"Julia" by Sandra Newman

An audio book, set in the world of "1984".

Julia, 26, works in the Fiction section of the Ministry of Truth, mending the machines that create plots. She wears an "anti-sex league" sash. Artificial insemination (ArtSem) is encouraged. She chats up Winston Smith. The Ministry of Love is white with no windows.

She finds an aborted foetus in the toilet of her hostel and reports it. It was Vicky's but someone else is blamed and is never seen again. Vicky fancies Julia. Lesbians are biologically unable to have sex, so it's not a sex crime. Julia fantasised about pilots. She's had sex with about 20 party members. She likes sex in the countryside. O'Brien has a private meeting with her. He's impressed that she denounced her mother. O'Brien says that Julia doesn't hate, that she (like him) is one of the new breed of humans. He knows that she's had sex with Smith and wants her to continue using him as her training subject. Winston thinks that O'Brien's in their side.

There's a long flashback to her youth.

She uses a grubby room in a junkstore to have sex with Winston and others. She knows that it's bugged and has cameras. She's fantasised about having sex with Big Brother in his crystal palace (he has nothing to hide - everybody else is under constant surveillance). When she thinks she's pregnant she gets inseminated as part of the "Big Future" project - it's Big Brother's semen.

Vicky is on the Central Committee. Julia tells her that she wonders if the "Brotherhood" (rebels) are really much of a threat, and whether there really is a war against Eurasia. She and Winston are arrested. They're tortured in the Ministry of Love by O'Brien, ultimately betraying each other. She's released though she's disfigured by rats eating her face, and expecting to be killed once she's given birth. She meets Winston, who feels guilty.

She escapes the city by merging with evacuees. She by chance approaches crystal palace. The rebels have taken it over. They welcome her. She's surprised that Big Brother exists. She's allowed to visit him. He's old and demented. She (like many other of his visitors) feels sorry for him and her own lost hopes. At the end, while she's processed to join the rebels she's asked the same questions as O'Brien asked Winston.

I can recall few details from "1984", so I looked it up on Wikipedia. It entered the public domain on 1 January 2021 in most of the world. I didn't realise that the statement "2 + 2 = 5" was a communist party slogan which encouraged fulfilment of the five-year plan in four years. I presume the conversation between Julia and Winston in "1984" closely matches that in "Julia", though here we get Julia's PoV, and there's more about sex. I'd forgotten that the anti-sex idea was in 1984.

Other reviews

• Natasha Walter (by about halfway through, I began to feel more convinced by Julia’s responses to this totalitarian state than I had ever been by Smith’s. Yet after that halfway point, the novel starts to weaken. The entry into darkness, into the Ministry of Love, does not have the power of Orwell’s journey. ... The book reaches what feels like an effective and sharply delineated denouement just over 50 pages before the end.)

"That's just perfect" by Nicola Gill

An audio book - Emily's 1st person PoV, Ed's 3rd person PoV, and Liz's 3rd person PoV.

Emily Baxter is a teacher living in England. Mark has left her, but she wants to keep it secret. Her father Ed lives in Tampa. He’s in a relationship with much younger Shona. He left Emily when he was 11. Her mother died when she was 17, after which she went to live with grandmother Liz. Ed has messed up a deal and is in debt - about to lose his condo. He turns up at Emily’s house. He asks his mother for a loan. She’s in debt herself – she’s lent £65,000 to her soulmate Peter, who she’s never met. Ed wants to show he cares by getting excited about Emily's wedding. He buys her a dress, having won some money betting. They look at wedding venues. She gets drunk on the eve of a school inspection and leaves messages on Mark’s phone. The inspection doesn’t go well. A parent complains.

My guess is that Peter will turn out to be genuine and will return the money, saving the day. Emily, Ed and Liz will all be older and wiser.

Emily's cat (which used to be her mother's) needs an op, bringing back memories of her mother's illness. He's mugged, losing his phone. Shona thinks he's been unfaithful.

