Angela Carter, by her own hand:
I was thrilled yesterday to receive Cocktails with Bompas and Parr (Pavilion, 2011) as an early Christmas gift, signed by the authors at a party thrown by the divine Natalie Galustian. It’s a charming read and beautifully presented (that vivid green wedge is sparkly and textured, very soothing to stroke):
There’s plenty in it for my enjoyment and edification. But more important than my own selfish pleasure is the good this book may do for society. You see, I have grave concerns for the art and future of home cocktail making.
Most twentysomethings can be trusted to wean themselves off the Casillero del Diablo teat and start taking a proper interest in wine, but spirits too often fall by the wayside after their cheap vodka days are done. It grieves me enormously that so few young people can make (me) a proper gin and tonic. As I tremble on the verge of 30 I don’t see that many of my older friends are doing much better, and it may be too late for them. And so I implore parents, grandparents, anyone with a loving interest in the nation’s youth to give generously this Christmas*. Give Cocktails with Bompas and Parr to someone in their first establishment, still finding their feet as a host/ess, and you will have done much. Perhaps along with Katharine Whitehorn’s Cooking in a Bedsitter, with which it shares a pleasing belle et utile affinity. And a bottle, maybe their first, of really good gin.
So here’s what you can expect from Cocktails… There are many fine recipes, but it’s even better that Bompas and Parr explain the principles of cocktail making. With a good grounding in the basics your amateur drinker can be as confident and adventurous as your amateur chef. For the advanced drinker there are some magical effects to try.
At the chapter on equipment I simply closed the book and hugged it. It’s neat, practical and places the proper emphasis on ice. You can tell it’s written by men who want to help, not waggle their muddlers in your face.
It’s a very complete work. The chapter on bar snacks, which would be tacked on in almost any other cocktail guide, is well thought through. I’m grateful for the bacon popcorn recipe - now I can recreate the idle luxury of an afternoon in the Gilbert Scott in the comfort of my own home and pyjamas. And they list G. Smith and Sons as their tobacco supplier, which I heartily endorse. For such venerable specialists they’re completely unintimidating, even if you’re not after a manly shag and just want something silly like Sobranie Cocktail cigs.
What I like most about Cocktails with Bompas and Parr is its warmth and generosity of spirit. In that sense it’s much more like my older drinking manuals (particularly the Savoy Cocktail Book and much of Kingsley Amis’s booze writing) than modern ones, which tend either towards barware wankery or slapdash cupcakery, all lifestyle over substance.
I dearly want to try the Ether Cocktail on Christmas Eve, which we’ll be spending with friends who have the pluck but who also have candles on their tree. If we can walk the line between fun and flammability it should be a festive season to remember.
*I don’t want to make it sound as if the only market for this book is callow youth. It’s for people of all ages, but choose your recipient wisely. Do they have you round for dinner because it’s what people do or because they love to feed and entertain? If the latter, give them Cocktails with Bompas and Parr. If the former, broaden your social horizons in 2012.
Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus (Harvill Secker, 2011) is enchanting. If there’s a supernatural reading season stretching from October to December, this book belongs at the latter end. The mechanics of magic within the story matter less than the languid glamour of the story itself. It’s a book for giving, with love, not least because of how beautiful it is. The black, white, and unofficial red of the Cirque des Rêves wrap round the endpapers and edge the pages, blank spaces are shaded with grey and the faded impression of stars. Morgenstern’s inscription - beaux rêves - is a lovely way to begin, even if she says that to all the readers.
The story concerns two young magicians, Celia and Marco, and the game they are pledged to as children by Celia’s sorcerer father and Marco’s guardian, the man in grey. This test of skill is based on pure magical prowess - not to destroy but to best one’s opponent. Their theatre will be Le Cirque des Rêves, founded at a midnight dinner by impresario Chandresh Christophe Lefèvre. His guests Mme Padva, the Burgess sisters and Mr Barris plunge into a mess of plans to realise a brand new kind of circus, a sensual feast, where every draped cloth and whiff of scented breeze ministers to the magic.
