The second, and highest rated batch of books of 2024 has a surprisingly large amount of non-fiction compared to my usual choices. They are also all books I’ve written about on the blog this year.
As usual, I’ve made a list-challenge of the books I’ve read this year.
Number Five
Patterns of Love - Oliver Other
I’m pretty surprised that I’ve included this at all, let alone picked it as one of my top five. It’s long, it’s frequently boring and it features views and politics utterly different to mine (let alone how it creates a ludicrous nightmare dystopia of views I broadly hold). Yet… yet… it stuck with me in a way that many of the other books I’ve read this year haven’t. It’s held me longer and deeper than Proust did, It’s stranger than many other books, rougher and thornier.
I wrote about it extensively here.
Number Four
Johnsonian Gleanings - Aleyn Lyell Reade
I’ve read a number of these and every time I have, I’ve been blown away by the attention to detail and sheer work. There’s something amazing about how a project which started as a work of genealogy became something which revolutionised the understanding of Samuel Johnson’s earlier years.
I had to include them as a group, not just because of how useful they’ve been in developing my current novel but also for the enjoyment I’ve found in them.
I’ve read a number of them but here I reviewed volumes III and X.
Number Three
The History of the Lichfield Conduit Lands Trust - Percy Laithwaite
It seems ridiculous that my third favourite book of the year is a very local history of a small town but this book was more than useful to me, or informative but surprisingly sharp and funny. Local history bores have that reputation for being boring - I think it’s because they quibble over details and also because they talk about recent history. This book takes in a whole sweep of time and is not afraid of a good anecdote.
I talked about it in more detail, here.
Number Two
Selected Writings - Abiezer Coppe
Of course a selection of slightly unhinged religious texts is my second favourite book of the year. I loved the writing of Abiezer Coppe, his passion, his command of rhythm and arresting detail, his freedom of expression (or his very false restraint when ‘repenting’). It’s surprisingly entertaining,
I’ve talked about it more here.
Number One
The Life of Orator Henley - Graham Midgely
This had to be the top of the list. I’ve been making a list of my top forty favourite books for my fortieth birthday and The Life of Orator Henley is the only book I’ve read this year to make it in the list. It’s engagingly written and managed to recast someone who’s always seemed a bit of an idiot as someone who is a bit of an idiot but also something of a hero. I rather loved Orator Henley after this book, and that’s an impressive thing.
More about it here.
For a special mention,
Another fairly flawed book that still succeeded in staying with me, Outstared by a Bullfrog is a novel by Alex Burrett, whose short story collection My Goat Ate It’s Own Legs showed a variety of invention and a fondness for the bizarre. The novel is similarly inventive and odd, taking in a narrator’s life story but also sending him on a metaphysical adventure where he discovers the truth of his own life and the truth about God.
Sent hurling through an office block window, the narrator finds he can astral-project, revisiting important moments and people from his life. He goes back to his first sexual encounter; in a moonlit pool on a camping trip, his greatest defeat at the hands of a kick-boxing kayaker, memories of his dearly missed, wisdom spouting Nan and many others. Throughout the journey through his life, he discovers a crumpled up face who nudges him into higher planes of existence.
It’s a book that seems undisciplined at first, a series of scenes, but they layer on each other to tell a life of near misses and failure, of moral cowardice and lapsed opportunity. Something that seems incidental at first will turn out to be a major clue to his next destination and events revisited turn out to be very different from how the narrator remembers them. It’s not a book that can be predicted, always being a little wriggle ahead.
There’s a confessional element to the book that is very raw. The narrator is not any worse than most, but his chance to examine his life lets his see his own weaknesses and they are not always the weaknesses found in fictional characters. We see the narrator’s secret lusts, his ignoble wishes and private his moments which frequently surprise. The book starts with God catching him masturbating, which he takes as a sign that the deity has a particular interest in his life, another mystery he has to solve.
There are some striking sentiments, whether it’s “a young person’s funeral is a protest march” against death, or a realisation of love being sparked by the way a person makes a cup of tea. There are discussions about famous aphorisms and advice, the narrator being a great collector of them but coming to a realisation that other people’s wisdom is only useful to a certain extent.
Where I had difficulty with the book was its blokey-ness. The narrator made a promise to God not to have sex for ten years, and as a result he has a hang-up around women and sexual matters. Most of the female characters are defined in sexual terms, and a surprising number of them fall for our narrator despite his admitted hesitancies. While Burrett clearly enjoys describing beautiful bodies and sexual shenanigans, I found it a little relentless for my personal taste.
Where the book really excels is the ending, where the title comes into play. The book has been twisting and turning and found itself in a really sweet place, with the narrator finding his peace and looking forward to life. He then crashes his car, plunges through the mirror and lays dying. It feels like a cop-out at first, but his spirit goes back to the land of Gods - where all the deities of the world are nothing but giant children on a school trip.
His own guardian deity is a wheelchair bound child who can do nothing to stop the big boy (the Abrahamic God) from picking him up and laying him out for dissection. The narrator realises that God won’t dissect him while he maintains eye contact, so he prepares to outstare God. He is nothing but a frog on a dissecting table, but if he’s going to be a frog, he’ll be a bullfrog. Not only did I find this a powerful ending, both pitiful and heroic, there is something really catching about the notion of outstaring God. It’s an image that’ll linger for a while.
While a little rough around the edges, Outstared by a Bullfrog has an energy to it that would be missing if it were a little smoother. It also sticks in the mind sharper than a more conventional book, especially the narrator’s fate at the end.
No comments:
Post a Comment