The Trouble with Goats and Sheep by Joanna Cannon

I’ve been looking forward to reading “The Trouble with Goats and Sheep” for a long time. Authors such as Rachel Joyce, Sarah Winman and James Hannah whose books I’ve loved reading over the past couple of years endorsed Cannon’s novel. Added to this is the fact that Joanna Cannon received support in writing this, her first novel, from the WoMentoring Project (a programme that matches mentors from the publishing industry with talented new female writers) which was set up by Kerry Hudson – another author whose books I love. So a lot of build-up was attached to this novel! Part of me was nervous that this would be a book with prose so polished the story would come across as cold. However, the pleasure of reading a debut author is that you never know what the writing will be like until you get into the thick of it. Rather than something overtly showy, I was delighted to discover that “The Trouble with Goats and Sheep” is awash with the subtle delights of relatable human stories and inventive writing that is rich with emotion. At its centre is the intriguing story of a neighbourhood mystery which two intrepid adolescent girls are determined to solve.

During a relentless heat wave in the summer of 1976, a woman named Mrs Creasy goes missing from her house in the avenue of an ordinary British town. Ten year old Gracie and her delicate bespectacled friend Tilly visit the local vicar about the matter which has the neighbourhood buzzing with worry. The vicar has delivered a sermon where he quotes scripture about people being divided into those who deserve eternal punishment and those who deserve eternal life – like a shepherd who separates the goats from the sheep. What the girls correctly guess is that it’s not always so easy to tell who belongs in what group. Life is filled with lots of moral ambiguity and appearances can be deceiving: that’s the trouble. This is certainly the case in this avenue filled with characters who all harbour secrets and private lives unknown to their neighbours.

The story plays out something like a ‘whodunnit’ as the stories in each numbered house are revealed and the tangle of their connections to Mrs Creasy becomes clear. Layered on top of the story of her disappearance is a tale from a decade earlier where the neighbours united against a local outcast with disastrous consequences. A socially-awkward and mysterious man named Walter Bishop was accused of a serious crime. The courts acquitted him, but he remained guilty in the hearts of his neighbours who still scorn him. One resident puts it like this: “There are decent people,” said Mrs. Roper, “and then there are the weird ones, the ones who don’t belong. The ones who cause the rest of us problems.” Even though some people find it harder to fit in (or be allowed to fit in) with others, this novel shows how everyone is equally complex and equally fearful of being cast out. Groups have a tendency to target and vilify those who are superficially unusual in an effort to hide their own hidden peculiarities or their own misdeeds. 

Grace likes to carve her name and the names of her friends into this delicious mousse-like dessert

It’s really original how this novel solidly creates in the reader’s mind a picture of a neighbourhood and the relationships between all its colourful residents. The author lays this out so clearly in the narrative that I felt like I could see a map in my mind where each house is positioned and how the inhabitants spend each day. Through short sharpened metaphors Cannon can invoke a rare feeling of understanding for another’s life. In one section she writes: “widowhood wore a beige cardigan and said very little.” This creates a powerful sense for the mixture of isolation, sadness and despondency this character feels. When Cannon hits these snippets which perfectly encapsulate a character the story really soars, but when the narrative gets too caught up in the minutiae of the neighbourhood interactions it can drag somewhat. However, what really drives the story and allows a three-dimensional understanding of the avenue are Grace and Tilly. This compelling and likeable duo trundle from neighbour to neighbour seeking clues for Mrs Creasy’s whereabouts - treated to plates of custard creams and bowls of angel delight along the way.

Grace is a strikingly precocious girl still discovering the ways her intentions don’t always meet her actions. This is eloquently described here: “I still hadn’t learned the power of words. How, once they have left your mouth, they have a breath and a life of their own. I had yet to realize that you no longer own them. I hadn’t learned that, once you have let them go, the words can then, in fact, become the owners of you.” This is a moving way of realizing how you have to take responsibility for what you say. In another part, Grace reveals herself to be a fellow bookworm from the pernickety way she organizes her shelves: “I had to run my finger down the spine of each book to check it was in its proper place and make sure they were all safe, before I could even think about doing anything else.” It’s endearing reading about Grace’s burgeoning awareness of her place in the world and the surprisingly central role she plays in this neighbourhood mystery.

Even though “The Trouble with Goats and Sheep” is a novel concentrating on a mystery set within one small neighbourhood, it stretches open to reveal many compellingly intricate stories of love and loss.

The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes

In 1936 a Russian man spends night after night sitting by the elevator of his building fully expecting to be taken away to be killed. Dmitri Dmitrievich is a successful composer whose work has been judged by an editorial as contravening the ideals of the Soviet Union. He wants to avoid trouble for his wife and young daughter who sleep nearby so waits outside his door with a packed suitcase. He’s made to live in a perpetual state of terror expecting secret police to seize him at any minute. Over years of intense scrutiny and being batted around by the ruling political powers, his immense talent and passion for his music is slowly twisted. It provokes questions about the meaning and value of art when it’s trampled on by the overriding political forces it’s created under. The novel is composed in triptych form capturing Dmitri’s feelings at three very different points of his life. Spaced in twelve year intervals it also makes a fascinating portrait of the Soviet Union at significantly different stages of its existence. Inspired by the real-life Russian composer Shastakovich, “The Noise of Time” asks how the pure intentions of music fare when played against the clamorous dogma of reigning ideologies.

One of the great challenges of reading any novel set in Russia is trying to keep track and comprehend the flurry of names which appear. Many people have triple-barrel names, each of which is intermittently used and sometimes variations of those names are used in place of the proper names. This simply poses a practical problem for a reader, but I’ve never found it really detracts from my enjoyment of a novel – especially when it’s as powerful and elegantly told as this one. My strategy is to keep a list of the primary characters while reading and, after a time, the story washes over me to a point where I know who is who. Another challenge is entering into Soviet Russia’s complex and extensive history of which I only have a bare bones understanding. I didn’t find this to be a problem though as long as you have a broad understanding of Communist Russian and Stalin’s life – who plays an integral part in the story. Really this is a novel about the fate of artists under the rule of tyrants. Its universal meaning can be strongly felt even if you don’t get some of the nuances of the world in which it is historically set.

Dmitrievich keeps on his bedside table a postcard of The Tribute Money by Titian – painting where the Romans try to bribe Christ for their own political motives.

