ReviewSaturday 20 March 2021 – Issue № 165

Still waiting for change — Novelist Yaa Gyasi on BLM “Thank you, again, for everything you and Vitsœ have done for us over the years. If only each shelf could talk…”

So wrote Marta, a In fact, this is the fifth time You could say that over the customer since 2004. she has bought from Vitsœ years their relationship has … and we’re fairly sure it become one of friendship. Her shelving system won’t be the last. Marta knows she is valued started out modest – as a customer and trusts and has grown over the Marta has been able to buy the advice she is given. years. It travelled with her an extra shelf or two when across London (above), needed, while Robin has If your shelves could talk, to Valencia, and now replanned her shelving to what would they say? Amsterdam. fit her Spanish walls and her Dutch huis. Every time she needs help, she speaks with her He’s even sent her more Design Dieter Rams personal Vitsœ planner, packaging to protect her Made in England Robin. shelves when moving to Founded 1959 each new home. vitsoe.com ‘My personality was once completely shattered. I glued myself together again, but some of that is still there, and I do slip ReviewSaturday 20 March 2021 – Issue № 165 into the characters and feel like I’m hearing what they’re saying.’ — Edward St Aubyn, page 16

Contents The week in books ...... 04 The books that made me by Jessie Greengrass ...... 05

COVER STORY Can books change minds, asks Yaa Gyasi ...... 06

Book of the week: New Yorkers: A City and Its People in Our Time by Craig Taylor...... 10 Nonfi ction reviews Spring Cannot Be Cancelled by David Hockney and Martin Gayford ...... 12 Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle with Coronavirus by Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnott ...... 14

INTERVIEW Edward St Aubyn ...... 15

Fiction reviews Kitchenly 434 by Alan Warner ...... 18 Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M Danforth...... 19 Silence Is a Sense by Layla AlAmmar...... 20 Bright Burning Things by Lisa Harding ...... 20 Crime and thrillers of the month ...... 21

BOOKS ESSAY Be more Alice! Lessons from literature on how to live ...... 22

COMMENT Anne Enright on sexual violence and male silence ...... 24

Books to cheer up children in lockdown, plus Tom Gauld ...... 26

COVER ILLUSTRATION Nathalie Lees Saturday 20 March 2021 The Guardian 3 ¶ Forewords

director. Glenn Close winner . Judging by the The week in books is nominated for best good reviews so far, supporting actress in Adiga won’t have to 20 March Hillbilly Elegy, Ron follow in Cather’s foot- Howard’s adaptation steps just yet. Sian Cain of JD Vance’s best- selling memoir. And an Queenie’s heirs Oscar origin stories is based on the 2017 adaptation doesn’t even Faithful readers of this When her novel A Lost nonfi ction book of the need a whole book: the page will remember the Lady was adapted into same name by Jessica biopic The United States warm voice of Candice a forgettable and Bruder. Actor Frances vs Billie Holiday draws Carty-Williams, our confusing fi lm in 1934, McDormand acquired on a section from former columnist and Willa Cather was so the rights to the book, Chasing the Scream author of the bestselling furious that she added a and approached Chloé by Johann Hari. novel Queenie. This condition to her will: all Zhao, who has made Plays also feature week it was announced adaptations of her work history as the fi rst heavily: The Father, that her second book, were henceforth for- woman of colour to based on director Florian and her fi rst young adult bidden, even after her be nominated for best Zeller’s Le Père; Pieces title, Empress & Aniya, death in 1947. This was of a Woman by director will be published on a shock to director Lee Kornél Mundruczó and 7 October. Described Isaac Chung , who hoped his partner Kata Wéber; by publisher Knights to adapt her 1918 novel Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom Of as “south London’s My Ántonia. So instead, by August Wilson; and answer to Freaky he took his inspiration One Night in Miami by Friday”, the novel is from Cather’s book to Kemp Powers all started about two girls from very write and direct a fi lm life on stage. Jane diff erent backgrounds about his childhood: the Austen’s work, a peren- who magically swap much lauded Minari, nial favourite of the bodies on their 16th which this week was best costume category, birthday: Empress, who nominated for six Oscars. appears yet again with lives in a single-parent Hollywood has never Autumn de Wilde’s household on an estate; seemed deterred by the adaptation of Emma. But and Aniya, who often age-old adage “the book this year, the only novel- takes her good fortune is better” and this year’s based fi lm that made the for granted. Queenie was Oscars refl ect literature’s best adapted screenplay one of the biggest books crucial role in inspiring category is The White of 2019 – let’s see if cinema. Nomadland , The United States Tiger, based on Aravind Empress and Aniya take also up for six Oscars , vs Billie Holiday Adiga’s Booker prize- that crown for 2021. SC TAKASHI SEIDA/HULU VIA AP/PARAMOUNT AP/PARAMOUNT VIA SEIDA/HULU TAKASHI Recovery WORD OF THE WEEK It was recently reported that only half of the “arts recovery fund” has been given Steven Poole to arts organisations, which does not augur well for our entertainment options if the wider economic recovery we all hope for arrives later this year. But what is a “recovery” exactly? Via the old French recouvrer, it derives ultimately from the Latin recuperare, from which we also directly take our word “recuperate”. A “recovery” could also be a rally of forces in battle, but in early usage you could not simply “recover” from an illness, you had to recover (ie regain) something, such as your health or happiness. The oldest English sense of “recovery” is legal: it is the regaining of some property or compensation through court action (to “recover damages” is still a current use). The long-suff ering British public, having just learned that outsourcing outfi t Serco’s top two executives were paid £7m each for their hard work in 2020, might wonder whether the hoped for post-pandemic recovery will also include a recovery of some of the vast sums so generously awarded in Covid contracts, if not to troupes of actors and music venues.

4 The Guardian Saturday 20 March 2021 The books that made me ¶

realise that trying to pin down an exact aetiology for ‘Angela Carter’s Nights my unhappiness was not only futile but also a waste at the Circus made of the only life I was going to get. The book I couldn’t fi nish the world open up’ I’ve never fi nished George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Jessie Greengrass despite enjoying it enormously every time I try, which just seems perverse. The book I am currently reading The book I wish I’d written Danielle Evans’s The Offi ce of Historical Corrections, The Owl Service by Alan Garner . which I’m reading for the second time, because it The book I think is most underrated has haunted me since I read it for the fi rst time a It mystifi es me that Dorothy L Sayers’s Gaudy Night few months ago. doesn’t have the status it rightly and truly deserves The book that changed my life as one of the real greats of feminist literature. Also I can remember as a teenager reading Angela Carter’s Mary Wes ley’s extraordinarily creepy, very weird Nights at the Circus, and feeling like the world had children’s novel The Sixth Seal. Everyone should opened up – reading Doris Lessing’s Shikasta and defi nitely read it. feeling extremely clever. I lay in the sun and read My comfort read Agatha Christie novels and it was a kind of peace, Detective stories. Christie and Sayers . Ian Rankin’s because it let me out of my life for the duration. I books. Also, I was recently introduced to Sara Gran, read TS Eliot’s The Waste Land and ached a lot about who has turned out to be that rare thing, a writer it and, at university, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical of books to block out days for. I t takes real talent Investigations, of all things, broke my heart. John to write a book that is both entertainment and Donne’s sermons showed me what language can do challenge, and three out of these four authors are when it is allied with thought. K yril Bonfi glioli’s that. Christie just wrote really, really good mystery Mortdecai trilogy made me laugh absolutely without stories, but it’s not like that’s so easy, either. restraint at a time when laughter otherwise was hard The book I give as a gift to come by, and when, in my 20s, I was too ill to do Frog and Toad Are Friends by Arnold Lobel : 100% joy much else, I read Jilly Cooper’s Rutshire novels and 100% of the time. It also contains one of the best John Berryman’s The Dream Songs alternately jokes ever written, which is to do with a poorly Frog because they felt like counterweights, which might who looks green. with luck allow me to cling on to the rope. The book that changed my mind The High House by Jessie Greengrass is published by

SIMONE PADOVANI/AWAKENING/GETTY SIMONE Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning made me Swift (£14.99).

