ReviewSaturday 13 March 2021 – Issue № 164

I’m a traveller who reached the Land of the Dead. I broke the rule that said I had to stay. — Michael Rosen on surviving Covid-19, plus an extract from his new poetry collection

‘The very act of writing and reading horror seems to me recuperative. That’s the experience people are looking ReviewSaturday 13 March 2021 – Issue № 164 for, a mutual moment of staring down the darkness.’ — Catriona Ward, page 19

Contents The week in books ...... 04 The books that made me by Yaa Gyasi ...... 05

COVER STORY Michael Rosen on Covid-19, plus an extract from his new book of poems ...... 06

Book of the week: The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race by Walter Isaacson ...... 12 Nonfi ction reviews The Book Collectors of Daraya by Delphine Minoui...... 14 The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing by Sonia Faleiro ...... 15

INTERVIEW Catriona Ward...... 16

Fiction reviews The Manningtree Witches by AK Blakemore ...... 20 Hot Stew by Fiona Mozley ...... 21 Our Lady of the Nile by Scholastique Mukasonga ...... 22 Science fi ction and fantasy books of the month ...... 23

BOOKS ESSAY A celebration of soul by Hanif Abdurraqib ...... 24

Books about vaccines, plus Tom Gauld ...... 26

COVER PHOTOGRAPHY David Levene/The Guardian Saturday 13 March 2021 The Guardian 3 ¶ Forewords

not a matter of simply expect a few more The week in books running through a neat 600-pagers . algorithm of taste and This must put Camp- 13 March bias, but of weighing up bell among the most the emo tional impact of prolifi c political memoir- books that maintained ists in history – though the threads of our lives Tony Benn is currently Judging the so much fi ction. What- and relationships and ahead, having managed Women’s prize ever pressures I brought imagi nations. All nine volumes of diaries Over the past few years, I to the reading list fell collaborative judging before he died. Anaïs have neglected fi ction. It away as books intro- processes are aff airs of Nin, Spike Milligan and seemed indulgent , some- duced me to worlds and compro mise . But in the Maya Angelou each pub- thing to be relegated to lives that, in the loneli- humility of realising the lished seven volumes . entertainment once the ness of the past year, limitations of my own Churchill wrote six on business of nonfi ction, of became so vivid that I fi rst reading premise, the second world war and trying to understand the often felt them crowding that com promise was fi ve on the fi rst, though upheavals brought about around in my head. easier than I thought it his most famous memoir, by a pandemic, by Brexit, It soon became clear would be. Nesrine Malik My Early Life: 1874-1904, and by a global racial that the value of fi ction For more details of the fi ts 30 years into one justice movement, was isn’t how specifi cally it longlisted authors go to book. Both Anthony done. But that business is has utility in explaining guardian.com/books. Powell and Piers Morgan never done. And judging a world in turmoil, but in are on four volumes; Alan this year’s Women’s prize how it equips us to plot Dear Diary … the Clark and Anthony Eden for fi ction was a reminder a course through that Olympic years left it at three ; Margaret that that business is the turmoil. Choosing the Volume eight of Alastair Thatcher and Barack work of fi ction too. long list then became Campbell’s diaries Obama stopped at two. We rarely read, or comes out on Thursday , Campbell’s boss Tony indeed write, in a with its publisher prom- Blair has currently only vacuum. And I felt the ising “some of Camp- published one memoir, seriousness of our times bell’s most poignant and A Journey, in 2010. So bearing down, burden ing thought-provoking writ- has David Cameron (For the books with a purpose ing so far”. Rise and Fall the Record, 2019) and so that they must fulfi l to be of the Olympic Spirit too did Clement Attlee, consid ered a worthwhile describes the years 2010- Alec Douglas-Home and contribution to the 15 ; volume one began in one of the most famous discourse . What I didn’t 1994, so with an average political diarists of all expect was the emot- of 2.6 years per volume time, Edwina Currie.

IAN ANDERSON; SHUTTERSTOCK ANDERSON; IAN ional impact of read ing we can presumably Katy Guest Fungible WORD OF THE WEEK When is an album not an album? Why, when it’s a “non-fungible token”, Steven Poole a new form of digital swag, related to cryptocurrency, being sold by artists and musicians such as Kings of Leon and Grimes, left. They are called NFTs for short, but why? The Latin verb fungi means to discharge some offi ce or perform some task, and so fungibilis means “useful”, and English “fungible” describes useful things that are interchangeable. If I order fi ve spoons of a certain design, it doesn’t matter exactly which fi ve of those spoons you send me. The OED says the word was fi rst used in English by the diplomat Anthony Ascham in 1649, though the citation it gives is actually, according to Early English Books Online, from a 1676 treatise on maritime law, De Jure Maritimo et Navali, by Charles Molloy and Robert White. Of money, they write: “Take away this fungible Instrument from the service of our necessities, and how shall we exercise our Charity?” Money is the paradigmatically fungible good, since one £10 note is as good as any other. Writers, though, are defi nitely not fungible.

4 TheTheeG GuardianGuaruuaaarrdiaddiiaian SaturdaySaSatturtuuurrdayay 13 MarchMarch 2021 The books that made me ¶

have catastrophic and far reaching eff ects on all ‘Toni Morrison blew away aspects of our lives. everything I thought The last book that made me cry Memorial Drive by Natasha Trethewey. I’ve long I knew about literature’ known Trethewey for her poetry and so was eager Yaa Gyasi to read her memoir. It is so beautifully written, so piercing, so tender and full of mourning. I cried The book I am currently reading and cried. I’ve been shopping my bookshelves these past few The book I couldn’t fi nish pandemic months, trying to read some of the books James Joyce’s Ulysses. I’ve owned for years but hadn’t yet read, which is The book I give as a gift what led me to my current read, Boy, Snow, Bird by The one I’ve given most often in recent years is Her Helen Oyeyemi. It’s just enchanting. Funny and Body & Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado. It’s lyrical with something sinister lurking. such a singular book that I know that the recipient is The book that changed my life not likely to have read anything like it. The stories are I read Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison when I was so shape-shifting that there really is something for 17 and it blew away everything I thought I knew everyone in it and I love to hear back from people about what literature was, what literature could do. after they’ve read it about what stuck with them. I remember thinking that I wanted to feel like this Usually, they’re just gobsmacked by the whole thing. every time I read: shaken and in awe. My earliest reading memory The book I wish I’d written Once, when I was really young, my parents made me Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward. Just a perfect write a report on the children’s book I was reading at book. Only Ward could write it, but I can dream. the time. I think it was The Rainbow Fish by Marcus The book that changed my mind Pfi ster, but I’m not totally sure. At any rate, I wrote Before I read Evicted: Poverty and Profi t in the something to the eff ect of “This book is very good. If American City by Matthew Desmond, I didn’t know you’d like to learn more about it, read it yourself.” I’m much about the eviction crisis in the US. The book happy to say that was the end of the book reports but clearly, devastatingly shows how eviction itself not the end of my love for reading. can plunge people into poverty. I have thought of it almost daily as news of the pandemic evictions pour Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi is published in. It has been said, but it still bears repeating: the by Penguin. The novel has been longlisted for the

HENRIK MONTGOMERY/TT/PA HENRIK failure of our government to meet this crisis will Women’s prize for fi ction.

Saturday 13 March 2021 The Guardian 5 ¶ Label ‘ The book is about what it feels like to nearly die’