One of the most fascinating sections is when Dmitri goes on a state-approved tour of America. He’s much lauded in other nations even if some of his work is still banned in his own country. The Soviet Union try to use him as a pawn to present their country as less oppressive and more open. But the effect of this ultimately fails: “Scrub, scrub, scrub, let’s wash away all this old Russianness and paint a shiny new Sovietness on top. But it never worked – the paint began to flake off almost as soon as it was applied. To be Russian was to be pessimistic; to be Soviet was to be optimistic.” Instead of being inspired by the “freedoms” supposedly found in the US and other western nations, Dmitri feels how they are both played and play into political forces which seek to suppress opposition to their power. He also hilariously notes about American journalists that “The fact that they couldn’t pronounce your name was your name’s fault, not theirs.” There is also quite a funny perspective given of the thinness of Picasso’s political convictions: “he knew Picasso for a bastard and a coward. How easy it was to be a Communist when you weren’t living under Communism!” Dmitri eventually finds himself unstoppably drawn into a system whichapplauds him as an idol for their own purposes “He swam in honours like a shrimp in shrimp-cocktail sauce” rather than an artist with an independent voice and spirit.

This novel made me question the degree to which my own creativity is guided under the society in which I live. Even if I don’t live within a country that seeks to directly shackle what’s created within its own dominant ideological beliefs, I’m guided and influenced by the media and popular beliefs of those around me. In this novel it’s observed how even good intentioned people are worn down by the fact of their survival because “conscience was always there to insist that more courage could have been shown.” Barnes explores the deep complexities and moral ambiguities involved in a lifetime under an oppressive regime. What survives through the gruelling circumstances under which it is created is the music: “Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time.” But the novel asks how this might become perverted when the mind of the artist has been poisoned by a lifetime of compromise. “The Noise of Time” is a short intense novel of breathtaking scope and wisdom.

Listen to a wonderful interview with Julian Barnes by Sinéad Gleeson on The Book Show where they discuss “The Noise of Time”, the author’s bookshelf and his development as a writer: https://soundcloud.com/thebookshow/the-book-show-s3-1-16th-january-2016-at-home-with-julian-barnes

The Man Without a Shadow by Joyce Carol Oates

Strong love stories drive many of the greatest novels of all time, but the love story in The Man Without a Shadow is remarkably unusual and haunting. From this tale Joyce Carol Oates raises probing questions about the nature of love and the phenomenon of consciousness. Elihu Hoops - a charismatic man from a prominent wealthy family and ardent civil rights activist - experiences an acute inflammation of the brain in 1964 which causes him to lose all short-term memory. He is incapable of remembering anything new for more than seventy seconds. His condition can never be cured because of irreparable damage to the hippocampus area of his brain which is responsible for the formation of new memories. In the proceeding decades he’s regularly taken to a university’s research facility or “Memory Lab” where groups of neuroscientists engage him with tests to better understand the biological connection between the brain and memory. Even though this is for the betterment of society and human knowledge, the question lingers if Elihu is being exploited. One of the scientists Margot Sharpe builds an entire career out of working closely with the amnesiac. The connection she forms with him over a lifetime turns into a strikingly original romance.

Read my full review on Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies: http://repository.usfca.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1019&context=jcostudies

Bret Easton Ellis and The Other Dogs by Lina Wolff (translated by Frank Perry)

It feels like a provocation for an author to include another author's name in the title of her book – especially if she calls that other author a dog within the subtitle. The name comes out of a section of the novel about a brothel in a run-down town called Caudal in Spain. There's a kennel at the back filled only with male dogs who are given the names of male authors after a feminist comes to visit the prostitutes who work there. There's also a canary bird called Harold Bloom. When clients are cruel to the prostitutes they take it out on the dogs by feeding them rotten meat. Later this image of consuming rotten meat is repeated when a man named Rodrigo dreams of a starving man who is only given putrid scraps from a butcher to eat. Images of putrid sustenance in place of nourishment for men who have heretofore escaped punishment have a strong resonance in this “civilized” society. Rodrigo is telling this story to a girl named Araceli who comes to see him at a hotel on her very first job as a call girl. Araceli is fascinated by a neighbouring woman named Alba Cambo who writes dark short stories that she and her mother seek out to read. It's difficult to pin down a single plot for this novel set in the Spanish landscape. It's essentially a collection of anecdotes, yet they all feel eerily tied together and are frequently fascinating. What Wolff gets at through all her divergences and stories within dreams within stories is a special commentary on the way self-perception works in conjunction with the way others view us.

There are stories in here about people who sell themselves, who cheat on their spouses and who live in unbearably bitter loneliness. Characters seem guided more by instinct than by logic. It's stated that “You never really know anything about anything. At best you have an aching feeling in your stomach and a compass that sometimes points right, and other times spins crazily.” Much of the time there is a slightly surreal edge to things so that when a man slips and falls unconscious in the middle of a Sitges dinner party it doesn't seem strange that conversation just carries on. People feel on guard about becoming too close to others or allowing them into their lives. They feel caution is needed because “beneath the thick skin of even the most armour-plated person there is always a crack that runs straight to the centre and you should think it over very carefully before raising a hand to signal your willingness to fall inside.” Indeed when a group of students surprise their teacher with a bottle of bubbly she unexpectedly opens up about her severe disappointment with life in a direct and uncomfortable way. So too when Araceli takes Rodrigo on as a client, but it turns out he's not after sex as he was sent to her by Alba and her own mother. Instead he wants to talk all night which strikes Araceli as in some ways more difficult to take because “Selling your body was one thing – but your mind, that was prostitution on an unparalleled scale.”

In this novel Lina Wolff is saying something really striking and original about human relationships and our relationship with literary culture. Children attending a school see literature as a diet which must be as balanced and nutritious as the food they consume: 'As literary anorexics we have to make sure we get some Borges inside us,' Muriel said. 'A few words a day, a few words that are the extremely nutritious parts of the tuna. Those are the bits that will feed us, and those are the bits from which we will be born.' This resonates strongly as I often feel that consuming the right books is important as eating right. There's a loutish man named Ilich who has an affair with Alba and blackmails Rodrigo who takes it upon himself to read “The Old Man and The Sea.” His crass interpretation of the book is laughable to Rodrigo who is more cultured. Yet, it is Ilich who ultimately succeeds in business and with Rodrigo's wife despite living a life which has been devoid of literary nourishment. When he flips through some salacious pages of Houellebecq's novel “Platform” he comments: “So this is what literature is all about? A bunch of wankers who stick pages together with their own sperm? Ha! It's enough to make you weep.” Wolff expresses in her stories a frustration with the hard economic realities of the world, but also a suspicion of the male-dominated literary culture. Her approach to depicting this reality is disarming and refreshing. “Bret Easton Ellis and The Other Dogs” is a highly unusual and haunting read.