Saturday 20 March 2021 The Guardian 5 ¶ Cover story Literature has the power to challenge and to change, but treating books by black authors as a kind of improving medicine is an impoverished response to centuries of physical and emotional harm. By Yaa Gyasi Hard to swallow

6 The Guardian Saturday 20 March 2021 Cover story ¶

n 2018, two other novelists and I were being fund raiser, an address driven back from a reception in Grosse where I insisted, as so many Pointe, Michigan, to our hotel in downtown black writers , artists and Detroit, when we saw a black man getting academics have before me, arrested on the side of the road. The driver that America has failed to I of our car, a white woman who had spent con tend with the legacy the earlier part of the drive ranting about of slavery. This failure is how Coleman Young, Detroit’s fi rst black mayor , evident all around us, from had ruined the city, looked at the lone black man our prisons to our schools, surrounded by police offi cers with their guns drawn our healthcare, our food and said: “It’s good they’ve got so many on him. You Yaa Gyasi and waterways. I gave my never know what they’ll do.” ‘The dissonance of lecture. I accepted the Two years before, I had published my fi rst novel, the black spotlight applause and the thanks, Homegoing , a book that is, among other things, about means you are and then I got into another the afterlife of the trans atlantic slave trade. The book revered and reviled car. It was a diff erent driver, thrust me into a kind of recognition that is uncommon at the same time’ but it was the same world. to fi ction writers. I was on late-night shows and photo- I was thinking about that graphed for fashion magazines. I did countless inter- driver’s words again this past summer as news poured views, very little writing. The bulk of my work life was in about the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery spent touring the country giving various readings and and Breonna Taylor. I was thinking about the way in lectures. I spent about 180 days of 2017 either at an which white people, in order to justify their own event, or travelling to or from one. By the time that grotesque violence, so often engage in a kind of car ride in Michigan came around, I was exhausted, fi ction, an utterly insidious denialism that creates the not just by the travel but by something that is more reality it claims to protest against. By which I mean diffi cult to articulate – the dissonance of the black that an unwillingness to see the violence actually spotlight, of being revered in one sense and reviled in happening before you because of a presumption of another, a revul sion that makes clear the hollowness violence that might happen is itself a kind of violence. of the reverence. What exactly can a man with a knee on his neck do, The next morning, I delivered my address to a what can a sleeping woman do to deserve their own

CHRISTOPHER MARK JUHN/ANADOLU AGENCY AGENCY JUHN/ANADOLU MARK CHRISTOPHER CENDAMO/GETTY LEONARDO GETTY; VIA room full of people who had gathered for a library murder? To make room for that grotesqueness, 

Saturday 20 March 2021 The Guardian 7 ¶ Cover story Hard to swallow that depraved thinking, to believe in any murder’s how a novel could pierce necessity, you must abandon reality. To see a man right through the heart of with several guns aimed at him, his hands on his me and fi nd the inarticul- head, as the problem, you must leave the present able wound. I learned tense (“It’s good they’ve got so many on him”) and absolutely nothing, but enter the future (“You never know what they will some minor adjustment do”). A future which is, of course, entirely imagined. was made within me, I make my living off my imagination, but this some imperceptible shift summer, as I watched Homegoing climb back up that occurs only when the New York Times bestseller list i n response to its I encounter wonder and appear ance on anti-racist reading lists, I saw again, awe, the best art. with no small amount of bile, that I make my living Yaa Gyasi found her To see my book on any off the articulation of pain too. My own, my people’s. novel on a reading list with that one should It is wrenching to know that the occasion for the list alongside books have, in a better world, fi lled renewed interest in your work is the murders of black by Toni Morrison me with uncomplicated people and the subsequent “listening and learning” pride, but instead I felt of white people. I’d rather not know this feeling of defl ated. While I do devoutly believe in the power of experiencing career highs at the same time as being literature to challenge, to deepen, to change, I also fl ooded with a grief so old and worn that it seems know that buying books by black authors is but a unearthed, a fossil of other old and worn griefs. theoretical, grievously belated and utterly impover- When an interviewer asks me what it’s like to see ished response to centuries of physical and emotional Homegoing on the bestseller list again, I say some thing harm. The Bluest Eye was published 50 years ago. As short and vacuous like “it’s bittersweet”, because the Lauren Michelle Jackson wrote in her excellent Vulture idea of elaborating exhausts and off ends me. What I essay “What is an anti-racist reading list for”, someone should say is: why are we back here? Why am I being at some point has to get down to the business of reading. asked questions that James Baldwin answered in the And it’s this question of “the business of reading”, 1960s, that Toni Morrison answered in the 80s? I read of how we read, why we read, and what reading does Morrison’s The Bluest Eye for the fi rst time when I was for and to us, that I keep turning over in my mind. a teenager, and it was so crystalline, so beautifully Years ago, I was at a festival with a friend, another and perfectly formed that it fi lled me with something black author, and we were trading stories. She said close to terror. I couldn’t fathom it. I couldn’t fathom that the fi rst time she did a panel with a white male Why are we back here? Why am I asked questions that James Baldwin answered in the 1960s, that Toni Morrison answered in the 80s?

8 The Guardian Saturday 20 March 2021 Cover story ¶

author she was shocked to hear the questions he was country in which there was a civil war and a civil asked. Craft questions. Character questions. Research rights movement 100 years apart, at some point it questions. Questions about the novel itself, about would be useful to ask how long a reckoning need the quality and the content of the pages themselves. take. When, if ever, will we have reckoned? I knew exactly what she meant. And so where does all the “listening and learning” So many of the writers of colour that I know have leave us exactly? In the early days of summer, as my had white people treat their work as though it were dog barked at the protest ers who fl ooded the streets a kind of medicine. Something they have to swallow outside my building, I tried to decide whether I in order to improve their condition. But they don’t wanted to join. When I fi nally did, I felt a million really want it, they don’t really enjoy it, and if they’re things all at once: moved and proud and hopeful being totally honest, they don’t actually even take and enraged and off ended and hopeless. There was the medicine half the time. They just buy it and leave something legitimately beautiful about being in a it on the shelf. What pleasure, what deepening, could multiracial, multigenerational, multiclass body of there be in “reading” like that? To enter the world people who for months fi lled the streets, shouted of fi ction with such a tainted mission is to doom and marched and defi ed. the novel or short story to fail you on its most And yet. To see white people holding up Black essential levels. Lives Matter signs as we marched through a gentrifi ed I’ve published two books during particularly Brooklyn. To see white parents hoisting children up fraught election years and the general tenor of many on their shoulders, chanting Black Lives Matter, when of the Q&A sessions has been one I would describe I suspect they’ve done as much as possible to ensure as a frenzied search for answers or absolution. There’s those same children never have to go to school with so much slippage between “please tell me what I’m more than a tasteful smattering of black children. All doing wrong” and “please tell me that I’ve done of it brings up the dissonance again. The revulsion that nothing wrong”. The suddenness and intensity of the makes clear the hollowness of the reverence. Black desperation to be seen as being “good” runs com- Lives Matter – a reverent, simple, true phrase – can only pletely counter to how deeply entrenched, how very be hollow in the mouths of those who cannot stomach old the problems are. There is a reason that Home- black life, real life, when they see it at a school, at the going covers 300 years, and even that was only the doctor’s offi ce, on the side of the road. Still, I marched. shallowest dip into a bottomless pool. A season of A few months later, I went back on tour for my second reading cannot fi x this. Some may want to call the novel, knowing what I have always known. The world events of June 2020 a “racial reckoning”, but in a can change and stay exactly the same •

A memorial to Breonna Taylor, who was shot by police in 2020, and a protester after the death of George Floyd JASON ARMOND/LOS ANGELES TIMES/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK; TIMES/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK; ANGELES ARMOND/LOS JASON GUARDIAN MACLEOD/THE MURDO LANE/EPA; JUSTIN

Saturdayy 2020 MMaMarcharcrrchcchh 220202102121 TheTThheGe GuardianGuaua 9 experienced the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the Book of Afghan war and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Taylor’s style is gentler, and he’s not concerned with the week capturing the truth of a particular historical moment. In his previous books on London, and on the Suff olk village of Akenfi eld , he has established himself as a good listener, a pleasant companion for the reader and an astute but laid-back interviewer who knows { Society } Voices from the how to put his subjects at ease. In some ways a closer Big Apple – extraordinary comparison than Alexievich would be the poet Heathcote Williams, who in 1964 wrote The Speakers, oral histories from cops, which collected the voices of the eccentrics and cleaners and thieves ranters at London’s Speakers’ Corner. As you’d expect from a book about New York, Hari Kunzru Taylor introduces us to people who provide services to the wealthy – a dog walker, a therapist, a personal chef – and characters with colourful, quintessentially When I fi rst moved to Gotham jobs such as the high-rise window cleaner New York in 2008, I asked and a man who wrangles balloons at the Macy’s someone how long it Thanksgiving parade. Taylor leans in to the cliches, takes to become a New and usually manages to get beyond them, extracting Yorker. Oh, she said. About some unexpected nugget of information, some gem six months? It was a fl ip of city wisdom. A cab driver explains how not to get answer, but it had a grain of mugged: “The thing about New York is the eyeballs. New Yorkers: A City truth. As a new immigrant You have to make contact with people in New York. If and Its People you have an identity here, you don’t they’re going to put one over on you. Why in Our Time a role to play in the great do people get robbed in New York? They turn away.” by Craig Taylor, polyphonic comedy of Among the most fascinating interviews is one with John Murray (£25) city life. Everyone hates an elevator repair man who tells hair-raising stories tourists, which is why most about mummifi ed mice and the appal ling sludge that residents take elaborate precautions to avoid the accumulates in housing project elevator pits, a toxic area around Times Square, but the brand new New “golden” mix of oil and urine that has to be cleared Yorker is a type, a tradition, and thus accorded a with an ice scraper. He also shares details about certain honour. the black market in elevator keys, which (perhaps A more serious answer to the question of inevitably) led me down an internet rabbit hole into belonging was given by a former neighbour of mine, the “elevator enthusiast community”. the novelist Colson Whitehead. “No matter how long Much of the pleasure of New Yorkers comes from you have been here,” he wrote in an essay published a kind of sly parataxis, the rhetorical trope in which soon after 9/11, a moment when the city was in a state elements are placed side by side, without being of traumatic shock, “you are a New Yorker the fi rst overtly connected together. The cop speaks, then time you say: ‘That used to be Munsey’s’ or ‘That the trans social justice activist. The lawyer is followed used to be the Tic Toc Lounge’.” The pandemic has by the car thief. The eff ect is like one of those high given those references a new poignancy, as thousands modernist paeans to urban life, John Dos Passos’s of shops and restaurants have been forced out of Manhattan Transfer or Dziga Vertov’s Man With a business, many of them the last hold-outs from Movie Camera, a narrative montage of faces and a scrappier, more eccentric era. My melancholy perspectives that is pressed into the service of – what, personal geography of “used to be s” now includes though? There’s an implicit idea of the cosmopolis, the dim-sum hall where my wife and I had our the city that contains the wedding reception, the playspace where I took my A cab driver whole world, and Taylor son when he was a toddler, the East Village dive explains how not has certainly talked to a where I drank with some slightly random people to get mugged: wide variety of people. when I’d just arrived and didn’t know anyone else. ‘The thing about With typical self-eff acement, Craig Taylor, a Canadian who lived for many years he uses someone else’s in Britain, arrived in 2014 to write New Yorkers: A New York is the description of his project City and Its People in Our Time, an ambitious and eyeballs. You to explain how he chose his enter tain ing attempt to channel the city’s collective have to make interviewees, not the “bold voice. It’s a collection of interviews, oral histories contact’ face names”, the famous somewhat in the mode of Svetlana Alexievich , the people New Yorkers rigor- Belarusian Nobel prize laureate and practitioner of ously ignore when they’re what she calls “documentary literature”. Alexievich seated next to them at a has gathered testimonies from people who restaurant, but the “lightly

