Book Review: Of Mutability by Jo Shapcott

Too many of the best cells in my body
are itching, feeling jagged, turning raw
in this spring chill. It’s two thousand and four
and I don’t know a soul who doesn’t feel small
among the numbers. Razor small.
‘Of Mutability’

In her essay ‘On Being Ill,’ Virginia Wolf describes the effect that being ill has on one’s perceptions. She talks about the ‘horizontal view of the world’ that comes from spending so much time on your back, the different ways of seeing that it inspires, and the way it opens up the sky.

In 2003, Jo Shapcott was diagnosed with breast cancer. Seven years later, the cancer beaten, she published Of Mutability. Although not specifically about her battle with illness – cancer is never mentioned for instance – that experience of ill health and the different ways of seeing it enabled, provides the topography upon which the collection is built. As the title suggests, these are poems about transformation, mutation, mutability, in the body and the world around it. Shapcott presents this mutation as sometimes liberating, sometimes destructive, full of possibilities and yet ultimately a symbol of just one terrifying inevitability. There are shifting territories and permeable boundaries, where pavements ripple beneath feet and fingerprints dent hillsides.

Of Mutability loosely follows a narrative arc from diagnosis through all sorts of mutations towards a resolution and all-clear. There are also nods to the artwork of Helen Chadwick, which two of the poems respond directly to, and Percy Shelley’s ‘Mutability’ with its clarion call: ‘Nought may endure but Mutability.’

That is certainly the feeling here. Mutability is the single consistency around which uncertainty orbits and transience passes. The first mutation, that of cells that leads to a diagnosis and the title poem is wild and unbounded. The year is 2004 and the world is tearing itself to shreds through war and climate change, leaving the narrator feeling ‘razor small’, everyone in skins they feel uncomfortable within. In ‘Era’ the reader is placed into a dangerous world where magpies squabble, fountains splash ‘chemical bubbles’ and traffic swarms ‘round Vauxhall Cross, like crazy fish, with teeth’. Later in St Bride’s we have an even clearer vision of war, where internal transformation and external conflict mirror each other, leaving ‘the smell of print and ashes in my nose.’ In ‘Night Flight to Muncaster’ the reader is transformed into an owl, flying free over the landscape and taking a trip to the seaside. But it ends on a sour note, as the owl’s senses enable it to hear things other can’t: ‘You can hear clouds creak, droplets hiss’.

This is an unhappy world being transformed against its will. Much later, in ‘Viral Landscape’, and ‘I Go Inside A Tree’, the mutated internal and external landscapes come together, permeable, liminal. And yet, around this, there is a calmer, sensual, more mystical view of mutability taking place. In ‘The Oval Pool’ a woman turns to water, and watches the pain of those around her. Yet she remains defiant: ‘there will be no evaporation.’ In ‘Abishag’ a couple seeks to mutate together so that they are sponged down as one, the borders between them vanishing as she licks the sweat from his skull and feels ‘his mind through my tongue’.

There is humour, too, a black humour in some, but genuine humour elsewhere. In ‘Hairless’, Shapcott questions whether physical transformation changes who and what you are, the poem starting with the line ‘Can the bald lie?’ and ending with a roar against the dying of the light. In ‘The Deaths’ she imagines walking with death like ‘two drunkards’ before she implodes ‘like a ripe mango’. One of the most enjoyable poems is ‘Somewhat Unravelled’, an imagined conversation between Shapcott and her auntie whose experience of the world has similarly been transformed by dementia. Their intimate words fill spaces, their promises of straight talk and ‘a meal so wholesome and blimmin’/pungent with garlic you will dance on it and/eat it through your feet’ a guard against further mutation.

There are series of poems that mythologise mutability, others that map the gradients of permeability and a series that reflects upon trees, those bastions of strength that yet ‘respond to everything, everything else’ just as everyone does.

Towards the end, the register again changes, uncertainty, hope, gratitude creeping in until, in ‘Procedure’, all the worries literally go up in the steam of a cup of tea, the narrator putting all the ‘blood tests, and cellular madness’ behind her and saying ‘thank you thank you thank you for the then, and now’.

Yet, ever playful, Shapcott ends on a different note, a postscript to the mutations. In ‘Piss Flower’, one of two direct responses to individual pieces of Helen Chadwick’s art, we finally see a limit to mutability. Now all clear, Shapcott is no longer so mutable, she become a man and produces ‘a golden parabola’, but she can do tricks of her own, in her own body and without any transformation. Perhaps other things may endure beside Shelley’s mutability.

The theme of mutability is so ubiquitous that it can even be applied to the structure of the poems themselves. Almost all start as one thing before transforming before your eyes, their implications shifting with one surprising line or dissonant ending.

In June 2012, Jo Shapcott spoke in Norwich and referred to life as ‘vertiginous, multi-layered joy’. That seems to me a perfect description of Of Mutability. But these layers are not separate, they leach into each other, they mutate, they contain within them near limitless possibilities. Of Mutability is a collection that looks mortality bullet-straight in the iris, but does so without fixating upon it. It is self-knowing and vulnerable. These poems are highly intelligent and yet entirely unpretentious, each word carefully weighted yet retaining an accessible clarity. The collection is playful, frequently humorous, and quietly powerful. It rewards multiple readings and careful consideration but has a visceral power that captures you immediately and doesn’t let go until the last word.

Ultimately Of Mutability is a book about the euphoria of survival. The notion of Per ardua ad astra – ‘through adversity to the stars’ – runs throughout this collection, an open mouthed appreciation of the spectacle of life, even when mired in earthly troubles.



Of Mutability is one of five books featured in the Writers' Centre Norwich Summer Reads programme. For more information and resources that include an extract, video content, and links to other reviews, see www.summerreads.org.uk

Book Review: Eating Animals - Jonathan Safran Foer

Read: January 2010

Eating Animals in one tweet-sized chunk:

Eating Animals is about the stories we tell about the food we eat. But also the gaps between the stories we tell and the stories as they actually are.

“Stories about food are stories about us - our history and our values.”

When I sat down to write this review I did so with 16 pages of notes and ambitions to compose a review that would change the eating habits of every person who read it. Only such lofty goals, I felt, could do justice to a book that casts the debate around the meat industry in a fresh light.