Slade House by David Mitchell

I was hesitant about reading “Slade House” when it came out a few months ago because I didn't finish his previous novel “The Bone Clocks.” Mitchell's recurring technique is to write really involving smaller realistic stories within larger, ambitious and fantastical narratives that say something meaningful about time and humanity. This was most successfully realized in his tremendous novel “Cloud Atlas.” The problem is that I come to feel really involved with some of the smaller enclosed stories and grow impatient with the larger all-encompassing story. This is the reason I put aside “The Bone Clocks” because I didn't care enough about the supernatural elements that tied disparate stories set in different time periods together. He uses the same structure in “Slade House” building quieter short tales of an insecure boy, a philandering detective inspector, a teenage girl self conscious about her weight, a lesbian journalist and a black Canadian psychiatrist into a chilling narrative of a pair of twins' paranormal existence. One by one these people are lured to a grand old house and then they are never seen again. The difference is that the length of “Slade House” better suits this technique. “Slade House” is only 240 pages compared to “The Bone Clocks” which totals 640 pages. This makes “Slade House” a much more fast-paced and thrilling read.

David Mitchell is such a skilled writer in the way he quickly and convincingly creates narrators that are immediately identifiable. Switching between all the different personalities I listed above over a 36 year time period could feel jarring to a reader, but Mitchell uses choice details and compelling voices which grab your attention. Even with an unlikeable character like Inspector Gordon Edmonds who makes sexist and racist remarks, he's a dynamic and vivid personality who is engaging to read about. Mitchell confidently brings in points of reference from the high-brow like famed musician Yehudi Menuhin to the ever-loveable Miss Piggy. At times Michell scrambles too much to invoke an atmosphere for the time period by flipping through news events or popular culture from the time period so it can begin to read like a wikipedia page for the year in question. But, on the whole, their stories feel layered and deeply thought out.

In the section 'Oink, Oink' teenage Sally Timms wears a Miss Piggy mask at a party in Slade House 

Mitchell gives a great sense for the depth of personality and the way people present version of themselves: “People are masks, with masks under those masks, and masks under those, and down you go.” It's interesting to see how over the course of the novel the sinister twins Norah and Jonah's characters gradually develop. The various people these mystic beings inhabit break apart to reveal their foibles and tensions between the pair. So, by the end, I felt as involved with their stories as I did with the tales of the individuals they lure into the supernatural house.

“Slade House” is essentially a group of short stories held in the framework of a fantasy novel. I admire Mitchell's ambition and the scope of his imagination to meaningfully tease larger questions out of tales that straddle great swaths of time. But such scale isn't always needed. In Mitchell's novel “Black Swan Green” he confines his narrative to a year in the life of a thirteen year old boy to great effect. “Slade House” is a thoroughly entertaining read and a refreshing new spin on a haunted house story, but I hope Mitchell doesn't always feel the need to contain micro stories within grandiose macro narratives. Sometimes a whole world of meaning can be felt the smallest of spaces.

The Widow by Fiona Barton

Every now and then I enjoy reading a good immersive thriller. Last year it was SJ Watson’s “Second Life” about a woman’s search for her missing sister and her adventures from creating a secret online identity. “The Widow” also taps into the nefarious corners of the internet at some points, but this psychological thriller centres on the case of a missing girl, the deceased man who was suspected of kidnapping her and his long-suffering wife-now-widow. This is Fiona Barton’s debut novel, but she’s had considerable practice writing about cases such as the dramatic one created in this story as she’s an experienced journalist. The story’s primary focus is not Glen Taylor, the primary suspect in a kidnapping case that’s been ongoing for four years, but Jean, the submissive and compliant wife who has stood always stood beside – but more often behind - him. The novel begins at a point when Glen has recently been killed in an accident and now Jean is left on her own with the media wanting her side of the story. What does she really think about her husband? How much does she know about the kidnapping? Is she lying to the police and reporters or is she lying to herself? These questions are explored over the course of this well-paced, suspenseful thriller.

At the beginning of the story I felt impatient with Jean because she’s initially so passive. She shows a wilful ignorance: “There is so much I want to ask, but so much I don't want to know.” While this is frustrating it’s also a true reflection of how some people evade looking at the truth. Without her husband to order her about, she knocks around her empty house until it’s invaded by skilled reporter Kate Waters who cosies up to Jean like a friend but really wants the big scoop. Gradually the extent of Jean’s introverted behaviour becomes more meaningful as her complex reasoning takes shape and she slowly reveals her version of events. The novel moves between 2010 when Jean is interviewed and 2006 when two-year-old Bella Elliot disappears from her single mother’s front garden. An investigation is launched by well-meaning detective inspector Bob Sparkes who becomes obsessed with solving the case. Bella’s mother Dawn launches her own campaign to find her daughter utilizing the media and stirring up public interest. The search eventually leads to Glen who becomes the focus of the case. What’s fascinating is the way his wife Jean gradually emerges from the background as she’s torn between her husband and the people investigating. Both sides try to manipulate her for their own purposes, but when she’s interviewed Jean is finally ready to assert her independence.

The novel really picks up pace half way through when a string of carefully placed clues start adding up, secrets are uncovered and Jean becomes more complex. I found the ending to be as satisfyingly dramatic as a thrilling crime drama. It’s particularly notable how well Barton writes about the methods journalists use to chase sensational stories like a kidnapping and how the media works in tandem with (or sometimes comes into conflict with) police investigations. “The Widow” is an engaging and well-executed thriller.

American Housewife by Helen Ellis

“American Housewife” is undoubtedly one of the funniest books I've read for some time. These short stories imitate the parlance of our modern day popular and online life to skewer the shallow values of a consumer-driven superficial culture. Sorrows are drowned with Chanel No. 5. Book clubs are more about potluck dinners and outfits than literature. Little pageant girls enter protection programs to hide them from their fame-driven parents. The satire of these tales is enriched with self-help guide speak which encourages you how to understand the subtext of what a “Southern Lady” says or how to be a “Grown-Ass Lady.” Longer stories push frivolous pastimes to extreme and absurd ends like being forced to be the surrogate for a group of ladies in a book club or neighbours who turn murderous over a decoration dispute of an apartment building’s common area. This bombastic horror exposes the underlying emptiness of trivial middle class standards of behaviour. Just like the self-portrait artist Cindy Sherman who inhabits personas of fictional characters distorted by the society they live in, Helen Ellis’ humorous imitation of women who bow to the values of popular culture serves to send up the shallow attitudes and seductive images we’re bombarded with in every day modern life.