The first manipulations are benign - Marco becomes Chandresh’s secretary and Celia hides in plain sight by auditioning to become the chief illusionist. In the slow mazes of the renowned travelling circus - and I’m not looking into a single tent on your behalf, you should discover each wonder yourself - everything is perfect. Outside, years are passing and the incidental cruelty of the magical challenge is discharged into the atmosphere. People seem unable to ask questions or make sense of what’s happening, illustrated most vividly by the sad alcoholic ruin of Chandresh and the death of Tara Burgess. You’d have limited sympathy for Marco and Celia if the sharpest cruelties weren’t reserved for them; and if they didn’t show more care for their charges than the men who casually enslaved them as children.
Celia and Marco’s discovery of each other is too much bound up with what happens at the circus - their arena and eventually monument - to dwell on for long. Their meetings at Chandresh’s house are at once more fraught and more innocent, literally electric when their lifelong bond, sealed with ring-shaped scars, grows into love. The hardbitten reader needn’t worry too much about romance, though he might not enjoy their plunge into the cushioned reading room as much as I did.
Written through this is another story about the Cirque des Rêves, in a different timeline that eventually loops round the original story and ties beginning to end. Poppet and Widget, twins born immediately before and after the circus’s opening, meet and later befriend a Massachusetts boy, Bailey Clarke. It’s beautifully done - the twins are a benevolent red-headed Janus, reading the stars and bottling stories of the past. Bailey is the child who will run away and join the circus in the most serious way imaginable, becoming closer to it than any rêveur (as its most ardent followers call themselves). These three children carry so much weight of action it feels like this story was written after the original. The two strands work very well together - but hidden in plain sight is a story without a plot. It’s as if Morgenstern has employed misdirection we’re supposed to see or at least suspect - the magician masquerading as illusionist.
The Night Circus sits somewhere between Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (no, not because of the title). It shares Clarke’s unhurried perfectionism and nuanced imagining of magical relationships. Like Carter, Morgenstern twins beauty and danger, binding them with the fantastic - there’s also something of Carter in her obvious delight in writing.
Like all good purveyors of magic, Morgenstern doesn’t reveal or explain everything. The story, such as it is, doesn’t expound on the source and nature of magical power or act as a guidebook to a new narrative world. Like a dedicated rêveur, you will be content to be amazed.
I am sometimes seized by the need to organise the flat. Not to tidy it - that’s for triflers and those with nothing better to do. I mean really rip the guts out of it, spread them on the floor, and see a future in which everything has its place.
This is really something to do alone, with no-one to mock your singing, dancing and innovative swearing. But last week a simple request to my spouse to please do something about all the old copies of Private Eye spiralled into a 7-hour ordeal. It would test our strength (both lower back and marriage). Something, at last, had to be done about the books.
In our flat there are what I think of as the proper bookcases, huge and solid and stuffed with my husband’s books. Then there are the glass-fronted ones, suprisingly good, bought quickly and cheaply from the charity shop (where everything cost the same, from bedstead to battered china dog) for me when I moved in. Still for me, there are some pretty baroque iron shelves nailed up at eye level. Then there are the clapboard things and exhibition stands stuffed into odd corners, temporary structures pressed into permanent use, like the post-war hut I was educated in for several years of primary school. Finally there are the piles and drifts of books forming non-aligned nations all over the furniture, making life in a confined space dusty and difficult.
It seemed a shame to pack up the last few years of unshelved reading, new favourites and authors I’m still working on. Many of these books deserved to have their first real home, and others could be banished to cardboard darkness in boxes stacked up round the bed.
The twentieth century Penguin classics were the first to go, followed by much of the nineteenth with the exception of Hardy and the Bronte sisters (I include Mrs Gaskell), who will always have a place on my shelves. Men in the bookish schoolgirls’ literary crush category were asked to leave - Burgess, Fowles, Golding. Lots of others - books I’d bought when I was young enough to think pleasing others was unquestionably more important than pleasing myself. All of the Angry Young Men except Kingsley Amis, who never convinced as one and whose collected Everyday Drinking is indispensable. And every last scrap of literary criticism, even AC Bradley.