10 The Guardian Saturday 20 March 2021 Book of the week ¶ ERNST HAAS/GETTY HAAS/GETTY ERNST

italicised”, the people he can use to illustrate some The great polyphonic son to that dilapidated, aspect of the New York experience, who occupy some comedy of city life … violent place. We hear two narratively useful niche. New York bankers scratching their Running like a thread through the book is Taylor’s heads about how it could experience volunteering at a lunch programme in a be possible to live here on under $150k a year, but church basement, and his friendship with a homeless we don’t hear about the funds buying up empty man he meets there. Taylor is a humanist – both in properties in low-income neighbourhoods such as the sense of wishing to be of service to others, and Browns ville and East New York, waiting for the right in the sense of seeing a city as fundamentally about time to fl ip them. people. In one sense, the point is inarguable. What History is absent, too, perhaps deliberately. There else would a city be “about” but the people who live is an extraordinary story about the Rockaways there? But cities also have a non-human life as well, peninsula during Hurricane Sandy, as a father and a life that demands to be thought of in terms of daughter battle to survive fi re and fl ood, but 9/11 systems – of sewers and power lines, transportation, barely registers. Nor does Occupy, or Black Lives communication. Cities are ecologies. They’re sur- Matter. The pandemic creeps in around the edges, faces over which power and control are distributed but by the time it’s under way, Taylor is moving on. with varying intensities. People are also members of His visa is up, and he’s on to his next project. He does populations, through which viruses are transmitted. a fi ne job of telling the New York story, but the place It’s not Taylor’s project to describe New York in doesn’t get into his blood. He doesn’t dream the dream. this way, and the absence of this perspective isn’t There actually is a dream, not the meta phorical necessarily a shortcoming of a book that admirably “American Dream” but a specifi c night-time dream succeeds in what it sets out to do. It does, however, shared by a very large number of New Yorkers. In the limit what can be said. Inevitably, in a book about dream, you open a door in your cramped, absurdly New York, stories about development and gentrifi c- expensive apart ment, and fi nd a room you never ation loom in the background. We meet a real estate knew existed . This can be alarming, but for most agent, and a downtown character who mourns the people, it’s very exciting. Space is freedom. The loss of the clubs and bars that defi ned his bohemian possibilities! A work room! Somewhere for the baby! scene, but we don’t get a sense of the incredible Then you wake up, and reality sets in again. You try speed and power of the processes that are trans- to master your disappointment. You go out to face forming the city, the deals that are restructuring the the city. If you dream that dream, and it doesn’t Manhattan skyline and, increasingly, that of down- make you look at real estate listings in the suburbs, town Brooklyn. We meet the mother of an inmate at congratulations : you’re now a New Yorker. Riker s Island, but we don’t get a sense of the struc- tural problems with crime and policing that sent her To buy a copy for £21.75 go to guardianbookshop.com .

Saturday 20 March 2021 The Guardian 11 resting point just where and when he did.” It was Nonfi ction time for a new venture. Gayford has been a friend and sort of Boswell to Hockney for a quarter of a century and has written two previous books that were both with and on the artist. He visited Hockney in France during the summer of 2019 and it was assumed he would return the following year. Of course that was not to be. But what had begun { Art } Lockdown blossom ... as one type of project soon turned into a diff erent and an illustrated record of larger one as Covid-19 exerted its grip. Perversely, the new restrictions on movement had presented an David Hockney’s year in opportunity for Hockney. One of the selling points of a Normandy farmhouse the house was that he wouldn’t have to drive any- where to fi nd his subjects, as it was all there in the Nicholas Wroe trees, streams and skies on his grounds. Now his patch of land became his sole focus, and his excitement at the arrival of the 2020 spring, one of the most abundant for In the autumn of 2018 decades, was palpable. “It’s spectacular,” he wrote to David Hockney made a brief Gayford. “And I’m getting it down.” Instantly, in those trip to France. He wanted early days of the pandemic, the work became a source to look at art – paintings of hope and solace to a fearful public with his vivid iPad from Picasso’s blue and paintings of land scapes and still-lifes from his garden, rose periods and the great made as the world locked down around him, appearing tapestries of Paris, Angers on the front pages of newspapers and on the BBC news. Spring Cannot and Bayeux – and to enjoy By now Hockney and Gayford’s conversations Be Cancelled “all that delicious butter had moved to Face Time, Gayford with a glass of wine by David Hockney and cream and cheese”. in Cambridge, Hockney with a beer in Normandy, and Martin Gayford, (As well as a country “more happily intrigued by the weirdly distorting light Thames & Hudson, £25 smoker friendly than mean- eff ects a dodgy wifi signal could render on the screen. spirited England”.) While in This book is Gayford’s record of their exchanges placed Normandy Hockney declared a desire to capture the within the context of a wider appreciation of Hockney northern French spring as he had done a decade or and his work, of art history in general and of some so before in east Yorkshire, producing work that pleasingly digressive musings on the “new things became the focal point of his blockbuster 2012 Royal said and done by an old friend, and the thoughts and Academy show. “There are more blossoms there,” he feelings they prompted in me”. Gayford artfully wrote to the art critic Martin Gayford. “You get apple, deploys the notion of perspective, a longstanding pear, and cherry blossom, plus the blackthorn and artistic preoccupation for Hockney, as a recurring the hawthorn, so I am really looking forward to it.” motif when examining the men’s relationship as it In impressively short order a large half-timbered evolves over time with their vantage points equally farmhouse 40 minutes from Bayeux was acquired. recalibrated by major events – the pandemic, Gayford It was a bit like “where the seven dwarfs live in the having a minor heart attack in January 2020 which Disney fi lm”, Hockney explained. “There are no required a stent, as Hockney had 30 years earlier – and straight lines; even the corners don’t have straight by small observations about gardens or sunsets or rain. lines.” Set in four acres and surrounded by meadows, Gayford convincingly conveys Hockney’s growing orchards and streams, it was quickly renovated and enthusiasm and energy for his task. When he alluded within just a few months Hockney was emailing out to Noël Coward’s dictum that “work is more fun than drawings from, and of, his new home to friends all fun”, Hockney’s rejoinder was to quote Alfred Hitch- over the world. cock’s variation on the old For someone so closely associated with his loca- For someone so saying “All work made Jack”. tions – the blue California skies and swimming pools closely associated Hockney’s burst of product- early in his career, more recently the muddy lanes with his locations ivity manifested itself in a and hedgerows of the Yorkshire Wolds – Hockney – blue California constant stream of new rarely stays in one place for long. He has made work images arriving in Gayford’s in China, Japan, Lebanon, Egypt, Norway and, of pools or muddy inbox ready for distanced course, France. He lived in Paris for a couple of years Yorkshire lanes – scrutiny. Some of this work in the mid-70s and, as Gayford points out, while the Hockney rarely will feature in a new Royal new house was bought, apparently, on the spur of stays in one Academy show due to open the moment , “It was surely not entirely chance place for long this May. Examinations of that an artist long admiring of French painting Hockney’s lines made with and the Gallic way of living, eating and smoking, crayons, charcoal, pencils with a French assistant, happened to fi nd an ideal and the ultra-thin marks