Cindy Sherman Untitled #461

Beneath the playful humour, there is a relatable simmering anger driving these stories. Women feel compelled to “stallion-walk” in their kitchens like Beyoncé. Even though we know we can never be like Beyoncé, we can’t help wishing to be like her and thus making ourselves look ridiculous. These stories are also suffused with a sense of frustration that what is trivial is popularized more than what is thoughtful. For writers specifically, it’s as if there can be little drive to pen anything worthwhile because it will just be chewed up and twisted by the machine of popular culture or ignored by an easily distracted public. It’s remarked “Looks like, unless we're raging drunkards, writers are boring.” In this story a writer who hasn’t published anything for some time is drawn into joining a reality show called “Dumpster Diving with the Stars.” Another story focuses on an author commissioned to write a novel by Tampax. One of the most funny-but-cringeworthy stories ‘How to Be a Patron of the Arts’ features the transformation of an aspiring writer who gradually dumbs herself down to the point of being a monotonous socialite and wife. When having a conversation at an art exhibit she instructs you to “admit that you published one book. 'It was a novel.' Talk about it in the past tense as if it's a dead child.” This book is awash with satirical humour that anyone can relate to, but particularly to writers like me who once had a novel published and have since failed to successfully get that second book to press.

I’ve been reading a few novels recently that are excellent, but heavy and difficult. So the stories in “American Housewife” made fantastic intelligent, but easy and very funny reads. They also made me intensely self conscious of the ways I might also be like an American housewife with glitter in my desk drawer and spending the morning hunched over my desk in my pajamas.

The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt by Tracy Farr

There is something special about the character of Lena Gaunt that I strongly connected to. On the surface she and I have nothing in common. She’s a ninety year old musician living in a small cottage in a suburb of Perth, Australia. Her specialty is playing the theremin or the aetherphone which is a special electronic instrument controlled without physical contact. Even at her elderly age she still performs in concerts and then retires to her quarters to smoke opium. She’s an eccentric character who narrates the story of her colourful life from early days in Singapore to her affair with a famous artist to the peaks and troughs of her musical fame. What’s so entrancing and sympathetic about Lena is her intensely felt dialogue with herself:  “I could connect – but with myself, in a closed circuit.” There is an element of unashamedly clear independence about her life which is beautifully admirable. She is defined more by her relationship to the creative process than to other people. This makes Lena an inspiration and a joy to read about.

As the title suggests, this book is also about the people Lena loves. It’s difficult for her to connect with others mainly because she’s more interested in her music. Her childhood is spent mostly in solitude. She feels little connection to her parents, but strikes a stronger bond with her Uncle Valentine who inspires her interest in music. It’s fantastic to read about a character who creates her own family units rather than remaining confined into the one she was born into. She’s drawn more to outsiders than those who tread a safe and conservative path. So there is her uncle who takes her to an opium den, a painter named Trix who takes her to a queer bar called The Buzz Room, a large Russian cellist who recognizes her musical talent and a woman living by the ocean who provides steady company. Her companions are few, but carefully chosen. There is a great love of her life who she forges a strong romantic connection to: “every night, as we held each other, curved into one another, we cared not what the world thought of us. We were entire, within ourselves. Perfect.” Their relationship is sincerely felt and very touching.

Leon Theremin playing the instrument he invented

Although these relationships are extremely intimate, she has a closer and more long-lasting relationship to her music and, by extension, to the elements of the world around her. For her, the rumblings of life are interpreted as a kind of music to her ears so that the sound of the sea roar is “basso profondo” and the engines of a ship beat “lentissimo.” In a more low-key sense, this sort of “music of the environment” reminds me so strongly of the Anna Smaill’s inventive novel “The Chimes.” However, this is a novel driven more by voice and its Lena’s personality that steers it. Inspired to reflect on her past by an ardent documentary film maker who persistently calls on her, Lena recounts the story of her life moving back and forth in time. For her “Time is all over the place, like a madwoman’s breakfast.” Like all great storytellers, all I wanted to do was pull up a chair and ardently listen for as long as she wanted to talk. This is Tracy Farr’s debut novel and it’s impressive that she’s created such an assured and compellingly voiced narrator who feels fully realized. “The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt” is an absolute pleasure to read.

Human Acts by Han Kang (Translated by Deborah Smith)

There is a disturbing thing which can occur when we’re faced with death on such a large scale as that which occurs in war or disasters. A group of individuals can be reduced to a number. Even when faced with piles of bodies we can start to think of them as things rather than people because the horror of what we’re seeing is too terrifying to deal with. This certainly happened to me a couple of years ago when I was watching the film ‘Night Will Fall’ about the process of creating a documentary with footage taken by Allied Forces inside German concentration camps. It’s a reality almost too nightmarish for the mind to deal with, but of course you can’t turn away from victims who’ve been rendered voiceless. “Human Acts” begins with such a startling confrontation and gradually reinstates the human face of those who’ve been lost as well as testifying to the struggle of those who survive. It starts with the immediate aftermath of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising in South Korea where hundreds of demonstrators protesting the military dictatorship were killed and beaten by government troops. This novel traces the survivors of this conflict using a radical style of writing to weave in and out of their perspectives, that of the dead and the reader her/himself who becomes inextricably drawn into the reality of their situation.

Adolescent school children work to prepare and organize bodies to be identified by their loved ones and readied for a funeral ceremony. A boy looks for one body in particular – his friend who was killed while by his side in the skirmish. When asked if he feels any fear working with so many corpses he replies: “'The soldiers are the scary ones… What's frightening about the dead?'” The consciousness of his dead friend persists in the narrative. Through it, he shifts the reader’s focus and the story’s point of view so we see the scenes from both the deceased and the characters still living in fear of the militia. It’s remarked at one point that “Being left as the sole survivor would have been the most frightening thing.” The novel follows the price of survival over many years until close to the present day. It includes stories of different aspects of the conflict and the society through the perspectives of a variety of characters including an editor dealing with state censorship, a prisoner, a factory girl and a grieving mother who demands official acknowledgement for the loss of her son. 

Han Kang's writing style changes throughout different sections of the book. At some points she invokes an interior voice or uses the confrontational second person "you" which could be directed at the reader or a specific character. Other times the narrative has a more documentary feel switching back and forth from the present to the past. Each shift in her method of telling better reflects these very different individuals’ stories which involve some recurring characters. It was interesting starting this new novel “Human Acts” having so recently read Kang’s book “The Vegetarian.” Whereas this earlier book explored a woman’s inwardly blossoming but outwardly deteriorating life through the perspective of three people close to her, “Human Acts” is simultaneously a novel with a broader political perspective and also more intensely personal to the author herself. It’s significant that the afterward is in the author’s own unmediated voice discussing the significance of the Gwangju Uprising on her family and how she approached this story. This is a novel about the legacy created by those members of the population living under a military regime who were willing to bravely stand up to it. Kang imaginatively takes readers into the reality of these victims’ lives and provokes serious questions about individual responsibility. She states: “Conscience, the most terrifying thing in the world.” Their actions and personal sacrifice made a statement which has shaped the country’s history. It’s also about the actions taken by the survivors of this conflict to memorialize those who lost their lives and are continuing their fight for human independence. “Human Acts” is a novel filled with significant insight.

