Books of 2022 Part 3: 31-41

 Yes it's that weird part of the year where I yank you backwards like I'm trying to save you from falling off a cliff. In this metaphor the cliff is "reading my top ten before you've looked at my least favourite books of the year". I managed a total of 41 books this year, and at least one of this bottom 11 is here in part because it dragged on far longer than it should have and hence cost me the ability to read more than that. But also because I didn't like these that much anyway. Oh and of course this one's in reverse order, from 31 down to 41.

31) Dark Lullaby - Polly Ho-Yen

It annoys me a bit when reviews of books like this use the Handmaid’s Tale as a comparison: “A Handmaid’s Tale for the Modern World” proclaims this book cover, but obviously the writer is hugely influenced by Atwood, and is trying to channel the same energy. So regardless of how successful her aping is, it’s such a lazy comparison to make as if people wouldn’t see it transparently and as if The Handmaid’s Tale is somehow not relevant to the modern world. Now let’s talk about the lack of success here. Polly Ho-Yen clearly has many of the story points and the emotional arc worked out well in advance of the story beginning, to the point where you can see broadly where it’s going from the start. Where she finds herself lacking is more fundamental to the storytelling: the world-building, and the writing itself. It’s a small quibble but I found myself annoyed at how often our first person narrator would turn explicator with phrases like “then something happened that changed everything – Cue next chapter”. I feel like skilful storytelling doesn’t need these elaborations, and if we are to buy that this person is telling her own story you wouldn’t really provide these narratorial interjections, you’d get on with the facts. But it’s hard to buy as well because the world-building is quite convenient and derivative. There’s these things called “spheres” that seem to be some kind of communication slash constant broadcasting device that are not really well described or explained in terms of their capacity or their omnipresence, but they feel like something a better sci-fi writer would have a whole mythology and technical knowhow about that they can slip skilfully into things that also have thematic resonance. In this case I found myself constantly unclear about them, including what danger they posed or how invasive they were while I also couldn’t see how they wouldn’t be. That one detail is kind of all there is as far as world-building goes apart from the more foundational scenario piece that there’s an infertility epidemic and a fascist group called OSIP who are in charge of enforcing that all parents raise their kids according to the strictest of standards, or else the kids get “extracted” to be placed in better care under the state. Now this is where the emotional arc comes from, you’re supposed to feel the terror as a parent of having your every move judged and every mistake penalised. It works for a while but it clearly and quickly becomes a mere framing device. The main narrative sin that Ho-Yen commits is making OSIP  so faceless and dehumanised. They’re just humourless trolls sucking all the joy and wonder out of parenthood. It needs more world-building again to make their nightmarish presence more realistic, and relevant. And to return to Atwood, what it tends to lack is the “aunts”, the cruel irony of a group charged with enforcing and policing the subjugation of other people like them. What Ho-Yen does eventually touch on is the parallel and more resonant idea of parents policing other parents, but it comes too late in the book. By the time this concept is touched upon, I already feel like I’ve been strung along by a contrivance, a convenience drawing on too many traditions of speculative fiction that it loses its emotional heft. It’s a well thought-out story that punches just its weight, but not a world I truly believed could happen, or that was on its way to happening, and that’s really the resonance- this story needs to have a real impact.

32) The Silence - Don DeLillo

It’s sadly been a long time since I was really excited about reading a new Don DeLillo book. I still revere Underworld, but everything else I’ve read from him since has largely failed to impress me. This book is no real exception, although it’s also just a little vignette of DeLillo surrealism so it’s not bloated or anything despite being fairly insubstantial. The premise is simultaneously simple and strange: in the midst of a Superbowl dinner party hosted by an intellectual couple, all electronics in the entire world spontaneously shut down, disrupting the broadcast as well as the incoming flight of two of their late-running guests. What ensues is somewhat predictable if you’ve read DeLillo before: specifically it becomes more about the surrealism than about the gravitas and impact of the events unfolding. The party guests feel like they’re locked in a scenario reminiscent to Bunuel’s The Exterminating Angel while the guests vacillate between spontaneous ramblings about global conspiracy forces and satirical nonsense about modern consumerism. Of course the endpoint of the book is… unclear, because DeLillo is more interested in elusiveness and obfuscation than in the story which is pretty thin. Again, a writer who knows how to weave some magical webs of story chooses to impose mostly ramblings and directionless invective in place of narrative. It’s a sad story of diminishing returns between me and Don that’s been going on since I was blown away by Underworld.