But what I soon realised as I considered how to achieve this gargantuan feat, was that the brilliance of Eating Animals is the extraordinary realism Foer injects into the debate. His master-stroke is to get away from the all-or-nothing vegetarian versus carnivore debate in favour of a third way, a way that promotes a reduction in our collective consumption of meat to a level that is conducive to stable and lasting farming practices. This is not a fundamentalist case for vegetarianism, or a moralistic case against eating meat per se, but an exploration of why the choices we make about what we eat matter – to ourselves, the animals we do or don’t eat, the planet, and the lives of all those who inhabit it.

Those who have enjoyed either of Foer’s sublime novels – Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close – will find the same inventiveness is at play here, alongside a familiar appreciation that what matters most is not facts and figures but the stories that surround them. He lets a factory farmer speak for himself, devotes an entire chapter to a debate between a farmer, his vegetarian wife, and a vegan PETA activist. He has an inherent understanding that there is no such thing as unequivocal truth, merely lots of different stories that collectively make up a whole.

Eating Animals is about the stories we tell about the food we eat. It is about their importance to our communal experiences of eating, our cultural ways of life. But it is also about the gaps between the stories we tell ourselves and the stories as they actually are. And it is about the stories we want to tell about ourselves in the future.

These stories begin with Foer himself. Having spent the first twenty-six years of his life disliking animals and oscillating between vegetarian and omnivore, between feeling guilty about eating animals and savouring the taste and smell of meat, the prospect of becoming a father made him reconsider the person he wanted to be. Taking his cue from Michael Pollan’s assertion in The Omnivore’s Dilemma that “eating industrial meat takes an almost heroic act of not knowing,” and faced with the responsibility of deciding what to feed someone more important than himself, Foer set out to understand what sort of repercussions the decision to eat meat had. But what started as a curious bit of research soon grew into a mission to expose factory farming and the culture of cheap food that drives it. He joins an animal rights activist in breaking into a factory farm under cover of darkness, and what troubles him most is not the horrific living conditions of the birds, though they are bad enough, but the secrecy, the locked doors and hi-tec surveillance.

“In the three years I will spend immersed in animal agriculture, nothing will unsettle me more than the locked doors. Nothing will better capture the whole sad business of factory farming. And nothing will more strongly convince me to write this book.”

Above all else Eating Animals is a bid to burst open that secrecy and end the whole barbaric practice of factory farming once and for all. Part investigative journalism, part scientific study, and told through a variety of literary mediums, it is difficult not to be convinced by the passion and conviction of his arguments and the panache with which he conveys them. Of all the arguments in the book it is the assertion that what we chose to eat matters that reverberates longest. He recounts a powerful conversation with his grandmother about how she survived the holocaust:

“The worst it got was near the end. A lot of people died right at the end and I didn’t know if I could make it another day. A farmer, a Russian, God bless him, he saw my condition, and he went into his house and came out with a piece of meat for me.”

“He saved your life.”

“I didn’t eat it.”

“You didn’t eat it?”

“It was pork. I wouldn’t eat pork.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean why?”

“What, because it wasn’t kosher?”

“Of course.”

“But not even to save your life?”

“If nothing matters, there’s nothing to save.”

One must make choices based on our own conscience, and Foer never deviates from this central assertion. However, that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t do everything in his power to shape our consciences. Much of Eating Animals makes uncomfortable reading. He tells of turkeys genetically modified to the point of being unable to reproduce sexually, to a state where there are virtually none left in America that could survive in the wild. “What we do to living turkeys,” he asserts, “is just about as bad as anything humans have ever done to any animal in the history of the world.”

He tells of the pigs slaughtered in stages, of cesspools filled with animal excrement, and the often-overlooked seafood industry’s mind-boggling war on the seas. He breaks down statistics into conceivable metaphors. At one point he asks the reader to imagine being served a plate of sushi that also holds all the animals that were killed for that one serving, concluding that “the plate might have to be five feet across.” Another chapter begins with its title - ‘Influence / Speechlessness’ - repeated roughly 840 times over five pages. Why? Because “on average, Americans eat the equivalent of 21,000 entire animals in a lifetime – one animal for every letter on the last five pages.”

Some consider this sort of approach glib and distracting, but it is this exuberance to communicate in a variety of ways that has always made Foer’s work so engaging, and it is as powerful here as ever it has been.

Not all the book is made up of tales of animal abuse, though. Far from it. Much time is devoted to the environmental degradation that results from factory farming. “Just as nothing we do has the direct potential to cause nearly as much animal suffering as eating meat, no daily choice that we make has a greater impact on the environment.” He explains how factory farming is implicated in the spread of global pandemic illnesses such as bird flu, how it produces terrifying quantities of waste which has no sewerage system through which to be disposed, and how meat is injected with so many hormones that it is strengthening the resistance of viruses to antibiotics and thereby damaging our health. His argument is that cheap meat is a false economy as factory farms do not pay for the mess they create, that they pass on all the associated costs of environmental clean-up and health-care to taxpayers without taking responsibility for either their actions or the consequences.

It would be difficult not to reach the conclusion, as he does, that industrial factory farming is a horrendous blight on our world that cannot even begin to be excused by the cheap meat it produces. While it is important to recognise that Eating Animals deals almost exclusively with the American industry and that the situation there is more extreme than in the EU, the picture he draws is reflected to a lesser or greater degree in every meat industry in the western world. It would be a travesty if the focus on the American system were taken to give readers reason to adopt the sort of arrogant superiority that so often underpins our reactions toward America. After all, the UK has some of the cheapest food prices in the world and those savings have to come from somewhere.

The problem Foer quickly encounters is that we consume too much meat - about 150 times more chicken than we did eighty years ago. And that sort of production is only possible through factory farming.

“We shouldn’t kid ourselves about the number of ethical eating options available to most of us. There isn’t enough nonfactory chicken produced in America to feed the population of Staten Island and not enough nonfactory pork to serve New York City, let alone the country. Ethical meat is a promissory note, not a reality. Any ethical-meat advocate who is serious is going to be eating a lot of vegetarian fare.”