In their place there are books and authors I’ve grown to love more recently. There’s Jasper Fforde, who blasts out wit and literary allusions like a mad confetti cannon. Doreen Tovey’s beautiful and bitingly funny domestic tales, now I’m unselfconscious enough to own up to an entire section on cat whimsy. Evelyn Waugh, who I read at one gulp, amazed. More fun, from Jerome and Grossmith. The uncategorisable and unsurpassable Saki.
There’s some outstanding recent non-fiction, in particular Humphrey Carpenter’s Seven Lives of John Murray, Simon Garfield’s Just My Type and Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes.
Looking very well all ranged together with their smart jackets, Everyman’s recent PG Wodehouse reissues. Angela Carter, who must have played dice with the devil to write that well. Sybille Bedford, who I feel sure would’ve been a nightmare, and Barbara Pym, who would not.
Rows of ghost stories carefully bookended by Ambrose Bierce and Edith Wharton - MR James and Le Fanu and Onions, scarily good children’s author Chris Priestly and some scarily grown-up Roald Dahl. Connected to the spooky stuff through Wharton there’s Henry James, which seemed to make sense, and Daphne du Maurier.
One shelf down Muriel Spark, Mary Wesley and Nancy Mitford keep each other company, all of whom I read with greedy joy. My two new favourite Patricks, Dennis and Hamilton. And a very strange book but one of the best I’ve read in recent years, GB Edwards’ The Book of Ebenezer le Page.
There’s still work to be done. The Stella Gibbons reissues from Vintage Books are arriving thick and fast, and while Conference at Cold Comfort Farm was more of the whip-smart same the magnificent and melancholy Westwood is a side of her I’d never seen before. Just now I’m reading Starlight, a sparsely populated book whose few secondary characters are pulled into the orbit of the quietly fatal Pearsons.
It should have been simple enough to make up a shelf of novels shading from Gothic to Sensation, taking a line through Wilkie Collins, but then I read No Name. I can see why it scandalised the circulating libraries, but really it deals with such bone-deep ideas of right and wrong, love and faith, that the odd unchaperoned female is neither here nor there. In structure and convention it’s no different from any other sensation novel, but the life breathed into the characters makes it incomparable. To circle back to Jasper Fforde, Magdalene Vanstone’s place in the Bookworld would be as an impatient mentor to her more helpless and vacillating literary sisters.
I don’t feel I’ve abandoned the boxed books - they’re fixed stars, with the odd comet (or bit of space junk) blazing a trail, and if they appear to be in different places now it’s only because I’m moving.
My partner has the unerring and incredibly annoying ability to sniff out the best book in my pile of to-be-reads and wander off with it. He doesn’t read very much fiction (by my standards), and he never chooses it for himself. I envy his reading experience - to him, it must seem as if all modern and classic fiction is great. In fairness, if we both like an author he’ll go to remarkably generous lengths. Now he’s aware of Mark Sanderson I wouldn’t be surprised if some signed first editions turned up, the start of a collection. Book trends for the general reader are a subject of constant, anxious debate among publishers and sellers, but for hardcore readers I think beautiful editions will always matter. There’s no contradiction between disposability at one end of the library and book-as-object-d’art at the other.
The Whispering Gallery (HarperCollins, 2011) is Sanderson’s second novel to feature 1930s crime reporter Johnny Steadman. His skill at creating atmosphere is striking and undeniable - the grimy stew of a London summer was a perfect evocation of our own recent heatwave. His writing is ripe with smells and textures. Even without the central mysteries it’s forcefully physical, dripping with sweat, piss and blood. And rats. These denizens of a parallel city almost never feature in books set in London, outside of fantasy or horror novels. So, I’m grateful for the rats.
Johnny Steadman is an ace crime reporter with a best friend in the force (Sgt Matt Turner), and considerably more enemies following an expose on police corruption (which I assume forms the basis of the first book, Snow Hill). The novel opens conventionally enough, but, as I’ve said about classic ghost stories, genre conventions aren’t just art-by-numbers. They’re theories of dramatic structure, within which authors can sink or swim. Sanderson is a strong swimmer - the foreword, which locks the reader in a dungeon with what appears to be a torture victim, gives us a brief and brutal intimation of the horrors to come.
