Breakfast At Libraries: March 2014

Thursday, 27 March 2014

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

Some of you may have seen the BBC2 adaptation of The Thirteenth Tale that was shown shortly after Christmas, starring Olivia Colman and Vanessa Redgrave. If you did, you'll know it was excellent, but if you didn't, read the book instead because, as usual*, the book is even better.

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield is, as the title suggests, a story about stories. It's also a story about twins, and loss, and loneliness, and the gradual decline of the upper classes in the early 20th century, and all manner of other things. It's not so much a mystery as a seemingly limitless number of mysteries: the plot, and indeed the characters, are packed with intrigue.

The book begins with Margaret Lea, a bookseller who has written a few obscure biographies of lesser-known Victorian authors, being commissioned to write the life story of Vida Winter, an immensely successful but notoriously private author known for telling capricious fibs to anyone who interviews her. Miss Winter is a prickly character - and not an easy one for either the reader or Margaret to like from the outset - but is prepared to reveal that she was born Adeline March, twin sister of Emmeline March, into a frighteningly dysfunctional family, all of whom appear to suffer from varying degrees of mental illness. Left almost entirely to their own devices with only the occasional intervention of the family's last remaining servants, housekeeper The Missus and gardener John-the-dig, the twins are entirely isolated from other children, speaking their own secret language and distinguishable from one another only by their differing personalities: Adeline is prone to violent outbursts, while Emmeline is gentle and good-natured.

All Margaret knows at the start of Miss Winter's story is that Angelfield, the house in which the twins grew up, was destroyed in a fire when they were 17, and Miss Winter's narrative almost immediately begins to raise more questions than it answers. Who is the twins' father? Why did their uncle disappear one day and never return? Why does the twins' otherwise ultra-rational governess imagine that Angelfield is haunted?

There are all manner of clues littered throughout this rambling, modern-gothic narrative, but this is much more than just a clever mystery with elements of psychological thriller. The Thirteenth Tale also explores loss, identity and the desperate need we all have to tell stories, as if the very act of storytelling in itself can be cathartic and reconciling.

Margaret, struggling with her own unresolved guilt and repressed bereavement after a tragedy that occurred shortly after her birth, seems able to relate to others only through the medium of books - and she admits that she prefers the novels of the 18th and 19th centuries to contemporary fiction because she prefers 'proper endings'. Her determination to find such endings for the characters in Miss Winter's story - and Margaret's own - means that The Thirteenth Tale does have, in some ways, the atmosphere of a 19th century novel, and there are recurring references throughout to Jane Eyre. However, it was really Wuthering Heights that kept springing to mind as I read this book, with its lonely, crumbling house, destructive, obsessive relationships and the recurring repercussions of each generation's actions for the next.

This is a novel that's far from concise, and like its Victorian predecessors, it doesn't always maintain a speedy pace. Despite this I never felt I was reading wasted words. Every detail contributes something, whether a practical clue to the mysteries of the plot or a psychological insight. Yes, it's convoluted and yes, a couple of the twists require some suspension of disbelief, but it's remarkably sensitively written, with a genuine sympathy for even the most unhinged of characters - almost all of them have experienced a loss of one kind or another that has left them feeling less than whole, and Diane Setterfield evokes this sense of incompleteness with considerable skill. The Thirteenth Tale could easily have become an overblown, sensationalist potboiler in the hands of a lesser author, but Setterfield has managed to strike the perfect balance between a gripping plot full of surprises and an astute, sometimes heartbreaking analysis of what it means to live with what feels like a part of oneself missing.

Oh, and yes, it does have very much what Margaret would call a 'proper ending'.

*In my opinion, the only exceptions to the 'the book is always better than the film' rule are:

The Shining (apparently Stephen King hated Kubrick's adaptation of The Shining. I can only imagine this was because he was jealous that Kubrick had taken his averagely good book and made into a masterpiece of a film)

Psycho (I read the book when I was about 15; it's very short and complete guff)

The Exorcist (the book is brilliant and very underrated; the film, however, is still better because frankly it's better than nearly everything)

I've often been told that The Godfather is a better film than it is a book, but I wouldn't know because I haven't read it.