Foer spends an inordinate amount of time searching for an ‘ethical farm,’ a farm whose meat he would be happy to feed his children. Though he finds better farms whose work is based on traditional animal husbandry and organic rearing, he still witnesses what he considers barbaric and unnecessary practices such as branding and concludes that there is no such thing as humane farming methods. This is the closest he comes to stating openly that he believes eating animals to be wrong. Yet still, he doesn’t say ‘don’t eat meat’ but rather, ‘eat less meat’. He separates his personal decision to become a committed vegetarianism from a universal demand that others follow. Because of this many hard-line vegans have criticised Eating Animals for its refusal to explicitly support universal vegetarianism. He is wise enough to know that an absolutist argument of this kind would be counter-productive. So he couches his argument in storytelling, in a journey of discovery. He pitches this book not at a distant utopian future of universal vegetarianism but a first-step incremental reduction in meat consumption for all

Eating Animals is a rallying call to unite in opposition to the factory farming method of meat production. Yet it is typical of the book that Foer doesn’t sugar-coat this message in moral absolutism, but rather a return to stories.

“To give up the taste of sushi or roasted chicken is a loss that extends beyond giving up a pleasurable eating experience. Changing what we eat and letting tastes fade from memory creates a kind of cultural loss, a forgetting. But perhaps this kind of forgetfulness is worth accepting – even worth cultivating (forgetting, too, can be cultivated). To remember animals and my concern for their wellbeing, I may need to lose certain tastes and find other handles for the memories that they once helped me carry.”

As a reviewer I am guilty of describing books as ‘must read’ far more often than is strictly true. Indeed, it is arguable whether any fiction is ever must-read. However, if there is ever a book that warrants the moniker then it is Eating Animals or another book on the ethical and practical questions raised by the food we eat. Aside sleep and death, there is nothing that can be said to unite the entire global population as eating does. What we eat, and the impact it has on the lives we live and the world around us, is a fundamental question of our existence.

Eating Animals ends with its author hosting a meat-free Thanksgiving for family and the acceptance that they will need to develop new stories for this new diet. But, he contends, that is a small price to pay for not living with the shame of supporting such a profoundly abhorrent meat production system. During the course of his journey he repeatedly returns to an emblematic story about Franz Kafka staring into a fish tank and, on seeing his own reflection mingling with the animals he once ate, saying “Now at least I can look at you in peace.”

Life is about recognising the person you are and the person you want to be. It is about making decisions based on knowledge rather than routine. Without ever being overly preachy, Eating Animals asks us all to stare into a fish tank, to see ourselves reflected, and to decide what stories we wish to tell in the future.

9 out of 10

Eating Animals is published in the UK by Hamish Hamilton, March 2010. ISBN: 9780241143933. 352pp

Book Review: Everything is Illuminated - Jonathan Safran Foer

To celebrate the 200^th review on Books, Time, and Silence, I will be re-posting 10 of my favourite reviews. 

On day 7 it is a chance to relive Everything is Illuminated.

Read: January 2008

Everything is Illuminated in one tweet-sized chunk:

Vast in scope and iridescent in execution, not to mention fearlessly inventive, Everything is Illuminated left me wondering when I would read a novel quite this good again.

“In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.”
Milan Kundera – The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Any novel which takes its title from a Milan Kundera novel has a lot to live up to. And sometimes, in this startlingly original and diverse debut, Jonathan Safran Foer exceeds even an optimistic readers wildest dreams. Such is the dexterity and invention of his writing that one gets the impression there are no challenges to which he couldn’t rise.

I barely remember the last time I savoured every word of an entire novel. From the hilarious opening pages in which Alex introduces himself in his uniquely translated English – “My legal name is Alexander Perchov. But all my friends dub me Alex, because that is a more flaccid-to-utter version of my legal name.” – to the inevitable conclusion to their “very rigid search,” this is a novel that engages the reader throughout, eliciting an emotional response of one sort or another on almost every page.

The plot is multifarious, but essentially follows a character named Jonathan as he arrives in Ukraine to investigate his family history. He hires a local tour agency and sets off in search of the village of Trachimbrod and the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazi’s fifty years before. Accompanied by his translator, Alex – America obsessed and speaking English as though he has swallowed a thesaurus, - his ‘blind’ grandfather, and their ‘seeing-eye bitch’ Sammy Davis Jnr, Jnr, their journey into the heart of rural Ukraine takes them into a past hidden from view by fifty years of concerted and deliberate forgetting. You could say this is a novel about the holocaust, but it is not. Like Art Spiegleman’s exquisite graphic novel, Maus, it is about how the past effects the present, and how we are defined by the ways in which we remember and deal with the horrors of the past.

There are three concurrent plot lines woven together, each illuminating and offering commentary on the others. First we have the actual journey, recounted in his beautifully mangled English by Alex, hilarious, shot through with peculiarly profound descriptions and eye for the heart of the matter. Then there is Jonathan’s family history novel of Trachimbrod, brilliantly imagined, full of bizarre magical realist twists, religious writings and intense, slightly otherworldly characters. Finally there are Alex’s letters to Jonathan, now back in America, commenting upon each of their novels, offering oversight to the work as a whole and a pleasing post-script to the main action of the plot.

Brought together by Foer's amazing ability to hold multiple themes in the air and bring them together seamlessly, Everything is Illuminated is a beautifully written, hilarious and moving novel which will illuminate the reading of anyone who chooses to pick it up.

The oft used criticism for Everything is Illuminated is that the author is being too clever: that his invention and wit and conceptual scope are the results of a smart-alec show-off, the kind of intellectual posturing which fiction can do without. But when on earth did being clever become such a faux pas? There is nothing more commendable than an author willing to experiment with their writing, to reach for the stars and try and say as much in as meaningful a way as possible. Perhaps it is because the prose is so eminently readable that his intellect conflicts with some. Because it is when the simple meets the profound that this novel really illuminates the room. I read much of this in the bath and frequently wanted to jump up, suddenly enlivened with a phrase or idea, and shout ‘eureka!’ For suddenly the world was that little bit clearer. There are some beautiful phrases, beautiful in how they relate to the themes of the novel, the characters and the plot. They are not easily recreated because they do not exist in and of themselves, but are made great by the novel in its entirety, every single word and phrase eventually draws together, circular and profound. From the slow evolution of Alex’s language to the subtle fissions forming along the fault lines of history, Everything is Illuminated replicates itself throughout. The tone fits the events, the characters evolutionary arc delineates the emotional heart of the novel, the humour makes possible the tragedy.

Indeed it is the relationship between humour and tragedy that sums up all that takes place. Not only does humour make it possible to glance at the tragedies of the holocaust but those self same tragedies demonstrate just how hollow and fragile the humour can be. Nothing is set in stone, ideas evolve and develop with the intense experience of the characters, and the reader is invited along for the duration. For example, early on, in his letters Alex writes:

“I know that you asked me not to alter the mistakes because they sound humorous, and humorous is the only truthful way to tell a sad story, but I think I will alter them.”