The story proper opens with a grand and grimly funny (the opening line is “he was going to take the plunge”) set piece in St Paul’s. Johnny is waiting in the whispering gallery to propose to his girlfriend, Stella. His plans for the day are changed by a Dr Callingham, who throws himself from one of the higher galleries, killing himself, narrowly missing Johnny and extinguishing a cleric called Graham Basil Yapp.
It’s an excellent beginning to a tangled journalistic and police enquiry that becomes dramatically personal when Johnny starts receiving a richly allusive series of postcards depicting saintly suffering and reflections on the nature of beauty - generally accompanied by a female body part.
If there’s a way of writing in this subgenre there’s a way of reviewing it too - I’m not going to give anything away, other than praise for Sanderson’s intertwining of the clerical corruption and deranged vivisectionist plots. Both, in their ways, are counting down to Johnny’s death - and Sanderson keeps the narrative stretched taut as a bowstring throughout.
In a more-or-less flawless book the things that aren’t stand out even more. Unless I’ve forgotten when the battle of Passchendaele was, there are two contradictory accounts of Johnny’s age. There are one or two bits in which research gets the upper hand (I don’t believe anyone would mentally reference the Peabody Trust when bemoaning city clearance), but for the most part Sanderson gets it spot on.
Some of the character interactions can seem a little off key too - a rival journalist called Simkins suffers quite horribly at the hands of the vivisectionist but seems completely sanguine when Johnny visits him in hospital. I’m inclined, though, to think that this is down to Sanderson trying to avoid melodrama. Certainly his ear for police station and newsroom dialogue is perfect, and we’re shown every tender nuance of Johnny’s complex relationship with Matt. He’s unflinching about sex, deviance and abuse - about joy and pain.
After you’ve read this it would be well worth digging out a copy of Crime Man, a behind-the-scenes account of life as a crime reporter written by Telegraph journalist Stanley Firmin, who would have been working at the same time as the intrepid Johnny Steadman.
I don’t want to jinx it, but summer’s here. The landscapes of my hot-weather reading are low-lying, smut-filled city and beachside caves filled with glaucous light, too hot and bright for ghost stories. But just in case we have any more torrential evening downpours on the way I want to recommend Kate Mosse’s The Winter Ghosts (Orion, 2009) as something you can read at one sitting, perhaps aloud to friends to salvage a ruined barbecue.
Ten years after the end of the Great War Freddie Watson is travelling in the French Pyrenees with a burden of grief for his dead brother. He meets a beguiling stranger and is inducted into the mystery of pain and loss that’s hung over this strange mountain village for centuries. This is a simple, mournful story - the ghosts are echoes of the dear departed, not supernatural terrors.
The Winter Ghosts is a brilliant primer to classics of the ghost story genre. You could give this book to a sceptic or a reluctant and have a convert on your hands. It contains many of the formal stylistic elements of the classic ghost story - narrated to a bookseller, involving several layers of history, physical isolation, an ambiguous turning point, a dream, fever, redemption. It illustrates why the peeling back of layers and narrowing of focus are staples of the genre in that they allow time for enchantment, for the reader to be completely embraced by the heart of the narrative.
The ghost story is the ultimate formal example of suspension of disbelief. Mosse is an excellent proponent of it, right down to the ending - ghost stories never end on the climax but winch you back up again from the long, dark well of story. A good one, however powerful it may have been, will leave you quietly contemplative. That Mosse takes a much-parodied form and uses it to tell painful truths on the subjects of grief and loss is a testament to her skill as a writer and the power of the genre.
Cuckoo (Headline, 2011) by Julia Crouch tells the story of what happens when Polly, with her husband Christos killed in a car accident, returns to England to stay with her oldest friend Rose. Rose and her husband Gareth, with two adorable children, are making a rather frightening attempt to live a very specific dream. The dream is familiar to me from books and television if not from life - removal to the countryside, painstaking renovation of an ideal home. The story blows its first cold breath down your spine by slowly revealing just how fragile this family is - the weight of expectations, the (for Gareth, unwanted) second child, the couple’s skewed understanding of each other… any outsider could set off fatal shockwaves. And Polly is far from just anyone.
