae in a New Version, his recreation of a gnostic fable, was cause for wild rejoicing. But the anticipation was further heightened by the prior release of a small collection of stories and essays. So as not to delay our enjoyment any further, let’s look at both books now.

The essays and short stories reveal small slices of Crowley’s genius, which the novel manifests in dazzling fullness. Crowley’s signature gifts come in paradoxical pairs. He is noted for his soaring lyricism, which somehow produces a keen, often melancholy gravitas. He is a master of naturalism, and yet uses his mimetic skills to discern and depict the veins of the fantastical running underneath our consensus reality. He believes in the unrivaled power of true love, over which death has no dominion — and yet death frequently seems to have the last word. He is an embracer and champion of tradition, almost basking in nostalgic, yet revels in the doings of rebels and nonconformists. He argues for the inevitability of change, yet highlights those elements of existence that remain eternal. This synthesis of opposites grants all his work a unique ambiance and charm.

PM Press is primarily a nonfiction publisher with a progressive bent. But starting in 2009, SF writer Terry Bisson began curating a series of fiction titles for them under the rubric Outspoken Authors, featuring such standouts as Ursula K. Le Guin, Norman Spinrad, and Elizabeth Hand. The latest offering in this line is Totaltopia, by Crowley, and it serves perfectly to introduce any newcomers to Crowley’s particular flavor, while also serving as an appetizer to those awaiting the novel’s banquet.

The book opens with a quietly nostalgic yet cosmic tale original to this volume, “This Is Our Town,” in which the Catholic childhood of a young girl who is lucky enough to see and converse with her guardian angel exfoliates to color human existence. “Prayer is how the world is managed.” Two other excellent stories will be familiar to those who have seen Crowley’s collection Novelties & Souvenirs.

The nonfiction work shows a piercing mind at work, as well as an expansive sense of compassion, as the author investigates the roots and methods of literary futurism (the title piece), Russian “cosmism” (“Everything That Rises”), and the fiction of fellow fantasist Paul Park (“Paul Park’s Hidden Worlds”). The concluding dialogue with Bisson, a signature feature of this series, finds Crowley wryly and gratefully assessing his career and nodding hopefully toward what he feels might very well be his “last full-dress novel,” Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr. What better segue could a reviewer ask for?

Crowley’s new book is something utterly unique when considered within his oeuvre, yet also totally allied to landmark works of his such as Beasts, Engine Summer, and Little, Big. As such, and if it is indeed his “last full-dress novel,” it stands as a worthy summation and knotting together of his eternal main themes: life as story and stories as life; the relations between nature and humanity; the meaning of and transcendence of death; the teeter-totter between social duties and rogue outsiderly freedoms; and the value of families.

The biggest and most obvious category into which the bountiful Ka can be stuffed is that of the “animal fantasy.” In it’s purest form, this sort of tale brings consciousness and language to its nonhuman characters but leaves them in a recognizably natural world — the most famous example of this mode is perhaps Watership Down by Richard Adams, which set the gold standard by not only conjuring up a riveting Homeric tale set within a small parcel of land, but also by creating an entire mythos and culture for its keenly delineated rabbit protagonists, who, while “human,” are never not also animals. A more recent fine example is The Bees by Laline Paull.

With Ka, Crowley provides a new benchmark in the canon of great animal fantasy. His species spotlight focuses on Crows, his hero being one Dar Oakley, who is representative in many way of the traits, predilections, and capacities of his kind but is also unprecedented. Dar Oakley sees more, thinks deeper, is bolder and more contrarian than his fellows. Moreover, he cannot die. Whenever his mortal form is extinguished, he reincarnates in some future era. These characteristics will guide and shape his uncanny biography. But at the same time, Dar Oakley is all Crow, sharing his nature with his compatriots. (This animal nature, especially in the sphere of a Crow’s fancy for eating corpses, is neither glorified nor denigrated but simply taken as evolutionarily correct, without demanding any apologies.) And Crowley — of course, the author’s surname nominates the Crow as his totem — provides unstintingly the details and realities of a Crow’s life. From mating to nesting, traveling to eating, the details of a Crow’s daily rounds are rendered in colorful and extensive verisimilitude.

Of course, given that the reader is inhabiting the mind of a Crow, a place no microscope can peer into, some of the scientifically unobservable details have to be invented: for instance, the four cardinal directions that Crows perceive are given names, and emotional associations and desires and fears are attached to their visible behaviors. But Crowley’s inventions consort so well with what we know of these birds that the reader never feels any artificiality. And just as Adams did for his bunnies, Crowley creates an etiquette and culture and back-story for his birds. Although unlike the rabbits, the Crows are not given to worshipping deities or time-binding with myths, being rather, well, flighty and mired in the present.