Then, later in the novel, Jonathan offers the other interpretation:

“I used to think that humour was the only way to appreciate how wonderful and terrible the world is, to celebrate how big life is…but now I think it’s the opposite. Humour is a way of shrinking from that wonderful world”

What begins as a very funny, witty and irreverent novel is slowly overtaken by a gloomy appreciation of history and the characters are transformed in ways that can never be reversed.

“‘There is time for all of them,’ I told him, because remember where we are in our story, Jonathan. We still thought we possessed time.”

A celebration of the writing process throughout, each of the characters takes up their pen to try and shed light upon the experiences of the past, and it is the process of writing which makes them stare right at it, to understand their lives through the process of writing them. As Alex says: “With writing, we have second chances.” And echoed in history comes the repeated phrase from Trachimbrod, “We are writing, we are writing, we are writing.” Conserving the past so as to live in the present.

One thing Everything is Illuminated cannot be accused of is understatement. Very little is left to the imagination of the reader, or to speak for itself without having its purpose comprehensively enunciated. But, though this usually annoys me, here the vast, brash, luridly grandiose intentions of the author come shining through. It is a novel that could only be written by a young writer, vast and iridescent, fearlessly inventive, it left me wondering when I would read a novel as good again. I have spent the last week flicking through the pages, desperately trying to assimilate it all, reminding myself of an event here, a phrase there. Perhaps I will even read the book again, immediately, afraid to forget a single detail.

For in a novel which is all about memory, the one thing I can say for certain is that I shall not forget it in a hurry. It is a book which gets under your skin and they are characters you take to heart. As Alex sums up at the culmination of the excellent movie adaptation:

“I have reflected many times upon our rigid search. It has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us, on the inside, looking out. Like you say, inside out.”

10 out of 10

Book Review: Netherland - Joseph O'Neill

To celebrate the 200^th review on Books, Time, and Silence, I will be re-posting 10 of my favourite reviews. 

On day 6 I revisit Netherland, a book that was met with barely contained hyperbole on publication, but controversially excluded from the Booker shortlist and seems to have subsequently faded from memory.

Read: August 2008

Netherland in one tweet-sized chunk:

Beautifully written, astutely observed, Netherland is the best zeitgeist novel of recent years.

Every so often a book comes along which is so well written, which feels so perfectly relevant to today, that you cannot believe you haven’t read it before. Netherland is just such a book. Hailed as the first great post-9/11 novel and being compared favourably with The Great Gatsby for its portrayal of the American Dream it is a novel about striving for more without being quite sure what it is you want more of. Although I would take issue with pigeonholing it as either a 9/11 novel, or one solely about America, there is no doubt that Netherland is one of the best books I have read this year.

Hans van den Broek is a Dutch investment banker living in New York, who seeks solace from his failing marriage in the form of cricket. It is the months after 9/11, and his wife Rachel decides to return to the apparent safety of London, taking their young son Jake with her. Hans is unable to see that his marriage is in trouble: he is distant, emotionally reserved, rational to a fault. He stays in America, commuting to London to see his son every couple of weekends, but otherwise living in the chaotic Chelsea Hotel and continuing to accrue wealth without effort or enjoyment.

Then, one Saturday afternoon at a cricket match, Hans comes across Chuck Ramkissoon, a verbose and driven umpire and businessman, who has grand plans for cricket in America. Chuck is a Gatsby-esque American hero; constantly striving to make something of himself, full of entrepreneurial determination and guile. Somehow, Chuck draws Hans into his schemes and soon, the two men have formed an unlikely, and somewhat shaky, friendship. On the one hand you have the wealthy Hans, who travels backwards and forwards between New York and London, and for whom America a nice idea to console his marital strife; on the other there is Chuck, a driven, dynamic immigrant, ever eager to find some sort of belonging in a country which represents possibly his only hope. He dreams a glorious future for cricket, a sport which he sees as instructional, the solution to many of America’s most pressing issues.

“All people, Americans, whoever, are at their most civilized when they’re playing cricket…What’s the first thing that happens when Pakistan and India make peace? They play a cricket match. Cricket is instructive…It has a moral angle. ... I say, we want to have something in common with Hindus and Muslims? Chuck Ramkissoon is going to make it happen. With the New York Cricket Club, we could start a whole new chapter in U.S. history. Why not?”

His idea is simple: to build a cricket stadium on a disused New York runway, found a cricket club, and host international, multi-million dollar matches there. Crazy? Perhaps. But his ideas bare remarkable resemblance to those of Sir Allen Stanford, the billionaire whose winner-takes-all Twenty20 matches between England and the West Indies had, at their heart, much the same intention: to cash in on an untapped market by bringing the sport back to America.

But in many senses, this plot is irrelevant. There are some beautiful descriptions of cricket, but this is not a book about cricket. Similarly it is set in the aftermath of 9/11, but it is not a book about that fateful morning or how it has affected the world. Nor is it specifically about the breakdown of a marriage. Rather, Netherland is about all these things and how they weave together in one man’s life. It is one of those supreme achievements which seems able to characterise something about our world which is not often captured, and to do so with such clarity of thought and simplicity of prose that it is a joy to become lost in its crisp pages. Joseph O’Neill was born in Ireland, to Irish and Turkish parentage, raised in Holland, educated in England, and now lives in New York. This sort of cosmopolitanism shines through his writing. Like Jane Austen, O’Neill is a master of astute observation. The world he writes about is a world I recognise intimately, he captures a certain Zeitgeist fabulously. When Hans reminisces about first meeting Rachel, he describes them as having “courted in the style preferred by the English: alcoholically.” At another point he characterises English summers as like a Russian doll: largest of all you have “the summer of the great heatwave,” (2003) and from there they grow smaller and smaller down to “the summer of Monty Panesar and, smallest of all perhaps, the summer of Wayne Rooney’s foot.”

But where some contemporary novels can feel glib and forced, here O’Neill writes so eloquently that you feel your life reflected back on the page. At one point, sat alone in New York moping over the collapse of his marriage, Hans uses Google Maps to focus in on his son’s residence, spotting the paddling pool in the back garden, but unable to make out any more amidst the “depthless” pixels. It is a moment of simple beauty. Another comes during a scene in the New York blackout, where life seems to hang frozen in the air, halfway between apocalypse and invincibility. This is a fragile book, with real heart at its centre.

