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Dear Reader, So having received my agent's comments and suggestions on the House at High Tide manuscript, I promptly began procrastinating, which resulted in a freshly shampooed carpet, clean kitchen cupboards, and a huge stack of library books read. So today is Book Report Day! The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters was probably the most assured novel I read last weekend, immediately engaging and with an extraordinary clarity to the portrayal of characters and setting. I think it's the sheer vividness of her fictional world that draws you in, since the action builds momentum slowly. But it's a book about obsession, and an obsession that is more than half hidden from the narrator himself, and I think Waters is absolutely masterful at handling the delicate problem of reflecting both the truth and the lies the narrator tells himself. An eminently readable book, also subtle, intelligent, and spooky as hell. Read this book! White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi, a new (to me) English writer, quite young, who's writing literary Gothics. I read this after Waters's book, which probably over-emphasized the "contemporary edge" faddiness in Oyeyemi's prose. After Waters's effortless clarity, Oyeyemi's deliberate opacity began to seem like little more than a gimmick, and the typological tricks -- parentheses, broken paragraphs, and especially the utterly pointless failure to indent some paragraphs -- looked like ticks and grimaces that had nothing to do with the story. Also, they are much the same ticks as I've encountered in other young English writers (Nicola Barker leaps to mind) which makes them all the more faddish and thereby annoying. That said, the characters were vividly portrayed, and although I thought Oyeyemi tried to cram too much subject matter into a small book (small story, come to that), all the things she was juggling did come into startling and intriguing juxtapositions. Food, mothering, racism, history -- and vampirism, ghosts, and a house come obscenely to life. Recommended for a day when you're too curious to be annoyed. The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield, yet another literary Gothic, which seemed to be the inadvertent theme for my weekend. This one was back on the traditional end of the spectrum, with rich prose and a layering of narratives that worked well enough but not brilliantly. The Gothic tale of incest and insanity in a decaying manor house is framed by the Penelope Lively-esque story of a bookish recluse who is chosen to write a famous author's biography, and I had the sense that the typically English, sweetly understated framing story was there to add legitimacy to the frankly over the top Gothicness of the main story -- which didn't quite work for me, since the framing story, being sweetly understated, was on the cloying edge of boring. But the prose was plenty good enough once you got past the encomium to the joys of reading (which haven't we all read before? lots?), and the Gothic story was very Gothic indeed. An excellent book to curl up in bed with when you've got a cold. Case Histories by Kate Atkinson, which now that I think about it also had more than a touch of the Gothic, though there's not even the suspicion of anything supernatural. Three more or less dysfunctional families are ruined by murder, their stories tossed in a bag with a private detective, and shaken well. So, yes, a bit of a grab bag as far as storytelling goes, but extremely engaging all the same, quirky characters, lots of genuinely funny humor, and so much hard stuff about children at risk that it almost had me squirming in my chair. I came away kind of wishing for a somewhat more unified story/narrative, but it was nevertheless an excellent read. The Death of the Necromancer by Martha Wells, which in case you hadn't already guessed from the title is a fantasy novel (no, really?). I'd put Wells on the same shelf as McMaster Bujold: they're both writing moderately romantic, not-too-clichéed fantasy that has a refreshing feel of enjoyment, even relish, on the part of the author. This book was delightfully influenced by gaslight Parisian mysteries of the kind that featured master criminals facing off against master sleuths -- think Sherlock Holmes only French, and therefore both weirder and sexier -- but set in a world of magic and monsters. Not really steampunk, more gaslight noir. Wells doesn't have quite the same grasp on plotting that Bujold has, so her books don't have quite the same smooth sleekness of drive, and oddly I thought she handled the gaslight crime story elements better than the fantasy elements that didn't seem as fresh as the rest of the book, but it was a fine, pleasurable read. There you go, a book report week. Now I should probably quit reading other peoples novels and start writing some of my own. Yes? Hope you're well, Holly |
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