33) A Spindle Splintered - Alix E Harrow

I picked this up out of mild curiosity but also just generally trying to ensure I had a good gender balance in my writers (although "Alix" is a nicely gender neutral name so I did need to double-check this one). The main thing to caution about this writeup is: I am quite a long throw from being the target audience of this book. I enjoyed it well enough as a personal academic exercise to expose myself to different ways of writing and different ways of thinking, but ultimately this didn't work for me at all. It tells the story of Zinnia, a terminally-ill young woman whose days are numbered due to an industrial accident causing the genetic disorder she was born with, and who finds herself supernaturally swept up in a Sleeping Beauty-esque fairytale (Sleeping Beauty being a story she is obsessed with due to the morbid parallels with her own fate). There are a couple of reasons this didn't work for me: firstly, the dialogue throughout the book is very shallow and quite coarse; by design as the whole premise is based on the juxtaposition of the medieval fairytale world and the 21st-century succinct texting aesthetic that Zinnia and her best friend - egregiously named "Charm" - engage in. But I found it a bit hard to sympathise with the characters, and Zinnia in particular, because she is so glib and fatalistic about everything. The juxtaposition that's meant to set the charm and the humour of the story ends up undermining what could otherwise pass for a sense of wonder in the magical realism she gets caught up in. But within that magical realism lies the main issue I had with this story, which is it's too self-conscious. Rather than just being a play on Sleeping Beauty and the fairytale tradition, this book crosses an imaginary border into post-post-modernism in that it's already conscious of fractured fairytales, modernist retellings, and feminist reimaginings of classic tales, and there's almost a boredom to the way the characters react when they realise how reluctantly they're being drawn into one of "those" situations. For the most part, Harrow's prose seemed to sabotage her own ambitions, in making this so obviously and overtly a post-modern reimagining that it's hard to get caught up in the essence of what makes the archetypal story transcend time and culture. It becomes far too much a wink and an in-joke commentary to the audience, and because there's too much of that I found it hard to really empathise with the characters because they all felt like nitpickers pointing out plot holes and making sure I knew when a subversion was about to happen. There's merit in the idea but I think Harrow focused way too much on showing the wizard behind the screen and not enough on the journey to get there, and as such I was never really invested in the story.

34) Days of Awe - A M Homes

I have the dumbest confession to make about this book and my reading of it. It took me quite an unreasonably absurd amount of time before I realised it was a book of short stories. Obviously, I could have read the blurb; I could have noted the “short stories” label from the library that was on its spine; I could even have noticed that each ‘chapter’ concerned itself with completely different characters and scenarios than the previous. But here’s the thing: I think the way Homes has written these stories lends itself to that kind if misconception. While it’s certainly true that short stories do not need complete and unambiguous endings to be satisfying, and while it’s also true that a skilled writer can introduce you deftly to new characters and settings without needing too much exposition; nevertheless I found myself throughout the second and third stories here to be impatient for the open ending of the first story to have some kind of resolution, or for me to return to this dense array of characters I’d been introduced to but without any semblance of their relation to each other or background. The opening story felt a bit like an Iris Murdoch novel in that I felt dropped suddenly into the middle of these characters’ story. And while Murdoch will spend the length of a full novel both exposing the sordid histories of each of them and expanding those histories into the present and future, by virtue of the short story format here it instead ended abruptly and without any elucidation. Ultiastely, having been spoiled by the beguiling skill of Alice Munro more recently, Homes feels like a writer with too much artifice and too much flourish to tell these stories in a way that I got my full complement of feelings from them. While there is certainly some satirical wit woven through these tales, there also seems too much artistic licence and playing around with structure and narrative voice to be fully immersed in the worlds she’s creating in such a short space. I didn’t get a strong sense either of any connections between these stories, and so the book’s success hinges solely on whether the individual tales pass muster, which only some did. My personal favourite was perhaps the most stylised: about an acquaintance and conversation between a teenage girl being molested by a local boy and an armed serviceman dealing with the stresses and horror of ordnance disposal, but the conversation is somehow taking place on an online message board dedicated to discussion among parakeet owners. There then ensues quite a compelling narrative with a lot of subversive dark humour as the parakeet owners butt in with irrelevant tidbits or pointless bromides to reassure the two. That story notwithstanding, the book often felt a little forced and the target of its intended satire often too elusive for me to really feel any pathos.

35) Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams - Sylvia Plath

For whatever reason I’d never sought out or thought about any of Plath’s other writing after being quite affected by The Bell Jar a few years ago, so I chanced upon this in the library and snatched it up. It’s both a rewarding and frustrating elucidation of Plath’s writing. There are some great and profound stories covering similar ground to Bell Jar, looking into mental illness and its manifestations in both a metaphorical and tragically ironic way. There are straightforward stories covering ideas like ageing, coming of age, family and community; nothing overly profound in a lot of cases but her writing is always engaging and competent and I felt a running theme that felt like exploring different stages of psychosocial development throughout life. What I found frustrating was that there isn’t a lot of coherence to the editing here. The first section is subtitled “The Most Successful Writings”. By what criterion is not made clear, and it sets up the second section called something like “the shitty hopeless failure writings Plath should be frankly embarrassed about” to be a disappointment. It doesn’t disappoint, because they’re fine, but there’s no coherent theme to the compilation of order that led to a great reader experience. The third section is a seemingly pointed but ultimately scant selection of four journal entries, one of which is then recreated almost word for word in a short story form in section four which felt redundant. Ostensibly the edition seems to be geared towards illustrating Plath’s development as a writer, which I didn’t really get if only because the most ambiguous and striking story is the first one, after which the collection is named. Otherwise there wasn’t much thematic development or clarity that made the actual reading more compelling than the individual bits of writing were. And mostly they were competent with a handful of interesting observations scattered throughout, but I feel with a more thoughtful and less arbitrary ordering they could have been more compelling as a collection.

36) Lone Wolf - Jodi Picoult

I’ve been meaning to read some Jodi Picoult for the longest time, but it was hard to know where to start because of the breadth of her output. The oddest thing though is that even though she’s close to a household name I had no idea what sort of thing I was in for and I have no idea who her target audience is. This seemed like a good place to start, being a bestseller and all (but then what books of hers aren’t? And like why? Who buys them?). But anyway, there’s no question after reading this about what her appeal is: it’s certainly got a gripping feel to it, in the sense that it keeps you turning the page wanting to know what happens next. The story is about Luke Warren, a Timothy Treadwell type who lived with wild wolves in Quebec for two years, and the family he left behind who then must make a decision about his life support when he is left in a coma from a car crash. The family includes his daughter Cara, his estranged son Edward and his ex-wife who has remarried and has two young kids to her new husband. The book is obviously a bit of a soap opera in the end, so as much as I kept turning the page I felt that Picoult’s writing was far more adept at driving plot than at crafting compelling situations, characters or indeed logic. Too many of the machinations of this plot derive from characters making bizarre impulse decisions that are too far-fetched to really make sense or draw sympathy. I feel like inevitably we are meant to be empathising with Cara here, who was closest to Luke and is determined to keep him alive for any chance at a life he has. But Picoult makes that impossible by rendering Cara an incorrigible little shit. Edward, the prodigal son returning, could be the Dickensian outsider on whom all mistrust falls but who ultimately saves the day, but in the most nonsensical of all the plot twists, he has what in a real person would be described as a wet brain fart, but in a fictional character is just a terrible and clunky bit of narrative trash wedged into the cracks of the plot. And we rightly lose sympathy for him at that moment too, just as Picoult needed us to, or whatever. I lost track many times on who I’m meant to be siding with. But rather than being an intriguing ambivalence running through it, that confused sympathy is also symptomatic of the clunkiness of her narrative-building: alongside the family histrionics, she attempts a moral fable about what constitutes right to life. But without being particularly compelling in favour of either camp, Picoult manages to plonk herself right on the euthanasia fence so that all readers whatever their fervently held belief can come away thinking the author agrees with them. I genuinely didn’t buy the argument that is put in favour of keeping Luke alive, but nor did I find the euthanasia case (with which I’d personally agree for so many reasons) well articulated at all. For the legal drama that this ends up being, it felt facile and sensationalised (the judge in small-town New Hamphire saying this was the strangest case of his career for example, when truly this would have thousands of precedents and is a very run-of-the-mill right-to-life case), while my wavering sympathy/apathy for the rival characters meant I was taken along for the ride but never truly felt it.