Mark returns. She's been told that "Someone can be a good person but not your person". Mark doesn't want to travel. She does. He says he'll go anywhere with her. That's not enough for her now.

Liz gets evidence of Peter's lies. She's about to kill herself in a river when Ed and Emily find her.

10 months later all 3 are together for Ed's wedding with Shona. Emily's been travelling.

There are many sentences of the form Emotion ... Verb ... Body Part - e.g. "Anxiety bubbles in my stomach".

"A short affair" by Simon Oldfield (ed) (Scribner, 2020)

Original short stories illustrated by Tracey Emin, etc.

• "The Kiss" (Russell Tovey) - The male first-person character had an unhappy childhood, went to New York, met a man called Cave and wanted to see him again, but didn't until he saw him by chance months later in hospital. Cave had leukemia. They live together until Cave dies. The narrator's suicidal. He sees Shirley daily. He gives her 10 weeks to talk him out of killing himself. She touches him (he's not been touched for a long time) and he's better. He's lasted 5 years in the city.
• "On Heat" (Elizabeth Day) - James (his PoV. 68, ex-Booker winner, adulterer, married to Patsy) is working on his next novel in his house when he sees a dog opposite tied up in hot sunlight. He moves it into the shade. Crossing the road back he faints. Patsy (her PoV) had given up her job for their marriage, could often feel herself adopting her standard submissive role. She recalls that day hearing a noise outside and seeing James lying in the street. She went to him, waiting for the ambulance to arrive, knowing he was dead. She had laced his drink with sleeping pills. She'd had enough.
• "Ms Featherstone and the Beast" (Bethan Roberts) - Stevie likes his feminist teacher Ms Amber Featherstone - she doesn't like Margaret Thatcher and she helps him edit the school newspaper. He's embarrassed by his parents' occasional intimacy. His brother is waiting to be sent to the Falklands. During an editorial meeting at Amber's house he discovers that she has a partner - Barney, who looks rough. He's called in by the deputy head about the newpaper. The teacher wants him to admit that the provocative articles are Featherstone's fault. He takes fully responsibility (which was honest). Next day it's announced that Featherstone is taking the rest of the term off. He goes to her, worried that she'd been sacked because of the newspaper, wanting to tell her that he hadn't said she was to blame. She has a black eye. She's chucked Barney out. He would like to help her somehow. She says she shouldn't be talking to pupils and tells him to leave. [My favourite so far]
• "Didi's" (Nikesh Shukla) - The female narrator, born in New York to Gujarati parents (now separated), has a dog, occasional boyfriends, but only one friend of her ethnicity. She thinks a lot about her mother's food. One night she find's Didi's, a backstreet warehouse where food is sold. She starts going there often, meeting people there. She discovers a photo there of her parents and her when she was 2 (in 1989) - her parents had lived 3 blocks away when she was born but hadn't told her about it. She realises that "This other house, it's always been here for me, home, I just hadn't found it yet"
• "A Quiet Tidy Man" (Claire Fuller) - Mr Grubb fell in love with Marjorie at 17, but she married someone else and had 5 kids. Grubb and Marjorie married when her husband suddenly died and the oldest child was 15. They lived in a ramshackle house, undisciplined, owning 6 horses. He let them get on with things. After a head injury and a coma he woke up a different man, angry and demanding. The kids decide to kill him one night, all jumping on his bed to suffocate him. But the post-mortum showed that he died from being heavily drugged. [didn't do much for me]
• "The lighting of the lamp" (Ben Okri) - 28 little sections. The narrator dreams only with her eyes open. She has many plants in her room. She stares at an abstract painting. Her goldfish dies. "Perched on the toilet seat, she re-reads passages of Hamlet. She intrigued herself by thinking that the death of the goldfish somehow illuminated Ophelia's suicide. She had a herbal bath with the fish in the water. Whn she finished she dried herself and performed a funeral rite over the dead fish, singing a Lou Reed song". She drinks, phones friends inviting them to join her. They don't. She goes to a pub, picks up an older man, takes him home. They have some beautiful moments then he leaves without tell her his name. "She felt that the room, with its potted plants and the flowers and the goldfish bowl, had experienced some kind of meaning with her"
• "These silver fish" (Anne O'Brien) - On Jutland a boy and mother are fishing for mackerel. The father had a heart-attack making a earth bank to obscure from the view a concrete building that neighbours had made. Big trawlers dock in the port nowadays. [I don't get it]
• "Panic attack" (A.L. Kennedy) - Ronnie, 5'6" on tip-toe is at a train station after visiting his mother. The woman beside her seems in trouble. He helps - not too much or little. She's had a panic attack. She and he get on the train in different carriages. We learn that he's been protective to his mother when young. He killed his nasty father, whose body wasn't found for weeks. He wants the women to find him and ask for help.