Sunday, 23 March 2014

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

Witty, moving and thought-provoking, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is narrated by Rosemary, an American college student who has always struggled, and continues to struggle, to fit in. Her loneliness is compounded by the fact that both her siblings, older brother Lowell and twin sister Fern, are mysteriously absent from the family, leaving Rosemary to spend holidays like Thanksgiving alone with her parents, without support or companionship, in a sadly reduced, incomplete family unit.

Told partly in flashback, and sometimes from several different points of view, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is a tale of identity, language, family bonds, the formative nature of our early childhood experiences and the arrogance of humans' confidence in their own superiority. It's clear from the outset that Rosemary desperately misses Fern, the sister from whom she was separated just before they were old enough to start school, but also that Fern was, a child who could be described, tactfully, as unusual.

Subjected to constant observation and testing by Rosemary's father, a scientist, and his team of graduate students, Rosemary and Fern are constantly compared and contrasted, and yet it's the similarities between them, not the differences, that really matter. The object of the experiment of their upbringing seems to be to find out how much Fern will learn from Rosemary - and yet, it soon starts to emerge that what the scientific study should really have focused on was how much Rosemary would be influenced by Fern.

At this point, it becomes difficult to discuss the novel in much more detail without sharing a sudden revelation that occurs just under a third of the way into the story; while this so-called twist (it's not really a twist as such, more just a piece of information that is made available) has been widely discussed in reviews and by the author herself recently on BBC Radio 4, I've decided not to talk about it here. Rosemary says herself that she has good reason for withholding the information in question, and I would agree with her that one would read the story differently from the start if this particular fact were already known. Either way, it shapes the rest of the book from that point on.

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is a sharply written, astutely observant novel which veers from funny to bittersweet to outright tragic over the course of its pages. It's a family drama about a family who, while so far from typical in many ways, is absolutely typical in others. It's fair to say that practically nobody will ever have had the experience of growing up in family quite like Rosemary's, and yet everyone will recognise elements of the relationships in the novel. There are secrets, there are misunderstandings, there are misjudgements. What's unsaid in Rosemary's family is just as important - often more so - than what's said, and indeed, talking too much, not talking at all or talking in ways that fail in their objective are incidents that recur throughout the book.

Characterisation, I felt, was shaky in places. Rosemary is a gem, despite her frequent poor decisions and infuriating weaknesses, as is Fern, but Lowell as an adult can't quite live up to Rosemary's own depiction of him as a child, and their father is barely more than a stereotype of a scientist with more ego than sense. Rosemary's wayward loose cannon friend Harlow failed to impress me too. I also felt that structurally, the book lost its way from time to time. The non-linear narrative works, for the most part, but a couple of tangents seemed indulgent somehow, and I'd have liked a more decisive, definitive ending.

Otherwise, though, this a fascinating book that held my attention from the very first page, charmed me with its darkly wry humour and raised all sorts of fascinating moral questions over which I'm still pondering.

Sunday, 16 March 2014

Annihilation (Southern Reach Trilogy 1) by Jeff VanderMeer

Annihilation is the first in a series of three science-fiction novels by Jeff VanderMeer, with the other two due to be published later this year. I'm glad there are two more books to come, because Annihilation is one of those novels that raises more questions than it answers - although it remains to be seen whether the next two books in the series actually offer any solutions or simply deepen the mystery.

Annihilation tells the story - in a sense - of a group of unnamed researchers entering Area X, a large stretch of coastal landscape rendered uninhabitable by 'the Event' some years previously. They have been recruited by Southern Reach, an agency that appears to monitor the border - if there really is one - between Area X and the rest of the world.