6 The Guardian Saturday 13 March 2021 Michael Rosen ¶

collaborated since 1974. “I think he was partly The poet, broadcaster inspired by Dahl himself.” Rosen’s poems for children always see the world and children’s author from their perspective and can be counted on to induce giggles – “‘Don’t throw fruit at a computer’ / contracted Covid-19 ‘You what?’” – especially when performed by the poet him self: he doesn’t have 98 million YouTube a year ago and spent 48 subscribers for nothing. He has written more than 200 books , including greedily devoured favourites Chocolate days in intensive care. Cake, Fluff the Farting Fish and Monster. His most recent books for adults include The Missing , an investigation into the fates of his European Jewish relatives during His new collection of the second world war, and his 2017 memoir So They Call You Pisher! , a lively account of growing up the son prose poems attempts to of Jewish communists in postwar Pinner: “Not the most encouraging place to start a branch of a political make sense of that time. organisation aimed at world revolution.” Then there are the two books he wrote in response to the death of By Lisa Allardice his second son Eddie (he has fi ve children, including Eddie, and two stepchildren) from meningitis when hen people stop Michael he was 18 : Carry ing the Elephant, a mixture of prose Rosen in his local neighbour- and poetry, and Michael Rosen’s Sad Book, illustrated hood of Muswell Hill in north by Blake. “I loved him very, very much,” Rosen writes, London to ask him how he’s “but he died anyway.” doing, which they do quite His new collection of prose poems, Many Diff erent Woften these days, he replies: Kinds of Love, with drawings by Chris Riddell, is his “Well, I’m not dead!” As is attempt to make sense of those missing weeks last now well known, the former children’s laureate spent year: “It’s just gone. You can’t quite deal with it.” He felt 48 days in intensive care after contracting coronavirus as if he was in a “portal”: his hospital bed liminal, like almost exactly one year ago. He went into hospital the train in Harry Potter or the rabbit hole in Alice in at the end of March as one of the nation’s favourite Wonderland, he says, his body “an unreliable narra- children’s writers and emerged a national treasure: tor”. It is about “what it feels like to be seriously ill, his poem “These Are the Hands”, written to celebrate what it feels like to nearly die, and what does recovery the 60th anniversary of the NHS in 2008, became an mean?” He likes to say that he is “recovering” rather unoffi cial anthem for health-workers coping with the than “recovered”. Covid has left him with “drainpipes” fi rst wave of the pandemic; and, in a nod to his most (Xen tubes) in his eyes, a hearing aid in one ear, missing famous book We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, teddy bears toenails, a strange sandiness to his skin . He suff ers were placed in windows for children to spot on their from dizziness, breathlessness and “everything gets daily walks during lockdown. a bit fuzzy every now and then”. Rosen was completely unaware of these tributes, Many Diff erent Kinds of Love follows a familiar Rosen as he spent all of April and much of May in an induced format – an anthology of “Bits and Stuff ”. As well as the coma, “a kind of pre-death that is similar, presumably, poems, there is a letter written by the GP friend who to when we go”, he says now. “People were reading this sent him to A&E, extracts from his “patient’s diary” poem by this dead bloke, but he wasn’t actually dead, recorded by intensive care nurses, and messages he was just lying like a cadaver up the road in the Whit- from his wife Emma, who is very much the heroine tington Hospital.” He doesn’t cry so much now, he says, of the story. The result refl ects how being in hospital but when he was fi rst told about the public reaction to “jumbles up your memories and percep tions, there’s his illness (Michael Sheen read “These Are the Hands”, no chronology to it”, and also his habit of jotting things “much better than me”, on Jo Whiley’s Radio 2 show down “to have a conver sation with myself on paper” on his birthday last year), “it was just, whoosh!” as a way of coping with “strange and weird” events. The 74-year-old writer is very much alive on Zoom He likes “writing frag- where, after a few technical hitches, he appears on Rosen likes to say ments and then piecing it screen seemingly as energetic as ever, his conver- he is ‘recovering’ together as fragments”, sation an engaging ragbag of rants and anecdotes, rather than a process he compares to ranging from King Lear to last night’s football match, ‘recovered’. Covid creat ing a stained-glass win- even if names escape him occasion ally. In real life, as dow or mosaic, “in which has often been remarked, Rosen resembles the BFG, has left him with you make a picture out of or at least Quentin Blake’s giant, all long limbs, a hearing aid diff erent colours and shapes. extravagant ears and messy lines. “You’d have to ask in one ear, When you stand back you Quentin. He’s never said: ‘By the way you are the dizziness and can see it. It emerges.” Light BFG’,” he says of the illustrator, with whom he has breathlessness and shade play off 

PHOTOGRAPHY David Levene/The Guardian Saturday 13 March 2021 The Guardian 7 ¶ Cover story Michael Rosen

 against each other, with Rosen’s trademark particular the uncertainty surrounding exams. Both humour providing respite from the grim unreality of his parents were teachers, and he “imbibed” not just being in hospital, where “the nights are long and sad”: their socialist politics, but a passion for education (on when a neighbouring patient is told his urine is dark, he which he writes regularly for the Guardian). He’s never deadpans “the times are dark”; on the next page comes been a fan of what he recently described in one of the darkest of poems, “I know death”, in which Rosen his columns as the “rigid, prescriptive, formulaic unsparingly recounts his mother’s fi nal moments, approach” of the primary school curriculum, and an then discovering Eddie. “Later, they put him in a bag / “addiction” to exam testing. His youngest son Emile I heard the zip / and they slid the bag down the stairs”. was due to be sitting his GCSEs this year and his Carrying the Elephant was written in the same daughter Elsie is in her fi rst year at university, but had frag mentary style. “What happened with Eddie was been at home until last month. “It is an awful situation so traumatic I couldn’t make it a coherent whole, so I for teachers, pupils and students to be in,” he says. just sort of said: ‘Well, what am I thinking today?’ I In 2014, when “homeschooling” still seemed scrib bled that down and tucked it away.” The title mildly zany, Rosen published Good Ideas, a guide to was taken from a postcard of an 18th-century engrav- educating your child at home. He’s also written a Book ing by Jean-Baptiste Oudry illustrating an Aesop’s of Play for adults. But even he agrees it is “very hard. fable that he saw in a Paris bookshop shortly after If you are stuck at home you’ve got no social motiva- Eddie died. “It felt like I’ve got this elephant that I’m tion … Young children need that social thing of sitting going to carry for the rest of my life,” he says. “It’s not in a classroom and seeing how others are doing.” quite like that now, but it certainly felt like that then. ” Publishing a new collection less than a year after Rosen appeared on the Today programme last nearly dying is impressive, but in prodigious Rosen year, around the time he contracted Covid-19, fashion he also has three picture books in the pipeline: arguing that older people have as much right to live one, Rigatoni the Pasta Cat, about the neighbour’s cat as anyone else. “Meanwhile, I was presumably was written while he was in sucking in the virus.” While “hurtful” on a personal ‘What were they rehab; Sticky McStickstick, his level, the idea that some people “matter less” or are thinking in name for the walking stick “more expendable” than others on the basis of age or February and he was given; and another any other factor is “a very dangerous slippery slope”, March? I was inspired by his son’s football he says. And he has no truck with what he perceives being mutilated by foxes. “I as a pernicious rise in blame culture. “In a way we all going around on thought ‘Oooh, foxes playing have underlying health problems. It’s called life.” packed tubes and football, there’s a story!’” He holds the government’s delayed response to the buses. I was going He’s also working on an ora- pandemic responsible for the fact that he was exposed into schools, torio with Ealing Symphony to the virus. “What were they thinking in February and signing books’ Orch estra to mark its 100th March? I was going around on tubes and buses, packed anni versary and has recor- full of people. I was going into schools, kids coming ded a series of his Radio 4 up to me, signing books.” In a blog posted last month , programme, Word of Mouth. Rosen created a timeline of those fi rst two weeks in When he fi nally got out of hospital, small acts of March, bringing together all the government’s state- independence, such as being able to make a cup of ments on the virus, from Boris Johnson’s “boasting” tea, were “just incredible” . He also really appreciated about shaking hands with patients to talking about the his home: “The corners, the light, the shelves, need “to strike a balance” between intervention and everything – just the sheer presence of the place,” a push for herd immunity. “Why would you balance he says, turning the computer for a glimpse of white it? Why wouldn’t you just dismiss it as lousy biology walls, big windows . “It has been wonderful.” and incredibly dangerous?” he asks now. “It was a An old friend asked him if he sees the world diff er- huge, huge gamble and, in a way, I’m a victim of it.” ently now. “The answer is yes, but I’m not quite sure And he has no intention of letting the government how.” The most profound change is an increased off the hook: “Yes Rishi,” he writes in reply to the sense of vulnerability; as he describes it in one of the chancellor’s pre-budget tweet on 2 March. “One year collec tion’s earliest poems, he has gone from being ago, your govern ment was still playing about with “a certain person” to an awareness that “Now every- the idea of herd immunity with out vaccination. The thing’s not certain”. result is that tens of thousands of people have died But despite coming so close to dying, it is still “very and thousands more aff ected, some of us for life.” hard to think of yourself as part of the death gang”, he Of the patients on his intensive care unit (fi lled to says. “If you do, do you become morbid and obsessed more than double its capacity) 42% died during the and miserable, or do you think: ‘Well, another day and time he was there. Doctors and nurses were working I’m still alive – great?’” A trick he learned after Eddie’s in “nearly war conditions. They’d go and get a cup of death is to try to concentrate on doing one thing, tea or something and the person has died.” however small, each day that makes him feel proud Another example of the government’s “crazed or good: he tries to “build optimism into every day”, incompetence” in his view has been the handling of such as planning a trip to the deli. “I can’t see any schools and universities during the pandemic, in point in feeling hopeless,” he says •

8 The Guardian Saturday 13 March 2021 Cover story ¶

EXCLUSIVE EXTRACT He asks me if I’m coughing. No. He says he thinks I’m fi ne. Many diff erent Keep taking the paracetamol and Nurofen, kinds of love There isn’t enough air. By Michael Rosen I can’t catch up. The doorbell rings.