So, on this not unimportant surface level we discover a novel full of animal-based adventures, loves, losses, triumphs, and quotidian pleasures, all of them at once “other” yet humanly relatable. Dar Oakley pioneers new territories, helps his tribe, falls in love, and seeks solace for his restless soul.

If this were the entirety of Ka, it would be a plentitude. But there is much more, and it lies in the frametale, and also in the interior tales and philosophical underpinnings.

We open the book with a human testament. Our unnamed narrator is a failing widower living in some near-tomorrow where civilization itself seems imperiled and on the point of extinction. He finds a sick Crow in his yard, nurses it, and learns improbably to communicate. This is Dar Oakley, and we receive the Crow’s autobiography through the lens of the human amanuensis, whose interstitial interpolations occur throughout.

Immediately we are thrust into speculation about the unreliability of our narrator. Are Dar Oakley and his entire story manufactured by this decadent, dying End Times Scribe? It’s an entirely plausible interpretation. In this case, the book reads as the sputtering, last-gasp attempt by a grieving humanity to selfishly re-inspire itself and vainly reconnect with the natural world our species has destroyed.

Valid as this angle of attack might be — and I can foresee future academic papers pursuing it — I cannot endorse it, for it discounts the third layer of the book, which is its resonant, poignant metaphysics. Believing that our human scribe has invented everything undercuts the obvious textual and thematic importance of the supernatural events in the book.

For Dar Oakley is a liminal figure, a psychopomp who can facilitate passage to various underworlds and afterlives. In his extended encounters with various sympathetic humans, from the circa-Neolithic times to the imagined near future, the Crow serves as a kind of flawed Virgil. For although he is conversant with other realms, he is not expert, frequently becoming lost and confused as he seeks in his Crow-like fashion to understand the riddles of existence. This shared vision quest between humans and birds serves as subtext and counterpart to the more mundane activities of the book. Ultimately, Dar Oakley reaches an acceptance and wisdom that the humans can see only partially.

A couple of other aspects of the novel bear mentioning. The nested stories within the main narrative echo such collections of folklore as The Mabinogian or Native American Trickster cycles. There is a cornucopia of stand-alone mini-tales herein that all serve to propel the major themes and plots while they also deliver independent joys. A definite flavor of T. H. White’s The Once and Future King obtains as well. And the Wellsian “history of mankind” panorama which Dar Oakley’s eternal existence allows us to witness has the kind of multi-generational view-from-a-height sweep that a book like Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz also displays.

And although it’s a given with those who know Crowley’s books, I would still be remiss if I did not comment on the sheer agile beauty of his prose. His voice — Dar Oakley’s voice — blends simplicity with complexity, gravitas with humor, sensuality with interiority. Here is a longish passage that I think illustrates all these points.

The Crows don’t remember, and neither do People, when farmers first tried to scare them off by making those false People to stand and stare, bowing a little in the breeze but never changing place. Dar Oakley tells how he’d stand watch and call, Watch out, watch out when one appeared as though suddenly standing up, with big eyes like the bird-costumed specter of the Wolves gang. It was enough to make most Crows stand off a ways from one, the braver ones still snatching a corn sprout here and there behind its back, then taking off . . .

The Crows finally came to delight in the figures; though Crows can’t recognize the many images of People that People make, the use of this one is so evident they can, and it has the effect on their sense of humor that a pun has on some People. They still like to pretend a little fear at first, then go settle on its outstretched arms, and crow in its face — for Crows do crow, in delight at wit and surprise: a sound you’ll come to know if you watch them. As the corn grew high the comical People were propped up higher, or they were left standing and hidden by the yellowing stalks; come late summer when the farmers and the hands, the women and children, came out to cut and shock the corn, the scarecrows fell amid the stalks and waste, lost their heads and hands. Dar Oakley was alone in seeing in them all the gaunt skeletons in his story, the bones of One Ear’s brother, the ragged men on the ground in Na Cherry’s old homeland. He could be startled coming unaware upon one, as though it might lift itself on its skinny arms and turn up its face to him.

Here we have the encapsulated essence of Crowley and this phenomenal book. Love and death, fear and fun, artifice and nature, all holding hands and dancing around some cosmic maypole to the eternal music of the spheres.

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