12 The Guardian Saturday 20 March 2021 Nonfi ction ¶

Clockwise from left: iPad paintings No. 599 (1 November 2020) and No. 263 (13 May 2020); David & Ruby in the Normandy studio

available via an iPad le d Gayford to ruminations on about, Gayford cites more often another favourite, drawings by Rembrandt and Van Gogh. Paintings of the Van Gogh, who liked to attach little sketches to his garden expanded into thoughts on Monet. Mention of letters much like Hockney does with his emails. Living the work of Hockney’s support team – Hockney often in the scruff y outskirts of Arles, and somewhat isolated says “we” rather than “I” – spilled into assistants as as no one much liked him, Van Gogh just got on with a sub-genre of art taking in Vel ázquez, Tintoretto, making memor able and beautiful art with what was Rubens, Warhol and Lucian Freud. around him. The unprepossessing fl at farm land of Gayford is a thoughtfully attentive critic with a Hockney’s Yorkshire and now Normandy would capacious frame of reference and his brief excursions similarly be seen as not obviously ripe locations for into houses in art, Hockney’s reading (Flaubert, such close inspection, but as Gayford says, the moral is Proust, Julian Barnes), his musical tastes (Wagner), that “it is not the place that is intrinsically interesting; and that almost defi nitive Hockney subject, the it is the person looking at it”. Following the spring depiction of water – described by Hockney as always Hockney con tinued to capture his four acres through a “nice problem“ for an artist – consistently illuminate the summer and the harvest and the glimpses of both Hockney’s work and the other artists his work autumn moons in anticipation of this year’s spring, brings to mind. (It should be added that the reader for which he was intending to ban visitors to his can see in the comprehensive illustrations almost home from March to May, lockdown or not. everything Gayford mentions.)

© DAVID HOCKNEY; JEAN-PIERRE GONÇALVES DE LIMA DE GONÇALVES JEAN-PIERRE HOCKNEY; DAVID © While Picasso is the artist Hockney most often talks To buy a copy for £21.75 go to guardianbookshop.com.

Saturday 20 March 2021 The Guardian 13 ¶ Nonfi ction

meetings called to marshal the UK’s response. But { Politics } A damning Failures of State surely settles the matter. assessment of the British Some acts of negligence are, like that serial Cobra truancy, already well known. Still, there is a value government’s handling of in having laid out before you just how costly, for the Covid-19 pandemic example, Johnson’s repeated delay in introducing lock down proved to be. Three times it was scream- Jonathan Freedland ingly obvious that the public would have to stay at home if the virus were to be reined in, and three times Johnson waited and waited. Publishing, like politics and There is poor judgment wherever you look, leaving comedy, is all about timing. the reader by turns baffl ed and furious all over again. The timing is not right for We read of the cabinet row in late March, when the fi rst this book, which is a damn- lockdown had already begun, over whether to close the ing assessment of how the country’s borders to fl ights from known virus hotspots. UK government of Boris No, said the Foreign Offi ce: that would complicate Johnson mishandled almost eff orts to bring home Brits stranded abroad. All right, Failures of State: every aspect of the corona- thinks the reader, then surely the government would The Inside Story virus crisis, so that Britain close the borders once all returning Brits were safely of Britain’s Battle suff ered both the highest back. But no. The fl ights kept coming. with Coronavirus death toll in Europe and There are lesser-known horrors in the catalogue too. by Jonathan Calvert an economic slump more The authors are keen to explode the comforting narra- and George devas tating than in any tive that the NHS coped with the pandemic even at its Arbuthnott, other G7 nation. The timing peak, and that everyone got the care they needed. Mudlark (£20) is off because of the one They report that some hospitals were forced to ration thing the government got treatment according to guidelines that struck doctors right. At this moment, polls suggest a nation grateful and nurses as “Nazi-like”, denying intensive care to to be vaccinated effi ciently and at speed, with case those who scored too high on three metrics: age, frailty numbers and deaths falling daily, schools open once and underlying conditions. Whole categories of people more and the fi rst sound of the key being turned on – the old, the weak, the disabled – were denied the a lockdown that has seemed to last for ever. Spring is critical care that might have saved their lives. in the air and people are itching to break free. Those Incredibly, the guidelines were so rigorously chunky Tory poll leads do not suggest a public eager enforced that in one Midlands hospital, dozens of to immerse itself in the horrors of the last year and inten sive care beds lay empty, kept free for younger, work out what went wrong and who to blame. fi tter patients, while those That time will come, however, and when it does, Three times it over-75 were left dying on this book will serve well as the charge sheet. More than was screamingly regular wards, without even that, it reads like the fi rst draft of the report that will obvious that the being off ered non-invasive one day be delivered by the inevitable public inquiry, public would have ventilation. It meant that even if it is balder and more scathing than those texts, of the patients who died at written in mandarin English – indirect, coded, implied to stay at home if the height of the pandemic – usually dare to be. If you’ve ever wondered what an the virus were in April, just 10% had actual catalogue of disaster might look like, look no to be reined in, received any intensive care. further. Failures of State is a Christmas-at-Argos sized and three times Calvert and Arbuthnott catalogue of the government’s errors, fi lled with its Johnson waited have exposed the failings mistakes, misjudgments and its possibly actionable of the PM, his ministers, crimes (it quotes lawyers who believe Johnson could advisers and many others. be charged with “gross negligence manslaughter”). What, perhaps, is missing – The authors are Jonathan Calvert and George besides a fuller look at the scandal of test and trace, Arbuthnott, investigative journalists and custodians of with its indefensible £37bn price tag – is the larger accu- the storied Insight brand at the Sunday Times. There sation hinted at in the title: the failures of the state that might be the odd Guardian reader who assumes the made this disaster likely, regardless of who was in Murdoch press would never lay a glove on this Tory charge. Is there a more deep-rooted arrogance and government. They should have been parted from that complacency, a lack of care, that went beyond, and misconception when Calvert and Arbuthnott pub- predated, Johnson and Dominic Cummings? That lished last April what they tell us is the most read story ques tion might have to wait. For now, this is the book in the online history of the Times or Sunday Times, an to throw at those who were meant to protect the public evisceration of Johnson’s pandemic response that was and failed. This vaccine spring may not be the moment headlined “Coronavirus: 38 days when Britain sleep- for that reckoning. But it will come, one day. walked into disaster”, revealing among other things that Johnson had failed to attend the fi rst fi ve Cobra To buy a copy for £17.40 go to guardianbookshop.com .

14 The Guardian Saturday 20 March 2021 Interview ¶ ‘ I’m easily crushed’ Edward St Aubyn tells Hadley Freeman about friends, enemies and trying to escape ‘Planet Melrose’

PHOTOGRAPHY IBL/Rex/Shutterstock Saturday 20 March 2021 The Guardian 15 ¶ Interview Edward St Aubyn

