ReviewSaturday 15 May 2021 – Issue № 173

Mind the gap Reading offi ce novels from home — Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

‘There’s an idea that segregation is ancient history. It never felt Review ancient to me.’ Saturday 15 May 2021 – Issue № 173 — Brit Bennett, page 18

Contents The week in books ...... 04 The books that made me by Patrick Ness...... 05

COVER STORY The future of offi ce novels by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett ....06

Book of the week: Lean Fall Stand by Jon McGregor ...... 10 Nonfi ction reviews Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe ...... 12 Notes on Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie ...... 13 Everybody: A Book About Freedom by Olivia Laing ...... 14 If You Were There: Missing People and the Marks They Leave Behind by Francisco Garcia ...... 15

INTERVIEW Brit Bennett...... 16

Fiction reviews The Rules of Revelation by Lisa McInerney ...... 20 The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century by Olga Ravn ...... 21 How to Kidnap the Rich by Rahul Raina ...... 22 Last Days in Cleaver Square by Patrick McGrath ...... 22 Poetry of the month plus poem of the month ...... 23

BOOKS ESSAY Leigh Bardugo on her hit fantasy series Shadow and Bone ...... 24

Kate Lister on the best books about sex, plus Tom Gauld ...... 26

COVER ILLUSTRATION Fabio Consoli Saturday 15 May 2021 The Guardian 3 ¶ Forewords

the playwright Timothy The week in books Allen McDonald. The show follows 15 May several interconnected stories of people aff ected by the pan demic and scenes are named after Meghan’s TV show to moan symptoms – Fever, Bench press about his life.” Aches, Swelling and The Duchess of Sussex Royal author Angela Irritation, Fatigue and (right) has announced L evin was widely Shortness of Breath. The she is writing a children’s reported as saying that production was fi lmed in picture book, The Bench, she felt the cover was a New York concert hall about father and son “dull” and that children in March and will be relationships. “Meghan did not enjoy “being available on the US Markle’s fun-free child- lectured”. Similarly, streaming platform raise money for Care ren’s book may put an royal expert Ann Overture+ . It may feel International, a charity entire generation off Gripper said she was too soon for some, but a working to vaccinate reading,” announced the “guessing” that The pandemic novel by the world against Telegraph in response. Bench would “probably” Picoult, Wish You Were coronavirus. “What would make the be “slightly sickly sweet”. Here, will follow in “ The situation in current shortlist for the Who knows what might November. SC India is particularly title of World’s Most happen when everyone heart breaking and the Ludicrously Inappro- can actually read the A new chapter inequality of the vaccine priate Book?” raged Piers book? Sian Cain in vaccination rollout is incredibly Morgan in the Daily Mail. A personal consultation unfair,” said publisher “While I haven’t read the Picoult’s pandemic with literary agent Jonny and thriller author book,” Karren Brady Jodi Picoult has become Geller, mentoring from Phoebe Morgan, who wrote in the Sun, some- famous for her will- leading novelists and launched the initiative. how not stopping there, ingness to take on big publishing fi gures, and “I’ve been delighted by “I do wonder if the last issues in her bestselling signed copies of books the way the publishing chapter consists of the novels: school shootings by authors including industry has responded father telling the son in Nineteen Minutes, Ian Ran kin, David Nich- – we have now raised that he’s old enough assisted suicide in Mercy, olls and Jessie Burton just shy of £15,000 , and to make his own money medical emancipation in are among 240 bookish bidding remains open and then the son having My Sister’s Keeper. Now lots on off er at Books for until 21 May so there’s a massive strop about she has created Breathe, Vaccines , an auction on still scope to raise much

VERA SHESTAK/ALAMY; CHRIS JACKSON/PA WIRE JACKSON/PA CHRIS SHESTAK/ALAMY; VERA it and going on a global a Covid-19 musical, with airauctioneer.com to more.” Alison Flood Patent WORD OF THE WEEK Joe Biden recently supported the waiving of patents on Covid-19 vaccines so Steven Poole more could be made in the developing world, an idea that was not greeted with unalloyed joy by stockholders in pharmaceutical companies . But where do “patents” come from, linguistically speaking? As with so much, we owe them to France: patent was a medieval French deriva- tion from the Latin patens , meaning “open” or “obvious”. From early modern times in English law, “letters patent” were open letters (to enable inspection) from a monarch or government that conferred some right or title on the bearer. Inventions, too, could be protected by letters patent, giving the holder com- mercial exclusivity, from the 17th century onwards; in time they were called simply “patent” or “patented”. Lovers of 1980s fashion might be pleased to know that “patent leather” is originally recorded as the brainchild of a Mr Hand of Birmingham in 1793, and “patent medicines” were advertised in the Essex Gazette of 1770, though quacks’ cures of those days were less reliable than modern mRNA jabs. Meanwhile, given that “patent” still retains its original sense of “clear” or “evident”, it is patently obvious that “patently obvious” is a tautology. The books that made me ¶

genuinely don’t understand the fuss. For years, ‘Terry Pratchett makes you I joked that every living American claims to be feel seen and forgiven’ “half-Irish, half-Cherokee”. Not 50 pages into The Goldfi nch, the narrator’s mother is described, without Patrick Ness irony, as “half-Irish, half-Cherokee”. I thought : “Nope, there’s no truth to be found here.” The last book that made me laugh The book I am currently reading Elif Batuman’s The Idiot. It manages the trick of I’m just about fi nished with Adam Levin’s thousand- being laugh-out-loud funny while not actually page The Instructions, about a 10-year-old boy who being a comedy. It just observes life, in all its truth, thinks he might be the Jewish Messiah. Everyone and is hilarious for page after page. Never trust an makes David Foster Wallace comparisons, as if that entirely dour book; it’s what bad writers think art is. explains anything, but I’ve found it a vastly enter- The book I couldn’t fi nish taining, wildly over-loquacious joy. Then, for Many. Lots. Several. There’s no shame in it. If a book something completely diff erent, I’ll be starting doesn’t hold your interest, it’s probably the book’s fault. Adrian Tchaikovsky’s The Doors of Eden. He writes The book I’m ashamed not to have read incredibly enjoyable sci-fi , full of life and ideas. None. Zero. Nada. There’s also no shame in not The book that changed my life reading a book, any book. The kind of people who Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins. I read it maybe a would shame you for not having read something are dozen times when I was 15 and 16, and it broke all the not anyone you need to know or associate with. rules for what introverted, painfully preppy me Their breath invariably smells of sour wine, and thought writing was supposed to do in novels. It they probably still listen to the Beautiful South. dared to be playful, which was a revelation. My comfort read The book I wish I’d written Discworld by Terry Pratchett. I am always at some Not a book – because jealousy is a mug’s game – but point through the cycle (I’m currently on The Thief the last line of Sula by Toni Morrison is the most of Time). They’re not only gloriously funny, they’re devastatingly perfect fi ctional sentence I know of. A humane in a way that makes you actually feel seen woman fi nally reali ses what the death of her lifelong and forgiven, with all your faults. He was a one-off , friend and sometime enemy means to her: “It was a Sir Terry. When I fi nish reading them through, I fi ne cry – loud and long – but it had no bottom and it simply put the last book down and pick the fi rst had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.” one up again. The book I think is most overrated I have tried to read The Goldfi nch three times and Burn by Patrick Ness is out in paperback, published

MURDO MACLEOD/THE GUARDIAN MACLEOD/THE MURDO failed each time. None of it rings true to me, and I by Walker .

Saturday 8 May 2021 The Guardian 5 ¶ Cover story

Wish you were there?

6 The Guardian Saturday 15 May 2021 Cover story ¶

potential to replace us is also a persistent anxiety, espe- A new crop of novels ci ally with fears of mass unemployment in the wake of Covid. The world of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the examines offi ce culture Sun, in which humans are being outper formed by machines and some are denied education and career – yet for many it feels advancement, feels uncomfortably close to our own. The white-collar workplace has long provided like a distant memory. writers with inspiration, from the passive rebellion of Herman Melville’s Bartleby, who would “prefer not Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett to”, to the entry of women into the offi ce, explored in books such as Rona Jaff e’s 1958 The Best of Everything and the presciently unsatisfying magazine intern- considers work and our ship in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Nicholson Baker embraced the mundane in his account of the minutiae search for fulfi lment of one worker’s day in The Mezzanine, while colleagues formed a Greek chorus in Joshua Ferris’s Then We hat has become of the offi ce? Came to the End. Its small, mundane daily Its current manifestation is the fi ction of the rituals, its smells – of over- “bullshit job” – a term coined by philosopher David boiled coff ee, synthetic Graeber in his infl uential examination of pointless, fabrics, other people’s psychologically destructive 21st-century work. In the W perfume – the low hum 90s, the literary “brat pack” that included Bret Easton of phone conversations Ellis, Tama Janowitz and Jay McInerney critiqued and the whirring of the printer. To those of us who the bland blankness of a society shaped by consumer are still working from home, it feels like a faraway capitalism; contemporary writers continue that place, a half-forgotten memory, and to those who legacy with dark, playful examinations of the lives of have returned it is utterly transformed: masked, the “precariat”, working in an insecure gig economy distanced, hushed. where jobs are temporary, stability is an illusion and It’s a strange time to be appraising the workplace workplaces are the soulless sites of petty employee novel. Will things return to how they were before, surveillance, imposing meaningless tasks that are or will we look back on our time of working long the enemy of creative and emotional fulfi lment. hours in the offi ce with relief that it’s over, or even And many of the resulting novels are very funny. nostalgia? I wonder if books set in offi ces will make us In Fake Accounts, Lauren Oyler paints a scathing wistful about some aspects of pre-pandemic life or if, picture of a millennial-targeted online media instead, these narratives will act as a warning against company: “Everything you said or did was probably returning to a working culture that felt, to many of meaningless and impermanent as well as potentially us, unreliable and unstable. hugely signifi cant; the eff ect was that you were both Temping , the unnamed temp of Hilary Leichter’s neurotically tetchy and quietly demoralised all the novel Temporary informs us, is a “shorthand career” time.” Meanwhile, meetings are “almost totally of “short tasks, short stays, short skirts”. In this brief, pointless” and the website itself embarrassing to surreal portrayal of peripatetic employment – which work for: “I deduced that smart people did not includes delivering mail, directing traffi c, temping bother with this website, and I didn’t blame them.” for a murderer, fi lling in for a ghost by open ing and “My routine is always the same,” Edie, the heroine closing doors in a family home, and standing in for an of Raven Leilani’s Desmond Elliott prize-winning extinct kind of barnacle – the absurdities of working debut Luster, tells us of her working day. “I dart from life are exposed with deadpan humour. the train and immedi ately wash my hands in the offi ce “I love it when the temp becomes a barnacle,” bathroom. I load up on the free hand lotion the pub- Leichter tells me. “It’s my favourite job in the book lisher started putting out but one for which I probably would not apply. I started I wonder if these after it was revealed that writing it as a bit of a joke, and that section – the idea narratives will the women in the company that when we destroy the planet, no one will be left act as a warning (a whopping 87 percent of to replace us – came to defi ne the whole project.” against returning the employee base) are still As a refl ection of the instability of the 21st-century making less than the men. gig economy, Temporary is a truly contemporary to a working The hand lotion has slightly work novel: part of a category of modern fi ction that culture that felt, increased morale.” Edie is forever expanding, despite the pandemic moth- to many of us, works in children’s publish- balling many offi ces this year. It’s unsurprising that unreliable ing (“I call meetings where the workplace looms large in fi ction: discussions of and unstable we discuss why bears are its future are as pertinent as ever, with so many of over, and why children only us working remotely, amid calls for universal basic want to read about fi sh”),