Day 12. The year’s seasons roll by in a night: sweats, Emma has asked our friend, a neighbour freezes, sweats, freezes. Wondered whose mouth who is a GP, to visit. I had: I didn’t remember it as made of sandpaper. She gives Emma Water is as good as ever. a contraption to check if Tweet from @MichaelRosenYes, 27/03/2020 I’m absorbing oxygen and waits outside on the doorstep. Emma hands it back to her. FEELING UNWELL She calls out: ‘You have to go to A and E right now,’ she says. Get tested, says my friend John. ‘I can’t really walk,’ I say, ‘I get the shakes just going to the loo.’ The GP has closed. ‘You have to go now,’ she says, ‘bump downstairs A recorded message at the surgery on your bum,’ she says, ‘I’ll ring them to tell them says to not come in you’re coming,’ she says. and not go to A and E. If you think you might have Covid-19, Emma drives me to A and E call 111, it says. I am panting. It’s night. I call 111. The road is empty The moment I go in I get through to the Ambulance Service I am surrounded with people in masks. and talk to a man They put an oxygen mask over my face. who asks me some questions. No, I’m not coughing, I say. No, I don’t feel worse today MESSAGES FROM than I felt yesterday. EMMA TO MICHAEL

He tells me to keep taking the paracetamol 05/04/20 and ibuprofen. 10:31 It’s a beautiful sunny morning. Today is Sunday, day I do. 9 – you have got yourself through 8 days and nights Mick – I know how uncomfortable and scary that has In the spare room at home been – but you have done it – brilliant – keep calm and I say to Emma keep taking it v slowly. There is NO RUSH – we r not it feels like I can’t get enough air. going anywhere! Xxx Love e x There isn’t enough air. ‘I can’t catch up,’ I say. Just spoke to nurse v quickly. She said you r stable, There are moments I feel hotter calm and just having a wash – they had to increase than I’ve ever felt before your levels last night by the sound of it, but it also and moments when I am colder sounds like you have settled again this morning. than ever before. These nights r very hard Mick, I know. Xxx e xxx I shudder as if I am naked out of doors. 18:52 Dr told me you are all stable again and that you look We look at the instructions: better today – that you have been in a diff erent Don’t call the GP position on your tummy which is helping. And you’ve Don’t visit the GP been having something to eat. This all sounds v like Don’t go to A and E progress to me & I want you to be encouraged and Ring the ambulance service. feel reassured that although it may feel v slow going I get through. & v hard work, you r going in the right direction. He asks me if I’m feeling worse than yesterday. Melon fruit cocktail and Tango on its way tomorrow. No. Lots of love e xxxx 

Saturday 13 March 2021 The Guardian 9 ¶ Cover story

19:58 You know the shit has hit the fan when the Queen is making a speech and it’s not even Christmas … Xxx

In the early hours of Monday 6th April a doctor rang Emma to say that they were going to re-admit Michael to intensive care and place him in an induced coma on a ventilator, and that he had agreed to this.

06/04/20 00:52 We love you so much – have a good rest now and we’ll see you very soon love you xxx e xxx

A doctor is standing by my bed asking me if I would sign a piece of paper which would allow them to put me to sleep and pump air into my lungs. ‘Will I wake up?’ ‘There’s a 50:50 chance.’ ‘If I say no?’ I say. ‘Zero.’ And I sign. I start to believe the edges of my body are liminal, they are touching other worlds RECOVERY sheets, blankets, the bed, the ‘fence’ on the side of the bed, the pillows Very poorly. and it is all this that stops me sleeping: It’s something they say about me. they are all edges. Every so often a doctor or nurse So I bring my hand up to my face stands by my bed and says, and put it under my cheek. ‘You were very poorly.’ It feels like I’ve found myself I’m starting to expect it. something that’s not on an edge They often seem pleased – surprised almost – and I’m back with me. that I’m less poorly. I get the feeling that some people I sleep well that night. who were very poorly, died. I didn’t die. ***

*** The ward is dark. I can hear a metal purr I chew over the word ‘liminal’ from the other side, and remember how in the class I teach then a bubbling syrup. at university we talked about how portals He coughs. in fantasy stories are ‘liminal’, More bubbling. a space or moment ‘in between worlds’ It must be coming up from his chest. or on the edge of one world but not quite The metal purr must be sucking it up. in another, A light is on behind the curtains where things are transient, temporary over there. or provisional The nurse tells him to keep still. but it can be a moment full of promise or it can be a moment of anxiety or danger: think the Alice books, REHAB Alice going down the rabbit hole, and through a looking glass. They’ve been worried Or sitting in the waiting area at an airport. about my low blood pressure I think of a train journey to a summer camping but they’ve brought me the Daily Mail holiday so it’ll be fi ne in just a moment. when I was 8 years old, with the land one side and the sea on the other. ***

10 The Guardian Saturday 13 March 2021 ILLUSTRATIONS Chris Riddell Cover story ¶

I try to walk to the loo It feels like a longterm objective. without using Sticky McStickstick. Anything else? she says. I stagg er. Live for a bit more? I think, I think of: and I’ve never bothered to pickle cucumbers, M People, Heather Small: I just buy them, I sing to myself but my mother made lovely pickled cucumbers, ‘Search for the hero inside yourself.’ I would like to try that one day. When I get there I sit on the loo You’re doing very well, they say. wondering how many people have sung, *** ‘Search for the hero inside yourself’, to get themselves to the loo. I am not who I was. I am who I was. This is not me. GOING HOME This is me.

I’m a traveller who reached I am now the person the Land of the Dead. who had Covid: I broke the rule that said I had to stay. the thing that came in March I crossed back over the water, I dodged the guard dog, I am now the person I came out. who disappeared I’ve returned. in April and May

I wander about. I am now the person who peers into the mirror I left some things down there. hoping his left eye It took bits of me as prisoner: will see what the right eye sees, an ear and an eye. catching a glimpse of the blackness of the big pupil They’re waiting for me to come back. looking back at me in hope. The ear is listening. The eye is the lookout I am now the person who hears the telephonic trebly sound *** through the hearing aid in his left ear, Two physios come over. that makes the sound of a kettle boiling They ask me to walk across the room. into scream. They say that’s very good. They ask me to push my legs against their hands. I am now the person They say that’s very good. who is alert to every twinge One of them asks me what are or mark anywhere on me. my longterm objectives. I am getting to know this person. I stop and think. This is not me What are my longterm objectives? This is me Do I have longterm objectives? Should I have longterm objectives? I would like to write a book about a French dog called Gaston le Dog. I don’t say that. I say that I would like to be able to walk to the Jewish deli on the corner and wheel the shopping back in our trolley. The physio smiles. She writes it down in her book. I’m trying to say that going shopping Many Diff erent Kinds of Love: and bringing it back Life, Death, and the NHS by seems huge, Michael Rosen is published much bigg er than anything I can do now. by Ebury on Thursday.

SaturdaySaturday 13 MarchMarch 2021 TheThT e GuardianGu iai n 11 of wisdom, compassion and, in some way that is Book of harder to defi ne, humanity. Doudna contributed to the identifi cation of the week Crispr, a system that evolved in bacteria over billions of years to fend off invading viruses. Crispr-Cas9, to give it its proper name, disarms viruses by slicing up their DNA. Bacteria invented it, but the insight that won Doudna – a biochemist at the University of Cali- { Biography } Designer babies fornia, Berkeley – the Nobel prize in chemistry last and ethical quicksand – a year, along with French microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier , was that it could be adapted to edit nail-biting account of genes in other organisms, including humans. The the birth of gene editing paper that sealed the duo’s fame was published in 2012, when Charpentier was working at Umeå Laura Spinney University in Sweden. By the beginning of 2020, two dozen human trials were under way for medical applications of the technique – for One of the most striking conditions from cancers to atherosclerosis to passages in Walter Isaac- a congenital form of blindness. son’s new b ook comes The Crispr story is made for the movies. It features towards the end. It is 2019 a nail-biting race, more than its fair share of rene- and a scientifi c meeting is gades, the highest prize in chemistry, a gigantic under way at the famous battle over patents, designer babies and acres of Cold Spring Harbour ethical quicksand. It presents a challenge to a bio- The Code Breaker: Laboratory in New York grapher, however, who has to pick one character Jennifer Doudna, State, but James Watson, from a cast of many to carry that story. Isaacson Gene Editing, and the co-discoverer of the chose Doudna, and you can understand why. Having the Future of the structure of DNA, is helped to elucidate the basic science of Crispr, she Human Race banned from it because of remains implicated in its clinical applications and by Walter Isaacson, the racist and scientifi cally in the ethical debate it has stimulated – unlike Char- Simon & Schuster, £30 unfounded views he has pentier, who has said that she doesn’t want to be expressed on intelligence. defi ned by Crispr and is now pursuing other Isaacson, who is to interview Watson, therefore has science questions. Doudna is the thread that holds to make his way to the house on the nearby campus the story together. that the scientist has been allowed to keep. When Still, you can’t help wondering how that story the conversation sails dangerously close to the race might have read if it had been told from the point issue, someone shouts from the kitchen: “If you are of view of Francisco Mojica, the Spanish scientist going to let him say these things, then I am going to who fi rst spotted Crispr in bacteria inhabiting have to ask you to leave.” The 91-year-old Watson salt ponds in the 1990s. He intuited that it did shrugs and changes tack. something important, then doggedly pursued this The voice from the kitchen belongs to Rufus, line of research despite a lack of funding and the Watson’s middle-aged son who has schizo phrenia. fact that everyone told him he was wasting his “My dad’s statements might make him out to be a time. Another version might have been told via bigot and discriminatory,” he once said. “They just the two French food scientists who realised in 2007 represent his rather narrow interpretation of genetic that Crispr could be harnessed to vaccinate bacteria destiny.” In many ways, Isaacson observes, Rufus is against viruses, thus securing the future of the global wiser than his father. yoghurt industry, or the Genetic destiny is a central theme of The Code Lithuanian biochemist Breaker, Isaacson’s portrait of the gene-editing Virginijus Šikšnys, who pioneer Jennifer Doudna, who, with a small army moved the story on again, of other scientists, handed humanity the fi rst really but whose work was eff ective tools to shape it. Rufus Watson’s refl ections rejected by top journals. encapsulate the ambivalence that many people Each one made an feel about this. If we had the power to rid future essential contribution, genera tions of diseases such as schizophrenia, and it’s diffi cult to say would we? The immoral choice would be not to, whose, if any, was the surely? What if we could enhance healthy human most important. A similar beings, by editing out imperfections? The nagging Jennifer Doudna dilemma preoccupied worry – which might one day seem laughably luddite, The American Carl Djerassi and Roald even cruel – is that we would lose something along biochemist won a Hoff mann in their 2001 with those diseases and imperfections, in terms Nobel prize in 2020 play Oxygen , which asked