Dinosaurs on Other Planets by Danielle McLaughlin

It's not till the last part of this debut short story collection by author Danielle McLaughlin that you reach the title story. If you've read all the stories in order (as I did) then you'll already have a sense of the title's more complex meaning. It’s a phrase taken from a conversation in one story where a child speculates that if dinosaurs were made extinct after a meteor hit Earth there could still be dinosaurs on other planets. However, a more layered understanding of how this image’s meaning connects with human relationships comes from the interactions of the characters throughout all of the stories. They convey a sensation that, even if we are emotionally destroyed in our own circumscribed existence, other lives still carry on independently. There is a feeling running through many of these varied and skilfully-written tales that the existence of others happens at a far remove from you and your own internal reality. Even if we live in close proximity to each other and especially if we're in a relationship with someone, the bulk of these other lives remains distinct and private. McLaughlin subtly handles this by creating deeply immersive and compelling stories which show a keen sense of how people relate to each other.

These stories centre on a broad spectrum of people from a university girl to a working class young man to a philandering husband to a grandmother. I admire how the author represents many different classes of Irish society. There is a story about a poor father and daughter who run a mink farm who take extreme actions to secure feed for their livestock. Another story directly references the Irish property bubble where a working mother loses faith in her husband who is searching for a job and she wanders through her decimated community which resembles a kind of post-apocalyptic landscape. The story ‘A Different Country’ shows the divide in understanding between urban dwellers and rural fishermen who take action against seals who meddle with their fishing nets. In ‘All About Alice’ a 45 year old woman feels bound to still live with and care for her father so on the rare occasions he is away she explores her hidden lascivious side. Together these stories form a complex portrait of society made up of different social groups all functioning in relative independence from each other.

McLaughlin also shows a complex understanding of gender. The first story 'The Art of Foot-Binding' features a daughter who takes a class project about an antiquated sexist practice to heart using it as a form of self harm because of her own insecurities about her weight. At the same time, her mother Janice emotionally binds herself in another way desperately trying to keep up appearances for her faltering relationship. Interspersed with Janice’s account are instructions about foot-binding coated in a poetic language which perversely emphasizes the barbarity of the practice. The juxtaposition of these instructions with the mother’s story creates a powerful new understanding about the way women have harmed themselves and each other throughout time because of social and misogynistic expectations that they live under.

Lily mistakenly identifies flowers by the side of her train as oleanders just as she mis-identifies the meaning of someone's friendly gesture

Other stories present very different kinds of challenges that women face. In 'Not Oleanders' a woman named Lily unexpectedly travels abroad in Italy when her companion cancels on her. On the train she meets a younger woman and believes that there is romantic potential between them. Interestingly, this is the first piece of fiction I’ve read that highlights a person’s clavicles as a part of the body to be desired! Because of some wrongfooted signals, there is a tragic misunderstanding. McLaughlin writes a beautiful line about the experience of humiliation: “The humiliation of earlier had faded a little. It would return, of course, as humiliations always did, it would wait for her in the long grass of memory.” I love how this captures the way in which our instances of shame recur in our minds over and over throughout our lives. The character of Aileen in ‘Silhouette’ lives in London but nervously returns to visit her mother in Ireland to tell her she’s pregnant. However, her aged and ailing mother has very traditional narrow values and Aileen is unwed and having an affair with a married man. A girl going to university in 'The Smell of Dead Flowers' acts somewhat as an agent of chaos in a household where she submits to a lodger's sexual advances and distracts her relative from the care of her mentally disabled daughter.

The author writes just as compellingly about struggles particular to men. In 'Those That I Fight I Do Not Hate' a married man attends a children’s party for the child of his former lover creating a tense environment for her and her husband. His intentions feel unknown even to himself. The man at the centre of 'Along the Heron-Studded River' has a wife with mental health issues who cares for their young child while he’s at work. There is a sense that care and attention for her must be handled delicately or there could be disastrous results. This is represented in a powerful image of him driving across icy pockets of water in wintertime “shattering membranes of ice stretched across the puddles.” In 'Night of the Silver Fox' a young man named Gerard finds his burgeoning feelings of romance squashed in the face of hard world economic realities. Throughout all of these diverse stories it’s compelling the way McLaughlin presents such varied portraits of the way gender roles can play into the way we relate to each other.

I first heard about this book when I attended an event chaired by Thomas Morris at the Southbank Centre in London towards the end of last year featuring authors Colin Barrett, Claire-Louise Bennett and Kevin Barry – all part of the so-called Irish New Wave. Barrett mentioned that this is one of the strongest books he’s read recently which made me really intrigued since I admired his debut story collection so much. I found each story in “Dinosaurs on Other Planets” captivating in its own way. McLaughlin has a talent for creating tension in her scenes of everyday reality so that every detail reflects deeper stories of hidden affairs, desperation, financial insecurity or love that has gone sour. I felt compelled to go back to the beginning of some stories after I finished them and reread them now that I had a fuller understanding of the characters. This is the mark of great fiction as these stories have real depth which isn’t immediately apparent. They are also so entertaining and beautifully-written that they made me want to spend more time with them. As this is only a debut collection, I think Danielle McLaughlin demonstrates tremendous skill and confidence in her writing. This is definitely a book to be savoured.

A Snow Garden by Rachel Joyce

I do like the holidays as much as most people – time off from work and an excuse to indulge – what's not to like? But I've never felt compelled to read something on theme whether that be something spooky around Halloween or jolly around Christmas. The only exceptions have been David Sedaris' fantastically irreverent “Santaland Diaries” or, as they are also known, “Holidays on Ice.” If I'm feeling in a particularly sentimental mood there is also Truman Capote's deeply-moving story 'A Christmas Memory.' So I had no plan to seek out holiday reading this year, but then I came upon Rachel Joyce's new book of short stories “A Snow Garden.” I love the understated beauty and quiet wisdom of her writing, especially in her novel “The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy.” That same power is carried through into these short stories which are all focused around the Christmas season, but these aren't syrupy tales of holiday cheer. Many of these stories focus on people on the margins like an irascible woman who feels isolated, a father with a history of mental illness trying to make things right with his sons, an older couple whose marriage is splintering apart or a girl's first tentative steps towards becoming social by attending a dance. These stories are very much about redemption and hope, but in a realistic and hard-won sense that won't leave you with a toothache.