37) The Quarry - Iain Banks

This is one of the few - if any - Iain Banks books that I haven’t had pre-vetted by Jez, as he had a tendency for a while there to gift me Banks books that he’d enjoyed each year. This one I just picked up at the library as it’d been a while since I’d read any of his, and I don’t know if I just need that Jez filter (worth noting that I haven’t loved everything I’ve read anyway), but this wasn’t very good. It was just frustrating and ultimately not that fun to read. It centres around the first-person narrator of Kit, an 18-year-old kid who seems to have some kind of neurodivergence (I suspect autism although it’s never said explicitly) who is looking after his terminally ill father Guy in his house at the edge of a quarry. One weekend they are visited by all of Guy’s old friends from university and they reckon with their pasts, presents and futures together. That’s, basically, the plot. The friends are all abrasive misfits, there are multiple arguments, misunderstandings, acts of hubris and misguided self-destructiveness. There’s a touch of Graham Swift’s Last Orders to it, but there doesn’t feel like there’s much narrative arc as far as their relationships go, and the denouement is all a bit awkward and even hurriedly dealt with when Guy finally succumbs to his cancer. There are two central mysteries in the book, where the plot kind of dances around them but without resolving either satisfactorily or indeed even attempting to. That’s really what led to the greatest frustration was the fact that I didn’t care really about any of these characters: Kit as the narrator is deliberately emotionally detached and comes across like an outsider anthropologist objectively observing the behaviour of this mob, while each of the more grown adults are individually flawed but in a way that gets tiresome, especially when you realise that spending time in their tiresome company is all the book’s going to offer. If it had answered properly either of the two central questions being asked, it would have been much better, even if it did so in a sudden Wasp Factory-esque left turn that jumped the shark completely. I frankly would have preferred something surreal and nonsensical to the bland anticlimax it offered instead.