12 The Guardian Saturday 13 March 2021 Book of the week ¶ AGEFOTOSTOCK/ALAMY

who should receive a “Retro-Nobel” for the discovery even wider circle of people will apply it, and they of the eponymous gas. Should it go to the scientist may not have the same priorities. It’s easy and who discovered oxygen but didn’t publish his dis- right to condemn Chinese maverick He Jiankui covery, the one who published but failed to under- for editing the genes of twins Lulu and Nana, stand the discovery’s signifi cance, or the one who supposedly to protect them from HIV infection, grasped its signifi cance but only thanks to the but in his impassioned reply to Doudna’s criticism insights of the other two? there seems to be a buried grain of truth. “You Focusing on Doudna also paints the Crispr story don’t understand China,” he told her. “There’s as more American than it was. Doudna herself an incredible stigma about being HIV positive, and acknowledged its international dimension, in her I wanted to give these people a chance at a normal own account, A Crack in Creation (2017). “All told, life ...” Genetic destiny means diff erent things to we would be quite the international group,” she diff erent people, as Rufus Watson understands. wrote of the team that produced the seminal 2012 Isaacson, who is best known for his lives of paper, “a French professor in Sweden, a Polish Steve Jobs and Leonardo da Vinci, remains a student in Austria, a German student, a Czech consummate portraitist. He captures the frontier postdoc, and an American professor in Berkeley”. spirit of Harvard geneticist George Church in an It was precisely because so many people anecdote about how, when Church was a child, his contributed, and because they disagree about the physician stepfather let him administer hormone signifi cance and primacy of their contributions, injections to his female patients (Church has been that they remain entangled in a row over ownership. testing experimental Covid-19 vaccines on himself The Crispr revolution owes a great deal to the US lately). Isaacson also has a privileged vantage point, and the premium it places on creativity and innova- knowing the Crispr backstory and the personalities tion, but as with so many scientifi c breakthroughs, that shaped it. In 2000, as editor of Time, he put there was an element of convergence – of people the two men leading competing eff orts to sequence independently and more-or-less simultaneously the human genome – Francis Collins and Craig arriving at the same insight. (Isaacson suggests Venter – on the cover. He understands the tensions radar and the atomic bomb were American that drive discovery and how fl awed brilliant people inventions too, but radar was developed in many can be. This story was always guaranteed to be a countries in the run-up to the second world war, page-turner in his hands. It’s just that science has while European refugees from that war helped outgrown biography as a medium. His subject build the bomb.) should have been Crispr, not Doudna. It’s not only the discovery process that is collective. As soon as a discovery is made public an To buy a copy for £26.10 go to guardianbookshop.com .

Saturday 13 March 2021 The Guardian 13 She is shaken to realise that “violence has reached Nonfi ction my home city”, the “invincible refuge, where I go to recharge between tough assignments covering wars, revolu tions, and political crises. Suddenly, the lines are blurred.” Then, one morning in Istanbul, as Minoui and her four-year-old daughter Samarra are on their way to their weekly storytime session at the French Institute, a suicide bomber detonates a blast just outside the { Biography } A library created institute’s entrance. Minoui pulls Samarra inside, seek- during the siege of a town in ing refuge among books. The symmetry is uncanny. Over many months of conversations with Syria becomes a fortress and Muaddamani and his friends, Minoui’s initial hunch a haven amid the horror – that books off er them a vital form of spiritual escape – is confi rmed. Before the revolution, Muaddamani Mythili Rao studied engineering, play ed football and had little time for reading. The war changed all that. “Books are our way to make up for lost time, to wipe out It begins with a photograph ignor ance,” library co-director Abu el-Ezz says. When posted to the “Humans of Minoui asks another young man she speaks to, an Syria” Facebook account armed rebel, why he turned to books, he says: “It was in 2015 – an image of two when I understood that the war could go on for years.” young men stand ing in He is frank: “Reading reminds us that we’re human.” a windowless room, Daraya never had a public library under Bashar surrounded by stacks al-Assad, so salvaging literature was also a political and The Book Collectors of books. The caption civic act. After the fi rst cache of books was discovered of Daraya reads: “The secret library in the rubble of an obliterated house, dozens of volun- by Delphine Minoui, of Daraya”. When she teers pitched in to recover more titles. Within weeks, translated by Lara encounters it, Istanbul- the library boasted 15,000 volumes. The librarians took Vergnaud, Picador, based jour nalist Delphine care to write the name of each book’s original owner £16.99 Minoui is trans fi xed by on its fi rst page; they won’t rule out the possibility the sight of this “fragile that someone might return to claim them one day. parenthesis in the midst of war”. Who were these The most popular titles range from self-help books young men? What is it that they were seeking ? to Arabic classics such as Kitāb al-’Ibar (The Book of In 2012 Daraya, fi ve miles from Damascus, began Lessons) by the 14th-century Tunisian historian Ibn to be besieged by Syrian government forces. Over the Khaldun, or the romantic verses of Syrian poet Nizar next four hellish years, 40 young Syrian revolu tion- Qabbani. The library becomes a gathering place, too – aries embarked on a remarkable project, rescuing for English lessons, for books from the bombed-out ruins of their town. There lectures and debates about is something seductive about the idea of knowledge democracy and revolution. as a bulwark against brutal force, and it’s an idea that It’s a vital barricade for these immediately resonates with Minoui. “The library is revolution aries, but not an their hidden fortress against the bombs,” she writes. impen etrable one. When the “Books are their weapons of mass instruction.” siege intensifi es, the book Minoui tracks down Ahmad Muaddamani, the bun ker is attacked. Wifi photographer behind th e Facebook image and one becomes a rarity, Minoui’s of the library’s founders . Their interviews take place long calls are reduced to ten- online, and some of Minoui’s most arresting descrip- Delphine Minoui tative WhatsApp mes s ages, tions feature their jittery internet connection. “His and she begins to detect image stretches and deforms like a Picasso portrait,” defeat and depression in the young men. she writes of their fi rst Skype call. Later, “whenever the Things reach their nadir in the summer of 2016, connection is lost from the force of yet another explo- when the Assad regime escalates its assault. One sion, his voice comes in jerks and starts, blanketing my book collector is killed, and after regime helicopters desk in Istanbul with small, unstitched words.” dump napalm on Daraya in August, the rest fl ee . It Minoui, who is French and Iranian, has won awards is not the story these men envisioned, or the one for her reporting from the Middle East, but for this Minoui set out to tell. “Why write? To what end?” she story she is unable to travel to Syria. She makes up for asks. “If only I could anticipate what happens next, the lack of access with an abundance of attention and hoping it will be less tragic, and after some happy empathy. And, over time, the war begins to feel not so event place the fi nal period.” Not all stories have far away. In November 2015 Minoui fi nds herself fran ti- happy endings, but we need them all the same. cally call ing friends and family in Paris after learning of attacks at the Bataclan concert hall and Stade de France . To buy a copy for £14.78 go to guardianbookshop.com.

14 The Guardian Saturday 13 March 2021 Nonfi ction ¶

Faleiro uses the structures of a true crime narrative. { Crime } Two teenagers are The need in the reader to understand these painfully found hanged in an Indian premature deaths and make sense of the world means that the real objective of The Good Girls – to turn village ... a shocking and and face the factual horror of inequality – is skilfully mesmerising investigation masked. “Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments,” was the Nikita Lalwani verdict of Janet Malcolm in The Journalist and the Murderer (1989); “The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and ‘the public’s right to know’; the Two teenage girls go miss- least talented talk about Art.” In this sense, Faleiro is a ing. They are discov ered judicious writer: as with her nonfi ction debut Beautiful hanging from a mango tree. Thing – a portrait of the table dancers of Bombay – the Sexual activity may or prose in The Good Girls is full of precise intention. Facts may not have taken place, are presented without the electric burn of outrage. prior to their deaths. Were The reader plays detective as the story unfolds, they killed or did they kill piecing together “evidence” that is remembered from The Good Girls: them selves? There are eye- earlier chapters – a phone call, a text, a snatch of over- An Ordinary Killing witnesses who may be the heard conversation, an admission that might later be by Sonia Faleiro, aggressors – their stories denied. The author will not hold your hand as you Bloomsbury Circus, don’t match up. To add to navigate this mystery; instead you are encouraged £16.99 this, there is a defi ning to solve it yourself. visual image : the dead At the heart of the book, and crucial to an interpre- bodies hang from the tree for days, knocking against tation of events, is the question of consent – more each other in repetitive, heart-breaking camaraderie, speci fi cally, of consensual desire. Padma and Lalli are while the grieving women of the village form a circle referred to repeatedly by relatives and politicians as around the tree trunk, to prevent the girls from being family assets – tangible, walking, breathing manifesta- taken down. If they come down, Padma and Lalli (not tions of family honour. There are multiple discussions their real names) will be forgotten. As long as the as to whether they have been raped – at one point the corpses retain the power to horrify, they are media reports declare this to be incontrovertible, and protected from indiff erence. yet the evidence does not support it beyond reasonable “Place is the crossroads of circumstance,” Eudora doubt. Vital evidence is tampered with, in the name of Welty wrote in her 1957 essay “Place in Fiction” – “the saving family honour: phone recordings are deleted, proving ground of, what happened? Who’s here? Who’s witnesses are told to revise their stories, and the num- coming?” In The Good Girls, the shifting answers to ber of potential rapists swells from one to fi ve and back these questions form a morass of half-truths and lies, again. The idea that the girls might have had their own freighting the ancient fi elds of Katra Sadatganj – an romantic lives with boys from the village is crushed “eyeblink of a village” in Uttar Pradesh, north India – in the white noise of gossip and misinformation. with existential threat. This ancestral land, a marker Faleiro’s subjects are numerous and interconnected of power and identity for those who work in it, “put – from India’s corrupt politicians and media to the dal in the katori, clothes on the back … It made them deleterious eff ects of caste prejudice and the systemic cultivators. Without it they were landless labourers”. rot scouring its way through the police force. But her Those who inhabit it “believed they would sense if core subject is that of entrapment, and she returns something was amiss, just as one can sense a change in again and again to the lack the texture of one’s palm. But this was not the case.” The mango tree of agency that the girls have What follows, in this shocking, mesmerising book by where the two over their own lives, banned Sonia Faleiro, is an unravelling of shared hubris . victims were found as they are from wandering freely around the village and its environs. The author concludes that “an Indian woman’s fi rst challenge was surviving her own home”. The girls’ nightly journey to squat in the fi elds after dinner to relieve themselves emerges as the only gap in a system set up to put them under constant sur veillance. And it is this gap of possibility, at Welty’s “crossroads of circumstance” that Padma and Lalli enter fl ushed with life, only to die hours later. The Good Girls is a beautifully calibrated book, suspenseful to the fi nal pages, urging us to walk into that night and listen.

