31 – My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Coming in as a tonic to Are You Happy Now is this blisteringly satirical take on much the same premise. A young woman, blessed with everything except self-awareness and meaningful purpose, resolves to chemically sedate herself into a deep hibernation until her ennui lifts. This she does with the help of a dangeroulys irresponsible psychiatrist and the tacit support of her emotionally febrile best friend.
She has inherited wealth, good looks, and a fine education. And yet she is disconnected from her work in which she commodifies juvenile art and packages it up into digestible chunks for the easily influenced world of ‘art lovers’. She is unlikeable in the extreme, privileged to excess, and her misanthropy shines through in every sentence. But she’s tried of her own tiredness, and resolves to do something about it.
And I liked this a lot more than Are You Happy Now, because in its rejection of activity it is far more purposeful. This isn’t a story about giving up, but rather a story of the restorative power of distance. The main character sets herself up with a year, hence the title, to restore her equilibrium with the world. To allow herself a chance to align her psychology with the heartbeat of life through renewed appreciation of that which was abandoned. And so this is more my kind of thing – directed and purposeful. And it’s also impressively mean-spirited in a way that is properly funny.
The key thing about this book is that the main character is unbearable, and that despite medicating herself into a borderline coma she still finds herself – with the evidence of photographs and physical exercises – going through the motions of an life that is notable for just how conspicuously active it is. Her medications put her into a state of sleepwalking – or sleep partying in many cases. None of it penetrates her conscious memory, it’s all just activity without engagement. Her own life is an Instagram reel in which she is increasingly disconnected with the way she spends her own time. It is only through genuinely disconnecting with the trappings of the world that bores her that she finds a new acceptance of what the world could be. It’s an extreme intervention, designed in part to stave off the blasé acceptance that drove Are You Happy Now. It doesn’t have the fundamental rebellion of Bartleby. The main character, current, ‘would prefer not to’. But overall she’d prefer not to prefer not to.
This isn’t a book with much of a plot. And it’s not a book with lovable characters. It’s a dark, hateful story of someone who doesn’t really want to be dark and hateful. It’s the weirdest kind of book about self-improvement, and I definitely recommend it to you.
32 – A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
This sure is a book that didn’t need to be written. As a prequel to the Hunger Games it doesn’t really offer much at all except a bit of background context to the man who would become President Snow. I honestly don’t think that’s necessary, but I understand the modern fandom desire for all the dark shadows of a story to be banished by the harsh torchlight of ‘word of God’.
So, here’s the problem – we know from the Hunger Games everything we needed to know about, well, the Hunger Games. Given their professed philosophy and the way in which tributes in the series are treated… well, we don’t need to be told that the whole endeavour wasn’t designed to be philanthropic. So to be taken back to the early days of the Games, when they were more akin to punishment than spectacle, doesn’t add anything of note.
So all that’s left in terms of an ‘original contribution to (fictional) knowledge’ is exploring the backstory of Snow. But that’s unremarkable because his backstory doesn’t follow an unexpected trajectory. We know how his story ends, and the only real value proposition here would have been if he followed a twisty, unexpected route to be cast along the curve of his arc. Spoiler alert – he didn’t. Born into a noble, but impoverished, family he cleaves strongly to the philosophy of the Capitol. The only mitigating factor we have here is that he is poor and struggling to keep up appearances, but it’s not even as if that adds anything to his character development. If Snow was rich and comfortable, he’d have done exactly the same things as he did when he was poor. His engagement with the early Hunger Games shines no new light on his character.
So, what we’re left with then is a creepy, unconvincing romance in which he falls in love with one of the tributes – the one he has been assigned to mentor. But that also fails to cohere in any meaningful way, even though there was potential there. He falls in love with her. And she, of course, falls in love with him. And they live happily ever after, right up until the point they don’t. But he never comes across as genuinely engaged in the relationship, even leaving aside its troubling connotations of Stockholm syndrome and trauma-induced PTSD. He’s interested only in the idea of being in love.
It’s a shame, because I unironically love the Hunger Games – both the novels, and the movies. I’m a fan. I wanted to like this.
The bigger shame though is that I think there are bits of this book that actually start to veer into territory that could be described as compelling. Snow is perpetually aided by his inventive sister, who finds ways to provide for him in his burgeoning career as an academy student. At one point there is an intimation that Tigris, the sister, has had to ‘do things’ to provide for her brother. Lucy Grey, the love interest, makes a similar intimation later in the book. They are defensive and coy about it, circumspect in how they broach it. They deal with it in hypotheticals. ‘Even if I had to do things to protect my family, what would be the sin in that?’