None of the expedition party knows what the Event was. None of them knows what it is about Area X that might be dangerous or why nobody can live there. They are led by 'the psychologist' who has trained them for the expedition and by whom they are constantly manipulated by hypnotic suggestion. Their equipment is inexplicably low-tech and their entry into Area X is something none of them can properly recall. They are known to one another only by their roles in the team - the biologist, the surveyor, the anthropologist and so on.

In short, everything in Area X is unknown, and as a result the group exists in a constant and debilitating state of unease and dread. There are vague hints on almost every page that something terrible, something sinister and watchful, lurks within the landscape, and yet nobody is ever quite sure what it might be. It's only a matter of days before the group begins to behave oddly, as if they are somehow absorbing the indefinable oddness of the environment. It's also clear that their perceptions of what they encounter vary considerably. A structure they discover is a 'tower' to our narrator but a 'tunnel' to the others. What is real and what isn't? And what does 'real' mean in Area X anyway?

There is a strong sense of Lovecraftian horror that runs throughout Annihilation, combined with a skilled, calculated matter-of-factness - the narrator is a biologist well known for her observant detachment - that reminds me of John Wyndham (high praise from me: Wyndham is probably my favourite science-fiction writer of all time).

It's fair to say that there are certainly moments when the narrative becomes more elaborate and descriptive, almost hallucinatory, as events take their psychological and physical toll on the biologist, but for me these are much less effective in building atmosphere than the subtler, more ambiguous allusions in the earlier chapters.
The nature of the story also means that character development is mostly secondary, and the biologist's expedition team mates are little more than an aid to driving the plot, but the biologist herself is, while clearly an unreliable and selective storyteller, reasonably well-drawn with enough back-story to induce me to care what happened to her.

If, like me, you enjoy books that question and confuse the reader, full of ambiguities and unspecified, unsettling suggestions that things are Just Not Quite Right, and you're open to the 'New Weird', Annihilation is definitely one for you.

The second novel in the trilogy, Authority, is due out in May.

Sunday, 9 March 2014

Dying Fall by Elly Griffiths

Elly Griffiths, along with Phil Rickman, is one of my go-to authors when I want a reliably entertaining page-turner, a nice, light, easy read with familiar characters I can greet like old friends. Having previously finished Cormac McCarthy's The Road - brilliant, but profoundly and relentlessly depressing - Dying Fall was an ideal choice.

I've reviewed the previous books in Elly Griffith's Ruth Galloway mystery series before, but to recap, Ruth is a forensic archaeologist based at a Norfolk university who is sometimes called upon by the local police to assist with the dating and identifying of long-buried bones.

Central to the books is her complicated non-relationship with DCI Harry Nelson, a married man who is also, thanks to an ill-advised liaison a couple of years previously, the father of Ruth's toddler. Ruth, essentially a slightly overweight academic nerd, is far from a conventional heroine and Nelson, despite appearances, is not quite the Gene Hunt figure he might seem at first glance.

In this instalment in the series Ruth becomes embroiled in an archaeological investigation started by her old university friend Dan Golding, recently killed, possibly deliberately, in a fire at his home in Lancashire. Dan has discovered an ancient burial site that could have immense historical significance - but why are there others who seem intent on stopping Ruth from carrying on with his work, and what's the connection with a local far-right organisation called the White Hand?

The mystery at the heart of Dying Fall is fun and engaging, albeit largely improbable and occasionally bordering on daft, and I can't pretend I didn't find the final revelation of whodunnit somewhat disappointing. But as always, the mystery plot is really of secondary importance to the characters who are pleasingly three-dimensional and rarely stereotypical - just when you think they might be edging into cliche, they'll always surprise you.

Moreover, Dying Fall is frequently funny, full of acerbic observations and sly wit. Like its predecessors in the series, it has a warmth to it, a sort of friendliness that, despite the tension of the mystery and the danger in which Ruth finds herself, makes it a pleasantly comforting and familiar read.