BURHAAN KINU/HINDUSTAN TIMES/GETTY; JOEL SAGET/AFP VIA GETTY VIA SAGET/AFP JOEL TIMES/GETTY; KINU/HINDUSTAN BURHAAN To buy a copy for £14.78 go to guardianbookshop.com.

Saturday 13 March 2021 The Guardian 15 ¶ Interview Catriona Ward

The horror author’s audacious third novel tears up the rule book. She talks to Justine Jordan about cats, killers, gothic fi ction – and the terror of Fawlty Towers ‘I have a real affinity for the monster. Every monster has a story’

hen Catriona Ward was Catriona Ward about 13, she’d wake up at her home in Devon each night with a hand in the small of her back, pushing her out of bed. “It W was abso lutely terrifying. I could feel that there was someone in the room.” Had Google been around in the early 1990s, she might have found out sooner about hypnagogic hallucinations, intensely real sensations on the border between wakefulness and sleep. “But it doesn’t matter whether it’s real or not; the fear is real. And there’s nothing else quite like it, that fear in the dark.” Fear in the dark is what powered her 2015 gothic horror debut, Rawblood , the follow-up Little Eve, and now her breakout third book, The Last House on Needless Street, published next week. Buzz has been building for months around a dark, audacious high- wire act of a novel that can be only tentatively 

16 The Guardian Saturday 13 March 2021 PHOTOGRAPHY Antonio Olmos/The Guardian Saturday 13 March 2021 The Guardian 17 ¶ Interview Catriona Ward

 described for risk of giving too much away. working phone, it was impossible to maintain ties Whereas Ward’s previous novels were historical outside the family; “a guillotine comes down”. chillers set in remote corners of Britain, featuring She and her sister had “a very intense emotional young women traumatised by cursed families and relationship because there were only the two of us – social oppression, the new book looks at fi rst like a we loved each other so much, but because there was contemporary American thriller. There are horrors nowhere else to put it, it becomes overwhelming. hidden in a rundown house on the edge of a forest; We looked very alike as well. You’re in the process a spate of disappearing children; a vulnerable woman of becoming, growing up – and it’s strange for your searching for answers. Ward introduces us to Ted, a sense of identity.” bizarre, childlike loner who lives with his daughter Ward soon seized on gothic and horror fi ction to Lauren and cat Olivia – and then pulls the rug, contextualise her night terrors. “The fi rst ghost story repeatedly, from under the reader’s feet. I ever read was ‘The Monkey’s Paw ’ – I remember The book’s starting point was the relationship thinking ‘Ah!’ I got the same thrill from The Haunting between serial killers and their pets, the disarmingly of Hill House. I thought: this is where you put that. upbeat Ward explains by Zoom from Dartmoor. This is how you rationalise and contain that feeling. What happens when those without empathy connect By sharing it, by opening it to the light you kind of with another living being? As she points out in an disempower it.” afterword, Dennis Nilsen’s dog, Bleep, “was the only After studying English at Oxford, Ward trained creature he could be said to have had any functional as an actor in the US – “all I’d wanted to do, ever, relationship with”. But the project wasn’t getting since I was a little child” – but froze up in auditions. anywhere, until seismic life changes – the end of Now she links her theatrical ambition to the desire to a long relationship, leaving her job working for a tell stories: “I was such a massive inhaler, hoovering human rights foundation and, at 38, moving back in up and consuming all the books I could.” She worked with her parents – left her with “nothing to hold on to on Rawblood as part of an MA in creative writing at except the idea of this strange narrative about a cat”. UEA, but the book ended up taking her seven years. “When you clear certain things from your life, “I found it diffi cult to reverse the stream – from you do leave a blank space, and all these thoughts receiving words and stories to myself creating. It started to emerge. A dam opened up and I realised felt like a huge act of temerity.” what I had to do.” A superbly achieved slice of gothic reinvention, One of the book’s many surprises is that it is Rawblood unfolds the story of a cursed family, partly narrated by Olivia, a fastidious, deeply trapped in an ancient house, whose generations religious feline who refers to humans as “teds” and are hunted down by a malevolent female presence: gives us an exterior perspective on her unreliable “a woman, or once a woman. White, starved ...” It owner. (“Ted is not a very clean ted. His bathroom explores psychological, social and body horrors, from does not look like the bathrooms on TV.”) Olivia, the “ghastly kitchen” of Victorian dissection labs Ward remarks, owes something to David Sedaris; to the global carnage and existential devastation of she provides humorous respite from the otherwise the fi rst world war, and on to the early 20th century’s harrowing narrative. medical brutalisation of women. “I just wanted It is, she admits, diffi cult to write as a cat. “I started to write a proper gothic novel,” Ward says now, having fun with it when I realised that what a cat describing it as a “kaleidoscope” of the genre, with would really like to do is watch a television show of nods to Frankenstein, Dracula, The Turn of the Screw itself, describing diff erent types of naps. and The Woman in White. “What do people see in a cat? What do they need Little Eve, which won the Shirley Jackson and a from them? It’s quite a moving relationship. They’re British fantasy award, is set amid a cult on a tiny fulfi lling our desire for something mystical and Scottish island after the fi rst world war, with women sphinx-like and unknow able, and yet slinky and and children held in thrall by the charismatic Uncle. friendly. There’s a magic about a cat which we Opening with a massacre, it intertwines the fates of desperately need, in these times more than ever.” two teenage girls – one the Setting the book in America opened up memories ‘One of the killer, one the survivor. The of a “very compartmentalised childhood”. Ward’s fi rst things horror here arises from the father was a water economist for the World Bank my parents sadistic control exerted by and the family spent stretches of time in the US, as asked me the damaged patriarch, well as Kenya, Madagascar, Yemen and Morocco, who creates a toxic family returning for a couple of weeks each year to an after reading that is also a prison. ancient house on Dartmoor, where Rawblood is set. Rawblood was: Both Rawblood and Little Ward’s mother taught English wherever they were ‘It’s not us?!’ Eve ex amine the idea of posted, while Ward and her younger sister “didn’t second sight, and in one really take an exam” until studying for A-levels in agonising scene Eve’s the UK at Bedales. “I never felt I lacked in education eye is removed as part of because we just read all the time. All we did was a ritual. Ward was born read.” Moving so often, sometimes without even a without sight in one eye,

18 The Guardian Saturday 13 March 2021 Interview ¶

Gothic reinvention Shannon Beer as the young Cathy in Andrea Arnold’s 2011 adaptation