And here there’s an opportunity for the book to do something brave – to confront Snow with the price of his privilege. To strip away the comfort of his ignorance. But no, he doesn’t want to think about it so he just dismisses it. Nowhere is there a reckoning with any teeth to it. He wants to live in denial, and so the reader too is denied a look into some of the darker contours of what is an already dark premise. It feels… I don’t know, disrespectful, of the female characters to deny them the catharsis of a reckoning. I’m not a fan of ‘female trauma for male character development’ as a trope, but I think it could have been handled compellingly and sensitively in the context of survival through a horrendous war. I think it could have addressed the luxury of ‘morality’, and perhaps given some nuance to Snow’s own awareness of his complicity in the suffering of others.
None of that though. Snow is exactly how you’d think he was as a young man. The Hunger Games are exactly what the original trilogy said they were. There’s no deeper tragedy created in the persona of Snow because of how he suffers in his early life. There’s no sense that his deep engagement with the Games is a way to stave off deeper problems, other than a nihilistic and underexplored flirting with the link between chaos and authoritarianism. There’s just… nothing of note here.
It’s not a bad book. It’s just utterly, irredeemably unnecessary.
33 – The Kingdoms
I didn’t really enjoy my first Natasha Pulley book (the Watchmaker of Filigree Street) but I did like her writing enough to put her on the ‘second chance’ list. The Kingdoms is a better book, I think, but it’s still not quite good enough to justify checking out any more of her writing. It’s an enjoyable enough stand-alone but it treads some extremely familiar ground without having much new to add. It doesn’t feel like it explores the shared themes with hero ther work more deeply, but rather just slightly changes the viewing angle. A lot of what was pertinent in the Watchmaker of Filigree Street is equally so here – a story about the peculiar nature of time and possibility; a love story in which only one of the people involved is aware that they’re in a love story; an alternate history take on British (and in this case, French) colonialism. But more significantly, both books suffer from their own confused exploration of the consequences of their metaphysics.
In The Kingdoms, our main character finds himself on a train in French-occupied London (or Londres). He has forgotten… pretty much everything. I know, it’s super cliché but stay with me.
Upon being committed, briefly, to an asylum he is recovered by his slave master, who brings him home to where he is supposed to be. Upon working off his indenture, he becomes an electrical engineer who is then sent off to a distant Scottish lighthouse to repair its broken lamps. When he gets there, he finds a set of mysterious pillars that, upon passing through them, allow passage to and from the past – specifically to the Napoleonic war. And here he finds himself torn between his obligations in the future and his compelled service in the past.
There’s a lot to like here. Much of the book is set aboard a war ship, which as you will undoubtedly know, is guaranteed to give me strong positive feelings as soon as I can smell the virtual salt in the imaginary sea. The writing, as before, is beautiful. The characters here are generally more interesting and complex (save for the protagonist, who is an empty jumper of a man). The setting is rich with promise and adventure and the premise itself is intriguing… what would have happened if the British had not prevailed at Trafalgar?
But the problems are primarily in the structure of the story itself, which is by turns confusing and baffling. Not because the story is complex, but because it is badly explained while paying lip service to a fluid conception of causality. It suffers from never being able to convince the reader as to the internal logic of its metaphysics. It’s a kind of Napoleonic-era reconstruction of Back to the Future without the latter’s own adherence to temporal consequence.
Roughly though, time travel tales break into three different kinds of model.
Perhaps the loose system here is one of multiple timelines, in which every change branches off a new universe? No, because that’s also not consistent with what happens in the book. It’s clear characters are bound to their own timeline, except in the circumstances where they obviously aren’t.
Perhaps it’s a kind of ‘what happened, happened’ framework, as in it’s impossible to break out of the structure of the past and attempting to change things only results in the things happening – albeit sometimes in unexpected ways. But that’s again not true here, because when things change in the past it changes the memories of people in the future.
So we have the final possibility, which is that history is a constantly changing entity and when something alters in the past, it changes the future. So yeah, Back to the Future style. Except The Kingdoms then undercuts the premise by adding in a clumsy loophole, ‘except when it happened in a different timeframe’. None of it makes any real sense, so you’re often struggling to appreciate the narrative because it seems so slapdash. Because ‘what happened, sort of changed the future’ you find yourself without a coherent theory of impact. The book’s solution to the paradoxes caused by time travel is to hand-wave a borderline magical solution. ‘Oh yes, X couldn’t have done Y while he was in Z, but he’s in Q now so he could’.
Perhaps none of that really matters, except it does because the clarity of the rules of science fiction matter. As soon as you say, ‘narrative convenience is the rule’, then your story runs aground unless you are going to double down on it. Terry Pratchett’s books are all about narrative convenience, and he built the metaphysics of the Discworld around that and what it means. The Kingdoms uses it as a band-aid, and so the whole thing just becomes… mushy.
It’s not enough to ruin the book – as I say, it was still an enjoyable read. But it is enough to make it meaningfully inferior to what it could have been.
34 – Severance
I read the first half of this novel believing it had been written in the aftermath of Corona, acting as it does as a tale of the dystopian consequences of a global pandemic. It wasn’t though – it predates Corona by about a year, and so it comes across instead as eerily prophetic. The desolation of the landscapes of the book feel like they’re being relayed from another leg of the trousers of time.
