"Granta 163: Best of young British novelists" (Granta, 2023)

Extracts from the work of 20 novelists under 40 - about 5 men. I know of Eleanor Catton, Saba Sams and Eley Williams. The introduction by Sigrid Rausing (a judge) roughly categorizes the writers -

• affection for the local - Thomas Morris, Saba Sams
• make meaning of hard lives - Yara Rodrigues Fowler, Natasha Brown
• displacement and alienation - Olivia Sudjic, Lauren Aimee Curtis, Jennifer Atkins, Anna Metcalfe, Eliza Clark
• experimental - Eley Williams, Derek Owusu, Sara Baume, Graeme Armstrong, Sarah Bernstein
• defying categorisation - Eleanor Catton
• what is love - K Patrick
• historical - Isabella Hammad, Tom Crewe
• speculative - Sophie Mackintosh
• deadpan, experimental, alienation - Camilla Grudova

Re the judges -

• Rachel Cusk "talked about writers' ability (or failure) to control and transcend their own material"
• Tash Aw "questioned how far we should privilege a text's internal sense or logic"
• Brian Dillon "noted the slightly caressing, watery feel of many of the novels on the shortlist, and the hard singularity of others"
• Helen Oyeyemi "(the judge among us perhaps most committed to fiction testing the boundaries of convention) was also interested in whether the writer succeeded in evoking curiosity in the reader"

Armstrong's piece about gangland activity (drugs, blades) is written "in dialect" without restricting itself to one register - "The internal revealed itself in the level ae substance abuse, isolation n suicide"; "we got ready fur T in the Park the-gither n bounced on a bus wae aw the GYT wans"; "Drug-inspired delusion or Christmas epiphany, A cannae say fur sure but everyhin changed fae that night on"

Jennifer Atkins' extract has this - "I found a taxi without trouble - Annie had promised there wouldn't be trouble. Earlier that month she'd invited me to come for dinner, the last weekend of the summer, for reunion of sorts at her and Edward's bungalow. She had spoken, drolly, about the meadows and the fields in their part of the country, and the drollness with which she'd spoken didn't match the sight of the late-flourishing land I saw from the taxi window. The sight from the window didn't match anything". Note the chaining together of sentences, the linking by repetition of "trouble", "droll", and "window".

Sara Baume writes "She has been ten for a month and she does not like it. She carries the weight of her extra digit like a chain-mail vest. She hunches her shoulders as if recoiling from the cold metal."

Eliza Clark's piece has atmosphere. It's a mermaid piece with stronger than usual SF/alien/coming-of-age overtones.

Tom Crewe's piece, unlike several of the others, is a self-contained story. I like it, especially the plot. Charles and another man in his 60s are invited to an exhibition of recently-dead Soutine's paintings. They were both his models, both working for a time at the same hotel. They compare how they've changed (Charles only a little). Neither recalls the other, though the other one recalls Charles's wife-to-be, a room-maid. Charles and the room-maid had opened a shop together, then divorced childless. They haven't met for 20 years. Home from the exhibition's opening he writes her an invitation to the show.

Saba Sams' "Gunk" is maybe my favourite piece.

"Blue, babe" by Shagufta K. Iqbal (Nine arches press, 2026)

I don't get it. I'll await reviews with interest.

"Literary landscapes" by John Sutherland (ed) (Elwin Street Productions, 2018)

Settings of dozens of novels are written about in this book. Sometimes there are paintings by (or admired by) the writers, sometimes maps. Authors range from Jane Austen (Bath) to Eleanor Catton (New Zealand) and beyond.

Some of the settings attract fans. There's Bloomsday, and SF fans trace the route of Wells' Martians from Woking to Primrose Hill. I've visited several of the locations, though I didn't feel close to all of them. The ones I most identified with were Manzoni's Lombardy, Hardy's Dorset, Joyce's Dublin, and Strindberg's Stockholm Archipelago.