HOWARD KINGSNORTHGETTY HOWARD income and the four-day week. Artifi cial intelligence’s but spends a lot of her 

ILLUSTRATION xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Saturday 15 May 2021 The Guardian 7 ¶ Cover story Wish you were there?

 time either browsing the internet or sleeping with book Can’t Even), is assigned a job that involves her col leagues. There is one other black woman work- sitting at a desk monitoring CCTV footage of a novel- ing there, who is after her job. She knows that, career- ist experiencing writer’s block; he is also sitting at a wise, she is on borrowed time, but doesn’t seem overly desk, staring blankly at a screen. The emotional distressed by this. Really, she wants to be an artist. labour of her past career left a “hole” in the temp, and These heroines are far from satisfi ed in their work. all she wants is an easy job that is close to her house, In Halle Butler’s The New Me, Millie is a temp. “The and requires “very little thinking”. She ends up taking new offi ces and coworkers provide a nice illusion of a number of placements, including writing the copy variety,” she tells us. “Like how people switch out on cracker packets and voicing the advertisements on their cats’ wet food from Chicken to Liver to Sea Bass, buses, but is always frustrated in her desire for blank but in the end, it’s all just fl avored anus.” At the heart monotony: life continually intervenes. of The New Me is the pointlessness of work, how it In its quirky portrayal of each placement, There’s results in a sort of spiritual death: “Back at my desk No Such Thing As an Easy Job verges on magic realism. I sit and slowly collect money that I can use to pay More experimental still is Little Scratch by Rebecca the rent on my apartment and on food so that I can Watson, which follows one young woman through a continue to live and continue to come to this room single day using a stream-of-consciousness narrative; and sit at this desk and slowly collect money.” the woman’s fragmented inner thoughts are inter- Unlike most contemporary work novels, Leichter’s spersed with, and intruded upon, by real-world Temporary makes no attempt at realism. Yet in its occurrences and interactions. absurdity it hits on a kind of truth about the empty For Watson’s protagonist, work is the site of an mores of contemporary offi ce culture. No agency is assault that left her traumatised. “The offi ce routine is going to send you to assist a murderer, but the killer’s something that she relies on to essentially suppress the words of encouragement to the temp could have come assault,” Watson says. Without a day job the narrator from any offi ce conversation: “It’s not like you don’t might have the time and space to work through what have any experience … give yourself some credit, golly.” happened to her; the tedium of repetitive work, in “There are so many smart realist books about what other words, is the enemy of psychological growth. it means to work today,” Leichter says. “I didn’t feel “Particularly in administration, you’re going through, that I had anything to add to that conversation, but essentially, a groundhog day every single day,” says that I could say something about how it feels to work, Watson. “Inspiration or diversion are impossible. how it feels like a funhouse. I wanted the feeling of Little Scratch is about the impossibility of fi nding disposability and vulnerability to guide the narrative meaning when the majority of your life is spent doing to the most unbelievable places.” something that has no point.” Another temping novel is There’s No Such Thing For a novel about trauma, Little Scratch is sur- As an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura. An unnamed prisingly funny, and despite the monotony of the woman, who we learn has suff ered from career tasks the protagonist undertakes, her inner voice burnout (a malaise on the rise among millennials, crackles with life. Other contemporary novels – most according to Anne Helen Petersen’s recent nonfi ction notably, The New Me, but also Severance by Ling Ma,

Clockwise from below: Hilary Leichter; Halle Butler; Kazuo Ishiguro; Zakiya Dalila Harris SYLVIE ROSOKOFF; JEFF COTTENDEN/FABER AND AND COTTENDEN/FABER JEFF ROSOKOFF; SYLVIE PHOTOGRAPHY MONDESTIN NICOLE FABER/EPA;

8 The Guardian Saturday 15 Mayay 220210210202121 Cover story ¶

The Answers by Catherine Lacey, and My Year of Rest ‘Being a society is now a 24-hour and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh – have been productive project that actually con- singled out by critics for a certain numbness. “Read- member of sumes all the space needed ing these novels in succession, you’d get the sense society is now for genuine inner develop- that mil lennials are defi ned not by the downward ment. I don’t think we can mobility of their generation but by something a 24-hour project now just talk about work or internal: a mysterious dearth of will,” wrote the that consumes labour as being the stuff Nation’s Katie Bloom. In the Baffl er magazine, Jess all the space that happens between nine Bergman laments the “perplex ingly alienated women needed for inner and fi ve in a designated of recent American fi ction”. development’ work space,” he says. “It’s Are these young women (and they are usually Sam Byers the ongoing work of making young women) really as disempowered as they think your personality a brand, of they are? The protagonists are, it should be noted, maintaining your wellness mostly white. These relatively privileged daughters through diet and exercise, of having this kind of of the feminist era grew up being promised the aspirational daily routine that is ironically liberation, independence and fulfi lment that came completely exhausting.” with education and a career; perhaps they have felt No wonder the “burnout novel” is fl ourishing. betrayed by the shabby, merciless reality of much The more pessimistic of these imply there is no way work under late-stage capitalism. Or, as Bloom out, there can be no alternative to capitalism – a suggests, do some modern workplace novels allow line of thinking that the late cultural theorist Mark middle-class people to feel “like the real victims of Fisher identifi ed as capitalist realism. Perhaps this capitalism instead of participants and benefi ciaries”? hints at why writers have turned to the surreal and Maya, the narrator in Sam Byers’s recent novel fantastical to off er narratives of liberation. In the real Come Join Our Disease, is far from privileged. She is world, an alternative way of living just doesn’t feel homeless, recruited to a job doing content moder- possible. How can it, when even basic stability ation for a tech company via a dubious rehabilitation (called “the steadiness” by Leichter’s temp) feels programme that brings to mind the techno-dystopias like a dream? of the science-fi ction TV series Black Mirror. “I wanted It will be interesting to see where, in light of the to get at this strange tension between the banality pandemic, the literature of work goes next. Will it of offi ce life and the profoundly distressing and become more and more surreal? Or, as our lives come traumatising nature of the imagery she’s exposed to,” to feel more dystopian, will pessimistic realism win says Byers. “To me there’s something distinctively out? As well as exploring the potential for collecti- contemporary about that.” vism and solidarity, I suspect it will grow in scope to The way Byers explores the interplay between the look critically at racial, class and gender imbalance. utopian and the dystopian feels Ballardian. Expected In the wake of #MeToo and the Black Lives Matter to document her every move for social media, Maya movement, workplace equality is still a long way off ; thinks she is being off ered a way out of poverty, but and in a precarious economy inclusion often suff ers. the reality is dehumanising. As Zadie Smith wrote of Luster touches on workplace tokenism, but Crash: “In Ballard’s work there is always this mix of forthcoming debut The Other Black Girl by Zakiya futuristic dread and excitement, a sweet spot where Dalila Harris, to be published in June, makes this dystopia and utopia converge. For we cannot say we its central conceit. Harris wrote it while working in haven’t got precisely what we dreamed of, what we publishing. She ran into another black woman in always wanted, so badly.” the ladies’ toilet (a “rare occurrence”), only for Maya’s response is to rebel, and her liberation the woman to fail to acknowledge her. What if, becomes central to the novel. Could it be found in Harris wondered, “there could only be one of us”? a community that celebrates the rancid and the The Other Black Girl begins as a story of offi ce micro- repugnant, allowing Maya to embody the opposite aggressions but morphs into something far stranger. of what young women are expected to be? Potential This tale of offi ce racism feels like a thriller and ends salvation lies in collectivity and community. In her up some where close to sci-fi . The payoff is darkly, essay, Bergman holds up Temporary as “the fi rst of brutally twisted, a witty commentary on the these novels to acknowledge solidarity as a salve behaviours people adopt in order to get ahead against capitalism’s worst off ences” – Leichter’s within oppressive structures. heroine joins an agency for fugitive temps. Come Join Rebecca Watson tells me that since lockdown, Our Disease and There’s No Such Thing As an Easy Job people have told her that the offi ce scenes in can be added to that list. And in Watson’s novel, too, we Little Scratch feel nostalgic. If it no longer exists, are left with the feeling that it is human relationships, could future fi ction writers look more kindly upon outside the workplace, that off er potential healing. offi ce culture? I suspect the opposite will be true. Yet, as is the case in reality, not everyone can hope “People felt this kind of work structure was an for liberation. Sometimes, work simply sucks and inevitability,” says Watson. “But suddenly, you there is no escape. As Byers notes: “Being a productive, realise that, actually, these structures are not actually respected, comparatively secure member of modern necessary, but forced upon you” •