• "The way I breathed" (Anna Stewart) - an old man has a slow pub crawl in a Scottish town. He can't recall if he'd been married. People help him. He's helped home. Back in his flat he wants to remember how he used to breath.
• "Feathers thick with oil" (Craig Burnett) - The narrator's at an airport. He's a travelling salesman of a dodgy drug. While watching a woman launch her suitcase like an athlete's hammer he wonders if she's on the drug. He leaps to save an old man from the flying case.
• "Heart's Last Pass" (Douglas W. Milliken) - The narrator's escaped from a Californian rehab. He's heading to the East Cost to his wife and daughter who he hasn't seen for years. He hitches and train-hops, takes drinks and drugs, doesn't know where he is.
• "Civilisation" (Will Self) - the narrator has a condition- at random a cupful of smell, silvery goo comes out of a random orifice. He's more or less flat-bound. They he discoveries that there are flecks of silver in the goo. He sells it. It becomes for him a symbol of civilisation.
• "Rough Beasts" (Jarred McGinnis) - "The first monster from the sea was a boar". It rampaged lethally through the sunbathers until it was finally shot. Benign animals had been appearing for years - "They all had the smell of burned paper and singed hair." "As the sea's animal-attacks became more commonplace, the victims faded from our attention." Coastal walls are built. [a tame ending, but it remains my favourite so far.]
• "Under the waves" (Barney Walsh) - Abigail died when she was 6. She can recall it vividly. She'd been with her father, looking for magic stones when she found a green disc (a smoothed bottle-base) and pocketed it. A freak wave swept her away. Her father couldn't see where she'd gone so he went back to their caravan and tried to have non-consensual sex with his hungover wife. She went for a walk in the drizzle, fed up about the holiday.
  It's 15 years later and pregnant Abigail's revisiting the beach with her girlfriend Bex. A lifeboat had saved her. Soon after that, her dad ran off. She takes a green disc from her pocket and throws it into the sea.
• "Paper chains" (Rebecca F. John) - A 6 year old girl makes paper chains in all sorts of shapes (which have symbolic value) when visiting her bald grandmother. The girl's told by grandma that her grandfather died long ago. A local boy goes missing. When she's 10 bones are found. When she's 11, her grandmother dies. On her stone is "Reunited with her beloved Edmund". The girl asks her mother if Edmund is her grandfather's name. Her mother says that her grandfather didn't die - he left because he did something bad. Edmund was grandma's first child. The recovered bones of the lost boy stirred memories in grandma.
• "Brad's rooster food" (Joanna Campbell) - Shy Diane, who's lived alone for 20 years, has been asked by neighbour Brad to look after his rooster while he's on holiday with his wife Wendy. Neighbours have complained about Brad's poultry. While Diane's feeding it, it escapes over the fence into Joy and Ray's garden. Diane knows that Wendy and Ray are having an affair and things are a bit tense. Diane retrieves the rooster. In the night Joy tries to shoot the rooster. She only wounds it. Diane protects the rooster for the rest of the night. She thinks that maybe she'll keep birds and hopes that she and Brad might become friends.
• "Freshwater" (Emily Bullock) - A father plus 4 teenage kids stay in a chalet, drinking and smoking. [I like the details - how the other half lives. The "twist" at the end is ok too.]
• "Morelia Spilota" (Cherise Saywell) - A young male priest gives a hitch-hiking girl a lift on the night. After 30 miles they stop. She's nervous and thinks about running. He's seen a snake by the road - a carpet snake. Morelia Spilota. Correct identification matters - it might be poisonous. He's puzzled how it got there. He thinks it's dead - there's blood. He puts it in the boot. It's not dead after all. He thinks it's bitten him. She sucks at the wound on his finger. They realise it was a piece of glass that caused the scratch. He releases the snake. They drive on.
• "How they turned out" (Lionel Shriver) - Susan Twitchell did some records in the 90s. She got a grammy nomination and 2 ex-husbands. She's mostly retired now, looking up old friends online and reading her old notebooks - lots of anguish, few details. "Let's face it: by sixty, the votes were in. You'd done what you were going to, and at best you would do a bit more of it". When a student she shared a flat with 4 other students, one of them being Grier Finleyson, another budding singer-songwriter. After Susan's first little concert, Grier and her side-kick Myra accused Susan of stealing Grier's style and content. Grier now organises kids' parties and and Myra is dead. They have almost no web-presence. Yet Myra was cleverer than Susan, and Grier had a better voice. Also, neither cheated on their second husband.
• "Sunbed" (Sophie Ward) - Nagel's bat. Elizabeth (55+) and Nicholas (an artist) are ex-pats living on the Brazilian coast. Elizabeth as a young woman on holiday met Ali. Their daughter is Rachel. Elizabeth wasn't happy when Rachel came out. The couple go to a dinner party. The hostess introduces Elizabeth to transvestites, etc. We learn that Rachel's biological father is Ali.