Misc notes -

• "Anne of Green Gables" is described as a "chosen one" narrative (a term I'd forgotten). In such texts, only one person can put a magical world (Oz, Wonderland, Narnia, Hogwarts) right. But Avonlea could be real.
• For Hardy, there's a map showing the real or fictional names of places. Portsmouth (where I grew up) keeps its name. Swanage (where my mother was born) is Knollsea. He renamed Wareham (my father's birthplace) Anglebury, after a pub that my grandfather must have frequently visited.
• Daphne du Maurier saw an abandoned estate called Menabilly and used it in "Rebecca" as Mandalay. When Hitchcock's film made her rich she bought the estate, but her children disliked living in it.
• "Arturo's Island" (Elsa Morante) is "Considered by many as one of the finest Italian novels of the twentieth century". Oops. I've not heard of it.

"Limberlost" by Robbie Arnott

An audio book.

Tazmania. Ned was 5, living in Limberlost, when his mother died. Only his sister Maggie, the eldest of the 4 siblings, remember her. When it's rumoured that a mad whale had been attacking boats at the river mouth at dusk, his father takes him and his brothers there, showing them the reef that drunk sailors used as an excuse. A huge whale surfaces by the boat. Ned would never forget its huge eye. 10 years later, his brothers at war, he's catching/shooting rabbits, selling their pelt to the army, saving up to buy a boat. He accidentally traps a Qual (a wild cat). He cares for it, keeping it secret from all but Callie, his friend's tomboy sister. He buys a boat, mends it, takes Callie on it.

When the cat's ready to be released, he and Callie take it on the boat to a forest. When he finishes the boat, people visit to admire it. There are hints that the farm is in financial trouble. He gets an offer for the boat. He take it one last towards the river mouth but the weather's bad. He sells it. Callie finds it wrecked by the road - there'd been an accident after it was collected. He visits it, overwhelmed by sadness - his cat gone, his boat gone, his brothers gone. He reads his mother's favourite novel, the one that she called the orchard after. He wonders whether the grief about the boat will ever turn to happy memories. At the end of summer his oldest brother returns. Looking back after a lifetime, it will seem his life's most overwhelming moment, surpassing even the moment when his wife died.

He marries an unnamed wife (Callie). They live on a farm - he knows about orchards, she about the rest. He travels to the Lake District (UK) as a rep of the orchard collective (!) to learn about a new spray. He sails on Lake Windermere. His mother loved the lakes - "was he drifting on a mirror that once held her reflection? The spray helps make the farm a success but there's a hint that it causes his wife's later cancer when his girls are little. He visits his 2 elder girls when they're at university. They ask if he had ever thought of returning his land to its real owners. He wants to tell them about the boat, the river. He means to tell them the cancer has returned. The orchards of the area have been converted to vineyards. He has grandchildren. At his 90th birthday he feels profoundly loved, profoundly alone.

The order of events presented above is little like the order in the book. In the first section we get a summary of his first 20 years. In the final paragraph we're told that his wife died, that he lived beyond 90. The book starts slowly, the key symbols gradually accumulating significance - especially given that there are no death scenes. He returns to the episode of the wild cat throughout his life, telling his young children about it. He's caring and considerate. That summer he cared for the cat and the boat. He befriended his wife-to-be. He learned how to love and lose. By the end, the book's moving, though the UK trip seems odd.

Other reviews

• Imogen Dewey (Arnott’s writing of the natural world is elegiac and elemental, capturing its out-of-kilter ferocity: a place of beauty but not peace ... Arnott, I think, isn’t sentimental. Ned’s failures and errors aren’t presented as moments of transformation or growth. They are allowed simply to stand, as part of the whole.)
• Melissa Harrison (Arnott has an eye and an ear for description that can elevate otherwise quiet moments to something genuinely transcendent: “He resumed walking through Limberlost, his father’s orchard, the rabbit swinging stiff in his hand. Smoke hazed from the house’s chimney. Apple trees in a nearby paddock had taken on the glow of dawn. At Ned’s back the river shone, teal blinking into slate and cerulean, revealing a greater truth of colour.” That is, by any measure, a gorgeous paragraph ... It’s a lovely read for anyone who enjoys descriptive writing, but would be more compelling with some tightening up of the nuts and bolts of storytelling: plot, pace and point of view. We’re told Ned really wants a boat, and this goal is what the first third of the book moves us towards, but we never really feel his need or fully understand why it takes this form. An inciting incident in which his father takes all three boys to see a supposedly mad whale lingers in Ned’s memory, but its meaning remains confused even as more details emerge ... When Ned falls in love, his partner remains unnamed until close to the novel’s end; it’s a gamble that doesn’t pay off, rendering an already rather sketched-in female character even less real without adding any much-needed narrative propulsion. ... Many of the details of a trip to the English Lake District, populated by flat-capped “West Anglians” and their collies, are likely to make British readers wince. Limberlost is told in a closeup third person; this allows for limited departure from the main character’s experience – usually for scene setting – but here isn’t handled consistently enough. Episodes are described in vivid detail that Ned doesn’t witness)