ost interviews in the lockdown His novels have a similar push and pull dynamic. era are conducted by video, Alongside the outwardly directed satire, the writing but the novelist Edward St plunges inwards and excavates wounds, not least in Aubyn and I are talking by old- the Melrose series, in which he fi ctionalised his own fashioned telephone because, life, from being sexually abused by his father, to Mhis publicist warns me before- extreme drug addiction in his 20s, to anxious but hand, “Teddy doesn’t do Zoom.” loving fatherhood (St Aubyn has two children from Of course he doesn’t. In truth, it’s a surprise that previous relationships). But his books are not navel- Teddy does telephones, because he often gives the gazing and the perspective often swoops between the impression that his presence in prosaic 21st-century characters, creating a mosaic of voices. London – as opposed to early 20th-century Russia “That’s probably due to the disastrous plasticity alongside his great-uncle Grand Duke Dmitri of my personality, which was once completely Pavlovich, or 19th-century Britain with his great- shattered,” he says. He depicts this shattering in grandfather, the Liberal MP Sir John St Aubyn, fi rst Bad News, the second Melrose book, in which Patrick, Baron St Levan – is an administrative error shortly strung out on drugs, is tormented by dozens of to be rectifi ed. internal voices. “I glued myself together again, but His novels satirise the foibles of the world around some of that plasticity is still there, and I do slip him with the savagery of a true insider, such as into the characters and feel like I’m hearing what when he takes on the petty snobberies of social they’re saying. ” climbers, and the bemusement of one who fi nds the St Aubyn is talking to me from his home in west modern world a frequent source of frustration. London. He is especially nervous today because he is Mother’s Milk – the fourth book in his Patrick Melrose promoting (“defending”, as he puts it) his new novel, series – was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 2006; Double Blind, which he sweated over for seven years. it didn’t win, but he metabolised the experience into “There’s a danger of my other books getting ignored 2014’s Lost for Words, in which he described literary because the fi ve Melroses have such a gravitational prizes with the horrifi ed amusement of an alien fi eld to them. I knew Lost for Words and Dunbar gazing upon bizarre human rituals. (Alas, not even wouldn’t achieve escape velocity from Planet Mel- mockery could save him from being subjected to rose,” he says, referring to the books he’s written such indig nities again: Lost for Words won the since publishing the fi nal part of the Melrose series, Wodehouse prize for comic fi ction.) At Last, in 2012. “But I hope that Double Blind will.” His accent out-poshes the royal family: “house” is I hope so too: writing about his past helped to “hice”, “haven’t” is “huff n’t”, as in “I huff n’t got a free St Aubyn from it, but he did it so well that he second hice to escape to,” which he says to me, twice, doomed himself to being asked about it for ever by when discussing his experience of lockdown. He says journalists and fans, especially since “Planet Melrose” this with the wistfulness of one who lives in a milieu was turned into a Bafta-winning TV series for Sky in which multiple homes are the norm, but also with Atlantic in 2018, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and the self-mockery of a man burdened with the kind of written by David Nicholls. Like the Melrose books, painful self-awareness not usually associated with Double Blind features elements from St Aubyn’s own his class. Judging purely from his background experiences (“What else have we got to work with?”), (aristocratic) and schooling (Westminster, Oxford), including a character undergoing treatment for a brain St Aubyn should wholly be a paragon of privilege and tumour, just as St Aubyn’s girlfriend Sara Sj ölund did, entitlement. But appearances are deceptive. He has a and he captures the terror of hospitals, the uncertainty habit of hesi tancy that I initially mistake for aloofness of the future. “I was in those rooms with her,” he but turns out to be anxiety: “I’m always so nervous in says simply. interviews because I assume I’m going to make a fool Double Blind is a book of big ideas, in which the out of myself. It’s odd, it hasn’t got any better since characters experiment with medicine, psychology, we last spoke. Yah! You would have thought that my narcotics, religion and meditation to understand paranoia would get eroded over time, but it remains themselves and fi nd peace. defi ant,” he says with an embarrassed laugh. ‘There’s a danger He tells me several times This is the second time I have interviewed him, of my other that Double Blind is very and although he sweetly pretends to remember our books getting diff erent from the Melrose encounter 14 years ago (“But of course!”), he didn’t ignored because books, and it is, but all read the interview. “I never read things about of St Aubyn’s novels are myself. Not because I’m so lofty – on the contrary, it’s the fi ve Melroses ultimately about the desire because I’m so easily crushed,” he says, and I believe have such a to break beyond the prison him. Behind the plaster prestige is a fragile core that gravitational of one’s own subjectivity. he works very hard to stabilise. He used to do this by fi eld to them’ He once described his mind alternately injecting speed and heroin, but he’s been as “a nest of scorpions” clean since 1988 and so now relies on coff ee “to try and the only drugs he feels to be intelligent” followed by beta blockers “which nostalgia for – and he writes then make me feel stupid”, he sighs. about them fondly in

16 The Guardian Saturday 20 March 2021 Interview ¶

assaulting him, and he did. “It was a short speech. But it changed the world.” It has long been rumoured that St Aubyn wrote another world-stopping speech: the eulogy read by his friend Charles Spencer at Princess Diana’s funeral. In the past he’s refused to comment on this but today he asks to go on the record: “I’m really bored on Charlie’s behalf that that rumour has gone around and I’d like it fi rmly denied by me. Before I thought I shouldn’t speak because it was unfair on Charlie to have such intrusive press in his life, but I think that was wrong. Charlie’s an excellent writer, he didn’t need me to write that speech,” St Aubyn says, and for the fi rst time I catch a glimpse of something close to imperiousness . Most of St Aubyn’s books include a thank you to the writer Francis Wyndham, who died in 2017 and was one of many quasi-paternal fi gures in his life. “I think inevitably someone like me who had an unsatisfactory relationship with their father will look for benign adults who do things normal fathers do,” he says. Other father fi gures included the director Mike Nichols and artist Lucian Freud , and the quality that united them was their “unalloyed support and enthusiasm” Double Blind – are “ones from the psychedelic realm, Benedict for St Aubyn (his own because they’re the quickest way to dissolve the Cumberbatch in father, of course, gave him subject/object division: you imagine the racing heart Patrick Melrose neither ). “Being admiring of the bird on the branch and you fl ow into the bird is always a sign of strength, and the bird fl ows into you,” he trails off wistfully. whereas other people feel they’re losing something These days, instead, he fl ows into his novels’ if they admire someone else,” he says. characters and the characters fl ow into him. One person who perhaps demonstrates the latter A desire to escape oneself begins with a desire tendency is St Aubyn’s former friend, Will Self. In to escape unhappiness. “Obviously if you think: Self’s 2018 memoir, Will, he writes about a man called ‘It’s absolutely great being me and there’s no room “Caius” who bears an unmistakeable resemblance to for improvement’” – he laughs at the thought – St Aubyn. When Caius eventually tells him that his “then there’s little incentive. But that’s not been father sexually abused him, Self’s response is to sulk: my problem.” “[Caius] got everything, whether they be material St Aubyn grew up in London and France. His things and even these extreme experiences, which, mother, Lorna, was an American heiress whose self-annihilatory or not, would undoubtedly make maternal skills he describes as “incompetent”, and good copy.” his father, Roger, was a frustrated musician and a I tell him that it was the most bizarrely bitter thing rapist. The fi rst time he raped his son, St Aubyn was I’d ever read. fi ve years old. He describes this in Never Mind, the “What a pity. He’s an odd person. I think he’s very fi rst Melrose book, and young Patrick imagines he is a unhappy and I’m sorry about that, but he certainly gecko climbing the wall, “watching with detachment doesn’t go to any trouble to disguise it,” he says. the punishment infl icted by the strange man on a St Aubyn is currently enduring the enervating small boy”. Patrick’s sense of self shatters, and in eff ects of long Covid, “which have certainly gone Double Blind St Aubyn looks into the connection on long enough for me”, yet our conversation between childhood abuse and schizophrenia. His continues long past our allotted time slot, and the father continued to abuse him for years. more we talk, the less anxious he sounds. Before As a child, St Aubyn dreamed of being the prime I leave him to recuperate I ask why his parents gave minister, “now rather a discredited ambition”, him the cuddly nickname “Teddy”, given how because he wanted to make speeches that would uncuddly they were. “It came about because the change the world. “I suppose that has an obvious ancestor I’m named after was known as Teddy, so psychological origin, in that I so much wanted to there was that. It is a cuddly name but it’s not a persuade everyone around me to behave radically guarantee of cuddliness: Teddy Roosevelt used to diff erently,” he says. When he realised he had “a go off shooting elephants! But I hope I make the mortal terror of speaking in public”, he focused grade,” he says, and he gives another self-mocking instead on writing. But he did make one monumental laugh, but this time it’s shot through with something speech: when he was eight he told his father to stop that sounds almost like optimism •

Saturday 20 March 2021 The Guardian 17 ¶ Label

out his days for us in a mixed language deriving from Fiction architectural heritage journalism and music-mag hagiography. (“Like a leaking nuclear power station,” he tells us, “the radiation of Marko’s vast talent, his mystique, settled and shimmered like dusk on the tops of telephone wires ...”) He’s obsessed with boundaries and trespass, and a silent intruder he keeps glimpsing in the grounds. He senses something out of joint, but at Narrated by a rock star’s night, when his rounds are done, he’ll put on his Magic odd job man, this gleeful satire Roundabout slippers as usual, set his Mickey Mouse alarm clock, reread his collection of Creem magazines. on 1970s England concentrates By the time you’ve heard all this you are beginning 20 years of cultural change to tire of his odd-job life, his misogynistic, unproduc- tive fantasies about women and his comically failed M John Harrison outings in His Master’s Ferrari, with its deliciously “curved, bulbous rear”. He has too many memories of triumphs not his own, while all you want to know Kitchenly Mill is the idyllic is what – if anything – is going to happen next. How East Sussex retreat of Marko will his confi nement be broken open? But Warner is a Morrell, guitar hero with 70s merciless jailer and Kitchenly 434 a gleeful satire about rock band Fear Taker. It is owning and being owned – by places, people, ideas a seriously moated Eliza- and economic systems. Crofton must serve his full bethan mansion, with Arts sentence before the author reluctan tly releases him. and Crafts restorations and Meanwhile, perhaps not content to be seen solely Kitchenly 434 contemporary architectural as the metaphor of Marko Morell’s waning cultural by Alan Warner, additions . It’s a work of love, infl uence, Kitchenly Mill develops a rich character White Rabbit, £18.99 and clearly an object of love of its own. Warner’s quiet parodies of heritage writing for Morrell’s pre-fame side- are abetted by Mark Edward Geyer’s illustrations kick, Crofton Clark, who narrates. Alan Warner ’s ninth of the building , and include an extended “quote” novel, like his earlier work in Morvern Callar or The from Ni kolaus Pevsner himself, that obsessive Sopranos, layers together music, culture and individual recorder of the English country house, who in his psychology so they seem to become a single, compo- classic Buildings of England describe d the house as site material; and it does so under a biblical epigraph “a summation of England’s history in solid form”. – Luke 16.2: “Give an account of thy stewardship.” In the end, Kitchenly Mill is almost exactly that – If Crofton loves Kitchenly, he worships Morrell, a late-70s version of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, whose Fender Strat makes the “mighty noise of a sardonic mirror of the historical entrapment of its consequence and of economic empowerment”. He’s inhabitants in which the character of Flay the butler been around Fear Taker since the beginning, deriving has been reimagined by a team including Jonathan his entire identity from the association. Just what his Meades and Will Self . place in the Kitchenly world might be these days – This is a gristly, enjoyably intractable book, which well, that’s the meat of a novel that begins in a kind of concentrates 20 years of cultural change. As well as Eng lish uncanny valley, moves through an unforgiv- drugs and rock’n’roll – and, perhaps more importantly, ing comedy of errors, and culminates in fi erce acts of money’n’status – it covers everything from sexual realism. It’s 1979: record sales have dropped. Account- politics to the curious asexual male-groupie syndrome ants and record company suits hover like extermina- that reached its peak in the ting angels over the wreckage of the rock project. A late- 70s version fi gure of the 70s roadie. If Crofton is the only one who doesn’t get it. He of Mervyn Peake ’s you want to know anything, trudges around the house and grounds, stiltedly laying Gormen ghast indeed everything, about the general history of the music, Kitchenly 434 is your manual. But one of its most interesting features is the way in which Warner uses the image of the house itself as a bridge between the cultural hollowness of the pre-Thatcherian interlude and the retrofi tted fantasy of England that would soon emerge: Albion as a sort of giant walled garden littered with unachieved futures and the beautiful houses of the past.