By the end I thought this was a good selection. I recall having read at least 3 of these before when authors reprinted their stories in monographs.

"A history of the world in 10½ chapters" by Julian Barnes (Picador, 1989)

I read it a long time ago and liked it.

• 1. The stowaway - The narrator’s a stowaway on the Ark. A woodworm. Lots of jokes: animals were tempted by prizes of luxury cruises for 2; chamelions learnt disguise to avoid being eaten by Noah. Noah throws carcasses overboard.
• 2. The visitors - Franklin Hughes is guest academic TV celeb on a cruise. Armed terrorists board. They get him to tell his audience that they were going to kill a pair of passengers each hour until their demands are met. Bodies are thrown overboard. American Special Forces board, sorting things out.
• 3. The wars of religion - It’s 1460. At a court-case a priest is called upon to defend woodworms against excommunication. A satire on theology?
• 4. The survivor - A woman, fearing nuclear war, leaves with 2 cats on a yacht. Paragraphs alternate between 1st and 3rd person. At the end we might be at a therapy session or inside her head on an island.
• 5. Shipwreck - We’re told what happened about the Medusa. Then we learn about how Gericault turned the catastrophe into art. The painting doesn't match the facts though Gericault interviewed survivors. He nearly painted the moment of mutiny. The author wonders why the Ark isn’t often painted, and at the end wonders if woodworm is in the painting's frame
• 6. The Mountain - Dublin 1837. A devout daughter decides to save her dead father's soul by going to the re-start of humanity, Mount Ararat. Disgusted by the behaviour of the monks there, she asks to be abandoned in a cave.
• 7. Three simple stories - Meeting a survivor of the Titanic. Analysing the Jonah story. The story of the St Louis, which in 1939 carried Jews to Cuba then back to Europe in 40 days.
• 8 Upstream! - A London-based actor in the Venezuelan jungle is playing a priest in a film based on a supposedly true story about 2 priests and a raft. He's writing letters to his girlfriend, apologising for his infidelity. He begins to respect the natives. His co-star dies, perhaps at the hands of the natives, who steal the crew's equipment. The film's abandoned and his girlfriend dumps him.
• Parenthesis - About love. He quotes Mavis Gallant - "The mystery of what a couple is, exactly, is almost the only true mystery left to us, and when we have come to the end of it there will be no more need for literature - or for love". He writes that he's been in love twice: once happily and once unhappily. The latter taught him more about love.
• 9. Project Ararat - An astronaut on the moon hears God say "Find Noah's Ark". Back home he tells his disappointed wife this, but nobody else. He fundraises to get money to go to Mount Ararat, spending weeks there. He finds a skeleton in a cave. He brings some of the bones back home. It turns out to be the woman's body from "6. The Mountain". He fundraises for another trip.
• 10. The dream - A man wakes up in heaven. He has a good enough time for centuries. He talks with the rep to find out how it all works. He visits Hell, which is like a theme park. He's told that all heaven's residents want to die in the end.