ARTIFICIAL EYE/ALLSTAR ARTIFICIAL of Wuthering Heights

but it took a boyfriend to point out the connec tion. archetypal shapes to them – they access fears that “It didn’t occur to me, not once, that I was writing perhaps only children are supposed to feel.” And something from my own personal experi ence! perhaps, as such an intrinsic part of the oral tradition, The way you use your self is so strange. Writing horror is still seen as “a bit yokelly and countrifi ed”. always hap pens off stage, in your peripheral vision.” “We have electricity and Bodum kettles now, we Ward wanted The Last House on Needless Street to don’t have to be afraid!” be a departure – “to write the mad and anarchic idea But as Ward points out, this is “a big, generously that came to me, as opposed to worrying too much shaped genre that has room for all sorts of variations”. about creating the platonic ideal of a gothic novel”. Her novels are all survival stories, drawing on the (She also told herself: “I can’t write another book conventions of gothic (fractured narratives, non- about lonely abused girls on moors.”) But it continues linear chronologies) to refl ect the intrusive memories her fascination with how monsters are made, and and jagged experiences of PTSD. But horror more how we recognise the monstrous within us. In widely can also be “very camp, in the Susan Sontag Rawblood, the terror of “her” hovers between way”, with tropes deployed to a knowing audience. projection and self-recognition, while in Little Eve “People know what it means when the reception dies every character is warped by their abuse at the on the cellphone, it’s a familiar pathway. I always do hands of Uncle. try to subvert, not diminish, expectations. Suspense “I have a real affi nity for the monster,” Ward says. and horror readers really enjoy that reciprocity “Every monster has a story. Empathy and monstros- between the reader and author – you’re playing an ity go hand in hand, you can’t provoke horror in the elegant game of tennis. Each of you knows what reader without evoking an intensely empathetic the signifi er denotes.” reaction at the same time. More than the monsters, And nearly all art borrows from horror, she points we fear becoming them.” out. “All good writing has horror in it. I cannot watch Monstrous mothers, especially, rear up through- Fawlty Towers, it arouses such innate horror in me – all out her work. “I’m not a mother, and my own mother the dread and anxiety of what will happen next! I feel is not a monster. But one of the fi rst things my parents about that what most people feel reading what I write.” asked me after reading Rawblood was: ‘It’s not us?!’ In fact, Ward admits cheerfully that “I’m terrifi ed Family ties are so primordial and atavistic, you can of everything – very afraid of the dark, hyper- always imagine the power, what would you do if it vigilant, easily startled. People think that because went wrong – explore those relationships from a I write horror, I’m inured, but that would make me place of relative calm and ease.” a terrible wri ter. Because I’m frightened, the reader This is a fertile period for horror writing, from is frightened. the success of Andrew Michael Hurley and Kelly “Horror is a reaching out through the page to the Link to new voices such as Sue Rainsford and Lucie reader, saying I’m afraid of this too, but if we go McKnight Hardy. It’s a welcome resurgence for a through it together, you look the horror in the face. genre that has been perpetually sidelined for a host The very act of writing and reading gothic or horror of reasons, from the feminisation of early gothic to seems to me recuperative. That’s the experience the infantilisation of Stephen King. “Some things are people are looking for, a mutual moment of staring considered to be for kids because they’ve got big down the darkness ” •

Saturday 13 March 2021 The Guardian 19 ¶ Label

Edes. Like Rebecca West, Edes is a documented Fiction fi gure in the archives Blakemore draws on, but their entanglement is among her inventions. It is rendered with sensuous precision, like so much of this novel, but its outcome is never really in doubt. Nor is it incidental: when cruelty is called for, few of the men here will be found wanting. The confl agration begins with little kindling. A The women persecuted in drunkard sees shapes in the dark. Cattle and horses the Essex witch trials are are variously affl icted, and a young boy stricken by mania. Petty grudges are stirred and fi ngers readily brought to life in a poet’s pointed. Hopkins steps forward, no longer reticent vivid, satisfying debut about his purpose, and a willing band of inquisitors soon assembles. This inchwise slide into depravity is Paraic O’Donnell as compelling as it is queasily familiar. The townsfolk are not all fanatics, but they fi nd fanaticism quite to their liking. “There’s men, and then The Beldam is naturally among the accused and there’s people.” So remarks reacts with characteristic defi ance. A witch, she says, one jaded widow to ano- “is just their nasty word for anyone who makes things ther, a little way into The happen”. But it is their word, too, for any woman Manningtree Witches. The living as she pleases, or merely within easy reach. two are merely gossiping, Hopkins, now styling himself Witchfi nder General, but the aside is slyly placed, soon ensnares Rebecca herself. He fi nds her worthy The Manningtree for the man who afterwards of special attention. Witches happens into view will What follows must be hinted at with care, since by AK Blakemore, more than prove her point. Blakemore here spans a historical void, but it is Granta, £12.99 AK Blakemore’s fi rst novel persuasive and satisfying. Crucial to the proceedings is a fi ctional account of the is a grimly fascinating Essex witch trials, and though it brims with language depiction of Hopkins, and of arresting loveliness, it speaks plainly when it must. one that strips away the We meet the young Rebecca West in 1643, amid the aggrandisements of popular early convulsions of the English civil war. Her mother, myth to show us an etio- known as the Beldam West, is a doughty widow with lated zealot who can’t a fondness for drink and confrontation. Rebecca decide what off ends him must share her mother’s mean lodgings and taint of most – the baseness of disrepute, but though she chafes at the narrowness his own nature or the of her existence, she is not without resources. “I am knowledge that a woman useful,” she says of herself. “I have taught myself to has seen and understood watch and listen.” it. What he denounces as And not for nothing, in a place where neighbourly sin, Rebecca tells him at bonds are now frayed by hunger and suspicion. AK Blakemore a climactic moment, is Though she seldom fi nds a warm welcome, Rebecca “the fi lth you like to play has a way of putting herself in the right company, of in”. There are people, and then there are men. catching the low talk or stray look that might warn of The Manningtree Witches ventures into dark what is coming. At church she and her mother must places, to be sure, but it carries a jewelled dagger. take the back pew, but from there she can survey the Blakemore is a poet, and readers given to underlining townswomen who elsewhere disparage her, noting may fi nd their pencils worn down to stubs. A black their “emanations of rosewater perfume, womb-clot, feather lying in the grass is “glossy and ideal”; a sweat and cinders”. When a pale stranger named fall of sleet “rarefi es into a silk mist”. Her women Matthew Hopkins arrives on unstated business, his are fi ercely alive and, in the Beldam’s case, often fi ne garments and apparent learning draw general deliciously bawdy: “A man like that’d stick his thing admiration. But Rebecca takes his measure more up a haddock if a Bishop told him not to.” Such carefully: “There is something about him slant and sharp wit and rich textures would be welcome in insubstantial, as though all [his] dramatic outfi tting any setting, but here they form what seems a fi tting houses none of the usual human meat.” tribute. The persecutors in this tale are given close She knows to keep these icily exact impressions to scrutiny, but the book belongs to the persecuted. herself, but her instinct for self-concealment is tested And on these pages, in all their ordinary glory, those by youthful desire. Though the fi ghting has left lean women are at last allowed to live. pickings, her attention settles – fatefully, it will turn

SOPHIE DAVIDSON SOPHIE out – on a mild-mannered young scholar named John To buy a copy for £11.30 go to guardianbookshop.com.

20 The Guardian Saturday 13 March 2021 Fiction ¶

sidekick Debbie McGee, and the denizens of their Can solidarity among the favourite pub. We meet, too, the young property marginalised bring about social developer, Agatha, who wants to knock down the brothel and pubs. If these sound like caricatures, it’s change? A dazzling, Dickensian because they are. Like Dickens or Balzac, Mozley is Soho tale explores the answer interested in breathing life into cliches, using two- dimensionality to gain breadth and social reach. Lara Feigel As in Dickens, the sociological typology is turned into something more strange and satisfying through the visionary dimension of the scene-setting. Mozley’s Soho remains tempting descriptions of locations are exuberant, whether territory for novelists, with focusing on the fabric-clad walls of the brothel (“the its brothels, sex shops and silk tendrils are the red of bull’s blood. They are the seedy pubs still nestling red of sow’s blood. They hang as if dripping”) or the among the private members’ labyrinthine tunnels of the Crossrail building site that clubs and sleek cocktail provides the setting for a brilliantly theatrical set-piece bars; it’s an inspired choice scene. The so-called Debbie McGee wanders away Hot Stew as the setting for Fiona from her down-and-out friends to travel through by Fiona Mozley, Mozley’s second novel. tunnels of concrete and mud, tripping over the roots John Murray, £16.99 The Booker-shortlisted of trees, drinking the dripping water, until she fi nds Elmet established her as a herself in a millionaire’s disused basement swimming writer of wildness, at home in the most remote of rural pool (“a fevered Hollywood dream, a Kodachrome test- settings, whose characters lived off the land. The strip”). Filling her lungs with the “ersatz tropical air”, switch to an urban location is decisive, but she has she embarks on a kind of lone rehab there. brought her dispossessed cast along with her. The This could all have been too much, but it is grounded prostitutes and drug addicts and out-of-luck magi- by the characters drawn from Mozley’s own gener ation: cians who populate the Soho of Hot Stew are trying fi ve recent Cambridge graduates. Bastian, the public to get by, as the characters in Elmet were, without school-educated son of Agatha’s lawyer, is oblivious succumbing to the values of the rapacious capitalist to the poverty he unknowingly exploits. But a chance world surrounding them. There is violence here, meeting with Glenda, a young woman he knew at as there was there, but Mozley is interested in the Cambridge, introduces him to the precarious world idealism and adherence to principles possible at the faced by well-educated young people without family margins. Together the novels ask us to envisage a money. Glenda lives in a derelict room in Soho, getting society no longer defi ned by what happens at the by, unlikely to achieve her basic aspiration: to do a job centre, but where the types of solidarity mod elled she likes and live in a home she likes living in. Through on the edges remake possibilities for everyone. Glenda, Bastian ends up questioning his own place Hot Stew operates on a larger scale than Elmet, and in the world and his preparedness to perpetuate it. Mozley navigates between the minds of about 20 Hovering throughout the novel is the question of characters with ease. This is the Dickensian sprawl, whether change is possible. Certainly, the forms of made more fl uid by a cinematic sensibility . There’s a protest attempted by the prostitutes are disastrous . dazzling panning shot at the start where she introduces Mozley’s achieve ment is to create room for ambiva- us to almost all the major charact ers without pausing lence and nuance. Are the police right to want to crack for breath. We meet the two prostitutes, Precious and down so vehemently on sex traffi cking that they end Tabitha, who have a fl at in a collectively run brothel, up destroying the lives of the women? And are they where they grow plants on the roof and sleep together right to mock the feminists in an ergonomic John Lewis bed. We meet the low-life West End ways who urge them to pro tect magician known as Paul Daniels, and his drug addict Soho, London their bodies from men? Sex workers turn out to be a good vehicle for the book’s investigations, because their bodies remain determinedly individual despite their commodifi cation, and because they are at once implicated in capitalism and remain outside it. Again, the connection with the Cambridge graduates adds complexity: Bastian’s girlfriend at university was funding her studies by working as an escort, a choice that he now comes to accept. In an age when so many novelists of Mozley’s generation take refuge in the dystopian, she has reinvigorated large-scale social realism for our times.