Saturday 15 May 2021 The Guardian 9 acting as guide and technical assistant for two young Book of mapping specialists, Thomas and Luke. The three- way dynamics are vividly established in agile prose the week that slips between their diff erent voices and ways of seeing. Robert’s talk of “radio discipline” and “correct operating procedure” meets Luke’s chilled “thanks for sharing”. In the storm, however, they can hear only snatches of each other’s voices on their radios, { Fiction } Disaster in the odd syllables adrift on white noise. Another kind of Antarctic, heroism at home: linguistic puzzle takes over in a long and extraordinary passage that records something close to Robert’s a profound interrogation stream of consciousness as his thinking gets more of language, care and loss confused in the unfolding disaster. “Wide noise like apple oars. Apple sauce. Appley saws. Appley laws.” Alexandra Harris He cannot reach the word applause . Tongue-twisters, nursery rhymes and riddles come to mind – but what is happening is no game. “It was sure where he’d Jon McGregor has a fallen. Sore. He was sure. Shore lips.” quietly and brilliantly It is Robert’s wife, Anna, who subsequently becomes transformative way of the central fi gure. We watch her, and watch with her, mixing up genres. His 2017 as she grasps what his physical disability and severe novel Reservoir 13, winner aphasia will mean for them both. McGregor presents of the Costa novel award a powerful portrait of a woman confronting tragic and shortlisted for the change, and of fi ercely independent spouses thrown Lean Fall Stand Goldsmiths prize, began together inescapably as carer and cared-for. None of by Jon McGregor, with news that a girl was it is written as tragedy – no agonised laments, not even 4th Estate, £14.99 missing. Search parties tears – but every line has weight. “I don’t want to be a gathered; torchlight scoured carer,” Anna says plainly. “I never even really wanted a northern village. Even the title, with its sinister to be a wife.” Now choice doesn’t come into it. “She had coolness, suggested that this book would follow the to get down on her knees to put the socks on his feet, contours of a crime novel, and accordingly it was wise and his feet into the trousers .” to be on the alert, paying heightened attention to each How did these stories of remote expedition and location, person and event. Gradually it became clear domestic care come to live together in a book? In that we were not really there to solve the crime. All 2004 McGregor joined an expedition to Antarctica. the watching and searching was failing to bring back His job was to write about the experience, and he Rebecca, but it was not without purpose. Each page, found he couldn’t. Which is not surprising: the charged with intensity borrowed from the crime plot, inadequacy of language has long been as much a was revealing the complex life of the village – its theme of polar literature as the midnight sun. Suc- landscape and wildlife as well as human inhabitants – cessive travellers have fi lled notebooks with similes through the cycle of seasons and passing of years. for the shapes of icebergs and felt descriptive strategies Lean Fall Stand moves into diff erent territory falling short. McGregor set the problem aside and entirely, but again McGregor pivots from one kind of wrote three searching, superbly crafted novels about story to another with profound eff ect. This new novel other things, but eventually he returned. The long looks as though it’s going to be about an Antarctic gestation, the retrospective look, allowed him to set expedition. It will doubtless be concerned with his Antarctic material in relation to bodies of thought character and endurance under extreme pressure; about illness, care and commitment. His diffi culty struggling fi gures will cross the wilderness; sublimity with language became the stimulus for an extended and quotidian banter will tell upon each other. Partly investigation of what that’s right; a storm strikes in the fi rst pages and the McGregor happens when words go ensuing battle for survival is narrated with riveting transliterates missing in many contexts immediacy. But the second and third sections of this slurrings and and for many reasons. three-part book unfold far from the ice fl oes. Condi- phonetic misfi res, When Anna is hit by tions remain challenging, endurance and discipline the crisis of her husband’s are required more than ever, but the work in hand is repeating the condition, few people in her now the gruelling task of living with a brain injury and same few phrases life say anything helpful, or (for others on this most testing expedition) the task while keeping even appropriate. She’s an of caring for a man who has lost his powers of speech. emotion mobile academic ocean ographer; Robert Wright has been working in Antarctica for her colleagues keep wanting 30 years. He is more at home at his fi eld station than to “bring her up to speed” in the family house, outside Cambridge, from which with research for a confer- he has been so regularly absent. This season he is ence. Her grown-up child-

10 The Guardian Saturday 15 May 2021 Book of the week ¶ GETTY IMAGES/MINT IMAGES RF IMAGES IMAGES/MINT GETTY

ren, superbly drawn in all their self-absorption and sessions, his voice and silences are heard next to vulnerability, duck out of the hospital as soon as they other people’s disordered speech – for example can (“it’s a work thing”). She longs for the silence of that of Peter, a fl uent aphasic whose sentences swell the Friends meeting house, and the peace of her gar- in rhythmic tides without conveying what he wants den. As for Robert, he has just a few words on repeat. to say. “Certainly we were all dream ing of the water “Yes, yes, well obviously of course”. “Christ!” He can from here to there and the you to him to her that say “yes” , but he cannot reach “no” . came upon the water wished and well we wish you Aphasia takes Robert and Anna to terra incognita well.” We might pause over the gravity, beauty and they never wanted to explore. Only a few skilled imaginative possibility here, holding that aesthetic speech therapists can help with mapping the terrain. response in precarious relation to the aphasic’s pain Robert reaches for words that are always just beyond and frustration in not being understood. him, “left outside, snowed under, needing to be dug Group therapy is an intriguing choice of subject out”. McGregor is too good a writer to push the matter. As participants are urged to choose smiley analogy. He lets the diff erent kinds of courage, or unhappy emojis to describe their week, and knowledge and loss sit quietly side by side. dancers arrive to encourage expression through There’s a dreadful and delicate poetry in Robert’s movement, the whole narrative feels poised between struggle for articulation. When he’s tapped on the scepticism, impatience and admiration. Robert shoulder: “Soul. Soul. Soul. Jar. Soul, jar … Well. walks out twice. But the novel holds us there in the Soldier, soldier.” You might think you were in a room. It’s in these sessions that we come closest to Gertrude Stein novel, or James Joyce’s Finnegans the kind of collective voice that McGregor has explored Wake , and for good reason. Many modernist writers in pre vious novels – in the shared narration of the were deeply interested in language loss, the creative troubled, vociferous, unheard addicts of Even the rhymes and substitutions that patients employ, and Dogs, rising between them like a Greek chorus, what they might reveal about our processes of com- and in the passive, impersonal recording of the whole munication. Samuel Beckett was preoccupied all his village in Reservoir 13. Now the strenuously made life with failures of articulation. George Steiner noted words of the group members fl oat together on a that in some cases the results of aphasia, rich in common stream of eff ort. neologism and metaphor, “are almost inspired”. Lean Fall Stand doesn’t have the lyric force and Yet Lean Fall Stand is unusual in the patience and structural patterning that gave Reservoir 13 such precision of its engagement with a particular clinical extraordinary rhythmic momentum. Nonetheless, disorder. McGregor transliterates slurrings and it’s a novel of complex feeling and beautiful restraint phonetic misfi res, repeating the same few phrases from one of the fi nest writers around. while keeping emotion and atmosphere mob ile. When Robert reluctantly attends group therapy To buy a copy for £12.74 go to guardianbookshop.com .

Saturday 15 May 2021 The Guardian 11 Jewish immigrants, was a qualifi ed psychiatrist, but Nonfi ction his fortune rose from his marketing skills. With his two brothers he took over an advertising agency that marketed drugs to physicians, mostly through a free medical newspaper that he published himself. He hawked Valium and other tranquili sers so eff ectively, Keefe writes, that “patients had started going to their doctors and requesting each new wonder drug by { History } Sacklers exposed: name”. Sackler hid his connection to his journals, so how the dynasty behind the when his partners in the publications were accused of bribing a government offi cial he stayed off camera. OxyContin crisis was able to Then the brothers bought a small, humdrum drug continue selling it for so long company named Purdue Frederick, a manufac turer of earwax remover, antiseptic and constipation pills. Samanth Subramanian Under Sackler, Purdue developed and sold MS Contin, a slow-release morphine tablet, without even waiting for regulatory approval. He died in 1987, and his heirs What a strange, uniquely sold their share of the business to his brothers, but illusive fi gure the doctor is. those members of the next generation of the family The art of medicine is so who who took over the company inherited his disregard manifestly a higher purpose for ethics and the law and used the company to fl og – the safeguarding of human their fl agship slow-release opioid: OxyContin. life itself – that its practi- The things they knew! They knew that OxyContin tioners enjoy a kind of was more potent than morphine, and they exploited Empire of Pain: The immaculate moral authority. the fact that doctors thought the reverse to be true. Secret History of Yet these doctors are also They claimed OxyContin posed little risk of addiction, the Sackler Dynasty the front line vendors in an even though Purdue had carried out no tests to that by Patrick Radden industrial complex, which eff ect at all. They knew they were using fl imsy litera- Keefe, Picador, £20 includes hospitals, equip- ture to reassure physicians about OxyContin’s safety . ment-makers, insurance They knew the drug could be injected, but they didn’t companies and drug fi rms, their eyes all fastened let on. Studying their sales data, they maintained a on their profi t margins. The industry relies on secret list of doctors who overprescribed OxyContin – the doctor’s unimpeachable image. In the US, in and did little to alert the authorities to these pill mills, particular, the gap between saviour and salesman preferring to grow rich off the proceeds instead. is a chance to make money off the most captive of Purdue Pharma earned at least $35b n from Oxy- markets: the sick hoping to get well again. Contin. With it, the Sacklers bought their reputation as One of the people to have recognised this most genteel cultural benefactors, along with mansions all clearly was Arthur Sackler, the patriarch of a pharma- over Europe and the US. A second-generation Sackler, ceutical dynasty that is the subject of Empire of Pain. Mortimer, purchased a home in Turks and Caicos, and The Sacklers ran Purdue Pharma, which sold Oxy- fl ew in yoga instructors to guide him towards inner Contin, the pain killer that peace. “If the sand on the beach got too hot in the ignited a blaze of drug A protest at the noonday sun, staff ers would spray it with water so abuse across the US. At least Louvre, Paris, in 2019 that guests could stroll where they wanted without half a million people have against its ties with fear of burning their feet,” Keefe writes. His book ends died from overdosing on the Sackler family in 2020, and right until the fi nal pages – well after the opioids such as OxyContin; the tablet became a way into heroin use. Patrick Radden Keefe fi rst wrote about the Sacklers four years ago in the New Yorker, just as Americans were getting angry about how the family that sold OxyContin was also celebrated for its philanthropy. Its name adorned the sites of cultural cachet that it had purchased: the Sackler Wings at the Louvre in Paris and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Serpentine Sackler Gallery in London; buildings at Harvard, Oxford and other universities. Empire of Pain is an attentive history of the family, and gathers up evidence of how they were aware of the ways in which OxyContin drove the opioid-abuse epidemic – how, in fact, they even marketed the drug to capitalise on it.