Other reviews

• Patrick T Reardon (As Barnes sees it, the history of the world is an endless series of Ark-like voyages headed nowhere in particular. Each of us on an Ark-like voyage. And each of us has an Ark that is being slowly but surely eaten away by some form of woodworm. A fairly bleak outlook. Yes. But then there is his “Parentheses,” a paean to love in all its oddity.)
• Jonathan Coe (while hardly a ground-breaking piece of experimentalism, succeeds to the extent that it is both intelligent and reasonably accessible. Where it falls down is in denying its reader any real focus of human attention or involvement. On this level, in fact, I found it an arid book indeed. ... Barnes's genuine cleverness is too obviously on show here to make such attempts at buffoonery seem anything other than an annoying pose. ... As one perceptive critic put it in 1975: 'Such moments of intended authenticity... become, in their turn, conceits, and honesty, despite the author's best endeavours, becomes self-defeating. It is the Catch-22 of fiction.' (The critic, by the way, was Julian Barnes; but he might have changed his mind since then.))

"Lady" by Laurie Bolger" (Nine arches press, 2025)

Rooms, birds, and womanhood. In "Period"

The loudest I've heard the women laugh is chatting about Period Colour Charts: over dark port and after-dinner mints - the blokes can't keep up with their joke it lands loud and heavy about the reds through to browns they are making up names and laughing - laughing - and I'm half asleep on the kitchen floor next to the dog who has the same name as my sister

I found "How much rain can a cloud hold" moving - episodic sadness about a 31 year old friend/relative who looked like the narrator. "You took something with you// leaving us in all this blue".

Among the phrases I like are -

• "I want to say I think we are so beautiful/ sat outside the coffee shop/ being honest in the cold." (p.46)
• When Cookie the pet is lost, "Sometimes we do this voice like a New Yorker smoking on a fire escape like: Cookie doesn't wanna come home"

I'm not convinced by "MASH" though.

Typos -

• "Mum teaches me how hide women's things at the back of drawers" - "how to hide"? ("Period")
• "they would get bored when their left on their own" - "they're"? (p.67)

"Perdido" by Chase Twichell (Faber and Faber, 1992)

Poems (nearly all of them longer than a page) from many good American magazines. I highlighted several passages. Some sound like poetry to me, some are too puzzling.

• Gravity draws down to me a halo whipped up of holy dust or dust from outer space: dim chalk of moonlight, phospher, youth in the eyes of my former selves. (p.6)

  I like the sound of this. Having "down" and "up" so close together confuses my mental image.

• The hotel’s heating system blurts sporadic clouds into the faint geometry of unlit monoliths beyond a flimsy Spanish balcony (p.9)

  Here (and elsewhere) is a passage where each noun has an adjective.

• The flip side of a wish is a fear, and that was why we crushed the heaven from those darkened rooms. How easily the stubborn pearl hoarded up and gave away its infinite concentric mysteries (p.10-11)

  Recognisable poetry.

• Minnows glittered in the shallows, a school of compass needles fixed on a single dream (p.18)

  She can come up with quotable images. I struggle with some of the passages between. Her poems are longer than I'm used to.

• Beloved is a word concealing four sharp points, four kinds of innocence, four winds of change (p.20)

  I don't get that.