"Granta 68: Love stories" (Granta 1999)

• Call if you need me (Raymond Carver) - Dan (his first-person) and Nancy have a son Richard about to go to college. They've each had recent affairs (he with Sue). Richard goes to stay with his grandmother while Dan and Nancy go to a rented cottage for the summer to save their marriage. On the first day they see a hummingbird, decide to fish and to get a dog. But by evening she thinks it's hopeless. She wants to see Richard and her mother. She goes to bed. When he sees a herd of white horses in the front garden he calls her. She's as awed as he is. They have a good night and sleep together. Next morning he gives her a lift to the airport. Dung and hoofprints are in the front garden. He phones Sue.
• Habibi (Ruth Gershon) - 45 pages. Hannah (a nominal jew) works as a lecturer in London. She has grown children. She lives alone. On a stay in Tel Aviv she starts living with Yussuf, an Arab. The sex is good. The jew/arab mix complicates social/admin activity. She misses him when she returns to London for the term. He doesn't reply to letters. She goes back. They argue. They make up. She realises how lazy he is. She leaves him for good. [Given the length, doesn't do enough]
• Famous people (Orhan Pamuk) - 1958. A couple plus their 2 young sons (one the first-person PoV) live in Istanbul. "Staring out of the window was such an essential habit that when television finally did arrive, people started watching it as if they were still looking outside". The boys collect cards of famous people from bubble gum packs. The persona catches his father trying to secretly leave - to Paris he says. The mother asks her mother if they can live with her. She refuses. The persona loses most of his cards in a game with his brother.
• Fit mother (Peter Ho Davies) - America. She and Bill were addicts. When she got pregnant, she stopped. When she had the baby, social services took him away saying she had 6 months to prove she was a fit mother. She went to collect her mother from far away, bringing her back to help. They hadn't met for years. Bill's arrested for selling drugs. The social worker's impressed by how she's turned her life around but says that her mother's dangerously senile. So she takes her mother back to where she has friends.
• Then and now (Daniel Meadows) - Rephotographing "ordinary" people photographed 25 years before as part of a project [Non-fiction]
• Exchange of pleasant words (Aleksandar Hemon) - The Hemon family trace their ancestor back to the Bible and Iliad. The family-council organise a "Hemoniad", inviting a lost branch of the family, the Hemuns. Videod for posterity.
• Uncle Ed (Keith Fleming) - The author when 16 went to live with his uncle, the openly gay author Edmund White. [Non-fiction. An interesting and entertaining read.]
• Going abroad (W.G. Sebald) - He goes to Vienna, having lived 25 years in England. He wanders all day, thinks he sees Dante. He spends a day with an old friend who'd been institutionised for decades. Then he catches a train to Venice. He gets a train to Verona. He thinks he's being followed. He escapes to Innsbruck. The piece includes graphics - photos, tickets, receipts.
• The furnace (Lydia Davis) - A married daughter, emotionally constrained, tries to communicate with her ailing father. They discuss their furnaces. He sends her crime cuttings from his local paper.
• Closer (David Malouf) - 6 pages. Amy, 9, belongs to a strict pentacostal family. Uncle Charles, from Sydney (Sodom) isn't allowed close. She dreams about him. [Not for me. Too much is about pentacostal oddness]
• Asking for it (James Hamilton-Paterson) - 4 pages. A British man is gang-banged by 5 Arab men in Libya. He didn't report it to the embassy or the police. He thinks it was more a political than an erotic act. [Non-fiction?]
• First cut (Jonathan Kaplan) - About becoming a South African surgeon during apartheit. His first patients were rioting students. It was difficult trying to be a neutral doctor. [Non-fiction]

"Weirdo" by Sara Pascoe

An audio book. The narrative is interrupted by school reports, letters about her debt, etc.