M John Harrison’s The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again is published by Gollancz. To buy a copy of

MARK WIENER/ALAMY MARK Kitchenly 434 for £16.52 go to guardianbookshop.com.

18 The Guardian Saturday 20 March 2021 Fiction ¶

of her scream queen horror-star mother. This is { Horror } Hauntings, Audrey’s chance for a big break, so when the direc tor destructive passions and explains that he wants her to conspire in creating a behind-the-scenes found-footage movie in which killer wasps in a delicious Merritt and Harper will be unwitting co-stars , she doorstep of super queer terror reluctantly agrees. - That brings our trio to Brookhants, and this is Sarah Ditum where things start to get really creepy. Which events are being orchestrated by the director, and which are legitimately supernatural? Could there really “I wish someone would be a curse on Brookhants, and if so, when did it write a book about a plain, begin? With the deaths of the girls, with the tensions bad heroine so that I might between Libbie and Alex, or with MacLane’s book, feel in real sympathy with which seems to leave a trail of destructive passions her,” wrote the North wherever it’s found? Perhaps the trouble started American memoirist Mary earlier, when the Brookhants family home was built MacLane in 1902. Plain Bad around an old folly known locally as “Spite Tower”, Plain Bad Heroines Heroines wears its debt to after a legend that it was erected to settle a score by Emily M Danforth, MacLane on its sleeve, between two brothers by blocking a favoured view. Borough, £14.99 starting with an excerpt Danforth braids the layers of narrative together from her teenage con- with expertise. She’s clearly a horror buff : besides fessional The Story of Mary MacLane, and then Lovecraft, there are explicit nods to Blair Witch, repaying that debt with not one, not two “plain bad Peter Straub, Berberian Sound Studio, M Night heroines”, but a whole cast of them, scattered across Shyamalan , The Omen and innumerable others. the 20th and 21st centuries, doing their bad deeds Another writer might have let the metatext choke from Rhode Island to California and back again. the dread, but Danforth uses it to thrillingly corrode Why those places? Because they are the twin the reader’s own sense of reality: a recurring night- capitals of American horror, birthplaces respectively mare theme has the of HP Lovecraft and his nightmare derangements, While horror characters discover, or and the slasher movie. And Plain Bad Heroines is a has historically maybe hallucinate, that horror novel, a proper one: a big fat doorstep of drawn its evil life solid objects are made of super-queer terror that never runs out of ways to from repressed the wood-pulp substance keep you deliciously disturbed. of the yellowjackets’ nest. In the early 19th century, MacLane’s (real) book sexuality, Made of paper, in fact. reaches Rhode Island’s (fi ctional) Brookhants School Danforth wants MacLane aside, there’s for Girls, where its scandalous mix of sapphism and more than perhaps no writer with ego inspires the formation of a Plain Bad Heroines frustration for a stronger presence in Society. But then two of the club’s members are killed her heroines Plain Bad Heroines than by a freak swarm of yellowjacket wasps, one of their Shirley Jackson . Malevolent admirers dies strangely, and after that things get tower in sinister mansion? weirder still at Brookhants (pronounced “Brook- Fraught intimacies between haunts”, a pun which the unnamed and omniscient women? Hello, The Haunting of Hill House. But while narrator disowns with winning chutzpah: “I cannot horror has historically drawn its evil life from help that the school’s name is Brookhants and that repressed sexuality, Danforth wants more than it’s said to be haunted”). The relationship between frustration for her heroines. Merritt laughs at Harper principal Libbie Brookhants and her dear companion for suggesting Brookhants was “planet lady love” – Alexandra Trills is tested beyond natural limits. these girls, explains Merritt, got a brief season of Those events entangle three more Plain Bad fooling around before being forced into straight Heroines in the present day. There’s Merritt Emmons, society as wives. a one-time wunderkind who wrote a dazzlingly What if that wasn’t inevitable? Death and misery successful book called The Happenings at Brookhants were once the only imaginable outcomes for a lesbian when she was 16, and has entered her early 20s with or bi woman in fi ction, but that isn’t so today. What if nothing more to show but writer’s block. The book she could create her own world? Plain Bad Heroines is is now being turned into a fi lm, produced by and that creation: in this novel, everything that happens, starring the world’s hottest “celesbian” Harper Harper happens between women. I’m not even sure there’s (her name is explained but I won’t spoil that here); the one conversation between two male characters – descriptions of Hollywood presumably draw on the whatever the reverse of the Bechdel test is, Danforth adaptation of Danforth’s 2012 bestselling YA debut defi antly fl unks it. Her novel is beguilingly clever, The Miseducation of Cameron Post. very sexy and seriously frightening. And cast alongside Harper, there’s Audrey Hall, a young actor following unsteadily in the footsteps To buy a copy for £13.04 go to guardianbookshop.com .

Saturday 20 March 2021 The Guardian 19 ¶ Fiction A refugee’s traumatic A gripping quest for self- memories mingle with knowledge: a mother battles shrewd observations about alcohol dependency in this Britain and immigration raw and ferocious Irish novel Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett Jude Cook

The unnamed narrator of Like Masha in The Seagull, Silence Is a Sense is a Syrian Sonya, the heroine of Lisa refugee who has been so Harding’s intense and traumatised by confl ict and unnerving second novel, is her perilous journey across in mourning for her life. Her Europe that she no longer Chekhovian name seems apt speaks. Living in a nameless when we learn that “failed Silence Is a Sense English city, she spends her Bright Burning actress, failed mother” by Layla AlAmmar, days watching the residents Things Sonya once triumphed in Borough, £14.99 of the estate she has come by Lisa Harding, productions of Chekhov and to call home , and writing Bloomsbury, £14.99 Ibsen on the London stage, columns for a news magazine from a “refugee pers- before fi nding herself single- pective” under the pseudonym “the Voiceless”. Her handedly bringing up her four-year-old son Tommy editor keeps pushing her for more memories, but she is in the Dublin suburbs, battling alcohol dependency. unable to “stitch it all together into a coherent pattern” . There’s a lot to lament, and even more to rail against, Layla AlAmmar understands trauma, how it frag- in a novel that becomes a ferocious jeremiad against ments the memory and turns people into startled life’s suff ocating forces. animals. The narrator recognises th is in those around After an eye-watering opening scene in which Sonya her: “the guy in the shop holding himself a little too leaves her son while she takes a swim in her under- rigidly … the young mother whose eyes are constantly wear, then returns home to sink a bottle of wine before scanning the street”. Trauma rejects con ventional blacking out while cooking fi sh fi ngers, her father narratives, a fact Home Offi ce inter viewers fail to stages an intervention. The result is a stay in rehab, understand. To be granted asylum, migrants must and a heart-wrenching separation from Tommy, with unfurl their horror for inspection; like our narrator, no guarantee she’ll regain custody. While resisting many are unable to stitch it into a coherent pattern. the 12-step programme, she’s forced to refl ect on how At times, the reader shares the editor’s feelings of complicit she’s been in her own catastrophe: “I think frustration: just tell us what happened, you want to of all the tall tales I spun in school … Was I, even then, say. AlAmmar off ers threads of information that hint at destined for this?” Later, there’s the poignant admis- the terrors of war woven in with shrewd observations sion: “I just wish I could do life, in the ordinary sense.” about Britain and immigration. Some people respond Only the appearance of David, a solicitor, counsellor to the narrator with kindness, including the bookshop and ex-addict, off ers her any hope of rising from the owner who lets her take books for free. Others are ashes of her life into a future that might contain love racist and aggressive. She feels the pressure to be a and family. Yet she’s only too aware, to use Larkin ’s “good” immigrant. “Everyone here wants a story,” phrase, that man hands on misery to man. Observing she says, “a nice little packet of memories.” her fellow recovering addicts, she notes with a shiver: AlAmmar is pursuing a PhD on “the intersection of “These men, their lives seemed inevi table, their Arab women’s fi ction and literary trauma theory”. This destinies charted from the moment they were born and other theoretical threads can be traced through to their crackhead fathers, criminal mothers, junkies, the novel, and at times it feels as if it is responding to alcos, selfi sh, stunted, addled parents. Like me. theory , rather than trauma itself. To readers, this may These men were born to mothers like me.” manifest in a certain failure of characterisa tion. The It’s moments like this, and their hint of a redemptive picture of this woman, like her memories, is cloudy. ending, that carry the reader through harrowing pages Despite this, several cliches and some dialogue that of self-evisceration. Comparisons have been made doesn’t ring true, I admire this book. It is an intelligent, between Sonya and Agnes, in Douglas Stuart’s Shugg ie insightful novel that asks vital questions about how Bain , but Sonya is a singular creation: com plex, con- we can begin to express trauma, and in what form. It trary, drily funny in a characteristically Irish fashion. faces up to its linguistic challenges. It doesn’t quite Written with energy and generosity, Bright Burn ing meet them, but perhaps no words truly can. That, Things is the raw, emotional story of a woman’s search after all, is the nature of trauma. for self-knowledge; one that grips from the beginning.

