Death, green, boxers, Bluestockings, devil, dragon, Bartleby, Deor

Recent books: Comyns, Rundell, Gallant, Bullwinkel, Bergman, and more

This post has short reviews of several new and upcoming books covering new fiction, journalistic memoir, Katherine Rundell, Ingmar Bergman, the Bluestockings and the Anglo Saxons. In the next post like this I’ll be covering some of the International Booker Prize Longlist. You can find

The Booker Prizes

on Substack too. (Here’s the previous book roundup.)

Remember, paid subscribers meet on Sunday 7th April, 19.00 UK time to discuss **Henry IV part I**. You can find all the Shakespeare essays here, and the schedule for future meetings here. There is a chat threat about the play here.

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1. Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead. “The ducks swam through the drawing-room windows.” With an opening like that, who doesn’t want to read on? This book was so good it nearly made me cry in a Five Guys. One of the outstanding works of 1954, a great year for novels. By Barbara Comyns, about whom a new biography has just been published (if I get a review copy, I’ll cover it here). Sophie Macintosh wrote about the same subject recently (a mysterious outbreak of madness in a small village) but this book is untouchable and has no rivals.

2. Green Water, Green Sky. Another masterpiece of the 1950s and a tremendous accomplishment. Every page is lesson in narrative technique: time and character are handled with tremendous economy. The equal of anything else written at that time. I want to now read all of Mavis Gallant’s stories. As Fran Lebowitz said, “She is the stand out.” Well done Daunt for reissuing this.

3. Bartleby and Me. I prefer Gay Talese’s version of his famous Frank Sinatra article in this memoir than in the original article. Frank Sinatra Has a Cold is over stylised, whereas the looser version of what happened in this memoir suits the story to the form much better: that piece was always more about Talese than Sinatra anyway. This is a good review in the New York Times. Few people can write this well so late in their career.

4. Headshot. A book that will be admired more for its content than its style. There are many good moments, but it is too repetitive and cliched. The opening of the second section,—‘“Perhaps the future will not be like the past,” said Rachel Doricko to no one in particular.’—is indicative of the whole book. There’s plenty of this and it’s hardly worthy of the reams of praise on the jacket. If this is “literature at its primal, vital best” or “perfectly unprecedented” it is because girls boxing is a zeitgeist subject, not because the writing is good or the ideas are original. Netflix ran a series called GLOW in 2017 all about women’s boxing in the 1980s, so even the subject matter isn’t “perfectly unprecedented”.

   
   The main method of writing is to slow the action down and make the narrative analytic:

   Rachel Doricko will count this fight in moments, in chunks of time that, in the hindsight of the match, glow with significance, whereas Kate will cling to the scoring system she’s been given. Round after round Kate will score and tally points.

   Thus for Rachel Doricko the bout starts like this: They are in a room. The room looks like a warehouse but someone has called it a palace. Everyone she can see looks like a conformist. The people stand separated from each other nameless and lonely, with their arms folded. The people are down below shorter than Rachel, not in the height of the ring, away from the spotlight of the fight and away from anything of importance that is about to unfold.

   This series of distorted pictures is the sort of shot you get in movies and tv programmes when time slows down just before the big fight. The insistence of the long sentences and the sub-clauses only draws more attention to this being really just a scene from television: it sounds like it is interrogating Doricko’s interior life, but really it is a series of cliches that stay on the surface:—the warehouse, the fighter as non-conformist, the slow looming shot above the diminished crowd, the lonely fighter in the ring, in the spotlight.
   
   That so many writers are prepared to say this is an “expertly crafted psychological study” or “a novel as fierce and vibrant as its girl boxers” is a demonstration of just how far modern literary culture elides content and technique, more than happy to substitute the aesthetic for the ideological. What does this have to offer us that non-fiction doesn’t? Indeed, this book would have been much better if it was about real women boxers. Has such a book been written? If not, perhaps Rita Bullwinkel should do that next.

5. Bluestockings. The First Women’s Movement. I’ll have more to say in a review in this month’s Prospect, but I can tell you this is a very capable book with lots of good information, and it’s not too long. I don’t think the bluestockings quite constitute a women’s movement, as such—but their influence on Wollstonecraft and Woolf was significant. The Bluestockings made money from their work, educated themselves widely, and were interesting company. You won’t regret spending time with them. Above all, this is a book about hidden talent and human potential. (Gibson also presents Samuel Johnson much better than many other writers interested in women of the period. Dr. Johnson’s Women is another excellent book on this topic.)

6. God and the Devil. Somewhat disappointing. Although there are moments when Bergman’s life is revealed—“Nobody, not even the actors, phoned me after the premier”, he said about the release of The Seventh Seal—this is more a summary of his career than his life. Bergman has gone through three marriages a third of the way into this book and yet we hear almost nothing about them. The fact that some of Bergman’s best and most significant work is about marriage, and that, as Peter Cowie says, Bergman is a very personal film maker, makes this a frustrating omission. If you know the films, you have little need of the analysis; if you don’t know, it is somewhat redundant. Bergman’s movies are so full of detail, so full of his characters’ lives: this book should have followed suit.

7. Impossible Creatures. Not as exciting as some of Rundell’s other fiction and somewhat over praised to my mind. Less inventive than a good fantasy novel, more a catalogue of the fantasy elements Rundell wanted to use. Many pages are gripping; many are dull. The openly didactic sections about climate change and preservation jar with the adventure. Rundell’s gift is for action and she too often gets pulled into the over-expressive language of her interviews and op-eds. “Galvanic”, in particular, is a word she ought to ban herself from using. The creatures fly past us too quickly. She has tried to put too much in. The comparison to Tolkien and Pullman on the cover sets the bar too high. Still, at her best Rundell really is a splendid writer. Unmissable for fans.

8. The Deor Hord. A fun book to dip around in that gives details of Anglo Saxon bestiaries and the origins and evolutions of language for various animals. The sections on dragons and wolves are good, there are decent pictures, and a lot of ground is covered. Hana Videen is hugely knowledgeable and this book is packed with information, quotes, illustrations, pocket histories and so on. If you are interested, this is worth looking at.