Most of the stories are loosely connected to each other or with Joyce's past books. Mention of a flight delay in one story is carried through into another story focused on people stuck at an airport. An unused winter-themed film set for a pop star's holiday special becomes the focal point in another story where a father is trying to rekindle a connection with his sons. I greatly enjoy short story collections which are lightly related to each other because it gives a more fully rounded sense of a fictional world and gives little pleasure triggers when I'm able to join things up. Connections with Joyce's past books are gently done so I don't think a reader will feel left out by not recognizing characters which they've met before. It simply functions like an added bonus for a Rachel Joyce fan who is in the know. One enduring thing which recurs throughout this book is an advert with an image of a girl in a red coat who is in a snowy winter scene. This feels so effective because it seems so true to life: a sentimental image created for commercial purposes which nonetheless effects the mood of the characters who continuously encounter it.

Although these stories are firmly grounded in reality, I like how sometimes Joyce's writing starts stretching the seams. So, when in her touching story 'A Marriage Manual' the couple who have been together their whole lives reach a near breaking point when collaborating on a bicycle's construction, the very construction of the garage around them begins floundering and breaking apart. The only point where I don't feel this works is in her story 'Christmas Day at the Airport' which is a modern-day retelling of the nativity story replete with a lesbian who gives birth, women who bear fragrant gifts from Duty Free and a donkey being held in the animal redemption centre. The concept of this story took over making it feel too manufactured. However, I found every other story in this book to be genuinely moving.

Rachel Joyce has a talent for creating really vivid and intensely-felt characters like a difficult woman named Binny in 'A Faraway Smell of Lemon' and a vibrant rebellious adolescent girl named Patty Driscoll in 'The Boxing Day Ball'. Each line of dialogue builds their personalities to make them feel immediate and real. She doesn't shrink from showing the awkward pauses or repetition of speech which hint at the underlying emotions of her characters. In their normal exchanges and the mundane detail, Joyce reveals hints of profundity in the everyday. In this way she remind me very much of Anne Tyler's fiction. So I really enjoyed reading this book over the Christmas season. Rachel Joyce has another novel forthcoming this year and I'm greatly looking forward to it.

The Long Gaze Back edited by Sinéad Gleeson

What a thrill that a new anthology has been published that is entirely dedicated to Irish women writers! Over the past two years I've become particularly enthralled by Irish writing and much of it has been written by women such as Anne Enright, Mary Costello, Edna O'Brien, Eimear McBride, Audrey Magee, Sara Baume, Belinda McKeon and Liz Nugent (some of these authors are included in this anthology). While I've also read many fantastic books written by Irish men it's sadly unsurprising that looking over many anthologies of short stories from Ireland (and around the world) that the authors included are “heavily weighted towards male writers” - as editor Sinéad Gleeson notes in her introduction. “The Long Gaze Back” is a necessary correction giving a platform to the huge diversity of writing by Irish women over time. Even if the literary cannon hasn't always included them and some of these authors' books have gone out of print, this anthology proves that these voices have always been there.

As the title suggests, it's an anthology focused on looking back at a rich and varied literary history giving a sampling of stories that encompass a range of themes and writing styles. The first writer included was born in 1786 and the last story is by a writer born in 1986. This offers a fascinating oversight to how the tone and subject matter of fiction has changed over two centuries. Although the language and themes have evolved radically over this time, the emphatic sense each story gives that the author has something important to say has not.

There are also surprising parallels that can be drawn. For instance, a parable by Maria Edgeworth written in the early 1800s about the way appearances can be deceiving when impulsively buying something is echoed in contemporary writer Belinda McKeon's sentiment about online behaviour and internet purchases: “There is always, sunk into those pages, the feeling that an ordered, layered, perfectly furnished life is within reach; that the clicks will bring into being a settling experience, a fitting of everything needed and everything already, awkwardly in possession into their rightful slots.” Another story by Mary Lavin shows how a widowed woman maintains her independence fending off the advances of a man who comes calling while Eimear Ryan tells a story of a widow who deals with her grief by actively seeking men out. The farcical and hilarious story of a man's extended train journey with a salmon by writing-team cousins Somerville and Ross is echoed in Lisa McInerney's tragicomic and explicit tale of a man's drug-fuelled night out. The intense feeling for the loss of an infant child in Maeve Brennan's brilliant story is given a different slant in Lucy Caldwell's beautifully-descriptive and cleverly-structured story of the tense and precarious early days in the life of a newborn. Viewing this wide range of short stories as a group gives a special insight into how similar ideas can be approached from different ways that are more meaningful for the time in which they are written.

Some of the stories deliver suspense and tremendously climactic scenes such as a tale by Elizabeth Bowen about the return of an old lover or Nuala Ní Chonchúir's story of sisterhood between women at odds with each other in a time of great need. Other stories focus on quiet moments of reflection as in Siobhán Mannion's story of a woman stealing privacy in a morning swim or Evelyn Conlon's story of a sister she believes to be lost in Australia. Some of this fiction such as the urgent and impactful 'Beneath the Taps: A Testimonial' by Anakana Schofield shows a tremendously inventive style of writing that breaks boundaries for how a story can be related. There are fantastic moments of quiet transgression in stories by Mary Costello about a woman who steals her neighbour's dog that is being abused and Kate O'Brien about a woman touring Italy who receives an emphatic and spontaneous proposition for an alternative life from a stranger. Stories by Roisín O'Donnell and E.M. Reapy hint at the process of change in Ireland, the coming and going from other countires creating national and racial diversity in the country's culture. And this wouldn't be a proper Irish book without a good deal of mulling over death such as the story by Eilis Ni Dhuibhne where a woman tends a grave or Bernie McGill's tale of how a family emotionally deals with a funeral or Niamh Boyce who invokes a voice from beyond.

I really enjoyed taking my time reading this entire anthology over a long period of time and I'd suggest you do the same. These are stories to be savoured and enjoyed. They invite you to seek out more work by these talented authors as each story is proceeded by a biographical brief that lists the authors' other publications. And I do now feel compelled to read much more by these writers. It's somehow reassuring that the voices in stories by authors I've read before like Eimear McBride and Anne Enright are most assuredly from those writers, but their technique and subject range prove to be dramatically different in this new work. Other stories by authors I haven't read before like Maeve Brennan and Christine Dwyer Hickey hit me like a slap making me wonder why I've never encountered their writing before. This is an anthology with many different points that you can spring off from, but it's also an important book with tremendous scope to be savoured by itself.