• The palms go on sharpening their long, invisible blades, and the sea erasing its infinity of names (p.22)

  Palms (trees) and the sea feature in several of these poems.

• I dreamed the structure of the self. It had a queer, disorderly geometry something like the atom’s, designed to be interactive (p.26)

  Something like the atom's? In what sense?

• We lie in a flood of white sand under the broken prism of the sky, watching its fragile rays disappear down the secretive avenues of palms (p.31)

  That adjective-noun fixation again. Would a "broken prism" produce the light effects she experienced?

• I can see that I’ve kept this story caged in the past tense as though the present were a spectator come to gaze at the wild thing up close, but it’s easy to lie with metaphor (p.40-41)

  Not a new concept, but I've not seen it rendered this way before.

• Sex had become a well into which I could throw the trash of all my sorrows (p.41)

  Again, a neat image.

• Sleep itself is a shadow, a heavy, invisible wave that swells and breaks over us where we lie in the moonlight dried white on our sheets (p.42-43)

  Sleep, sea, moon - elemental ideas. Earlier I quoted "dim chalk of moonlight". I like this dried white image more.

• all the while watching the pleasure boats glide past us trailing bits of broken mirror, their engines pulsing steadily, fueled by what's left of the future. (p.55-56)

  Earlier we had "broken prism". I prefer this image of a wake. I don't think final image survives much analysis, though I like the sound of it.

• Like pain, such joy is locked in forgetfulness, and the prisoner must shout for freedom again and again (p.57)

  Another image I like.

• Atoms! Each one a window through which the wilderness of the future leaks, poor water blank as infancy. (p.67)

  I've quoted "atoms" and "future" before. I think the words have different associations for her than for me. I don't get that final line.

My favourite is “The Condom Tree”

"Heroes of the frontier" by Dave Eggers

An audio book.

Josie, with daughter Anna (5) and Paul (8), is driving around Alaska in an old RV (nickname Chateau, max speed 48 mph). She's been separated from her useless husband Karl for 18 months. She had an adventurous late teens (unstable mother; travels abroad), eventually owning a dentist practise. But she feels guilty for encouraging a boy patient to enlist (he soon died) and she had to sell her practise to pay for missing a patient's oral cancer.

They have various adventures, meeting potential role models. Alaska is expensive and she's running out of money. They camp where they shouldn't and are talked to by the police. They squat, sometimes for weeks, in abandoned buildings. She thinks they're being chased. She's ambivalent about the single men she meets. She has bouts of rhapsody (often brought on by Nature, or seeing her kids happy) after which she does things she wouldn't normally do.

It's episodic. Some of the episodes feel too long - they might not be needed -

• They watch a magic show on a big cruise liner. She realises that the props need to be on wheels so that they can be turned.
• She employs a little band of musicians so she can develop a musical about Alaska.

There are insights and humourous events on the way. E.g.

• a pond existed because conservationists had campaigned to keep it for migratory birds
• "it's not as if they'd been burning money at the feet of orphans"
• She realises that single parents start using their oldest child as an advisor/confidant.

At the end they're evacuated because of forest fires. They might never see the RV (and the bag of money in it) again. They go on a mountain walk. There's a thunderstorm. She has to depend on her son's hand-written map to find cover. They find a shack prepared for a family reunion party - balloons and food. Snuggled naked under a blanket, gorging in front of a fire, they're all happy. This is where and who they're supposed to be, she thinks. The final chapter is very short - "But there is tomorrow".

Other reviews

• Alex Preston (Eggers paints a fine and sympathetic portrait of a life that is never quite unbearable, but never all that far off. ... I think Eggers is trying to tell us something about contemporary American life, about the meaning of courage in a world where danger appears only on television)
• Marcel Theroux (Throughout the book, her outrage is exquisitely articulated and very funny. The novel is studded with jeremiads on incivility and selfishness, on high-end grocery stores where the food is “curated”, on pushy cyclists and leaf blowers ... An alluring combination of Walt Whitman, Bridget Jones and an angry standup comedian, Josie is seduced by the hope of escape)