And this is no more so the case than where it reflects 9/11. Joseph O’Neill understands something important about the events of that morning: that grandiose words are incapable of capturing them. Just as Don Delillo did in Falling Man, O’Neill does not seek to explain or resort to hyperbole. Instead, he is happy to cast 9/11 as an event which affected a great many people in lots of unexpected ways, but which did not transform the world in the ways that people often conceive. As Hans observes near the end:

“Not that long ago, at yet another gathering of familiars, our host, an old friend of Rachel’s named Matt, makes some remarks about Tony Blair and his catastrophic association with George W. Bush, whom Matt describes as the embodiment of a distinctly American strain of stupidity and fear. On this side of the Atlantic, this is a commonplace judgement, so commonplace, in fact, as to be of no real interest.”

This book laughs at the sort of exaggerated, reactionary anti-Americanism which seeped across the world in the Bush years. But it is not pro-Bush, or pro-American either. It is not pro anything. It is simply a book that seeks to represent the world as it is, not as we want it to be, or fear that it may become. And I am not sure I have read a book which is more packed with witty little observations that reflect the contemporary world more accurately than Joseph O’Neill does in Netherland.

If you like plot-based novels, then this is possibly not the novel for you. While the plot description appears to offer a murder mystery centring on the discovery of Chuck Ramkissoon’s body in a New York canal, in reality there is no mystery. This is a book about one man, and his life. Despite the strange meanderings of Hans’ narrative, I was quite happy to follow where he led, to dip in and out of the multiple stories at his whim, to wait patiently while the slowly unfolding events played out. Within two pages I knew I was going to love it. And if, perhaps, there is a little too much of the male mid-life crisis literary prose here then so what? It is so brilliantly written that it could have been about alien addiction to sherbet for all I cared. I just wanted to sit back and enjoy the fantastic prose, with its gentle rhythms, astute observation, and understated characters.

Perhaps Netherland is not the ‘Great American Novel’ it has been cracked up to be. After all, it does not seem to be pre-eminently concerned with America. It is a global book, a Western book at least. But so much more than that, it is a great novel about people and places and experiences, and how they interact with our mindsets at the time. You have to read Netherland; it is, quite simply, brilliant.

9 out of 10

Book Review: The Road - Cormac McCarthy

To celebrate the 200^th review on Books, Time, and Silence, I will be re-posting 10 of my favourite reviews. 

On day two it is The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

Read: October 2007

The Road in one Tweet-sized chunk:

Sparse, understated. The Road is everything good in modern fiction.

They are nameless. The man and his son. But they are us all. Walking The Road because it is the only way they can go. Alone. Heading for the coast. A post-apocalyptic world enshrouding them. Ransacked. Gutted. Ash rain tumbling from the grey blanket that was once called the sky. Perpetual gloom.

It is always there. The threat. From armed cannibalistic gangs, from hunger, from loss of hope. Horror assaulting the eyes behind every corner. And the sun no more to be seen. “He looked at the sky out of old habit but there was nothing to see.”

Polluted. Now the earth is expunging life from itself. But they keep walking the road south, fleeing the winter they know they cannot survive. Sometimes he remembers the before, but those memories are fading. And he will not let himself dream. The boy never even knew the before. But he knows plenty about life.

“He turned and looked. He looked like he had been crying.

Just tell me.

We wouldn’t ever eat anybody, would we?

No. Of course not.

Even if we were starving?

We’re starving now.

You said we weren’t.

I said we weren’t dying. I didn’t say we weren’t starving.

But we wouldn’t?

No. We wouldn’t.

No matter what.

No. No matter what.

Because we’re the good guys.

Yes.

And we’re carrying the fire.

And we’re carrying the fire. Yes.

Okay.”

Sparse, understated. The Road is everything good in modern fiction. It may be bleak and desolate but through the gloom come little chinks of lights: it is life affirming, redemptive. You can taste the ash in the water, feel the gloom and almost reach out and touch the boys terror. It is immediate, visceral, omnipresent.

The Road warrants every acolade accorded it. It will undoubtedly become a global classic.

9 out of 10

Book Review: The Theory of Clouds - Stephane Audeguy

To celebrate the 200^th review on Books, Time, and Silence, I will be re-posting 10 of my favourite reviews. On day one it is The Theory of Clouds by Stephane Audeguy, a book I consider the most fortunate discovery of my life.

Read: December 2007

The Theory of Clouds in one tweet-sized chunk:

The Theory of Clouds is a journey across skies and into lives, quietly building a tapestry of interlocking narratives on life, obsession and memory

Since the dawn of time writers have been drawn to the sea, to its solitude and its silent power. From Homer and William Shakespeare to Virginia Woolf, Iris Murdoch, and John Banville, the sea has existed as both a living presence, and metaphorical idea on which novels, poems and plays have floated…and occasionally sunk. Yet despite their equally transient nature, moodiness, and deceptive depth, clouds have been largely overlooked in the annuls of literature. Suddenly, having read The Theory of Clouds this strikes me as a remarkable oversight.

“All children become sad in the late afternoon, for they begin to comprehend the passage of time. The light starts to change. Soon they will have to head home, and to behave, and to pretend.”

From this sumptuous first paragraph, The Theory of Clouds takes you on a journey across the skies and into lives, quietly, gradually, sparsely building a tapestry of interlocking narratives, stories of life, and obsession, and clouds. Stephane Audeguy’s debut novel, already the recipient of the Grand Prize of the French Academy, reveals a rare and delightfully fresh new literary talent.

Legendary couturier Akira Kumo has built his whole life for himself: never questioning the holes in his memory: the absence of a childhood, or family. Now retired, he has devoted himself to amassing the world’s largest collection of books on clouds and meteorology. Requiring someone to catalogue this vast library, he hires Virginie Latour and begins to teach her about the history of clouds, and those who have watched them.

So begins this most gently beautiful of books. As Kumo takes Virginie on a historical tour of clouds, we meet prominent men whose lives have been attracted to those deceptively heavy clouds which float so lightly across the skies.

We meet Luke Howard a devout Quaker who, in 1821 gave clouds the names by which they have been known ever since, Cirrus, Cummulus, Stratus, and Nimbus. Then there is Lewis Fry Richardson, a devout pacifist and mathematician who devised the means of modern weather forecasting years before the technology existed make it a reality.