The book’s blurb and styling suggest a hand-that-rocks-the-cradle/mummy martyr sort of set up, but it’s a good deal subtler and more interesting that that. There’s a degree of mummy martyrdom but Crouch very coolly lets us walk around it. She doesn’t insist that we take Rose at Rose’s own estimation of herself - despite her central importance she’s not set up to be a heroine. There are some very sharp criticisms of her treatment of Gareth, and of her overstepping the mark in caring for Polly’s sons.
Polly’s advent and protracted stay, her effect on the family, is beautifully realised. This former musician and junkie (with both habits revived and going strong) is one of those immensely resilient people, with a cruel and ancient glamour that subordinates people to her even in her weakness. The relationship between her and Rose is not a straightforwardly toxic friendship - I’m beginning to think those can only be developed in adulthood, and that the friendships of our youth (even when they’ve boiled down to mutual hatred) are much more difficult to reason our way out of.
The rhythm of the narrative is produced by a constant round of cleaning, cooking, bathing, shopping, the children’s routines. It’s all the more effective when it, and Rose, breaks down - as she lets go it becomes difficult to gauge how much time is passing. There’s a lot of movement (between different parts of the house, driving about on errands), mundane stuff that slowly turns frantic - the three significant outings (hospital, pub gig, Brighton) are sour with with fear. Beneath the topnotes of home baking and disinfectant the story is mired in blood; symbolically dead animals, suspicious accidents, rough sex.
The final showdown isn’t between Rose and Polly at all - after a terminally violent blow-up with Gareth it becomes finally apparent that theirs is the most vital relationship in the book. Immediately after reading I had Polly pegged as the aggressor, but it’s not so straightforward. Rose has certainly been hard done by, but she’s not without her own power to manipulate. Polly finds renewed fame and fortune, and Rose calmly sets to work on the dream all over again with Gareth’s brother. The two women hurt each other, conspire together, threaten each other, and will be friends for life whether they like it or not.
I’m a narrative junkie. I like it in abundance, in character serials. I like it in essence, in poetry. I like it in music, in songs like Folsom Prison Blues. People in my story-struck demographic are considered, in some quarters, to be responsible for the dumbing-down of history. Serious students of the past suck their teeth as we thrill to The Suspicions of Mr Whicher and suchlike. Narrative can be the spoonful of sugar that helps the etcetera (though with some sublime results like EH Gombrich’s A Little History of the World) but I think our craving for it is more fundamental than that. Story is our chief mechanism for making sense of the world, so I’m not too ashamed to admit that a strong narrative helps me to retain facts and fit them into a proper understanding of… whatever bit of history is under discussion.
So it’s boom-time for thickos like me and I was practically giddy at the publication of Kate Colquhoun’s Mr Briggs’ Hat: A Sensational Account of Britain’s First Railway Murder (Little, Brown, 2011). Death and trains, what could be nicer? This tightly written tale is an account of the 1864 murder of Thomas Briggs, the development of the police case and press/public reaction, and of the trial. And there’s a thrilling transatlantic boat chase about halfway through, which is a seriously jammy way for the writer to pause and marshall the facts from the first half while laying ground for the second. Colquhoun makes such stuff as an extradition hearing, inquests and indictment proceedings gripping, all taken from primary sources with no room for reality-defying, tv-style courtroom drama. Her cleverness is in not intruding, in having confidence in her material and arranging it to the best story-like effect. This may not be history in the analytic sense but it’s history in the telling.
If you’re as interested in the whole business of detective history as I am it’s well worth reading Mr Briggs’ Hat in cross-reference with Judith Flanders’ The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime (Harper Press, 2011). More of a serious-scholarly, work it traces modern policing and detection back to their roots, taking in the changes to social structure that made a new kind of policing necessary. It, too, acknowledges the importance of narrative - Flanders is exhaustive and interesting in collating the stories a society in ferment (several, with attendant foments) told to itself through the press, entertainment and literature. I haven’t finished it yet but no doubt I’ll be returning to it many times for reference and perhaps as a companion to the crime literature of that era.