To buy a copy for £ 13.04 go to guardianbookshop.com. To buy a copy for £12.74 go to guardianbookshop.com.

20 The Guardian Saturday 20 March 2021 Fiction ¶

There’s more embroidery, this time a neatly sewn Books of death threat, in Dangerous Women ( Michael Joseph, £14.99). Author Hope Adams has skilfully patched a the month murder mystery into a historical event – the 1841 voyage of the convict ship Rajah from London to Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania), during which the cargo of female prisoners created a quilt for the gov- ernor of their new home. The narrative tacks between { Crime and thrillers } Feuds and past and present as we learn about the lives of the family secrets in New Orleans; (fi ctional) transportees, the majority of whose crimes have been committed out of dire necessity, and of the murder at sea; and the mystery (real) matron, idealistic young Kezia Hayter, who pre- of Christopher Marlowe sides over the sewing and, when one of the women is stabbed, helps to fi nd the culprit. Masterful plotting, Laura Wilson well-drawn characters, and a plausible balance of des- pair for what was left behind and optimism for what lies ahead add up to an immensely satisfying read. Alan Judd’s latest novel, A Fine Madness ( Simon & Schuster, £14.99), is another well-researched splice of fi ction and historical fact, focusing on playwright Christopher Marlowe, whose death in 1593 – a stab bing in a Deptford tavern – has been the cause of much speculation, as has the extent of his work for Elizabeth The titular dwelling in Melissa Ginsburg’s second I’s spymaster, Francis Walsingham. Here, Thomas novel, The House Uptown (Faber, £12.99) , is the New Phelippes, a real codebreaker and sometime right- Orleans home of boho artist Lane. Her slow drift into hand man to Walsingham, is languishing in prison dementia on skeins of marijuana smoke is interrupted 30 years later when he puts quill to parchment at the by the arrival of her granddaughter Ava, whose request of King James, who – for reasons unknown mother, Lane’s daughter Louise, has just died. The to Phelippes – has asked for an account of the dead resourceful 14-year-old soon begins to wonder not man. There follows a vivid tale of espionage, dissent only about the cause of the long estrangement and intellectual discourse, with the past brought to between her mother and grandmother, but also about teeming, pungent life at a time when religion loomed the behaviour of Lane’s assistant, the apparently large and the threat of death, from both humans and loyal Oliver. Told as a time-slip – the roots of the nature, was ever present. alienation date back to 1997, when teenage Louise Gytha Lodge’s Gytha Lodge’s third DCI witnesses the 2.30am arrival of Lane’s local politician third DCI Jonah Jonah Sheens novel, Lie lover, blood-covered teenage son in tow – this is a Sheens novel Beside Me ( Michael Joseph, superbly written, intriguing character study of how kicks off with the £12.9 9), kicks off with the the past impacts on the present. blackout drunk’s blackout drunk’s worst The sins of the fathers are visited appallingly on the worst nightmare: night mare: waking to fi nd a children in the fi rst book of Karin Smirnoff ’s Jana stranger’s corpse in your bed. Kippo trilogy, My Brother ( Pushkin, £12.99, translated waking to fi nd a Louise Reakes remem bers by Anna Paterson). When Jana returns to her child- stranger’s corpse going to a club, but most of hood home in northern Sweden, she fi nds her twin in your bed the evening is a blur; now she brother Bror drinking himself into an early grave. It’s has a blood-soaked mattress hardly surprising: their father beat his family and and a dead man on her hands raped his daughter, and their religious mother as well as a thumping hang- accepted their fates as the will of God, and relieved her over. By the time Sheens arrives, the body has been feelings by embroidering doomy biblical mess ages, relocated to the front garden, but although Louise is while the neighbours looked on and did nothing. Jana’s the prime suspect, it soon becomes clear that her best lover John may have killed his wife, and most of the friend Amber and her husband Niall have things to villagers seem as harsh and merciless as the weather, hide, and the dead man isn’t quite what he seems, harbouring grudges and helpless in the face of each either … Secrets and self-sabotage abound in this other’s cruelty and betrayal. There’s no conventional gripping psychological thriller. investigation here, but chinks of light appear as secrets Lastly, Penguin Modern Classics is reissuing fi ve are revealed and Jana begins to come to terms with novels by black American writer Chester Himes the past. My Brother is challeng ing, certainly, but the (1909 -84) featuring hard-boiled detectives Coffi n Ed fragile, sardonic Jana is a distinctive narrator, and if Johnson and Grave Digger Jones. Starting with you can relax into the writing style (no capital letters A Rage in Harlem (£9.99 ) from 1957, these wholly except at the beginnings of sentences and the running original, disorienting and sometimes surreal books together of words), it’s well worth the read. are a must for all crime fi ction afi cionados.

Saturday 20 March 2021 The Guardian 21 ¶ Books essay

joy by her parents before they succumbed to typhus, Lessons from implan ting in her a belief in her right to life and selfh ood and a fi erce protectiveness towards her own literature imaginative freedom. After suff ering public humiliation from the sadistic Josh Cohen headmaster Brocklehurst, she tells her friend Helen Burns: “to gain some aff ection from you, or Miss Temple, or any other whom I truly love, I would As an analyst I know willingly submit to have the bone of my arm broken, or to let a bull toss me, or to stand behind a kicking that characters such horse, and let it dash its hoof at my chest – ”. Jane is eff ectively saying that the worst imaginable as Jane Eyre, Clarissa pain is preferable to the void of lovelessness. She makes an interesting contrast with Frances, the pro- Dalloway – and even tagonist of Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends. Both as a couple and as parents, Frances’s mother Alice – can teach us a and father are defi ned by a kind of emotional evasive- ness, an inability to show the love they feel . Their withholding tendencies come to shape Frances’s lot about relationships conception of herself as “emotionally cold”, too distant from herself to know how or what she feels. in lockdown From the beginning of the novel, Frances lets us know just how much energy she invests in not giving s my virtual consulting room herself away. W atching a shirtless Nick, the older man reminds me hourly, listening feels soon to become her lover, act on stage, she feels “a like a precious commodity at the sting of self-consciousness, as if the audience had all moment, when our curiosity is turned at this moment to observe my reaction”. perpetually drowned by fear. When Frances can access her inner self only through the A the fi rst lockdown began, it struck eyes of others . me that the people I listened to in Perpetually at war with her own feelings, Frances analysis sessions would often sound locked down gives us insight into sexual love as a region of danger, imaginatively, pinned to the spot by the force and raging with volatility and turbulence. Unable to bear immediacy of their worries. the sheer intensity of her emotional life, she obfus- And the pandemic hasn’t been the only thing cates her own feelings, deceiving herself as much as menacing our capacity to listen. Toxic political divis- others. She is a fi ne companion for our own feelings ions, stoked by demagogues and amplifi ed in media of uncertainty and self-doubt. bubbles, have turned those who think diff erently into Such ideas have been particularly on my mind the deadliest of enemies. The willingness and courage lately, as I’ve listened to men and women tell me of to listen to other voices can rarely have seemed in their marital struggles in lockdown. How are they such short supply. This may be one way in which to bear the unbroken intimacy enforced by their fi ction can help. Think of Alice, wandering through confi nement, they ask, channelling Dorothea the anarchic and disturbing dream worlds of Wonder- Brooke’s lament in Middlemarch : “Marriage is so land and Looking-Glass with such easy curiosity. unlike anything else. There is something even awful The boundary separating reality from illusion is in the nearness it brings.” much more porous for a child than an adult. Alice’s This experience of marriage is brought to distres- favourite phrase, “Let’s pretend!”, is one most of us sing life in countless great novels: Middlemarch ; Anna abandon somewhere on the road to adulthood, and Karenina; or the experimental writer Chris Kraus’s some are deprived of the chance to utter in the fi rst 2006 con tribution to the genre, aptly titled Torpor. place. For the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, Torpor follows its couple – protagonist Sylvie and this is a source of many of the malaises of adult life; if her partner Jerome – around Europe in 1991, as they we’ve not known what it is to pretend we cannot feel bicker with a kind of genial sado-masochism , all the properly alive. while pursuing a doomed plan to adopt a Romanian Alice off ers us a kind of masterclass in aliveness. orphan. Kraus brings out the comedy of the “awful An expansive imaginative life like hers is rooted in nearness” of coupledom, the way it traps its partic i- the inner security that comes from being loved from pants in torturous and oddly gratifying loops of the birth, as another great fi ctional girl, Jane Eyre, same arguments and resentments. The members of a confi rms. At the point Jane Eyre begins, Jane has couple are liable to obtain obscure gratifi cation from been stranded in the hostile confi nes of her Aunt their awful nearness to one another, to relish getting Reed’s home. Charlotte Brontë takes pains to let us stuck in the torpor of their life together. So what know that this hasn’t been her only emotional would it mean to make that nearness less awful?