38) Machines Like Me - Ian McEwan

I've found that sometimes McEwan protagonists, especially narrators, tend to have a know-it-all quality to them that can sometimes be because they provide the insight the story requires (eg. The Children Act) and other times feels like a narrative conceit to make the narrator a basic stand-in for McEwan himself (cf. Nutshell in particular). In the case of this book, the narrator lost me very early on because his prose is so unapologetically verbose, but without having the particular professional acumen that's required to make observations on such complex topics. He's an anthropologist, aptly since we're dealing with questions of artificial humans here integrating into society, but... I don't remember the finer details because I lost interest early, but I seem to recall that he's not an anthropology expert in that he's spent years in the field studying in-depth, it's more of an amateur hobby for him, and it shows. The trouble is that the narrator and his loquacious but ultimately facile observations end up being a synecdoche for the book overall. The novel's ambition and its opinion of itself far outstrips its ability to make itself coherent and engaging. The central issue I had with it is simply that there's too much going on for McEwan to deal with any of it in the depth it requires and that I expect from him. Centrally this is a story about a new line of human-like androids, one of whom our narrator acquires as an early adopter, and how he - the android - and others like him manage to cope with human nature. But McEwan sets the story not in the near or distant future, but in an alternate reality where a number of significant historical events just happened to fall 'the other way' like the ring toss in Match Point. The key one that's not so much a plot point (I'll get to why it's not really a plot point) but is a heavy focus of the book's zeitgeist is that the British lose the Falkland Islands conflict. Others include Thatcher subsequently losing to Labor in the following general election (which then leads to her Labor successor actually dying in the Brighton IRA bombing), Jimmy Carter defeating Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election, JFK not actually dying in November 1963 in Dallas; while another that's given a bit more focus is that Alan Turing decides to undergo jail time for his homosexuality instead of chemical castration. This latter is a key point, since it seems to be the catalyst for the more advanced robotics they have by the 1980s in which this is set. But anyway, the point is: none of these alternate-history events actually matters, and it's unclear on what point McEwan is making when he includes them (some of them are just mentioned in passing anyway); they seem to be parallel to the plot without really affecting it except in incidental ways. Possibly I need to have lived through all of the actual events to really ponder 'what if something different happened' but even that thought exercise intrinsically is a diversion rather than a critical commentary on the state of affairs. Alongside this, there's a love story here, and a weird indictment on the legal system as it relates to rape allegations and convictions (and frankly is completely unrealistic in this regard, because a rapist actually gets convicted and sentenced on far flimsier evidence than many others have been acquitted). All of which makes for a bit of a mess of a story, but a mess of a story where the narrative and the narrator is hell-bent on providing all the details we could possibly need and all the commentary we really don't. It's hard to sympathise with this character at the best of times because he's such a dullard, but his motivations are always fairly obtuse as well, and the thematic resonance of all the different elements McEwan is introducing get far too tangled and muddled up in each other for any of them to have any significance. My only real issue but also my lasting impression of his work is that he tends to hate humanity; I would have killed for the kind of cynical gut-punch I got from The Comfort of Strangers or Atonement. What I really felt from this work was little more than obliviousness, on what I was meant to be feeling or even, despite the constant diatribes, what I was meant to be thinking about.

39) The Museum of Broken Promises - Elizabeth Buchan

This book felt a bit frustrating to me. I feel like Buchan had a good concept in her mind but faltered when transferring it to the page. It feels a bit weighed down at the start, given that the prologue is very much the pivotal scene in the entire timeline of the story, but then we get a great amount of “present day” Laure’s story, when she is curator of a small museum in Paris called the museum of the title. There’s a mundanity to the way the story begins as it follows several ordinary days as the curator, giving too many details of her quotidien activities but no details at all about her and her personality. And that’s really the great frustration I found, because when we finally delve further into her past, I don’t really have a good sense of what makes her tick in the present day, and therefore no great sense of what made her tick back then. The present-day narrative is generally just dull with her constant obfuscations being frustrating rather than intriguing; as a result the drama and curiosity it’s hoping to engender is ineffectual. Which in turn makes her impulsive, impassioned behaviour in the past feel both false and, worse, superficial. The book is ostensibly a love story set against the backdrop of Prague during the cold war (this is not a spoiler as this is the subject of the prologue, but it feels like I’m giving a spoiler as it’s a long way into the book before we get any more of it), but Laure as a central figure is not really a good guide, being either naive and facile, or the superficial object of primal desire. In all honesty, both in her starry-eyed youth and in her sexually dynamic but cynical maturity, she’s the kind of shallow character that I’d completely roll my eyes at if this book were written by a bloke. The fact is it relies quite exclusively on the reader sympathising with Laure or at least being able to connect with her feelings, but I found those feelings either overly simplistic and juvenile, or needlessly obtuse and blockaded, so the story struck me ultimately as histrionic- more than anything else.