The jacket designs of Colquhoun’s and Flanders’ books are oddly similar - same colours, similar mix of fonts, each with a single bold symbol (skull, tophat) and a kind of ‘ta-da!’ flourish about them (theatre curtains, railway tracks in perspective). Despite the differences in style and content they’re both clearly aimed at the same audience and bound together by the visual shorthand that’s supposed to influence our book-buying habits. Works on me…
Like a whole series of journals that have fallen into disuse (I was going to write ‘desuetude’ but now I’m not entirely sure it means what I think it means. For years I had my own unique definitions of ‘contumely’* and ‘stigma’** - the intuitive grasp of meanings that comes with learning to read can really lead you up shit creek when it goes awry) I’ve not paid much attention to this blog lately. To clear the backlog of books read and loved I’m going to recommend a few series that I’ve truffled through very happily:
Sophie Hannah: Charlie, Simon and the crimes of the century
I wish I’d come to these sooner because they’re bloody brilliant. They work as standalone books (I began with A Room Swept White, plucked from a shelf almost at random as I was hiding from someone in Foyles) but are worth reading in order of publication to understand and appreciate the relationship between Charlie Zailer and Simon Waterhouse. This isn’t your standard troubled copper stuff - Sophie Hannah writes real people with real emotions, not genre affectations. I suppose this is why AA Gill dismissed the recently aired Case Sensitive (based on The Point of Rescue) as a ‘women’s book club adaptation.’ I don’t have the energy to unpick everything that’s offensive about that phrase, but it’s his own loss - yours too if you pick your reading material to suit your genre and gender biases. The books (of course I’ve read them all; I’m waiting impatiently for the next one) are generally split, in the telling, between third-persons following the police and some secondary characters, and first-persons from the protagonist. These are executed with perfect dramatic timing and serious skill to support the most incredible (but oh, how horribly plausible) plots. We’ve all got our quirks, perversions, suspicions and obsessions - if the crimes in these books have anything in common it’s that they come from these secret places, the darker feelings that’ve turned sour or escaped to poison everyday life. The narratives speed along like a tightly-wound spring uncoiling, thrilling and dangerous. If you’re like me one half of your reading mind will be exploring the complicated passions at play while the other will be capering about and clapping its little hands in glee at how absolutely first-class the writing and pacing are. You’ll also wonder just what it is about Simon Waterhouse. Will we find out in the next instalment? One final question raised by this series: what are the criteria for the title or author’s name being embossed? If there’s some sort of sales formula behind it I’d really like to know.
Jason Goodwin: Yashim the eunuch detective
I’m endlessly fascinated by Istanbul and I love detective fiction. When I heard that there was a detective straight outta Topkapi I went slightly nuts. Goodwin’s books more than justified this - he’s a scholar of the Byzantine and Ottoman empires and uses his knowledge to stunning effect. After reading this series you will be able to walk round bits of old Istanbul and have a real feel for where you are. The stories are loaded with visuals and, more unusually, smells (Yashim’s a wonderful cook) - he writes in such a beautiful, melancholy key. Yashim counts among his friends the hungover Polish Ambassador Palewski, relic from a deleted nation, and the enigmatic valide, a humbly born woman occupying one of the most dangerous seats of power in the world. Try these books - and try some of Yashim’s recipes.
James Anderson: Inspector Wilkins investigates
I’ve only read the reissues of the three books set in the Earl of Burford’s home (his out-of-print work is annoyingly difficult to get hold of in good condition) and it’s a shame there won’t be any more. They’re clever, witty, full of allusions for Golden Age afficionados - but most importantly they’re scrupulously plotted and very entertaining. I hold the majority of Golden Age pastiche novels in complete contempt - it’s loathsome to send up a genre when your own writing skills are inferior to the authors you mock. As a literary joke it’s in poor taste and as literature it’s just crap. I think Anderson’s work gets a bit lost among these idiot outpourings. Seek him out for an affectionate and playful take on the classic country house mystery.