STEPHANE DE SAKUTIN/AFP VIA GETTY VIA SAKUTIN/AFP DE STEPHANE Arthur Sackler, the restless eldest son of European

12 The Guardian Saturday 15 May 2021 Nonfi ction ¶ opioid epidemic touched off a wave of heroin abuse – the Sacklers refuse to con cede their role in th e calam- { Memoir } The author ity. In a Congressional hearing in December a reflects on the loss of her father legislator told two of them: “I’m not sure I know of any family in America that is more evil than yours.” during the pandemic, in an Keefe’s narrative is so lush with details that only in exquisitely written tribute the chinks do we spot the story behind the story: the rotting structure of US healthcare. Some failures are Catherine Taylor born of lethargy or neglect. A federal offi cial once told me that if states had transitioned faster to reporting health statistics electronically, someone might have On 10 June 2020, the writer caught a pattern: “all the drug overdose deaths, the Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie suicides ” that advertised the opioid crisis. But other experienced “the worst day failures are the results of a system maintained at a of my life. There is such a level of designed corruption. For instance, an offi cer thing as the worst day of at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted life, and please, dear OxyContin its approvals in an astonishingly short time universe, I do not want – 11 months – and then quit the agency. A year later, Notes on Grief anything ever to top it.” he was working at Purdue, earning $400,000 a year. by Chimamanda Her beloved father had died In Virginia, in 2007, Purdue pleaded guilty to lying Ngozi Adichie, suddenly at the age of 88. about OxyContin’s potential for addiction, paid $600m 4th Estate, £10 She had talked to him only in fi nes, then continued selling the drug . The standard the day before, on a Zoom rogues of capitalism assisted: corporate lawyers, call from her home in Maryland to her parents’ in lobbyists, con sultants. (The moment the Sacklers Abba, south-east Nigeria. Every Sunday, the family began toppling from grace, one consultant warned a had engaged, like so many the world over, in a new colleague that it was time to start “eliminating all our routine of remote communication: “our boisterous docu ments and emails,” Keefe fi nds.) When the lockdown ritual” . In the book, s he recalls her last Sacklers faced their stiff est legal challenge, two years moments with her father. “On 8 June Okey [Adichie’s ago, they cashed out their stakes , moved most of their brother in Lagos] went to Abba to see him and said he money overseas and had Purdue fi le for bankruptcy; looked tired. On 9 June, I kept our chat brief, so that once that was done, no court could claw damages out he could rest. Ka chi fo, he said. Good night. His last of their personal funds. For a while, in 2019-20, it words to me.” When another brother, Chuks, tele- seemed possible that family members and company phones to let her know the awful news , she recalls: executives would face criminal charges. Then the “I came undone.” Trump administration engineered their reprieve. Notes on Grief, written during the weeks and months Keefe set out to be a chronicler of the Sacklers, so following the death, (it fi rst appeared as an essay in it’s unfair to complain that he spends too little time the New Yorker) is both emotional and austere, a interrogating the nexus of money and government. work of dignity and of unravelling. Spare and yet Nevertheless, that nexus is clearly the source of so spiritually nutritious, the book serves as a refl ection much dysfunction in US healthcare – to the extent of Adichie’s turmoil in loss. It is also an exquisitely that to read Empire of Pain is to wonder if even the written tribute to her father, James Nwoye Adichie, Sacklers are just a distraction from the real problems. who was Nigeria’s fi rst professor of statistics. In the past half-year, the sceptics among us have The loss is acutely underlined by the pandemic. been advised to celebrate the marvel of vaccines “It was not supposed to happen like this, not like a developed on the fl y. These are brandished as proof of mal ici ous surprise.” With the world locked down and the essential soundness of the medical industry . None Nigeria’s airports not open until August, and then of these champions hangs around very long to listen to September, the funeral is constantly postponed. the argument that, while the vaccines may bear out the Adichie’s mother is a bereft and stoic symbol “already march of science, their distribution suff ers from many … settled on the sofa in placid widow pose ”. Later she of the industry’s mer cenary habits. The rich prevail will insist on the Igbo mourning tradition of shaving over the poor. Taxpayers fund research, only for large her head, despite her children’s protests: “I’ll do fi rms to cling to intellec tual property rights and the everything that is done. I’ll do it for Daddy.” revenues they will bring – and for governments to back Yet it is overwhelmingly the “never again” that pre- this opportunism even during a pandemic. Companies occupies Adichie. Grief is specifi c but it is also, how- publish dubious data. And those members of the Sack- ever hackneyed, universal. In Tony Harrison’s poem ler family who were involved have endured nothing of parental death, “Long Distance II”, grief becomes more distres sing than a social downfall. Only in a the “disconnected number I still call”. Sim ilarly for deranged world can the erasure of their names from Adichie, “for the rest of my life, I will live with hands museum galleries be considered punishment enough. outstretched for things that are no longer there.”

To buy a copy for £17.40 go to guardianbookshop.com . To buy a copy for £8.50 go to guardianbookshop.com .

Saturday 15 May 2021 The Guardian 13 ¶ Nonfi ction

“orgone energy” to its libidinally depleted occupant. { Psychology } From the Marquis It can seem as though all the great victories and de Sade to Wilhelm Reich ... tragic failures of modern sexual politics are concen- trated in the fi gure of Reich. For Laing, his supreme a moving history of sexuality, insight – that the true source of the body’s power is fear and bodily freedom the vulnerability we prefer to conceal – has never been more valid. In shutting down our vulnerability, Josh Cohen we block access to the full range of our feelings, giving rise to the kind of mechanistic compliance favoured by fascism. Right at the end of this exhil- But what makes Reich’s tormented life so poignant arating journey through a is how, in striving to release us from the authoritarian century’s struggles over mindset, he couldn’t help getting caught in it himself. the human body, Olivia As he aged he fell prey to pseudo-medical moralising, Laing invites her reader to ascribing disease to blockages of orgone energy in his “imagine, for a minute, what 1948 The Cancer Biopathy, while worrying in his 1953 it would be like to inhabit People in Trouble about “biologically degenerate” Everybody: A Book a body without fear”. This forms of sexuality. Towards the end of his life, he About Freedom simple hope comes to sound turned down Allen Ginsberg for treatment because by Olivia Laing, like a radical demand for he was gay. Picador, £20 the impossible; after such a If Reich is somehow exemplary for Laing, he is vivid catalogue of the many hardly unique in his concerns. On the contrary, what humiliations and cruelties a body can be made to she shows across many diff erent lives and milieus, bear, it isn’t easy to envision. from Susan Sontag to Andrea Dworkin , 1920s Berlin to Laing’s impassioned commitment to the promise 1950s Kentucky, is how the urge to release the body of bodily freedom, of every body’s right to move and from fear and prejudice is rarely free from ambivalence feel and love without harming or being harmed, and contradiction. The theme is amplifi ed by refl ective shines through every sentence of the book. But she is vignettes of her own bodily experiences, woven into too canny a writer to miss the rich and bitter irony in the book with deftness, candour and generosity. which eff orts to realise this promise so often get This is an expansive book, bold in scope and spec- caught: every movement to liberate the body comes ulative range, an invitation to ongoing conversation to be marked in some way by the constrictive regime rather than bland assent. In that spirit, I would venture it’s trying to escape. The writer who best grasped this a diff erent view of the dynamic between freedom and irony was the Marquis de Sade , of whom Laing writes control animating the book. Laing’s Reichian take on with an open and compelling ambivalence. De Sade’s sexuality as a “wild force”, which every social order nihilistic fantasies of sexual torture are a discomfi ting seeks to circumscribe and control, might account for reminder of how easily the liberty of one individual why states and institutions keep such vigilant watch becomes the enslavement and abasement of others. over the body, but not why liberation movements so But her central character is Wilhelm Reich, disciple often sabotage or compromise themselves – why, for of and eventual dissenter against Sigmund Freud, example, an agitator for sexual reform such as Magnus visionary theorist-activist of sexual politics in the Hirschfeld, founder in 1919 of Berlin’s Institute for Viennese 1920s and hapless, delusional inventor of Sexual Research, should also have been an advocate the orgone accumulator in the American 1940s. for “welfare eugenics”, including the compulsory In Vienna, Reich had sought to draw psychotherapy sterilisation of the “mentally stupid”. away from Freudian analytic neutrality and towards a Reich, in other words, has a theory of suppression, practice of liberation, whereby the patient’s “character of how the body is kept compliant by external forces; armour”, coiled knots of but he lacks its essential Freudian complement, a psycho-physical tension, theory of repression, of the anxiety induced by the would be dissolved by strangeness and lawlessness of the body’s drives and touch, releasing ecstatic the unconscious mechanisms we employ to keep them libidinal fl ows through the in check. From my more Freudian perspective, fear body and restoring its belongs as much and as indelibly to us as to the police. availability to the full range Yet Laing’s Reichian utopianism, with its ultimate of feeling. But an increas- horizon of a body without fear, coexists with a clear- ingly persecuted and eyed sense, at work in all its granular explorations of grandiose mindset would sexual politics, art and ideas, of how and why that eventually lead him to horizon seems always to be vanishing. And this tension imagine that this same cure Laing weaves in between defi ant hope and sober realism only enriches could be achieved by refl ective vignettes her intensely moving, vital and artful book. confi nement in a tiny about her own bodily

SUKI DHANDA/THE OBSERVER DHANDA/THE SUKI wooden cell emitting experiences To buy a copy for £17.40 go to guardianbookshop.com .