IML IMAGE GROUP LTD/ALAMY GROUP IMAGE IML To buy a copy for £14.78 go to guardianbookshop.com.

Saturday 13 March 2021 The Guardian 21 ¶ Fiction

landscape description and a playful postcolonial A girls’ boarding school history of the school, these two cars are enough for in Rwanda provides the us to understand that something darker lies beneath the comic accounts of adolescence that follow. setting for this ominous The girls, given unfamiliar food by a French cook, postcolonial satire bicker over treats brought from home for midnight feasts: “Beans and cassava paste, with a special sauce Sarah Moss … bananas slowly baked overnight … red gahungezi sweet potatoes; corncobs; peanuts; and even, for the city girls, doughnuts of every colour under the sun.” Our Lady of the Nile is a They take walks in the long rainy season, compare girls’ boarding school high their growing bodies, tease and boast about boy- in the hills of Rwanda , friends, make fun of “Mr Hair”, a young French very near the spring that is maths teacher on voluntary service overseas. They reputed to be a source of are, perhaps, more realistic about their own future the Nile ; there is a plaque prospects than their teachers are: “We were already announcing its “discovery” fi ne merchandise,” says Immaculée, “and a diploma Our Lady of the Nile (“Cock Mission, 1924”), and will infl ate our worth even more.” by Scholastique a statue of the Virgin Mary, For a while, the spats between girls who take the Mukasonga, or possibly the ancient convent ideology seriously and those who regard translated by goddess Isis, erected by the routines of study and prayer as an inconvenience Melanie Mauthner, a Belgian bishop in 1953. seem as serious as those between the daughters Daunt, £9.99 In the 1980s the school of Hutu “majority people” and the two girls who is run by French nuns to constitute the required quota of Tutsis. These two, educate the daugh ters of Rwanda’s elite, training Veronica and Virginia, take to sneaking off into the them “not simply to be good wives and mothers, forest to visit the Parisian Monsieur de Fontenaille, but also good citizens and good Christians … who in youth “set off for Africa to seek his fortune” to spearhead women’s advancement”. and is now a kind of heart of whiteness, Conrad’s National tensions are rarely explicitly addressed Kurtz replayed as farce. Monsieur de Fontenaille has in the business of school life, but a sinister dynamic developed an obsession with painting the portraits unnerves the reader from early on with the arrival of Tutsi girls, convinced that he alone can restore to of Gloriosa, who “stepped out of a black Mercedes the Tutsis the ancestral memory of their heritage in with tinted windows, preceded by her mother”. The “the empire of black pharaohs”. He wants to paint mother has to rush back to the city for dinner with Veronica as the goddess Isis and Virginia as Queen the Belgian ambassador, but “Gloriosa announced Candace, apparently believing them to be descen- that she would stand with Sister Gertrude at the gate, dants or even reincarnations of the ancient rulers beneath the national fl ag, to greet the other seniors of his fantasies. “I don’t think he even sees the and let them know that the fi rst meeting of the same landscape as we do,” says Veronica. “It’s like committee she chaired would take place the a movie playing in his head, but now he wants fl esh- following day”. Gloriosa’s rival Goretti “also made and-blood actresses, and that’s us.” He drugs the a grand entrance, perched on the back of a huge girls, not primarily to assault them but to dress military vehicle whose six thick tyres took the them in the costumes and spectators’ breath away”, alongside soldiers in High in the masks of his pharaonic/ camoufl age fatigues. Against the background of hills of Rwanda Tutsi myth of origin. Veronica knows perfectly well what’s going on, but the money she fi nds in her bra is useful. This postcolonial satire is the background to Virginia and Veronica’s more acute danger, which comes from Gloriosa, the society waiting to believe her lies and the thugs at her father’s command. The ending is violent, bleak and wholly believable. Melanie Mauthner has made a perfectly pitched translation of the original French, which is eerily laconic, both comedy and tragedy hauntingly understated. The novel reminded me of Magda Szabó’s brilliant Abigail, another school story for grownups that is also a book about our inability or refusal to protect children from history.

STOCKIMO/ALAMY To buy a copy for £9.29 go to guardianbookshop.com.

22 The Guardian Saturday 13 March 2021 Fiction ¶

and it is all very vividly written – but I couldn’t help Books of feeling it would make more sense as a graphic novel: fantastic and colourful, but lacking depth. I could the month also have done without Adam’s shooting spree: the old western trope of the good man driven to pick up his guns should have been put to rest long before now. Sarah Gailey has been nominated for Hugo and Nebula awards; her domestic thriller The Echo { SF and fantasy } A pub with Wife (Hodder, £17.99) begins as scientifi c superstar drinks from another planet; Evelyn discovers that her husband has been cheating on her … with her own clone. Evelyn has come up biblical Adam in present-day with a way to grow adult clones, capable of speech Britain; and Aztecs in space and understanding, from a DNA sample, the original’s personality imprinted on their brains. Lisa Tuttle Legally they are not people, merely disposable tools. The horror of a soci ety that would allow this is never touched on, nor are there any moral or economic arguments made for their use. The plot is even more full of holes: Evelyn is a genius, yet her husband (a mere academic) not only runs with her idea, he manages to secretly produce her clone in his spare time. Gailey’s main concern is showing how people are shaped by others, so Evelyn often recalls Skyward Inn by Aliya Whiteley (Solaris, £14.99) her cold, brutal father, and hates her clone for being combines an intriguing, character-driven plot with the softer, gentler version her hus band wanted, yet great splashes of science fi ctional weirdness. The the novel doesn’t rise above the banal. novel grips from the start, exploring with deceptive Sylvain Neuvel’s A History of What Comes Next simplicity issues ranging from the diffi culties of (Michael Joseph, £14.99) is alt-history with a communicating with the people we love to diff erence. It basically traces the true story of the colonisation on a planet ary scale. It opens in a development of rocket science, namechecking traditional English village pub, run by Jem, who the real people involved has returned home from a 10-year posting to the This is alt-history in the days before the planet Qita with a Qitan called Isley. Although there with a diff erence, space race, but adds an is a spaceport nearby, the villagers have nothing to bringing an alien-conspiracy-theory do with it; they belong to the Western Protectorate, edge of alien edge in the shape of a a region of Britain that chose to divorce itself from fi ctional team of mother- the complications of the modern world and adopt conspiracy daughter clones, reborn a simpler way of life. But even they cannot escape theory to the through the ages with the consequences of humanity’s contact with aliens , development of three imperatives: who only appear to be human, as the truth about rocket science “Preserve the knowledge; the Qitan lifecycle, and the imported psychedelic survive at all costs; take brew served by Jem from under the bar, is gradually them to the stars”. Along revealed. I was reminded of the authors who fi rst with the usual problems got me hooked on science fi ction : writers such as faced by women trying Theodore Sturgeon, Kate Wilhelm and Ursula Le to change the world (or at least get men to listen Guin. Skyward Inn feels like an instant classic of to them), they are threat ened by a mysterious the genre. “Tracker” who has spent centuries trying to kill Adam, the biblical fi rst man, “created before them. All good fun, and since this book takes death” and therefore immortal, is the hero of Birds us only up to 1961, we can expect more to come. of Paradise by Oliver K Langmead (Titan, £8.99) . Arkady Martine’s debut, A Memory Called By the 21st century, he has little aff ection for his Empire, won the Hugo award for best novel last year; many descen dants, preferring to spend his time A Desolation Called Peace (Tor, £16.99) is the sequel – with other immortals: the original creatures he had and obviously not the best place to start. At the same the privilege of naming. Crow, Magpie, Raven, Owl, time, new readers will be plunged, unprepared, into Butterfl y and Pig generally hang out with him in the strangeness of a space-faring empire somehow human form, but occasionally fi nd it useful to revert grown out of the ancient Aztec culture – a fascinating to type. He thinks about Eve, but not until the end creation that soon had me hooked. This is fi rst-class of the book does he remember why she is no longer space opera, with added spycraft, diplomatic intrigue beside him. There is a plot about the search for and scary aliens, along with interesting explorations immortal plants, and competing attempts to of perception, ways of communicating, and what recreate the original Garden in present-day Britain, makes a person.