Alan Bradley: Flavia de Luce and the science of detection
I’m not sure if these are intended as children’s books but they’re certainly suitable for adults. Flavia, our heroine, lives with her sisters (Ophelia and Daphne) and her widowed father at Buckshaw, their grand but decaying house near the village of Bishop’s Lacey. Her mother is remote, romantic and dead; killed in a mountaineering accident when Flavia was a baby. Add in a faithful retainer in the shape of Dogger and a bicycle called Gladys and you should be in for a comfortable if well-worn treat. And yet… into this idyll intrudes real pain and peril. Ophelia and Daphne are savage tormentors of their younger sister. Their father does little to notice, much less prevent it - his time is taken up with philately and his social training leads him to coldly repel any displays of filial affection. Dogger has fallen from butler to gardener, in the grip of flashbacks from his time as a POW. And Flavia is an 11-year-old chemistry prodigy with a particular interest in poisons. The mysteries are good, grand guignol fun but the real charm is Flavia - a determined, quick tempered and fiercely lonely girl and a first-rate narrator.
* I thought it meant a sort of withering snub
** During an outbreak of lice at my primary school we were given pamphlets to take home. They said, apropos myths and facts, that “lice come with a dreadful stigma attached.” I understood this ‘stigma’ to be a claw by which lice latched onto the scalp. Naturally, this terrified my infant self.
Before we begin, I should say that this is the best piece of modern fiction I’ve read in at least the last 6 years, maybe longer. Do not let the plodding, workmanlike quality of my own prose blind you to the sheer brilliance of SJ Watson’s Before I Go To Sleep (Doubleday, April 2011).
Before I Go To Sleep was, for me, a long time coming. I first heard of the book, or at least the author’s legendary success, when I took a course at the Faber Academy last year. One of the students (now a friend but at the time just a frighteningly well-prepared stranger) was telling us about the person who’d written a novel on the more advanced course than the one we were taking, how it had been sold in countless territories and was being made into a movie. Later I found out the author’s name (apparently initialised because publishers like doing that for certain types of book - so the reader can comfortably assume that all these A.N. Others are men) and later still got my hands on the text.
The story is about a 47 year old amnesiac named Christine Lucas. She can remember who she was, how her life was, before her accident. She can form new memories during the day - her mind is resilient and gravely beautiful, the narrative she spins out of painfully discovered and threaded-together facts is captivating - but loses them after sleeping. You see the significance of the title immediately and you’ll keep seeing it refracted though hope, suspicion, rising terror.
The book is divided into three parts - a short opening section in which we meet Christine and learn about her situation (necessarily in real-time); the long middle section containing the journal of a few weeks, which the doctor we meet in the first section suggested she keep; the closing section in which Christine has knowledge she could never have hoped to gain in any other way besides writing. And the frankly terrifying denouement.
The subject of Christine’s amnesia has been researched and interpreted with real sensitivity. There are no shock tactics or sell-outs to narrative expediency - she is not a symbol or a victim of anything, and the fact that you’ll identify so completely with what the lit-crit part of your brain keeps trying to denounce as an unreliable narrator is testament to Watson’s skill.
This is a huge technical challenge. The repetitions of detail from slightly different angles, keeping our own memories in synch with Christine’s so as not to create distance, the sheer unlikeliness that dogs so many novels with character-written sections (like the implausible epistolatory car-crash that is Dracula) - Watson turns these difficulties into triumphs. Reading Christine’s journal is like making an archaeological discovery of the very bones of story. I chose to read it at one sitting, as she must. Not just because I was gripped but because it would have felt madly disloyal to let her carry on reading her history, for the first time, on her own.
It’s too soon after the first reading for me to have thought much about how, but I did notice as I was going along that Watson uses the subtlest of inflections to change the emotional feel, that you can be plunged into an atmosphere of dread without anything especially dramatic happening. As in dreams, when the situation can be mundane but still suffused with malignity.
After you and Christine have finished reading the journal it’s time to confront what we now understand about her life. I don’t credit myself with being especially perspicacious so again it’s the hand of Watson that delivers, in the final pages, 3 relentless punches to the gut - 3 possibilities, each worse than the last. Where you’ll stick will depend on your capacity for horror (I was stubbornly holding on to scenario two even as it became clear my worst fears were about to be realised).
There is hope, you will be left with the possibility of redemption and recovery, perhaps. I put the book down (actually gave it to my partner and instructed him to start reading immediately), disturbed and exhilarated, and just sat quietly to try and fix a happy ending in my mind… but then I thought about the title one last time.
In conclusion: buy Before I Go To Sleep now.
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