14 The Guardian Saturday 15 May 2021 Nonfi ction ¶

was for a 2019 piece in Vice magazine examining the { Society } A thoughtful study increase in numbers of reported missing persons. Since that gathers testimony from then, he has “gravitated to the stories of those slipping out of view”. The root of this preoccupation, he came people who have gone missing to realise, was the disappearance of his Spanish father, and those left behind Christobal Garcia-Ferrera, who met Garcia’s mother while she was holidaying in his hometo wn, La Línea. Lamorna Ash After moving to London together, Christobal was struggling to make money, often exploited by bosses for his poor grasp of English, and started drinking Every year in the UK 176,000 heavily. In the fi rst years of Garcia’s life, his father people go missing . These went missing several times, fi nally disappearing for are the known missing. good back to Spain just after Garcia’s mother died of Some will make the papers, cancer. He was only seven. some of their faces shared These two tragedies shape both the text and its so widely we feel we know author, allowing Garcia some common ground with them. Others, the public those he interviews as well as giving the narrative a If You Were There: never hears about. Perhaps teleological momentum – throughout, he deliberates Missing People and they are not young enough, whether or not to seek out his father again. In The Year the Marks They white enough, photogenic of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion describes an aspect of Leave Behind enough in the eyes of the grief she calls the “vortex eff ect”, whereby any chance, by Francisco Garcia, press, perhaps they have mundane event might trigger memories of her lost Mudlark, £14.99 mental health issues, or are loved ones. For Garcia, too, each story is liable to evoke children in care. Then there thoughts of his own father. When he speaks to a young are the unknown missing, those who abscond from man who became lost inside his own life due to nar- their lives, those who are homeless, undocumented cotics addiction, Garcia equates him with Christobal, immigrants, young people who disappear for weeks “their shared frailty and sense of not quite belonging at a time while ferrying drugs across county lines. In in the worlds they’d found themselves living in”. short, those whose passing out of sight is not reported. This fl ickering – between Such examples create a rupture in our under stand- Garcia has some the past and present, the ing of what it means to be missing: is a person missing common ground personal and more general – if no one is looking for them, if they disappear more with his subjects is also played out in Garcia’s than once (a third of all cases are repeat incidents), if as his own father style, which is simultan e- they want to remain gone? At once, the term becomes ously assured and willing to less clear cut. This is journalist Francisco Garcia’s went missing admit uncertainty. Refl ect- intention : to interrogate our conception of missing several times and ing on how losing his parents persons, hoping that, by its end, they will no longer then disappered aff ected him, he writes, “the be considered “an abstraction” but an inevitable part for good when choice is to fi ght forward or of society, operating at the peripheries of all our lives. Garcia was seven stare back … Or maybe that In each section, Garcia looks at a diff erent aspect of isn’t it at all, as smoothly the missing through extensive interviews: those who certain as it might sound”. seek them (charities, missing persons units, the police), This construction recurs the “returned missing”, those whose lives have been countless times, a refusal to resolve or settle in one destabilised in the wake of missing loved ones. All the place, echoing his realisation that you should never interviews are given equal weight, so in some sections ask the families of the missing “about closure”. For, the narrative drags. He also us es unwieldy blocks of even when someone returns, some aspects of their quotation , which would have been more eff ective if disappearance will always remain unknown. As such, rephrased in his own thoughtful style. This is the pace is slow, gentle, tentative in its conclusions. remedied in later sections, especially in his profi le of There is a sensitivity to the way Garcia engages with Esther Beadle , a journalist who went missing in 2016 his interviewees. Of an email exchange with a woman for 41 hours. Garcia holds back Beadle’s own remem- whose brother is missing, he gives only a brief brance of the episode until the second half , begin ning summary, explaining: “There were many things that by summarising the events in an informed but Chloe asked me to leave out.” During a conversation distanced way. This allows the reader to experience with a friend whose mother disappeared, he turn s his the shift in perspective – from what it is like to hear voice recorder off because he “sensed we’d talked these stories, to what it is like to live them. As Beadle about traumas of the past for quite long enough”. explains, “I didn’t see myself as a missing person. These absences only make the narrative stronger. He Stuff happened to me. I was there, inside it.” does not expose or breach the trust of his subjects, If You Were There is bookended by two chapters instead treating them with dignity and respect. exploring Garcia’s own relationship with people who go missing . His fi rst journalistic encounter with them To buy a copy for £13.04 go to guardianbookshop.com.

Saturday 15 May 2021 The Guardian 15 

PHOTOGRAPHY Name in here Brit Bennett ¶ Interview

The author of the Women’s prize-shortlisted The Vanishing Half and bestseller The Mothers talks to Emma Brockes about race, the danger of nostalgia and writing only what pleases her ‘I wanted to write about the past in a way that felt honest, and real’

here was a rule to which Brit Bennett Brit Bennett adhered during the writing of Both her books The Vanishing Half. It is a sprawling have been top of blockbuster that opens in a small The New York Times town in Louisiana in 1954 and bestseller list T unspools almost to the present day. It takes twin girls, Desiree and Stella, and through their divergent fortunes tells a story of race and class in America, in which history appears much closer than one might think. Bennett’s rule of composition was this: in a narrative heaving with sadness and disappointment, whenever the writing started to drag like homework, she broke off , only to pick up again when she’d rediscovered the joy. “Just write the parts that are exciting to you,” she thought, “and fi gure out later how you’re going to connect it.” The smart premise of The Vanishing Half helped to propel it to the top of the bestseller lists in the 

Saturday 15 May 2021 The Guardian 17 ¶ Interview Brit Bennett

 US, where it appeared as one of the New York child this terrible history of violence. But the children Times’s best books of 2020 and was longlisted for the feel it, nonetheless. National book award. Desiree and Stella, twin girls “Kennedy has no idea what’s happened,” says born and raised in the fi ctional town of Mallard, make Bennett. “She doesn’t understand why her mother is a startling decision after running away in their teens. so distant from her, or why she’s so skittish; doesn’t Mallard, which “had always been more of an idea understand these very foundational things because than a place,” writes Bennett, is peopled exclusively she has no information about the past. And yet she is, with light-skinned African Americans, “fair and herself, this person who is always restless, always blonde and redheaded, the darkest ones no swarthier running. One of the pressing ideas [of the novel] than a Greek”. After arriving in New Orleans, one was what does it mean to inherit so much from our twin decides to “pass” as white; the other remains parents?” Bennett considers herself lucky: “Both of black. Through this device, Bennett is able to explore my parents are still living and I have a very good not only “shadeism” and the arbitrary demarcations relationship with them – we talk a lot. But there is, between racial groups, but other social boundaries, I’m sure, so much about their lives that they haven’t too. “A lot of stories about passing are about these told me, will not tell me. Occasionally they’ll tell me multiple forms of passing,” she says. When Stella a painful memory that comes out of nowhere, and marries a wealthy white man, she is confronted with you think, ‘Oh, you suddenly make more sense to me.’” the task of not only performing whiteness (“there The question of trauma and how it communicates was nothing to being white except boldness,” writes itself down the generations was central to Bennett’s Bennett), but performing wealthiness, too. motivation for writing the novel, which was pub- The Vanishing Half is Bennett’s second novel. lished while Donald Trump was still in offi ce. Plenty Her fi rst, The Mothers, in which she told the story has been written in the US about black Americans of a 17-year-old girl recovering from the grief of her “passing” as white, but those stories tend to be set mother’s suicide, was published to acclaim in 2016. earlier than Bennett’s novel, beyond living memory But it was an essay written by Bennett in Jezebel where they are easier to dismiss as irrelevant to two years earlier that fi rst vaulted her to public today. This was not Bennett’s aim. “My mother went attention. Running under the headline “I Don’t Know to segregated schools. For me, there’s no remove at What to Do With Good White People”, the then all from this kind of issue. The idea that this is ancient 24-year-old described her reaction to what she called history – it never felt ancient to me. I’m one genera- the “self-aggrandisement” of “good white people”, tion away. That’s something I’ve always been aware self-fl agellating in the wake of the death of Michael of and it’s a reason why I wanted to write a story Brown, an unarmed black teenager shot by a police about passing that was a bit more contemporary than offi cer exonerated by a grand jury. She told a story the traditional stories, that are usually early 20th of her father, a lawyer, who when he was a young century. I wanted a story that got you up into the late man had been pulled over by the LAPD, cuff ed 80s and 90s, into thinking about the fact there hasn’t and thrown on the kerb and had guns pointed at his been that much time that has passed, at all.” head. They had mistaken him for someone else. There was one very good reason for nailing the “Sorry, buddy,” they said, dusting him off after book to this timeframe. “I was aware that I was realising their error. They had simply made a mis- writing a book set in the past in this moment of really take; this was the fi ction told and maintained and intense national nostalgia,” she says, “and that was then interrogated by Bennett. As Bennett’s mother, something I was very suspicious about. The whole who came from a family of sharecroppers in rural Make America Great Again nostalgia felt like TV: Louisiana, used to say: “It was a lot simpler in the people are nostalgic for Leave It to Beaver, not about rural South. White people let you know right away any moment that has ever really existed. They where you stood.” wanted to go back to this childhood that they saw Family stories inform the theme of inter- on television – this gross nostalgia. It made me very generational trauma that runs through The Vanishing aware that I wanted to write about the past in a way Half. Early on in the novel, that felt honest, and real.” This period that Trump the twins witness their ‘Trump colonised and his voters were yearning for, she says, was “this father being dragged out of our brains for romanticised and false vision of the past”. the house, later to turn up years. There Bennett, who studied English at Stanford before dead after a lynching. When wasn’t a day we doing an MFA at the University of Michigan, grew the twins grow up and have up in Oceanside, California, where both her parents daughters of their own – weren’t aff ected worked in law. They were both also only one gen- Kennedy, wealthy and by his whims. eration removed from poverty. Class interests white, living in an affl uent And suddenly Bennett as much as race. In The Vanishing Half, LA neighbourhood; Jude, he’s just gone? It Stella’s cover as a wealthy white woman is almost stuck back in Mallard, feels very surreal’ blown when she displays the wrong kind of racism, where she is considered attacking a new black family in the neighbourhood “too black” for the town – with a vigour her white neighbours consider neither mentions to her unseemly. “I loved the idea of her always performing

