It’s been a great year for reading. I may not have read as many books as usual (or, if Goodreads is correct, as many pages) but I have still enjoyed some really good stuff.
All the books I read this year are to be found here
At number 10
The Amazing Dr Darwin
I initially talked about this book here
A fun counterfactual romp, a little like the X-Files cousin of the Samuel Johnson: Detector series. In these, Erasmus Darwin takes on medical frauds and curiosities, taking everything in a slow, thoughtful way and having as many big dinners as possible.
In at number 9
The Swallowed Man
The Swallowed Man is a strange and melancholy book that tells Geppetto’s side of the Pinocchio story. Despite being an English writer, Edward Carey originally wrote the book in Italian.
It begins with Geppetto being swallowed by the beast. It’s like a horror story, having Geppetto grope his way around the inside of the fish, discovering the contours of his land and being surprised by the large wooden structure than becomes his new home. Trapped in this purgatory, he remembers his life, particularly his past loves, unravels his relationship to Pinocchio, creates art, slowly goes made and counts his existence by the number of candles he has left.
In this, Geppetto was not always poor. He was born in Collodi (see what you did there) where the main industry was the creation of famous and uniform plates. His family were in charge of the plates’ decoration and they stick to one pattern which the young boy must learn. But he can’t learn it. No matter how he tries, the pattern becomes distorted. Because of this, he is spurned by his family and the town’s only industry dies. It was interesting for Geppetto to have a backstory with a disappointing father, when Pinocchio serves as a disappointing son.
He creates artworks of the women he’s loved in his life. Some were banned youthful dalliances, others poor women dying from the embalming fluids she uses in her work. His last love was a hallucination brought about when he was slowly being poisoned by a badly fitted gas pipe. This last woman, and the one dying of cholera were both blue women to him, linked to the fairy with blue hair in Pinocchio.
It was the grief of losing this lost love that drew him to creating his little wooden boy. But the boy won’t be contained, he is “loathe to follow the rules of objects.” It’s strange how little time Geppetto and Pinocchio spend with each other, yet it sends Geppetto to stalk the world looking for his lost son. He also creates artworks, paintings and sculptures of him which get progressively darker and stranger. (The book contains photos of these works and they are strange, especially the white ones supposedly carved off mushed up ship’s biscuit).
One of these artworks, one made in a drunken haze, comes to life as the dark boy. A figure of terror, madness and death that stalks him around the ship. He also imagines a story of a china boy called Otto, who he then makes. As well as all these, he becomes imaginatively invested in the photos left behind by the previous captain of the ship.
It’s a story about a man who can’t help himself but create but his imagination and creativity eat at him as much as it sustains him. Creation is not an unconditional good because he loses parts of himself to create, much as he loses parts of the ship to create carving, or parts of his food supply to sculpt ship’s biscuit sculptures.
There’s a cheeky Disney reference, where he says, “I wish I may, I wish I might” on the subject of ending it all. In the film, Geppetto says this when wishing on a star - the most saccharine element of the Disneyfication of the story.
The Swallowed Man, is an uncomfortable book, trapped in a world where the thing that brings salvation is the same thing that brings destruction. It’s a book that’ll linger.
At Number 8
Great Expectations
Wow does Great Expectations start.
From the opening details of how Pip got his name to his imagining of his dead parents and siblings resembling their epitaphs in some way to the escaped convict coming out of the mist - it grips. Pip is placed so small in the marshes as “a bundle of shivers” and then this hulking brute comes, escaped from the hulk, with all his wetness, filth and deprivation described over a whole page. He’s terrifying, and the book being from the young child’s view, his obvious lie about a young man who removes gizzards is even scarier.
So Pip goes home to steal the file and food. His home life is so brilliantly set up, with his anger, bitter sister “raising him by hand” - the walloping of one. We are also introduced to the safety of Joe, who Pip sees as another child and promises the ‘larks’ they will have in the future, working at the forge together.
Even worse, it’s Christmas day and they have visitors who stare at him and make him feel guilty, especially the wonderfully named Uncle Pumblechook (who never quite develops into one of Dickens’s truly despicable characters, but comes close). Again, Joe makes this dinner bearable by the liberal pouring of gravy.