But though some lives are made by their relationship with clouds, others lose themselves in their deceptive depths.

“Men are destroyed, and destroy each other, over basic things – money or hatred. On the other hand a really complicated riddle never pushed anyone to violence; either you found the answer or gave up looking. Clouds were riddles too, but dangerously simple ones. If you zoomed in on one part of a cloud and took a photograph, then enlarged the image, you would find that a cloud’s edges seemed like another cloud, and those edges yet another, and so on. Every part of a cloud, in other words, reiterates the whole. Therefore each cloud might be called infinite, because its very surface is composed of other clouds, and those clouds of still other clouds, and so forth. Some learn to lean over the abyss of these brainteasers; others lose their balance and tumble into its eternal blackness.”

It is this infinity, this capricious refusal to be defined, that can send people mad. For example, Carmichael, the English painter, whose obsession with painting the true nature of clouds drives him mad. But it is the story of Richard Abercrombie, noted cloud watcher and all round English gentlemen, which holds the key, not only to Kumo’s collection, but to his past, and Virginie’s future.

So when The Abercrombie Protocol becomes available, Kumo dispatches Virginie to London to see if she can lay her hands on the fabled document. Her journey takes her into the heart of the very history Kumo has been teaching her, its locale and its characters, and soon she returns with fresh stories, stories which run to the heart of that most difficult of relationships, between clouds, and the people who watch them.

The Theory of Clouds is about the interconnectedness of nature and humanity. Without a single line of dialogue Audegey builds a novel which is both illuminating and beautiful, understated and yet intensely profound. The narratives verge from the fictional to the literal, each story merging together, reflecting its predecessors in some way or other, be it geographically, emotionally, intellectually or in the events of life and death. And slowly but surely the lives of Kumo and Virginie merge with their forebears, being written into this future history of clouds.

There are touches of Kazuo Ishiguro here, in the Japanese history and the sparse prose, the ability to let events and stories speak for themselves. Subtly, ever so quietly, this novel will creep up upon you until you find yourself thoroughly engrossed, hungry to read at all hours of the day. There are hints of W.G. Sebald too, in the search for memory and historical truth.

“Only the ocean may be more fascinating to watch than clouds, and equally dangerous, for nothing is more useless and more deceptive and generally more stupefying that watching something that is ever changing and ever self-renewing. Yearning to describe or understand, or even control it can cost you everything. What Virginie first perceived as a long and sweetly amorous procession of clouds now contained an element of despair, unrequited love, and dreary solitude.”

Reading this simple tale of clouds is so much more and less than that. It is like watching the clouds pass overhead, like looking at life itself, head on for once. Infinity, infinitely recurring, always changing, never definable. And the clouds are both literal in the history and science behind them, and a metaphor for the transience of thought, of life, and of expectations.

I finished The Theory of Clouds on a Friday afternoon and started re-reading it immediately. I had never done that before and it was as good the second time as it was the first. I can offer no greater recommendation than that.

10 out of 10

Book Review: Catching Fire - Suzanne Collins

Read: September 2009

Catching Fire in one tweet-sized chunk:

Catching Fire does exactly that, igniting eyes-glued-to-the-page compulsion like few other books can. But then it goes off the boil.

“If it were up to me, I would try to forget the Hunger Games entirely. Never speak of them. Pretend they were nothing but a bad dream. But the Victory Tour makes that impossible. Strategically placed almost midway between the annual Games, it is the Capitol's way of keeping the horror fresh and immediate. Not only are we in the districts forced to remember the iron grip of the Capitol's power each year, we are forced to celebrate it. And this year, I am one of the stars of the show. I will have to travel from district to district to stand before the cheering crowds who secretly loathe me, to look down into the faces of the families whose children I have killed...”

Months have passed since Katniss and Peeta cheated the odds and scored a surprise and subversive victory in the 74^th Hunger Games. Now, faced with the obligatory Victory Tour and the need to once more impersonate a perfect couple, Katniss longs for the obscurity and freedom of her previous life. Though it is no longer a financial necessity, she continues to hunt outside the electrified fence and frequent the dodgy Hob. She regularly visits her old home, and the family of an old friend. It may not be perfect, but at least it is her life. For now.

One night, however, Katniss returns home to a surprise visit from the sinister President Snow who reveals that her little act of rebellion, her little victory over the Gamemakers, has had wider implications than she could have predicted. The situation is simple: the Victory Tour goes smoothly or she will be in trouble. For everyone knows that acts of rebellion, even ones solely designed to stay alive, rarely escape punishment in Panem. The effect of challenging an omnipotent state and winning, in any context, is to question the very existence of that power.

Catching Fire quickly proves an appropriate title as Katniss and Peeta struggle valiantly to save their lives and quench the flames that their actions have ignited. What they see on tour shows just how far things have progressed. There are rumours of a secret district, messages passed around in baked loaves of bread, simple acts of defiance. Katniss's Mockingjay pin increasingly comes to inspire and encapsulate the rising unease. And all the while President Snow waits in the background, smelling of blood and roses, embodying the omnipresence of the state, the ability to destroy with just a nod. Now seventeen, and in the middle of an awkward love triangle she has no interest in being part of, Katniss is propelled into a world of adult games for adult stakes. The violence may be less physical and imminent than it was in the arena, but it is no less deadly. And with the 75^th anniversary Quarter Quell looming and outright rebellion starting to spread, it appears that it wont be long before the authorities put out the fire once and for all...

The Hunger Games focused to such an extent on the eponymous games that we gained only a tantalising glimpse of the powerful forces that gave rise to it. Catching Fire is a far more intriguing book because the gaps start to be filled in. I've always been a fan of the middle book in a trilogy, or the penultimate one of longer series. They are generally the chance for an author to set the scene for what is to come, to focus on character and setting rather than plot. The slower pace allows for more detailed investigation into the background of a situation; the knowledge that there is already a committed readership eager to know more provides a certain leeway for an author to indulgence their imagination and flesh out their world.

And for the first 300-odd pages that is exactly what we get here. We travel with Katniss and Peeta as they travel to various districts of Panem on their Victory Tour, meeting people and seeing places that begin to round out the wider setting. All the while we are aware that events are progressing inexorably towards whatever the Capitol has in store for them, but that is in the future. It is enjoyable simply to stare out of the window and begin to understand. Questions are answered and more are posed. It is fascinating, enthralling, compelling reading. There are scenes back in the Capitol which are cinematic in scope and visual magnificence.