18 The Guardian Saturday 15 May 2021 Interview ¶

Sweet escape In The Vanishing Half, twins Desiree and Stella run away to New Orleans IVAN DMITRI/MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY ARCHIVES/GETTY OCHS DMITRI/MICHAEL IVAN these categories wrong, and always trying her best; these awful people, was a miserable thing for me but even her husband thinks that the way she to write emotionally and psychologically. And then performs towards black people is tacky. It’s not that I thought, ‘What if I just pick up with her leaving he’s supportive of civil rights. It’s that [her version of this place?’” racism] is trashy.” Jude escapes Mallard on a bus to LA, and the While Stella is struggling to pass as a white reader’s heart soars with her. It’s a gesture of hope, housewife in California, her twin sister, Desiree, is but of course her childhood demons fl ee with her. working as a fi ngerprint analyst in Washington DC, Does Bennett see the US, in the aftermath of Trump, a job Bennett’s mother once held. It off ers an almost as a country eff ectively still in shock from the recent too-perfect route into discussions around immutable past? “I feel that we’re in a moment of deep trauma identity, although it took Bennett a while to realise from the past four years,” she says, “which we haven’t the gift her mother had given her. “These were just been able to process collectively. The strange thing stories she’d told me,” she says. “She happened to with Trump is the fact that he has disappeared; a arrive in DC a week before Dr King was assassinated, complete vanishing of him being gone from Twitter.” and coming from a small town found herself in the His absence, she says, was in the fi rst instance middle of this really intense moment, working for the almost as striking as his prior omnipresence. FBI.” Her mother would entertain Bennett with “This is a person who colonised our brains for years. stories of “how severed fi ngers would arrive for her to I don’t think there was a day in the last four years fi ngerprint, and I always thought it was fascinating, when we were not constantly reacting or com- and wanted to write about it at some point. And when menting or reading about the things he was saying I started to write about it in this book, I thought: and doing, or weren’t being aff ected in a visceral ‘OK, thematically this is very relevant.’” way by his actions and his whims, his moods and Although their lives take such starkly diff erent emotions. And suddenly they’re just gone? It feels paths, neither of Bennett’s heroines transcends the very surreal.” unhappiness of her origins in that small, cruel So, too, she says, does the sheer volume of town. But their children, in diff erent ways, claim a news over the past few months. “Occasionally I’ll future for themselves neither woman could have be talk ing to friends and be like, do you remember foreseen or thought possible. This, says Bennett, was when there was a failed coup?” As Bennett’s novel the surge of joy she felt propelling her on to expand suggests, all of this will have to be grappled with at the story away from Mallard. Originally, it wasn’t some point. And for pragmatic political reasons, going to be a multi-generational saga; but the pros- she would, she says, be happier if Trump were more pect of spending more time in that town depressed visible. “I want eyes on him! Because there’s a very Bennett as much as it did her characters, particularly real fear that this man’s going to pop back up in four Jude, the too-dark daughter whom the entire town years – Trumpism hasn’t gone anywhere.” And yet hated. “It felt untrue to the spirit of these characters there are days, she says, when the deafening silence to go, here’s 100 pages of this person’s suff ering. I from that quarter is almost akin to peace, or at least, think it would’ve been awful to read. To me, what the illusion of a short break from history. “I saw becomes interesting about that character is how an article today : ‘Where has Trump gone?’” Bennett does she try to move on from this? To show her laughs. “And part of me was like: ‘Do we need being bludgeoned over and over in this town, by to know?’” •

Saturday 15 May 2021 The Guardian 19 ¶ Label

Ryan can’t leave his past alone, and the uncertainty Fiction about who is holding on to whom is typical of the rich tangle of motivations that animates McInerney’s storytelling. Her characters all share that urge to fl ee from the city and get free of each other, yet whenever they threaten to succeed, something calls them back. For Ryan, the ties that bind take very physical form now that his on-off girlfriend Karine is also the mother The third volume in a sharp of his son. It’s a relationship that practically begs you trilogy about Cork’s underbelly to pin the label “codependency” on it: “Karine had always considered herself one of a system. One brings the comic melodrama daughter in three, one dancer in a crew, one friend to a satisfying finale of a squad. Something to someone. There was little she could do about the fact that she was defi ned by Sarah Ditum a man’s absence.” Karine’s mates do plenty of eye-rolling, as you would if you were her friend, but in the McInerney- The Rules of Revelation verse, you must keep your history close. The Cork is the third part of Lisa novels take place in a self-consciously modern McInerney’s “unholy Ireland, with all its contradictions: “To be Irish was trinity” of Cork novels, to be resentful, fl ippant, European, nationalist … which began with the young, gifted and damp.” Yet while this is no longer Women’s prize-winning the country of the Magdalene laundries, it is still The Glorious Heresies in a country that must square up to its misdeeds. The Rules 2015 and continued with So it’s inevitable that Ryan and Karine should of Revelation 2017’s The Blood Miracles. pick up where they left off . Inevitable, too, that when by Lisa McInerney, McInerney’s world is a Ryan’s band needs a stand-in guitarist, they recruit John Murray, £14.99 compellingly sleazy demi- Mel, Ryan’s childhood nextdoor neighbour, whose monde of drug dealers, mother, Tara, played her own decisive role in Ryan’s sex workers and property developers, and she has a story before disappearing. pleasing disdain for minimalism: here you’ll fi nd big Meanwhile, Maureen Phelan – “fi ve foot three characters and lots of them, having big emotions and and comprised mostly of cardigans”, the mother to going through so much incident that keeping on top Jimmy Phelan, Ryan’s former gangland boss – has of the plot can leave you with the enjoyably dazed embarked on her own mission to set the record feeling of trying to follow a close-up magic trick. straight, not just in the personal sense but regarding At the centre of this world is Irish-Italian Ryan the whole city. “Cork is a very male place,” she thinks, Cusack. In Heresies he was a teenager torn between resentfully. “But then I suppose isn’t that the way of his love of music and junior gangster life, and head ing history? It’s all fecking men.” Her quest to uncover for a fall. In Miracles, he served out his purgatory in town mothers to match the town fathers fl eshes out Naples, where he faced off against the Camorra. Now the novel’s sense of place, as she pounds the streets Ryan is back in Ireland and hoping to make it as a delivering ad hoc lectures to German tourists. legitimate citizen: he’s out of the drug business and is Also in the business of the singer in a band on the brink of breaking through. Cork is ‘a very rewriting the narrative is Success – and redemption – seem imminent. male place’ in former sex worker Georgia, Except that Ryan’s past can’t leave him alone – or McInerney’s novel whom Ryan once ushered out of the country at the barrel of a gun. When she catches wind of his return, she decides that justice demands the truth of his criminal career be told and recruits journalist Medbh, perhaps the least ethical fi ctional hack since JK Rowling’s Rita Skeeter, to help her spread the word. Where previous entries in the trilogy have some- times had a feeling of almost too much happening, Revelation exercises just enough restraint to avoid being overwhelming, and in doing so brings the saga of Ryan to a satisfying completion. “It was simultan- eously the end of the world and the best time to be Irish,” writes McInerney. “Was it not all they could do to tell the story of it?”

DESIGN PICS INC/ALAMY PICS DESIGN To buy a copy for £13.04 go to guardianbookshop.com.

20 The Guardian Saturday 15 May 2021 Fiction ¶

installation by Lea Guldditte Hestelund exploring Shortlisted for the International “the relationship between diff erent types of presence Booker, this science-fiction and body”, both human and not. The alien fi nds in the novel that draw, repel and provoke the diff erent satire on corporate language crew members are recognisably the objects in the is a miracle of concision exhibition, now archived online. Ravn maps the exhi- bition room on to the spaceship: the same white walls, Justine Jordan sterile spaces, corridors between installations; even the “niches in the walls where you can hang your suit”. Art galleries and spaceships are both playgrounds for From the mysterious the cultural imagination; in another uncanny layer monoliths in 2001: A Space to an eerily rich text, by the end of the novel the ship Odyssey to the impossible itself becomes a macabre kind of museum piece. spaceship in Arrival , Despite the sterile setting and often chilly prose, one of science fi ction’s The Employees is a deeply sensory book, suff used favourite tropes is the with aroma and alert to tactility. The materiality of alien artefact that defi es the objects makes crew members long to put them in The Employees: human comprehension. their mouth; to discover where the limits of the self A Workplace Novel Danish author Olga Ravn’s end, like babies learning about their new world. The of the 22nd Century brilliantly unusual novel image recurs of a marble or wooden sphere rolling by Olga Ravn, The Employees, which has around inside a mouth, person and possession in translated by been shortlisted for the intimate proximity. The pages crawl, also, with Martin Aitken, International Booker prize, is disturbing up-close descriptions of egg clusters, open Lolli Editions, £12.99 an SF epic in miniature, but pores with tiny stones in, it takes a prosaic approach In the midst of fl esh specked with dots, to our dreams of extraterrestrial transcendence. “It’s corporate jargon, pomegranates stuff ed with not hard to clean them,” says a crew member of the the novel is seeds. It is as though Ravn is strange objects found on the faraway planet New haunted by channeling trypophobia, dis- Discovery, now housed in the Six-Thousand Ship gust for clusters of holes or orbiting above. “I normally use a little brush.” longings, dreams, bumps, to evoke fear of the The Employees is not only a disconcertingly quoti- lyrical fragments nonhuman. “Repetitive, dian space opera; it’s also an audacious satire of of memory from organic structures are corporate language and the late-capitalist workplace, a long-lost Earth unbear able,” reads one and a winningly abstracted investigation into what it statement. “They cannot be means to be human. The book takes the form of a series destroyed and will continue of statements – some missing, some with material to regenerate.” There are redacted – made by the crew to a bureaucratic affi nities here with the committee investigating the eff ects of the strange unleashed vegetal energies in Jeff VanderMeer’s objects: not what they might be or reveal, but how novels about mutation and non human sentience. One they might “precipitate reduction or enhancement humanoid declares: “I’m a pomegranate ripe with of performance, task-related understanding and moist seeds, each seed a killing I’m going to carry out.” the acquisition of new knowledge and skills”. It is astonishing how much Ravn achieves in her “I’m not sure, but isn’t it female?” asks that same small canvas of 130-odd pages: she muses on cleaner about one of the objects. The novel is saturated transhumanism, illuminates the dreamlike logic of from the outset in ontological uncertainty; the crew inner lives, contrasts artistic and religious impulses is made up of both humans and humanoids, the born with the anti-human reductionism of corporate and the grown, but it is not always possible to work jargon. And she does all this while retaining an out from their statements which is which. Where one elliptical, open-ended mystery and a delicately humanoid cannot imagine any meaningful activity elegiac tone. Translator Martin Aitken perfectly beyond the work they were created for, another balances all the diff erent registers and voices (though insists on their burgeoning selfh ood: “I may have DIY enthusiasts may be jolted by repeated references been made, but now I’m making myself.” It might to taking the alien objects “back to Homebase”). merely be a question of bureaucracy. “Am I human? Like humans, the humanoids are always chasing Does it say in your fi les what I am?” asks one crew their own metaphysical tail. “In the programme, ben- member. The statement that reads in its entirety eath my interface, there’s another interface, which “My body isn’t like yours” is a reminder that is also me…” This clever, thought-provoking novel humanity may lie in the eye of the beholder. catches something of our recursive search for the nat- In the midst of corporate jargon, the novel is ure of consciousness; a question that answers itself, a haunted by longings, dreams, lyrical fragments of voice in the darkness, an object moving through space. memory from a long-lost Earth. It is haunted too by its genesis as a companion piece to a 2018 art To buy a copy for £12.99 go to guardianbookshop.com.