40) The Supernova Era - Cixin Liu

I’m still excited to pick up a new book by Liu, wondering what inventions and conceits he’ll introduce me to, although how long that excitement will last is definitely up for debate following this. This was another unsuccessful book following from Of Ants & Dinosaurs which I read last year; it loses focus like a lot of his work does but without spiralling into a delightful sort of world-ending chaos like Death’s End did. The premise here is that a nearby star goes supernova, dosing the earth with enough lethal radiation to wipe out humanity. The catch, though, is that people under the age of thirteen are unaffected by the radiation, so the earth becomes populated entirely by kids. This premise I felt had promise, and I expected it to go in all sorts of analogical directions like Of Ants & Dinosaurs. Instead Liu fails here by being too reductive; there’s a quantum computer who is used to democratise the voices but of course “the kid” population then only wants to have fun and play games and not run society so the quantum computer and any subsequent commentary on democracy and groupthink gets pushed aside in favour of a simplistic exploration of “kids being in charge”. There is some commentary on the society the adults left them and its inadequacies, but Liu spent I feel far too little time expounding on them too. Instead he focused too heavily on childhood’s obsession with games and playing, and how that manifests itself when they have their hands on big, real weapons rather than toy ones. It’s all rather glib, and to me the worst part was how much the world view resorted to hackneyed stereotypes: the English are uppity, the Japanese are cold and stoic, and of course the Americans are aggressive and boorish  while 95% of the world’s nations don’t warrant a mention except maybe once to acknowledge they exist. This then descends into a fairly dull exposition of war ‘games’ and it goes on way beyond its value in actually making any interesting commentary. The depiction of American society is essentially that episode of Futurama where Fry gets transported to present day Los Angeles, only without the humour. The book also ends quite abruptly, with only a tokenistic wrap-up of ‘history’ as it’s recorded, and the final international manoeuvre feels inconclusive and enigmatic but without me having a great deal of intrigue. I was waiting to see where he took it, rather than gripped and willing it to go somewhere. Ultimately, lack of clear commentary and vision, and sadly resorting to a number of easy narrative cheats and get out of jail free cards rather than really building a tangible world.

41) On Beauty - Zadie Smith

Started out my reading year with this, and it took me more than a month to get through. Yes, it’s long; yes, some of the prose is quite dense when Smith gets into great detail about an object or a mood taking over somebody that morning; but honestly the main reason it took so long is I found this boring, and hard to motivate myself to keep going. The main issue I had with it is I’m really not sure - and wasn’t from the get-go - what the point of this story was. It starts out in a series of letters written by the eldest son of a mixed race family while staying in London, and after a series of misadventures, we never see anything written in letter form again. The son remains one of many, many characters in the story but the focus is not on him much at all for the entire rest of the story. Largely of course because the story is completely unfocused. There are close to a dozen characters who get at least a moment in the spotlight, and at times that moment includes an internal monologue and a piece of their psychology, and when these characters are so peripheral or incidental to the central conflict - that between the patriarch and matriarch of this family (although it’s one of a dozen conflicts, too; it’s just the one that runs through the majority of the narrative) I found myself wondering why I’m supposed to care? It’s really difficult to care about any of these characters, who range from irritatingly pompous and self-unaware to utterly vile, with the one exception of Kiki, the black matriarch of the Belsey household. But despite this, even she feels like a cardboard cutout: she’s a Caribbean beauty who’s gained an enormous amount of weight and holds this exotic beauty about her while becoming the wronged party and the only one without moral fault in all she does, so she becomes this convenient perennial victim for all of Smith’s vicissitudes. The book is of course titled “On Beauty”: does it contain profound observations and poignant insights about the same? No. It mentions the exact phrase maybe twice, while also disseminating frankly a shallow and facile exploration of beauty which would more appropriately be titled “On Lust and Desire” than anything about what beauty entails. I found the whole book in the same vein, concerned about superficial themes while interested deeply in letting these simplistic caricatures of siblings, middle-aged men and intellectuals, have all the floor to air their nonsense as they could use. I find it a shame that this is the third of Zadie Smith’s books I’ve read and I simply don’t get what the fuss is about regarding her writing. Without exception I find her prose cluttered, obtuse and only ever floating on the surface of themes - particularly cultural alienation amid diaspora - that could be fascinating if explored with sharper clarity and focus.

So that's it for this end of the scale; tomorrow I'll count down my top ten and we can all finally put 2022 to bed.