My Top 10 Books of 2015

This has been a year of great personal change for me. More than ever, I'm aware of how books work like a conversation informing our lives and that it's important to talk back. (This blog is me talking back.) My reading this year increased somewhat largely because I joined in on a shadow jury for the Baileys Prize and as a judge for this year’s Green Carnation Prize. I read 96 books in total, but this doesn’t count the dozens of books I started but put aside after fifty or even two hundred pages. I’ve become more cutthroat because the truth is there isn’t enough time to keep reading a book that’s not doing it for you. You might not connect with it only because of where you are in your life, but I think it’s best to move onto something you feel passionately engaged with rather than slogging through something you feel you should read. There are rare examples like “The Country of Ice Cream Star” which took me longer to read than any other book this year and which I found incredibly difficult. Ultimately it was rewarding and I’m glad I stuck with it till the end, but such cases are rare.

There are dozens of really superb books I’ve read this year. I’m always passionate about reading short stories and the books I’ve read by Donal Ryan, Tom Barbash, Ali Smith, Mahesh Rao, Stuart Evers and Thomas Morris all contain stories which have really stuck with me. Because the Green Carnation Prize is open to books in all genres, I also read more memoirs, young adult novels, poetry and nonfiction than I usually do. I hope to continue reading more widely as some of these books like Erwin Mortier’s profound/heart-wrenching memoir and Mark Vonhoenacker’s meditation on flying have been truly fantastic.

Book podcasts have also been a welcome new presence for me this year. I’ve always avidly listened to The Readers, hosted by two of my favourite book bloggers. But I’ve also started regularly listening to Sinéad Gleeson’s The Book Show and Castaway’s Bookish, hosted by the owners of two Irish bookshops. These two definitely have struck a chord with me because I’ve been reading so much Irish fiction. The country does seem to be going through something of a renaissance producing a profuse amount of writing of sterling quality. This has been debated about in the media such as this Irish Times article about a Guardian article which highlighted the “new Irish literary boom.” Although, to my mind, the best Irish book of the year is Mrs Engels which seems strangely missing from all these lists.
If you have favourite book podcasts please do comment and let me know about them as I enjoy finding more.

Finally, here are my top ten books of the year which have all made such a strong impact on me and left me thinking about them long after finishing the last page. Click on each title's name to read my full thoughts about these books.

A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James
It’s funny looking back on this post I made last year about books I wanted to read and hadn’t yet got to (including this one). At that point, Marlon James’ most recent novel had received praise from critics, but hadn’t made many sales. I didn’t get to reading it until this summer as part of judging the Green Carnation Prize. It went on to win as well as taking that obscure award called the Booker. What a difference a year can make in the life of a book!

The Green Road by Anne Enright
I felt slightly suspicious starting this novel because I was worried it wouldn’t do anything new, but Enright proves again with this novel that she's an enormously creative writer. She creates a fresh structure for this book and takes her characters into territories unlike any of her other tremendous novels. It all works to present a complex and entirely new kind of portrait of a family.

Mrs Engels by Gavin McCrea
Lizzie is headstrong and tough, but she possesses rare passion which bleeds through every page of this beautiful novel. It pierced my heart and stayed with me like nothing else I’ve read this year. Sometimes it's like I can still feel her near me with all her earnest judgement, wisdom, humour and tender feeling. I'm deeply saddened she isn't a part of my life any more.

Lila by Marilynne Robinson
I wasn’t expecting to like this novel much since I’d only felt a mild response to Robinson’s writing in the past. To my delight, it gripped me and held me all the way through. Lila is a girl who came from nothing but through the generosity of a scant few people and her own determination she makes a life for herself and finds a rare kind of love. This is writing which is profoundly moving and it’s a story which completely captured my imagination.

Almost Famous Women by Megan Mayhew Bergman
History books are strewn with footnotes about fascinating women like Lizzie Burns in "Mrs Engels" who probably never became more famous because of the simple fact that they were women or from a lower class. Bergman honours a select and fascinating few to create mesmerizing short stories with immense emotional depth. The points of view they pose allow us to re-enter history and question what we find there.

Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff
I was introduced to Groff’s writing last year when I read her impactful story in the Best American Short Stories 2014. What a thrill it was to discover that her compressed and strong style of writing can also work in such a long novel. This book was an absolute pleasure to read giving such a unique perspective on relationships and the secrets we keep from those closest to us.

The Lost Landscape by Joyce Carol Oates
It’s so rare for Oates to reflect on her own life in her writing. It’s unsurprising that she approaches the subject of childhood and her formative years in a deeply questioning and philosophical manner. In this creative and deeply-personal book she reflectively looks at her own life and her life as a writer/reader to produce a profoundly surprising point of view about the nature of identity.

The Long Gaze Back edited by Sinéad Gleeson
Many anthologies of short stories are a patchwork of good and fair stories, but few contain great after great like this revelatory volume of Irish women writers. Several stories are by writers whose books I've read and admired over the past couple of years such as Anne Enright, Mary Costello, Eimear McBride and Belinda McKeon. Other writers like Kate O'Brien, Maeve Brennan, Molly McCloskey and Anakana Schofield are new to me. There are stories of high drama and stories of subtle power, but all utilise language to capture exactly what it is they need to say. In addition to the fascinating diversity of styles and subject matters covered in this entertaining and lovingly-assembled anthology this book serves as a fantastic jumping off point for reading more of these talented writers' work which I'm now eager to track down. Each story is prefaced by compelling short bios for each writer which serve as helpful prompts for discovering more. This is a book to always keep by your bedside. 

Sophie and the Sybil by Patricia Duncker
It’s rare that I find a book where I love every minute of the reading experience. This novel which functions as both a love letter and critique of George Eliot is tremendously fun, immensely clever and makes a truly romantic story. It takes a lot of bravado for an author to insert herself into a narrative, but Duncker does so with fantastic results.

Physical by Andrew McMillan
Poetry can be such an intimidating form of writing to engage with because much of it can feel opaque. McMillan’s extraordinary writing spoke directly to me. I’ve found myself going back to several poems in this book again and again. I’ve also recommended this book to a huge amount of people because I think these revelatory poems will connect with many.

Have you read any of these or are you now curious to give them a try? I've enjoyed reading through many end of year book lists so please comment to let me know your own favourites. 

My Top 10 New Films of 2015

I saw 78 new films at the cinema this year. There were some great adaptations of books including ‘Brooklyn’ which reminded me what an extraordinary novel this is and ‘Macbeth’ which gives a new perspective on and interpretation of the play. Some of the most entertaining films this year were the foreign episodic film ‘Wild Tales’, the successful remake of ‘Mad Max’, Pixar’s brainy animation ‘Inside Out’, the successful return of the Star Wars epic ‘The Force Awakens’, heartfelt comic drama 'Grandma' and the wild revenge-tale ‘Tangerine.’ But here are ten fantastic films which were a pleasure to watch, changed my perception of things and left the most lasting impression upon me.