Saturday 15 May 2021 The Guardian 21 ¶ Fiction A get-rich-quick The ghost of Franco visits a scheme unravels in this veteran of the Spanish civil savagely entertaining war in a deftly handled story satire on modern India of past trauma and deceit Sana Goyal Nicholas Wroe

In Rahul Raina’s satirical Few writers establish state-of-the-nation debut, a sense of dread and which slices into the soul uncertainty as smoothly of contemporary Indian as Patrick McGrath . “Hard society, things aren’t always now to forget the fi rst time the way they appear. Ramesh I found him in the house. Kumar is himself a sham. In the house !” opens our How to Kidnap Having long left behind a Last Days in narrator, Spanish civil war the Rich childhood fi lled with abject Cleaver Square veteran Francis McNulty. by Rahul Raina, poverty on the streets of East by Patrick McGrath, When we meet him he’s Little, Brown, £14.99 Delhi, he sits entrance exams Hutchinson, £16.99 an aged poet living in the that are entry points to the eponymous unkempt west – the best universities, “the whitest lives” – for south London square. And the intruder? General the elite. Rudi, a teenager with a “no-matches-on- Franco in full uniform, medals rusting and the braid Tinder-face”, opts for the “All India Examinations: coming unstitched from his cuff s, exuding a stench Premium Package”. If you place in the top thousand, of death or manure or maybe of Spanish jasmine. it’s your ticket out of India. But what if you rank fi rst? But this is Kennington in the summer of 1975; Overnight, Rudi (the “topper”) goes from being a the real general is dying in a palace full of Goyas in dim-witted nobody to the nation’s favourite, becom- Madrid. The women around McNulty gather, like ing star host of the quiz show Beat the Brain. Ramesh something out of Lorca: daughter Gilly, who works gets greedy for more than the negotiated sum of in the foreign offi ce; housekeeper Dolores López, 1.3m rupees; “India is a country of deals”, after all. rescued from the civil war by Francis when she was Bribery, blackmail and betrayal consume the cast just eight; elder sister Finty, an artist. “Pretty far of characters, which includes a corrupt construction gone, is it?” she baldly asks her distressed brother. giant, a crooked TV producer and, comically, a too- Like so many of McGrath’s protagonists, McNulty clean government offi cial. speaks directly to the reader. We don’t quite believe As if the stench-fi lled setting of East Delhi isn’t him, but McGrath’s technique is less about unreliable claustro pho bic enough, the political presence of the narrators than the near-impossibility of being reli- “Saff rons”, a synecdoche for the rightwing party in able. The Franco apparition seems to merge with power, also hangs heavy. “This India, my India, smells McNulty’s drunken cardiologist father, while “mil- like shit. It smells like a country that has gone off , all dew on the asters” evidences blight in his beloved the dreams having curdled and clumped like rancid garden. Anxieties large and, maybe more unsettlingly, paneer,” says Ramesh, who is terminally disillusioned small – a missing cat, some lost poems – begin to with the “centre-of-the-world’s-greatest-democracy”. mount. A jour nalist with the fl imsiest outline of an This is a cinematic caper – HBO already holds fi lm assignment arrives and gets Francis to open up about rights – and though Raina is highlighting expired what really happened during the war, acting as part dreams and inequality, he is always perceptive and shrink, part confessor. playful. No one is beyond scrutiny, from the Americans McGrath expertly deploys some of his trademark to the Chinese. Social commentary meets standup elements, as with the double-edged naming of comedy, as with a biting wit reminiscent of Binyavanga Cleaver Square – he has had characters called Cleave Wainaina’s essay “How to Write About Africa” or Paul in the past – and is unfailingly deft in his handling of Beatty’s The Sellout, Raina stretches stereotype and trauma and deceit. Tiny elements fl eetingly present cliche into incisive satire. in the story return later on like a whole arsenal of Near the end, Ramesh says that real honesty bores Chekhov’s guns to be duly discharged, or occasion ally people. “But honesty that’s just on the line between decommissioned. By its conclusion Last Days in truth and falsehood? The world is built on it.” Good Cleaver Square manages to pull off the impressive fi ction sits somewhere on this line. Nothing is just as trick of being narratively coherent and satisfying, yet it seems in this “rise-and-fall-and-rise-again” story – still true to the messy businesses of memory, ageing, it depends on where you stand in this changing world. guilt and how to tell the story of a life.

To buy a copy for £13.04 go to guardianbookshop.com. To buy a copy for £14.44 go to guardianbookshop.com.

22 The Guardian Saturday 15 May 2021 Label ¶

(Carcanet), builds on the success of her 2018 debut, Poetry enriching her striking powers of social observation. In “Western Heroes”, the cowboys’ onscreen horses have “thin obedient ears, large eyes / pooled under soft fringes”: every single adjective attentively exact. Between fi nely perceptive poems about houses and families, the bulk of her book concerns working as a radiographer. Without straining for eff ect, she A playful reworking of mixes pity with horror – and a repeated theme of Euripides; a new translation fallibility. “Barium Swallow” opens, “What was I doing there – the family fumbler, / the dreamy one”, of a Welsh epic; plus cowboy a question it’s hard not to echo as we follow the narrator “into the smoky Mater staff room from heroes and a tender lament ENT theatre”. A dreamlike sense of estrangement is Fiona Sampson focused on to never quite having the right footwear for theatre – those eponymous American mules . Andrew McMillan’s consummate pandemonium (Cape) enters hospital by a diff erent door. The young celebrant of sexuality who burst on to the literary scene with 2015’s physical has undergone a deepen- ing and darkening. His new collection includes “George”, a tender lament for a stillborn nephew: “how should we think of you / dear nephew / except in your entirety […] you were complete and ready”. Even at its best, the poetic mainstream we call the “Uncivil” records life in a tough district of lyric tradition can run the risk of appearing po-faced. Manchester. But the book’s dominant story is of a So it’s a joy to come across a mistress of the art taking turbulent relationship with a sometimes suicidal rumbustious pleasure in revisiting the matter of partner, who is unable to cope with “so much life poetry itself. Anne Carson ’s new version of Euripides’ arriving / every day too bright too bright”. The Trojan Women (Bloodaxe), with artist and McMillan’s verse is a work of personal witness . cartoonist Rosanna Bruno, is resolutely subtitled At its best, its grace transcends context, as in the self- A Comic; and a graphic novel is exactly what it is. portrait “swan”, which ends: “I reared up I jumped But of course the words are Carson’s. Simultaneously I watched myself / broken fall towards myself”. That straight-talking and experimental, the Canadian has lyric “I” is the only capital letter in the volume, which been reclaiming the classical tradition as an essential can grate a little. Yet even this is, in the end, a tribute resource since the 1980s. In recent years, she has to the lyric tradition’s capacity for serious material. collaborated with a number of visual artists. Now she makes time for literary play, her Troy “crouched on the plain like James Baldwin / with its eyelids drifting Poem of the month down and drifting up”, but her writing remains fi erce as ever. At this #MeToo moment protesting against the Auspices objecti fi cation of women, her Trojan women are drawn by Rachael Boast as literally animal, the spoils of war, a “mob of dogs and cows you see downstage […] leftover females”. It’s better not to move Carson’s purposeful play bypasses nostalgia for in the long heat and languid evenings, the kind of traditional forms on display in another or maybe just this arm, looking creative revisioning. Gillian Clarke’s new translation for a way of overcoming – of The Gododdin (Faber) subdivides the medieval Welsh epic into a hundred short lyrics named after the it will do its work. You bring dead warriors they eulogise. While this loses some the silver breeze with you of the cumulative lamentation of the original stanzas, up from the forest path, a delicate mercy cool around my ankle like a bracelet. it follows Memorial , Alice Oswald’s infl uential 2011 rewriting of Homer, in underlining individual deaths Still I’m adorned with the fi re rather than glorifying war. It also leaves space for of the day. Don’t fan the fl ames, Clarke’s characteristic lyric gift: “Power in the front don’t call the song thrush over line, / sunlight on the grass […]/ until green grew to beat her wings. the grass / on the grave of Gwrfelling Fras.” This appropriation of male tradition by today’s From Hotel Raphael by Rachael Boast female poets is brilliantly refreshing, but original work (Picador , £10.99) . aff ords plenty of chances for reinvention too. Irish poet Martina Evans’s second collection, American Mules