Everything is hotting up nicely.

But then it goes rapidly off the boil. Catching Fire turns out to be a deeply flawed and unbalanced book. It is as though, having spent so long providing background and detail to the world, Collins, loses her nerve and tries to cram in a rehash of The Hunger Games to ensure her readers don't get too bored. There may be a new terrain and different competitors, but it remains the same old Hunger Games. And without the freshness of the last games, the tension that has built up fizzles out. The world-weary and battle-scarred competitors are far less beguiling than their younger counterparts were, and they have neither the time nor, it seems, the compunction to make much of an impact. The effect is that what is supposed to be a dramatic finale to set of the final volume becomes a rushed and truncated affair.

Basically, Catching Fire is too short. The first two thirds are perfectly paced, intriguing and at least as eyes-glued-to-the-page-exciting as The Hunger Games. Probably more so. But the second Hunger Games is crammed in; there is no chance for the tension to ratchet up or the other characters to make sense. The entire reading experience is unbalanced by the distracting knowledge that the pages are running away quicker than the plot is finding resolution. It is a disappointing way to end what is otherwise an exhilarating read.

But pleasingly, the rerun of the Hunger Games is also its epitaph. For better or worse, the final book will have to tread completely new territory. There will be no comforting returns to the all encompassing power of Panem, no reality TV nightmares, no sparkling costumes on launch nights, none of the routine features that have worked so well up until now. The first two-thirds of Catching Fire suggest that Suzanne Collins is more than capable of living up to the hype that will inevitably surround its release. Mockingjay should be a dramatically different book, and I'm awaiting it all the more eagerly for this.

Edition shown: US edition, Scholastic Press, September 2009, ISBN: 9780439023498, 400 pp
Current UK edition: Scholastic, September 2009, ISBN: 9781407109367, 480 pp

7.5 out of 10

Book Review: The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins

Read: September 2009

The Hunger Games on one Tweet-sized chunk:
The Hunger Games is exciting, enjoyable, and escapist. A swashbuckling action-packed adventure guarunteed to engross readers of all ages.

I don’t know exactly when it was, but sometime last year I fell out of love with reading. Books that would usually be read in a couple of days were taking weeks to finish, whole weeks went by when I didn’t even think of picking up a book. It wasn’t that I was reading bad books but for some reason my mind wasn’t in a place to be transported by them as it often is.

Yet amidst the books I failed to get enthused by there were a few notable exceptions and first among them was The Hunger Games. I didn’t just read it from cover to cover. I devoured it. I read it whilst walking to work, I read it at my desk on my lunch break, I read it walking home again in the evening. I finished it at 4am on a weekday, then picked up and read the first chapter of the second book, Catching Fire, before finally snatching a couple of hours sleep. It is exciting, enjoyable, and escapist: some of the best things a work of fiction can be.

Set in a dystopian, post-apocalyptic future America known as Panem, The Hunger Games is an annual reality TV show that pits 12 boys and 12 girls against each other in a battle to the death. For the winner: fame and fortune. The other twenty-three competitors leave in body bags.

It’s a particularly repugnant society that could let such barbarism take place, and Panem is worse than repugnant. Ever since the Capitol won a civil war many years ago, it has ruled its twelve Districts with an iron fist. Movement between districts is utterly impossible, food strictly rationed. Any sign of rebellion is punishable with death. And the jewel in the crown of their control, the very demonstration of power and means by which it is exerted, lies in The Hunger Games.

Katniss Everdeen is sixteen-year-old growing up in District 12, a poor coal-mining area of the Appalachians. Her father was killed in a mining accident when she was just a child and ever since then her mother has suffered bouts of depression. For years she has supported the family, hunting illegally outside the electrified fences and learning to take care of herself. She is tough and skilled and absolutely terrified that her name will be selected to compete in The Hunger Games. But there is one thing she fears even more than certain death…

Combining commentary on the exploitation of Big Brother-style reality television with political angst, teenage defiance, and tonnes of action adventure violence, The Hunger Games is as exciting as reading gets. Katniss and the other characters are utterly beguiling, their situation the stuff of nightmares. One cannot remain emotionally uninvolved or neutral. There are spectacular costumes that dazzle with subtle messages of defiance, people willing to spend all they have to keep their competitors alive. There can have been few societies – either in history or fiction – whose moral bankruptcy is so extensive as the wealthy and materialistic Capitol's. The eagerness with which they consume The Hunger Games is truly gruesome. They get bored if there aren't enough deaths, gamble on the fate of the competitors, tune in to 'round-up' shows that show the days dramatic battles. There is something of the Colosseum blood-lust to their viewing, but mixed with detached indifference. There is a gap between everyday reality and the movie style 'reality' of the TV.

I love the slightly disturbing direction that Young Adult fiction has taken in the past decade or so. Earlier this week I finally got around to reading The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and became aware of how adeptly this type of book can distil complex situations into emotionally involving portrayals of common humanity. The visceral reaction they produce reminds us that sometimes there really things which are just morally wrong.

The Hunger Games is one of them. If it weren’t for the breathless pace of the plot that keeps the pages being turned, one might cast the book away in disgust. Yet the violence, though ever present, is not gratuitous and always couched within a healthy sense of disgust for what is happening. It is humanity that shines through strongest, simple friendship developed in extraordinary situations.

The Hunger Games is a swashbuckling action-packed adventure guaranteed to engross readers of all ages. The prose doesn’t shine, the premise shamelessly derivative (Battle Royale anyone?), the plot twists largely predictable. But sometimes that just doesn’t matter. If you are looking for a quick and involving escapist read then they don’t get much better than this.

Edition shown: US edition, Scholastic Press, September 2008, ISBN: 9780439023481, 384 pp

Current UK edition: Scholastic Books, January 2009, ISBN: 9781407109084, 464 pp

7.5 out of 10

Book Review: Sputnik Sweetheart - Haruki Murakami

To read a shorter version of this review, click here.

Read: January 2006 (and again in January 2010)

Sputnik Sweetheart in one Tweet-sized chunk:

Sputnik Sweetheart is a novel of almosts, where liminal spaces overlap and longing can never quite be divorced from true love.