Selma
This is one of the first films I saw this year as I got to see a preview. I don’t often cry in films but this emotionally floored me. Not because it’s a new story. Although there were some details that were new to me, at school in America I was taught a lot about the Civil Rights movement. What this film does so well is take the viewer into the experience of the protesters. It makes it feel immediate and real.

Girlhood
It seemed like an irresistible provocation to create a film called ‘Girlhood’ after the success of the critically-acclaimed ‘Boyhood.’ However, this film isn’t just an exercise to explore a girl’s coming of age. It sensitively acknowledges the difficult choices a young black girl from a lower class background faces in modern France. The story opens several paths for her to take in life and her decisions are ambiguous. Newcomer Karidja Toure gives one of the best performances of the year.

Tab Hunter Confidential
This is a documentary that gives a comprehensive history of the life of 1950s matinee idol Tab Hunter. He lived the American dream being transformed from a country boy into one of the country’s most desired pin-ups. He had to hide his sexuality for many years and faced difficult choices when the starring roles dried up. This is a story which is in some ways the male equivalent of the life of Marilyn Monroe as sensitively written about in Joyce Carol Oates’ masterpiece “Blonde.”

The Look of Silence
Another documentary and a sequel to the devastating film ‘The Act of Killing’ which explores the terrifying Indonesian genocide in the years 1965-66. I felt this film was more focused in a way as it concentrated upon one family and a particular man who works as an eye doctor and lost his brother in the killings. He travels around the country interviewing men involved in the killings while testing their eyes. He literally and metaphorically tries to make them see reality more clearly. It’s amazing and it’s my top film of the year.

The Diary of a Teenage Girl
The style of this coming of age film set in 1970s San Francisco faithfully mimics Phoebe Gloeckner’s graphic novel. It’s a story of imaginative beauty and goes into some dark, twisted areas of sexuality both for the girl and her wayward mother – a performance that allowed Kristen Wiig to take on an unusually dramatic role. I love that the film also invokes the voice of comics artist Aline Kominsky giving a touching portrayal of a writer’s apprenticeship.

Carol
Adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s novel which she originally published under a pseudonym, ‘Carol’ allows extraordinary director Todd Haynes to re-enter the 1950s period which he evoked so beautifully in ‘Far from Heaven.’ This is another “forbidden love story” but one done so powerfully and isn’t afraid to show the unlikeable aspects of its protagonists while still making you care deeply about the difficulty of their dilemma.

45 Years
It’s not often that issues of sex and emotional connection between couples who have had successful long term relationships are portrayed in films. ‘Hope Springs’ is the only other film that comes to mind. A couple played by Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay are nearing their 45th wedding anniversary and find their comfortable routine existence disrupted by a secret that’s uncovered and introduces an element of doubt. This is a subtle and powerful film directed by Andrew Haigh who seems to me to be one of the most exciting directors around. There's nothing visually daring about his dramas - just solid stories that get to the heart of relationships.

Son of Saul
I was lucky enough to see this at the London Film Festival. You may dread the idea of going to yet another fictional representation of a WWII concentration camp, yet this film is such a stylistically-daring and emotionally-powerful story it had me gripped from beginning to end. A Hungarian-Jewish prisoner named Saul works in the prison burying the dead. The camera’s focus remains on actor Géza Röhrig the entire time while unspeakable horrors occur in the background around him and he embarks on a personal mission of faith. It’s amazing.

Chevalier
Another film I saw at the London Film Festival, this is a humorous tale of a yacht holiday between several male friends that nonetheless sensitively and hilariously explores the subtleties of male companionship. I believe it also shows how Greek female director Athina Rachel Tsangari is another one of the most exciting directors around. I wrote more about this film here.

The Lobster
This is absolutely the most daring and absurd film I saw this year. Single people are forced to remain in a resort to find a partner in a certain amount of time or else they will be transformed into an animal of their choosing. Though comic and strange, it says something so striking and meaningful about the pressures society places upon people to conform to either have a relationship or remain single. Plus Olivia Colman is always an absolute joy to watch. I absolutely loved this film.

What did you like watching in the cinema this year? 

The Vegetarian by Han Kang (translated by Deborah Smith)

I've been wanting to read this novel since it was published earlier this year. It's interesting getting to it now so soon after reading "Fates and Furies" because both novels are concerned with the way women's points of view are suppressed in narratives, but they have very different approaches. In "The Vegetarian" the novel begins with a conventional man's perspective complaining how his unremarkable wife Yeong-hye suddenly became a vegetarian, thus passively disrupting their blandly ordered existence. His cruelly reductive opinions about his wife suggest that she is especially unspecial: “She really had been the most ordinary woman in the world” but his perspective is interspersed with short intense italicised passages revealing this wife's inner monologue. Like a modern day Bartleby, by resisting to observe convention and quietly refusing to do what's expected of her, the wife's family become incensed and her life completely changes. What follows is a novel of strange beauty as a woman's strong inner-life is gradually revealed and the constrictive society around her is forced to acknowledge the power of her independent perspective.

An artist is inspired by the radical and colourful artist Yayoi Kusama to paint nude bodies with flowers. 

In some ways this is a surreal story where a woman believes that she's gradually transforming into a plant. The reasons for this transformation are very different from the narrator in Ali Smith's story 'The beholder' in “Public Library” who experiences a real blossoming of branches and flowers out of her/his body. At the same time “The Vegetarian” is a brutally realistic tale about the long-term effects of child abuse and the diminishment of women in society. Her transition begins in earnest when in the second section her sister's artist husband creates a video installation centred on painting flowers on Yeong-hye's naked body. This is a project bourne out of his sexual obsession and was in part inspired by the artist Yayoi Kusama who colourfully painted her subjects bodies and let them interact with each other. The brother-in-law's project is more sinister as his secret desire to possess and have sex with Yeong-hye builds to a terrifying scene.

The novel's focus eventually shifts to her sister In-hye's perspective and concerns Yeong-hye's being sectioned after her total mental breakdown. Here the story becomes much more intimate and confessional. The spectre of an abusive father looms large so that Yeong-hye's transition from submissive wife to outright rebellion seems entirely logical. Normality is inverted because beneath the veneer of civilization there is a world of hidden pain. So it feels that “sometimes it's the tranquil streets filled with so-called 'normal' people that end up seeming strange.” I admired how the novel gradually builds a complex portrait of a woman's inner life created entirely from the points of view of the people around her. The reader is given hints and suggestions of a radically different form of consciousness that wants to rapidly evolve to a more organic existence, yet she's suppressed by the social world that uses limited terms to define her life. “The Vegetarian” is a novel of rebellion, hope and rare passion.