Saturday 15 May 2021 The Guardian 23 ¶ Books essay

hen Leigh Bardugo fi rst ‘People sneer at things came face to face with her characters, she wept. In a women and girls love’ video that was uploaded everywhere from YouTube Wto TikTok , the author stepped on to the Budapest set of Netfl ix’s Shadow and Bone and embraced her Leigh Bardugo, author heroine, Alina – or rather, the actor Jessie Mei Li in costume. “You guys look amazing,” Bardugo repeats of the hit YA fantasy in the video, between hugs and tears . “You look so incredible. It’s actually eerie.” series Shadow and Bone, “Adaptation is scary,” Bardugo says now. “I don’t begrudge any author the right to say that they don’t talks to Sian Cain about want to do it, because we’ve all seen it go wrong. It would be heartbreaking to be locked out of the house that you built. But I got lucky, because the people Netfl ix stardom, making I collaborated with cared deeply – not just about the material, but the people who love it.” her novels diverse and To understand how popular Bardugo’s books are – more than 3m sold in English, translated into 41 why she had to give languages, a No 1 show on Netfl ix and countless passionate fans, including one Tiktoker steadily up a close relationship adapting the books into an unoffi cial musical – is to understand why young adult fi ction itself is so with her fans signifi cant. Her seven YA books, starting with Shadow and Bone, meet very fundamental human desires – to be recognised as special, powerful or loved. They are fi lled with high emotional stakes and transformative life moments – whether that Shadow and Bone is a fi rst kiss or dis cov ering was published in the you are a powerful sorcerer aftermath of Twilight with the potential to save Ben Barnes and the world. Jessie Mei Li in the Like Twilight’s Bella or Netfl ix adaptation Katniss from The Hunger Games, Bardugo’s Alina is yanked from obscurity. She is an orphan con- scripted to the First Army, a non-magical force in the kingdom of Ravka that serves as cannon fodder, when an accident reveals that she is actually a Grisha, one of the mysterious magical elite who form Ravka’s feared Second Army . But Alina is no ordinary Grisha. She is the Sun Summoner of prophecy with the power to destroy the Fold, a gigantic, shadowy zone fi lled with dark creatures that has split Ravka for centuries. So Alina is whisked away from her dishy childhood friend Mal to be trained by the equally dishy Darkling, a Ravkan general who wields the shadow to her sun, and holds a secret, vested interest in her power. A special, magical girl with two boys fi ghting over her: so far, so YA. But Bardugo’s books are unique in a few ways: their rich, tsarist Russia -inspired setting; her ornate social hierarchies and magic systems; Alina’s prickliness . They are popular for the same reasons snobs may mock them: they’re nerdy, roman- tic and appealing to young women. “Teenage girls have so much sway over culture, yet people sneer at the things that women and girls love, and are con-

NETFLIX temptuous of the creators of that content, particu-

24 The Guardian Saturday 15 May 2021 Books essay ¶ larly if they are women,” Bardugo says. “To me, that shooter; and Wylan Van contempt speaks to a deep fear. ” Eck, a merchant’s son with With her dark lipstick and gothic clothing, often dyslexia . “It is our job to seen with a silver-headed cane (Bardugo has osteo- make our worlds welcoming necro sis), the 46-year-old is the antithesis of Califor- to all,” she says. nia beach culture. But though she was born in Jerusa- Bardugo realised that lem, Bardugo was raised in Los Angeles, a precocious her fi rst trilogy was over- reader, as lonely children often are. Bullied for her whelm ingly white and Jewish faith and relative lack of wealth by rich kids at rectifi ed this from Six of school, she was also “very unhappy” at home. So she Crows onwards; in the retreated into Frank Herbert, Isaac Asimov, Octavia Leigh Bardugo Netfl ix adaptation, Alina Butler, Diana Wynne Jones and Stephen King. “Read- was re-written as having ing, like writing, was a survival strategy when I was Shu heritage, Bardugo’s equivalent of east Asian. young because these were ways of feeling that my “I am very proud of Shadow and Bone but it is world could be much larger than it actually was,” she laden with tropes,” Bardugo says. “I think that was says. “It was inevitable that I would end up writing because I was echoing a lot of the books that I had sci-fi or fantasy.” grown up with. But as I wrote more, I gained con- While it may have been inevitable , it was not fi dence. I felt I could refl ect our world more authen- immediate. In the 1990s she went to Yale, where she tically. I look back and see mistakes that I wish “found my tribe, my fellow weirdos”. She joined I could alter. My world is not straight, white and Wolf’s Head, one of the university’s eight secret homogenous. I don’t want to be. So why should societies, which only began admitting women in my fi ction look that way?” 1992. This would eventually inspire her fi rst novel Six of Crows and Shadow and Bone were combined for adults, 2019’s Ninth House, in which Yale’s secret in Netfl ix’s adaptation, a suggestion made by the societies have supernatural specialties . In the years showrunner, Oscar-nominated screenwriter Eric between, she worked as a journalist, wrote movie Heisserer. Bardugo thinks it worked “beautifully”: trailers, transcribed footage for reality TV show The “It makes the world feel bigger. It’s a much more Bachelor and did a stint as a Hollywood make-up fi tting introduction to a universe that I’ve been artist. This last job freed her from writing, so she working on for a decade now.” She even makes a could fi nally concentrate on her fi rst book, 2012’s cameo, hugging Alina in an ornate purple coat. Shadow and Bone. But as her fame grows, so too has her caution She considers herself a latecomer, landing her around her fans. She used to chat freely with them; book deal at 35, but her career took off at breakneck now she must contend with the peculiar ownership speed. Within 37 days, she had an agent and a three- fans can feel for what they love. “When I was new, it book deal, but she still doubted that she’d be pub- was so thrilling to fi nd people who wanted to talk to lished: “I had wanted to be a writer since I was a kid, me about these books. Fans were vital to the life of but I could not fi nish a manu script. I always lost that fi rst trilogy ,” she says. “But, unfortunately, as momentum, I had no idea what I was doing.” She my readership has grown, it’s become less possible wrote Shadow and Bone in eight months. to be that engaged. That feels like a tremendous loss. She credits her success to “fortuitous timing”. I used to be very active on Twitter and, quite hon- Shadow and Bone was published in 2012, in the after- estly, I don’t feel comfortable interacting there any math of the success of Twilight and The Hunger Games. more, so I stopped.” Her fandom simply got too big. Adults who might have been embarrassed to buy teen “Now it has its own life,” she says, sadly. books fi ve years earlier purchased Bardugo’s without And she’s not getting any less famous. With thinking twice. It was an immediate hit. Siege and Heisserer, she has “a grand plan” for more seasons Storm followed in 2013, and Ruin and Rising in 2014. of Shadow and Bone: “We are all crossing our fi ngers Then, while driving in LA, she had a fl ash of and hoping that Netfl ix will give us the chance.” inspira tion from the strangest of places: a billboard Bardugo published the seventh book in the series, for a George Clooney fi lm got her thinking about Rule of Wolves, in March, which she is calling the Ocean’s Eleven – “and then of course, I had to write “fi nale, of sorts” for the Grishaverse. She had worked a fantasy heist! I had every intention of moving away hard to make it come out before Netfl ix’s adaptation, from the Grishaverse, but I was so excited. I had the because “I knew it would be the last opportunity to characters in my head waiting to be called up, and release a Grishaverse book that just belonged to the I realised that I could bring them all together, so readers. I wanted to off er closure.” Is it really the end? I wrote Six of Crows.” “We’ll see! I don’t know. There is a big door left open. In Six of Crows, Ocean’s 11 become the Dregs gang. But I want to write books because I feel compelled to, The heist mastermind is Kaz Brekker, a street-smart not because I feel an obligation to. And for now, I club owner who walks with a limp and a cane . His want to take a step back.” She may visit “Ravka” in companions include Inej Ghafa, a devout young person, to hug her creations in Budapest again. “And woman who survived sex traffi cking to become a maybe in three months or three years, I will want to much-feared spy; Jesper Fahey, a bisexual sharp return to Ravka on the page. Right now, I don’t” •

Saturday 15 May 2021 The Guardian 25 ¶ Further reading

prejudice but off ers In fi ction, Wetlands The best books sound practical advice. by Charlotte Roche is about sex One of the most disturbing but incred- important books about ible. We have such a Kate Lister sex work has to be sanitised view of sex. Revolting Prostitutes: Bodies are scrubbed, The Fight for Sex plucked and perfumed. From sex history and should be objective and Workers’ Rights by Juno Little wonder then that modern erotica to self- unemotional about their Mac and Molly Smith. Roche’s story about help books and the art subject. The book is a tri- Challenging the polaris- 18-year-old Helen of penis origami , sex is a umph because Mitchell ing view of sex workers Memel, who delights in topic that spans every unashamedly makes as either “happy hook- the sexual putrescence gen eration and culture in the personal political. ers” or tragic victims, of her own body, has so the world , so any “best” We might think of Mac and Smith compel shocked readers and list can only off er the ourselves as a sexually the reader to see how critics around the world. books that have meant progressive bunch, but the fi ght for sex worker The novel is vividly and the most to me, person- our idea of sex, and who rights is a fi ght for deliberately grotesque – ally and professionally, should be having it , is human rights. just make sure you have as a historian of sex. actually quite limited. The Ethical Slut: A a strong stomach. Vénus Noire: Black Although our society is Guide to Infi nite Sexual Fanny and Stella : The Women and Colonial saturated with sexual- Possibilities by Dossie Young Men Who Shocked Fantasies in Nineteenth- ised images, they tend to Easton and Janet Hardy Victorian England by Neil Century France by Robin be of young, able-bodied, is a classic and helped McKenna tells the true Mitchell is an impec cably typically beautiful launch the modern non- story of the cross- researched history of people. This is where monogamy movement. dressing sex workers how ideas of blackness senior-sex coach and Easton and Hardy defi ne Ernest Boulton and and black women were activist Joan Price comes a “slut” as “a person of Frederick Park , who were appropriated by 19th- in. Her trailblazing any gender who has the arrested and charged century white French Naked at Our Age : courage to lead life with conspiring to com- culture as hypersexual, Talking Out Loud About according to the radical mit sodomy . This book is predatory and “exotic”. Senior Sex grabs stigma proposition that sex is a masterfully crafted pic- It opens with the story of and stereotypes by the nice, and pleasure is ture of gay subculture in Sarah Baartman, the so- scruff of the neck and good for you”. The book Victorian London with called “Hottentot Venus” gives them the dressing- directly challenges ideas an unforgettable and who was paraded on tour down they deserve. around monogamy and inspiring story. before white paying Drawing on the voices of sexual shame and off ers tourists, and Mitchell’s health professionals and an ethical guide to read- A Curious History of passionate rejection of sex therapists, th e book ers who wish to explore Sex by Kate Lister is the idea that historians not only confronts multiple relationships. published by Unbound .

Tom Gauld

26 The Guardian Saturday 15 May 2021