“In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life. An intense love, a veritable tornado sweeping across the plains – flattening everything in its path, tossing things up in the air, ripping them to shreds, crushing them to bits…In short, a love of truly monumental proportions. The person she fell in love with happened to be 17 years older than Sumire. And was married. And, I should add, was a women. This was where it all began, and where it all ended. Almost.”

Sputnik Sweetheart is a novel of almosts, where liminal spaces overlap and longing can never quite be divorced from true love. It is beautifully evocative yet difficult to define, a tale of unrequited love, unrealised ambition, and yearning, always yearning, for more. Perhaps because it is about anticipation of, and longing for, love rather than love itself, it is also one of the most romantic books I have ever read.

The plot revolves around a love triangle between three people who, like Othello, love not wisely but too well. Their fatal flaws are not violent jealousy though, but a sort of insidious loneliness destined to prevent them ever really finding what they most crave. There is K., your typical easy-going and pensive Murakami narrator; Sumire, a bohemian and obsessive writer who dresses in an oversized coat and heavy boots, dreams of emulating Jack Kerouac, and whom K. is helplessly in love with; and Miu, the women Sumire has fallen for. Miu is a successful wine importer, independent, stylish, and confident – everything Sumire wants to be. She is drawn to Miu like a little Sputnik orbiting a vast planet.

If ever love has transformed a person it does Sumire. She becomes Miu’s assistant, exchanging a life of compulsive all night writing and chain smoking for a regular nine-to-five job. She buys nice clothes and changes her hairstyle, begins to appreciate wine and learn Italian, and soon moves into a bigger apartment. She spends hours on the phone with K., discussing the big questions in life: love, sexual desire, existentialism, the process of writing, whether she should confess her feelings to Miu.

Miu and Sumire set off on a business trip to Europe, leaving K. behind to console himself in a series of meaningless affairs. But when a distraught Miu calls K. out of the blue from a small Greek island to say that Sumire has disappeared without a trace, he drops everything and travels halfway around the world to help find her.

What started out as a love story morphs into a sort of otherworldly detective novel. K. finds a document on a floppy disc hidden in Sumire’s luggage and it holds a clue. But can it be that the key to Sumire’s fate lies in the strange events which afflicted Miu on a Ferris wheel almost 14 years before, turning her prematurely and completely white?

Transformation – both voluntary and involuntary – is one of the central themes of Sputnik Sweetheart. The loneliness is not only borne of not being around others, but of being apart from one’s self. Each ruminates on loneliness in their own way: “Who can really distinguish between the sea and what’s reflected in it? Or tell the difference between the falling rain and loneliness?” meditates K. at one point. This detached passion runs throughout his narration: you get the feeling that in recounting Sumire’s love for Miu he is really giving voice to the love he has fantasised Sumire showing him. Typically for Murakami characters they prefer this sort of sexually enigmatic fantasy to actual love. Each of the protagonists lives out their own longing in their own unreciprocated – and therefore unsullied – way. Sputnik literally translates into English as ‘travelling companion,’ and that is what they are each looking for: a human connection, someone to talk to, fall asleep next to, and yearn for. Someone to free them from themselves, from loneliness. And in a way that is what they each find, though not in the way any of them had hoped.

Part detective novel without detective or resolution, part love story without reciprocated love, pinning Sputnik Sweetheart down is far from easy. Everything seems to be “one step out of line, a cardigan with the buttons done up wrong.” Writing in The Guardian when it was first published, Julie Myerson professed to not really knowing what it was all about. “But”, she continued, “it has touched me deeper and pushed me further than anything I’ve read in a long time.”

Such is the mysterious power of Murakami novels.

Given the characters obsessive longing, it is perhaps unsurprising that the imagery sometimes borders on the overblown. Murakami treads a fine line, pushing the longing as far as possible, without quite tipping over into the histrionic. Near the beginning Sumire expresses her desire to one day compose “a massive 19th century-style Total Novel, a kind of portmanteau packed with every possible phenomenon in order to capture the soul and human destiny.” Sputnik Sweetheart achieves this in barely 230 pages. With a similarly spacious style to Hemingway, Murakami lets events speak for themselves; he is a master of anticipating his readers’ reactions, manipulating without appearing to do so. “A story is not something of this world. A real story requires a kind of magical baptism to link the world on this side with the world on the other side.” All the brilliance of Murakami’s novels lies in an understanding of this. And it is precisely because this magical otherworldliness is juxtaposed with a routine, everyday recounting of events that he is able to move one so.

There are those who find the ambiguity of Murakami’s fiction baffling and infuriating in equal measure. Certainly it is unwise to pick up any of his books expecting rational explanations or perfectly tied up plots. Yet the quality of Sputnik Sweetheart is in its representation of an emotion, a sense, a deep held belief that can be neither proved nor disproved. It captures longing – for love, for artistic realisation, for life, for beauty – at its most elemental.

Everything is ethereal, nothing quite as it should be. Whatever you think you perceive vanishes when looked at too closely. Like most great romances, Sputnik Sweetheart has the feel of a dream. There is something of Wuthering Heights here, in the way that not even physical separation can overcome the connections the characters share, and not even emotional closeness can fill the void each others absence leaves in themselves. As with Cathy and Heathcliff, what takes place defies explanation, and doesn’t really need one either.

“All over again I understood how important, how irreplaceable, Sumire was to me. In her own special way she’d kept me tethered to the world. As I talked to her and read her stories, my mind quietly expanded, and I could see things I’d never seen before. Without even trying, we grew close. Like a pair of young lovers undressing in front of each other, Sumire and I had exposed our hearts to one another, an experience I’d never have with anyone else, anywhere. We cherished what we had together, though we never put into words how very precious it was.”

Like much of Murakami’s oeuvre Sputnik Sweetheart is best understood as a sort of ellipsis, a gap in everyday life that is simultaneously mundane and fantastical and into which all the things we sort of know about ourselves and sort of suspect about the world around us are given composite reality. He is an author who never fails to reaffirm my love of reading. His fiction, never more so than in this slim novella, creates worlds where dreams – in all their bizarre and often troubling unpredictability – come true.


9 out of 10


Edition shown: The Harvill Press, ISBN: 9781860468254, 229pp
Currently available edition: Vintage, ISBN: 9780099448471 ,  240pp

Vulpes Libris is one of ten blogs invited by The Big Green Bookshop in Wood Green, London, to take part in their new Bloggers’ Book of the Month promotion. Sputnik Sweetheart will be our choice for March.