But enough of that. The book is good. Really good, in fact. I devoured it in a single day, which was surprising because it began at a disadvantage. Like The Martrix, which I reviewed… I don’t know how long ago… this is a book that eschews the basic expectation of punctuation by avoiding anything as trite and cliché as a quotation mark. I’ve said before that I think that style is almost impossibly arrogant. Nobody’s writing is clear enough that it doesn’t benefit from proper writing structure. I don’t think it makes the writing more clear, as some claim. I think it makes it more confusing. I don’t think it looks cleaner on the page. I think it makes it look unfinished. I don’t think it looks elegant, and even if I did I think it’s a poor version of elegance that relies on the ornamentation of the writing rather than the writing itself.
I don’t find myself engaging more deeply with the text because the author has decided their writing is elevated above expected norms. It makes me just skim over the bits that are confusing or unclear. Nothing is lost through the inclusion of quotation marks. Much is gained.
Anyway.
Leaving that aside, Severance is a meditative exploration of the link between activity and the value of life. All over the world, people are coming down with Shen Fever – fungal infection that causes people to gradually give up conscious thought, replacing them with the compulsive execution of rituals they carried out in life. Someone coming down with the fever at the shop where they work for example may find themselves endlessly looping over the folding and refolding of clothes for display. Coming down with the fever at home might result in someone endlessly setting and resetting a dinner table for a meal that never happens. Nobody becomes violent or aggressive – this is as pandemic where zombies are only as dangerous as the ones we see in day to day life. It plays a bit with the premise of the opening of Shawn of the Dead, where Shawn has no idea that there’s a zombie apocalypse because it’s hard to tell the difference when everyone is so disconnected with the mundane lives they live.
As the pandemic spirals out of control, our main character finds herself encased in a world where those rituals of work become increasingly hard to perform. Subways get closed off and replaced with buses. Those buses stop running and taxis take over. Eventually those taxis stop coming. But without activity what’s the point of anything? So she continues to turn up to work every day, working towards a hazard payday of astonishing generosity. Right until she realises that she has given up a meaningful portion of her life to service her largely superfluous role in an economy that no longer has any value. She notes this herself in the flashback chapters – she works in the bible design department of a large publishing house, and the bible is year-on-year the best selling book. It offers no changes or revisions. All that can be changed is the packaging. Even before the pandemic, she felt her work contributed little. And so when she finally realises her contract is up – formally and philosophically – she leaves New York City to find refuge amongst the other refugees she encounters.
Along with this, the book delves into the immigrant experience and the loss of meaning that comes with forever being foreign in your own life. How hyper consumption is both a symptom and a cure for a sense of disassociation. How monotony has a protective power in a world where projecting softness is a sign of weakness. But it’s also a story about how we are imprisoned by memory and how nostalgia creates chains around us. The victims of Shen Fever are all physical manifestations of that – a catechism of working life expressed through the following of familiar grooves of action. In the end it seems less like the pandemic is caused by the fungus so much as it is triggered by nostalgia. One character succumbs to the disease almost instantly upon returning to her childhood home, trapping herself in an endless groove of trying on outfits in the mirror in preparation for a night out that will never come.
I genuinely loved this, even with the irritating affectation of the writing.
35 – Sharp Objects
Gillian Flynn writes unpleasant characters very well, and I think partially it’s because those unpleasant characters rarely have nice things happening to them. Her books are like mini-mortality plays about redemption, except there’s not really much morality and redemption is completely off the table.
Sharp Objects is a book about a newspaper reporter trying to capitalize on a small town tragedy by virtue of her personal connection to the area. Using her familiarity with her hometown, she seeks out grieving people and tries to get them on the record so that she can help sell newspapers back in her home base of Chicago. I mean, the book never really puts it in such stark terms but that’s what’s happening – exploitation of ‘the rural hicks’ for the gratification of the sophisticated urbanites – or at least, that proportion of them that buy tragedy porn of that nature.
The thing is – and again, this is a very Gillian Flynn thing – there’s a twist that brings the tragedy into much tighter orbit with the main character than she would have expected, and certainly more than she would have liked. She encounters a town that never changes in its essential nature, but is textured in unfamiliar and unpleasant ways by her own proximity to what is going on.
This is a very plot driven book, so I won’t dig too deeply into how it all fits together but it’s certainly a very enjoyable read. Well. I don’t know. Enjoyable may not be the right word for something like this. Compelling, maybe. It’s a compelling read. And it has a lot to say about nostalgia; tragedy; and the imperfect and unreliable narratives we construct of our youth. It’s a story that winds itself around you like a snake, constricting and tightening until there’s almost no oxygen left – nowhere for the plot to go except into its own eventual destruction.
Really good! Really recommended!