After all this is dealt with, and a little of Pip’s poor education at the Dame School, the book makes a sharp turn in tone and genre with the introduction of Satis House and Mrs Havisham. She’s an absolutely astonishing character, pitiful and frightening, a bit like a large but weedy spider. She’s accompanied by the cold, purity of Estella.
Then the book shifts again with Pip’s expectations and the move to London. The book is never quite as good as it was in the beginning after this, but there are lots of fun parts and characters.
I love the moral griminess of the lawyers office. With Jaggers being a formidable holder of everyone’s secrets, a lifeline to the most desperate but also a hard businessman, never a comforting figure. He’s so stained by his job he carries a perfumed handkerchief and constantly washes his hands. His assistant Wemmick, solves this problem by having two versions of himself, the tense-jawed, postbox, office self and the warm, quirky self who lives in a cottage-castle with his aged P.
Herbert Pocket is also enjoyable in his ineffective way. I found it interesting in how pointless being a gentleman really is, with their stupid Finch club. At one point Dickens says, “there was a gay fiction among us that we were constantly enjoying ourselves”, remind me of university. Everything about his London life is horrid, his love affair with Estella which only humiliates him, his feelings of worthlessness and shame.
It’s a very grim novel. The plot hinges on two old people using young people as puppets to play out their fantasies and get revenge on a man who never feels that revenge, it only hurts he young people themselves. Then there’s the fact the book is narrated by an older Pip who only looks back on his life with his embarrassment and shame, the whole thing aches with regret.
It’s a great book. I loved Joe, was fascinated by Estella, pitied Miss Havisham and Magwitch - but it wasn’t a world I wanted to spend more time in like David Copperfield was. A fantastic book though.
Number 7’s book is…
The Pillow Book
I wrote more about this book here.
This is a fascinating book, similarly both private and public, relatable and alien. There’s always this element of performance in the book but also one of a diary - it’s a wonderful contradiction, full of life and energy.
In at number 6
The Turn of the Screw
I read this coming up to the end of October but I should have read it in December as The Turn of the Screw is an instalment in the brilliant tradition of Christmas ghost stories.
I love the set up, not just people gathering round a fire telling tales, but one with a tale so dark and intricate that they’ll have to send home for the manuscript - adding a few days postal service into the build up. What’s more the manuscript is a letter written to him, so it’s coming to the reader third-hand.. and what’s more ghostly than hearing the tale through a chain of people?
I am most aware of the set up to this story because of a parody of it called ‘The Turn of the Knob’ from the brilliant radio series, Tales of the Mausoleum Club. This is my first Henry James, and the rumours are true, the man loves a comma. I didn’t find his style distracting though, if anything, they lend to the breathless nature of the tale being told.
A governess answers the advert of a mysterious London gentleman. She is to look after his niece and nephew and is, under no account, to bother him about them. She goes down, expecting the worst (a real Agnes Grey scenario) but finds the housekeeper is lovely and the little girl quite angelic. The boy is being sent home from school under a cloud, he’s been expelled, but he is, if anything, even more perfect than his sister.
The governess starts to see figures, she asks about and determines them to be the ghosts of sinful servants who were spreading a baleful influence on the children. Are they trying to continue that influence beyond the grave? What’s more are the children in on it? Are they helping or slowly being possessed? … Or is the governess going mad and her obsession is he biggest threat to the children?
What’s brilliant is that all interpretations are on a knife-edge. James manages to keep all options open all the time and the story becomes a different kind of horror depending on the reader’s focus. At face value, it may be about evil pernicious ghosts who are after the children. Or it could be about an increasingly crazed governess whose desire to protect the children is the real harm. It could also be a tale of two creepy children who summon the ghosts or cause the madness. (Those children are too perfect, and why is the eight year old girl in a highchair with a bib?)
Gripping, strange and unnerving by the sheer lack of certainties, it’s a very successful creepy story.
Find the rest of list 5-1, here.
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