The narrator Sophie, 32, works as barmaid in Essex. Chris, an ex-colleague who she fancied, comes in with a girlfriend, Ella (who's in a relationship with Steve). Sophie hasn't seen him for 3 years. When Chris went to Australia she'd followed him so she could bump into him by chance - after which nothing happened except a kiss. Partly because of that holiday she's over £10k in debt. She says wacky things to mates which they laugh at because they think she's making them up.

Her father's in Australia, evading taxes. She currently lives with Ian who fears her sexuality. It's not love. She used to live with James who got her pregnant. She had an abortion. James is about to marry her sister Dayna. On New Year's Eve, Chris is at her bar. He takes her home. When they have sex he tries to be considerate. It doesn't work. He mistakes her cries of pain as excitement. She discovers he's soon to marry his Australian boyfriend. In the days after she feels she's finally achieved her aim. She discovers she's pregnant. She's happy. She thinks destiny has planned things that way. She miscarries. She leaves Ian. Ella (who Chris exploited the same way he exploited Sophie) leaves Steve and as sex with women.

3 themes emerge -

• She has disassociation issues, feeling that her character isn't part of her, etc. She thinks she could be an experiment, a brain in a jar, and "not even the most important brain in the jar". She read Camus' "The Stranger". She thinks she may be a non-violent psychopath. At school she was clever but caused trouble, having fantasy/reality issues. She tries to show the emotions that people expect. Ian blames it on her cold mother. When Sophie's pregnant she feels that the baby is taking her over.
• She thinks she's a twin, lacking a spiritual partner as in Plato. She sees Dayna or Ella as her twin.
• Destiny: fate works in mysterious ways.

I like -

• She has an idea of marketing Smart Scissors - scissors that won't let the user cut their own hair if they currently have low self-esteem.
• She says that some films are much sadder the second time around - it hurts to see the characters oblivious to the trouble ahead.

The internal monologue is too mundane and needs editing. As a psychological profile it fails - it needs to be more forensic. If she falls in love with men who love her because she wants to be loved (self-validation), then the Chris obsession is odd, and her response strange. As comedy it's not funny enough.

Other reviews

• Ella Risbridger (There’s a touch of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time here; plus, perhaps, a very funny, candid smattering of Louise Rennison’s beloved teen diarist Georgia Nicolson. Pascoe has written about her adolescent love of Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World, and it’s not hard to draw the line between his naive, careful philosopher Sophie and hers. If you combined those three teenagers, and aged them up 15 years, you might find something of her narrator’s pure, strange tone.)
• Hephzibah Anderson (Just how far from “normal” is Sophie? Her paranoia suggests she’s not merely kooky but needs real help, and this can make for uncomfortable laughter.)
• Annie Kapur (I would definitely call this book a failed attempt at stream-of-consciousness because none of it really comes together. ... I know she states that she wants to keep these things for her future biographer because she is a narcissist, but I cannot help but think that these debt letters do nothing for the overall story. She tells us she is in debt many, many times, we do not require actual physical proof of that. ... I genuinely don't care about her dating life because her professional life is so badly put together I cannot fathom how anyone can stand her even as a friend, let alone a romantic partner.... All in all, I found the characters of this book simply too insufferable to read. It wasn't funny but it was faux-quirky and got tired very quickly.))

"Ripening: NFFD 2018 anthology" by Santino Prinzi and Alison Powell (eds) (Gumbo Press, 2018)

The National Flash Fiction Day anthology with the theme "Food". Flash and a few micros.

Favourites were "Famous last meals" (Nan Wigington), "Milk and Eggs" (Megan Giddings) and "Attack of the Robot Grannies" (Angela Readman)