Saturday 13 March 2021 The Guardian 23 ¶ Books essay

the crowd that the America they’re living in isn’t that A new groove diff erent from the America she felt compelled to escape. The America where she was kicked out of Hanif Abdurraqib hotels she was later asked to perform in; the America where she would light up a stage but not be able to get a drink at the bar. Because Little Devil cent res on black performance as it relates to America and the American memory, it felt vital to understand Baker’s Washington From Josephine Baker speech as an indictment of the US’s obsession with forgetting and reframing its histories, in the hopes to the Soul Train line, that it will never be found out. But the thing is that a great many of us have found it out already. we should recognise The spirit of Toni Morrison hovers over the book, even though she is not in it. My fi rst impulse was to the triumph and the joy write a diff erent book. I was interested in the appro- priation and transformation of legacies. I had spent in black performance some time in Memphis in 2015, and while there, I’d been in the old Stax building, now a soul music museum. I saw the custom Cadillac Eldorado that and free expression Isaac Hayes loved so much. He had received it as part of a deal in 1972, but then went bankrupt and lost it hen I began A Little Devil years later. And now it sits in a museum, detached in America, I was thinking from the artist who loved it, a somewhat comical about Josephine Baker. The artefact. I began to think about the legacy and treat- title of the book comes from ment of black artists in a place like Memphis, where Baker, from her speech at people line up to get into Graceland, to revel in the W the March on Washington safe and sanitised legacy of Elvis Presley. in 1963. It is a speech that is And so I set out to write an account that was initially often overlooked. The legacy of the march so often propelled by a rageful curiosity. About what can be centres on its male speakers (Martin Luther King taken, and what was owed. Americans love to ask Jr, A Philip Randolph), and Baker was well past her questions about the separation of artists from their art, most notable prime. At 57, she chose to return to as though it is the great complex inquiry of our time, the US from France and make a small speech – but but the country has extracted black art from black also to confront the country she’d left and vowed artists without honouring the humanity of the art- not to return to. The speech is at times tender, at makers for years. I thought, initially, that if I set out on times funny, at times teeming with rage. There was a scorching path to unearth the core discomforts I had a fullness to it ; Baker considering the vastness of with this dynamic, something would be revealed that her life and the many lives she’d lived . Her speech is might allow me to make peace – with what, or whom, defi ant and brilliant, punctuated by Baker aligning I wasn’t sure. I was seeking a broad, vague comfort. her experiences with the national plight of black And then Morrison died, when I had pretty much people in America: a draft of the book that I felt fi ne with, but wasn’t entirely in love with. It was a book of inquiries that You know, friends, that I do not lie to you when felt braided together in a kind of infi nity loop of I tell you I have walked into the palaces of kings noise, and when I came out the other side of it, I was and queens and into the houses of presidents. And hungry for more noise. It was occurring to me that all much more. But I could not walk into a hotel in of the answers I needed were already embedded in America and get a cup of coff ee, and that made me America’s history and relationship to black people, mad. And when I get mad, you know that I open and that all of my digging, while not entirely futile, my big mouth. And then look out, ’ cause when was not serving my actual interests. Josephine opens her mouth, they hear it all over Morrison often spoke of black writers detaching the world. themselves from an investment in whiteness, and the ideas of whiteness; to ask the question of how the work Baker was important for me when thinking about this might be better served if it was not catering to even book, because what is it to honour a life, if you do not the presence and potential presence of whiteness. I’d attempt to honour the completeness of a life? What is realised that so much of the book, then, was operating a life – particularly a black life – in a moment that is not in fear . It was using the ominous nature of what could desirable to the constructs of whiteness, or a life that be uprooted and repurposed as a tool of propulsion, must exist and live on even when the limited imagi- and that isn’t what I thought was most fascinating nation of whiteness is done with it. What was most about my pursuits in the moment. gratifying about Baker’s speech, looking back on it What also happened around this time was that I now, is how it uses her personal history to clarify for had been sent a hard drive from an old pal. It had an

24 The Guardian Saturday 13 March 2021 Books essay ¶

immense archive of Soul Train episodes from the I loved Aretha There are those who 1970s and 80s. I hadn’t asked for this, I’d just told Franklin’s funeral might call my book an my friend that I thought I needed to take the work in and the idea archival project, and I a more celebratory direction, and this is what he sent. that love means think that is generous but For weeks, I spent hours watching clips. The ecstasy also would maybe do a that poured over a room when a performer hit a good fi ghting to keep disservice to archivists, groove, or when an interview went in an especially someone alive. who dedicate entire life- salacious direction. And yes, of course, the beauty of The funeral that times to this type of work. I the Soul Train line in all of its glory – dancers showing turns into a party think, instead, the book is a off their moves as they strut towards the camera – catalogue of excitements – specifi cally in the 70s, when the construct of the line Beyoncé’s Super Bowl Show, could be overburdened with joy and come apart, Dave Chapelle’s standup. I despite itself, fl owing bodies on top of bodies for the allowed myself the freedom sake of fi ghting for a little dance fl oor to move upon. to jump from place to place, It was there, my nightly baptism in the glow of from idea to idea, from emotion to emotion. I wanted a television screen carrying me back to a place of to populate these essays with as many people as I pleasure, that I decided what I was actually aching for could, as many images, as many magazine covers and was a book about celebration, about revelling in the songs and music videos and dance moves as I could. many revelations I came towards while watching black In the end, I return to Josephine Baker, as I did people move. Or when thinking about the joy in black when I’d changed the direction of the book and had people throwing down playing cards on a fl at surface. to decide how to shift the tone of some of the pieces Or when thinking about the moment during “Gimme I’d already written. I thought the best story to tell Shelter” when Merry Clayton must have felt touched about Baker was the story of her coming home, which by God, entirely invincible. This was what my actual to me also is the story of what it is to love a place that interests were reaching towards. The idea of celebra- was not constructed with the interests of serving you. tion without consequence. The type of small perfor- Some might say there is a triumph in overcoming mances that, even if they could be mimicked, could that set of circumstances. But I came to understand never be rightfully done by anyone but us. the triumph in losing interest in the serving of It was good, for example, to also consider the circumstantial geographies, and instead fi nding funeral. A point of grief that I had known many black some ground on which you can perform in whatever people to turn into a celebration. To manipulate the way serves you, serves your people, serves the terms idea of loss into something immensely fl uorescent you wish to engage with • and immediately joyous. I had so loved witnessing Aretha Franklin’s funeral and this idea that love means A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black fi ghting to keep someone alive. The funeral that turns Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib is published

SOUL TRAIN/GETTY; ESTATE OF EMIL BIEBER/KLAUS NIERMANN/GETTY; REX; MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES OCHS MICHAEL REX; NIERMANN/GETTY; BIEBER/KLAUS EMIL OF ESTATE TRAIN/GETTY; SOUL into a concert, into a dance party, into a revelation. by Allen Lane.

Clockwise from above: Soul Train, Josephine Baker, Beyoncé, singer Merry Clayton

SaturdaySaSaturtutururdadaydaayy 1313 MarchMMaarcrchchh 220210 The Guardian 25 ¶ Further reading

refusal to take part in the vaccine refusal has led to Books about cam paign to eradicate out breaks around the vaccines small pox. Some fears world. In the US, well- seem comical now, such educated white women Eula Biss as the belief that vaccin- are among the demogra- ation could cause you to phic groups most likely grow horns. But other s to refuse vaccines for Exactly one year ago, improbable world of remain familiar – fear of their children. For Her I searched my book- viruses . They endlessly bodily pollution, doc tors Own Good: Two Cen- shelves for Daniel match the strategies our and the medical system, turies of the Experts’ Defoe’s A Journal of bodies have devised for and opposition to the Advice to Women by the Plague Year. In 1665, survival , and over the government’s role in Barbara Ehrenreich and the narrator wanders the past year, their ability to public health. Deirdre English explores empty streets of London, reinvent themselves has The anti-vaccine pam- the fraught history of where quarantines and heightened the sus pense phlets of that time com- women’s health and why curfews have been around develop ing new pared doctors to vam- some are reluctant to imposed. He tracks vaccines against pires, but the vampire accept exp ert advice . the num bers reported Covid-19. hunters in Bram Stoker’s Medical Apartheid: by the weekly bills of Patenting the Sun, Dracula include two The Dark History of mor tal ity and witnesses Jane S Smith’s lively doctors who “sterilize” Medical Experimenta- a mass burial. account of the fi rst the count’s coffi ns so he tion on Black Americans All this now feels eerily vaccine against polio, cannot rest in them. from Colonial Times to current, but I fi rst read provides a history of suc- Germ theory was widely the Present by Harriet A that book to learn about cess. S he was among the accepted by 1897, when Washington off ers con- what life was like before millions of US children Dracula was pub lished, text for the lack of trust the advent of vaccination. vol unteered by their and the novel’s drama is some black people feel It was published in 1722, parents to be test sub- driven by conta gion. towards a system that long before germ theory jects for the programme. Dracula’s bite infects his has f ailed to off er them was valida ted. The nar- Vaccines predate victims, making them the same standard of rator mentions a curious penicillin, X-rays and vampires too. In this care as that received by rum our that disease most of the advances of horror story, disease, not white patients. If we want might be caused by tiny modern medicine. Scep- vaccination, is terrifying. to restore trust and pro- dragons visible only ticism of them is as old The smallpox inocu la- mote widespread vaccin- through the lens of a as vaccines themselves. tion was more dangerous ation, we will have to microscope. In Bodily Matters: The than any modern vac- address these inequities. A Planet of Viruses, Anti-Vaccination Move- cine, but it wiped out the Carl Zimmer’s slim col- ment in England 1853- disease. In theory, other Having and Being Had lection of essays, off ers 1907, Nadja Durbach diseases could be eradi- by Eula Biss is published an edifying tour of the details widespread cated too, though by Faber.

Tom Gauld

26 The Guardian Saturday 13 March 2021