ALLSTAR/DISNEY; ALLSTAR/PARAMOUNT; BBC ALLSTAR/PARAMOUNT; ALLSTAR/DISNEY; experience, that baby Jane’s arrival was received with Few writers have thought about this question

22 The Guardian Saturday 20 March 2021 Books essay ¶ more deeply than DH Lawrence. One chapter of Real closeness they are older, will speak of The Rainbow begins with the extended voluntary must involve a gulf in contact, of a lone- con fi nement of a young newlywed couple, Anna and the recognition liness that their partner’s Will Brangwen, in their cottage and, for the most of the other’s presence only amplifi es. part, their marital bed. How do we live with such The problem is that the couple can’t be forever need for emotional disappointment ? immune to the encroach ments and pressures of the separateness Few novels off er a richer world outside. Anna feels a sudden and irresistible or else be mired response to this question urge for “a real outburst of housework”, which trans- in tragi comic than Virginia Woolf’s Mrs forms Will at a stroke from languid love-god to nuis- torpor Dalloway, her account of a ance: “‘Can’t you do anything’ she said, as if to a sunny day in the life of the child, impatiently. ‘Can’t you do your wood-work?’” disappointed wife of a Tory leaving Will furious at his sudden superfl uousness. MP. Long past childbearing, What could be more ordinary, banal even? Versions celibate and cloistered in a single bedroom, Clarissa of this row are repeated in households everywhere, all experiences “the oddest sense of being herself invis- the time. Lawrence’s brilliance lies in his revela tion of ible; unseen; unknown”. She is fearfully attuned to this little scene as a skirmish in an ongoing war of “the dwindling of life” . uncon scious forces. But the paradox of Mrs Dalloway is that it is in It’s not about the feet getting in the way of the precisely this unpromising inner landscape that we vacuum cleaner. It’s more that the resulting twinge of can fi nd remarkable experiential riches. The des- irritation touches the edge of something bigger and perate, inchoate “unhappiness” Clarissa feels is only much more frightening: all my external and internal the warp to the weft of the overwhelming “love of space is shared with this person. Everything that life” that can just as easily overwhelm her. Even her happens to them happens to me. Everywhere I turn, loss of youthful energy and hope becomes an eerie they’re there. kind of joy . What Clarissa means by the joy of But this is the essential paradox of intimacy: in “having done with the triumphs of youth” is a sense intensifying our closeness to another, we not only of happiness no longer being projected into an end- make them more familiar to us; we come alive to their lessly deferred, elusive future; suddenly, fl eet ingly strangeness and irreducible diff erence. Real close- but unmistakably, it’s right here, waiting for us in the ness must involve the recognition of the other’s need faces of the people and things around us. for separateness or else be mired in tragicomic torpor. This strikes me as a fi tting wisdom for our This is the substance of Lawrence’s dark and risky current confi nement. There is no comfort for the optimism about love and marriage, and it strikes me lives and material security and freedom lost to the as holding special resonance for couples living pandemic. But buried in these losses is a gain of through lockdown. sorts: the chance to stop searching frantically for But if some people complain of the claustrophobic meaning and pleasure everywhere else and fi nd intimacy of marriage, others, perhaps especially if it where we are •

Clockwise from main: Mia Wasikowska as Alice; Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf in The Hours, the 2002 fi lm based on Mrs Dalloway; Ruth Wilson as Jane Eyre

Saturday 20 March 2021 The Guardian 23 ¶ Comment

apists are not a talkative lot. They The sound of silence don’t discuss the deed much, after they have been caught. And you might think this is because they feel remorseful, but often they don’t R seem to know that they have done something wrong. Or they know that they have done something illegal, but the act itself This week’s protests is fi ne by them. They admit to nonconsensual sex “but not rape”. They admit to rape but not to blame: against sexual violence “I felt I was repaying her for sexually arousing me,” a man in one of the few studies says. have seen women On a Reddit forum where, at the onset of the #MeToo revolution, my soul went to die, men wrote sharing stories of “from the other side” of sexual assault. Their accounts implied covert participation – “She just had this harassment and assault. unusually sexual way of carrying herself” – or active reciprocation: “In my mind, at the time, she wanted it.” This man looked at the woman’s face and realised It’s time that men spoke he had been mistaken. A few things are striking about the comments: one up, argues Anne Enright is that desire – and I think this is true for women also – turns the sexual object into a fragmented object. When people are having sex, they can get a bit lost in it. We do not always look into our lover’s eyes, not all the time, so yes it is a good idea to check back with the entire person to see if your needs are still aligned. The sense of entitle ment is, with the vengeful or narcissistic types, always breathtaking. This is something society does not encourage or allow in women, for which you might almost be grateful. Who wants to be like that? There is also the mechanism of blame, that magical pro jec tion machine. These men speak as though arousal comes DAN KITWOOD/GETTY; FRAN VEALE/GETTY FRAN KITWOOD/GETTY; DAN

24 The Guardian Saturday 20 March 2021 Comment ¶ from somewhere outside who talk abusively about women. He wants us to know the self, and that it, even that this is not a call for greater sensitivity, however – more strangely, contin ues he seems to real ise how sensitive men can get when to happen outside the self. you ask them to be “sensitive” – no, this is a leadership There is no reality check. thing, “because the typical perpetrator is not sick and She started this. She wants twisted. He’s a normal guy in every other way, right?” this. It comes from her. Well, how would I know? I can’t say if a perpetrator The courts don’t laugh is a “normal guy” because I am not a guy, and the at these projections, they men who do know are saying nothing. I do think mag nify them. We have all misogynists are “twisted” because of the way they seen women destroyed by twist the truth of their own psychology and I think a justice system that puts some men are aware of this them on trial for being attacked. The courtroom dis- If I were a man and some men are not. cussion becomes all about the victim, her clothes, her I wouldn’t be Is that why society main- “mistakes” , while the perpetrator remains a blank. writing this tains a silence about rapists, This gap in the argument is an odd absence that because writing because we secretly think requires a lot of energy to maintain. This is why that they are just “normal” strange things happen in court: why a woman’s thong about rape, guys, they are just “male”? is waved by the defence, as in a case in Cork last year; protesting It is possible that men worry or a woman’s silence during a gang rape is taken as a against rape, and this is the case and Katz sign of her enthusiasm, as happened in a 2019 trial in being raped are wants to reassure them that Pamp lona, Spain. A good part of female outrage, the all women’s work their fantasies, their swagger years of #MeToo, has been taken up by raw disbelief. do not auto mati cally turn These courtroom arguments are a bit mad. They are them into monsters. He is, also a distraction from the man in the dock. There is a very cannily, working with kind of trick happening here. and not against male bonding, which has a big role in Men do not just disappear in court, they disappear the formation of male sexuality. But he is also accurate from the discussion, they disappear from the lang uage to the fact that most rapists do not com mit other we use. Rape is described as “a women’s issue”. We crimes. In social terms, they can be anybody. speak of “women’s safety concerns”, not “concerns Most rapists do not end up in jail. The rapists who about men’s violence”. We call it “an abusive relation- do end up in jail, according to one American study, ship” as though the relationship were doing the abus- are also more likely to have committed non-sexual ing, or an “abusive home” as though the walls were crimes. Work within this cohort shows that convicted insulting the occupants for fun. The notor ious line rapists tend to start young, have female-hostile peer “she was asking for it” is not so diff erent to “a woman groups, like rape-pornography (which is more than was raped”; both take the rapist out of the sentence. 80% of pornography), often report feeling rejected in Male agency is routinely removed from descriptions some way and suff er from a lack of empathy. of male violence, and this helps men get away with it. The vengeful sentence “I felt I was repaying her for I still can’t fi gure out the contradiction, though, that arousing me,” feels very familiar to women, who are the violent assertion of male potency also involves a long tired of the weirdness it contains. But the man kind of vanishing act. It seems very self defeating. who said it also seems to consider arousal to be a kind The American theorist and activist Jackson Katz of punishment. It is not pleasant. It is unfair. The man is one of the few men who states the obvious fact that who says, “This is her fault, she did this,” feels as men’s sexual violence is fi rst of all an issue for men. He though he has been acted upon. He is passive, perhaps also says male silence about this so-called “women’s unbearably so. This man is taking himself out of his issue” is a form of consent. His remarks about the use own desiring; you might say he is obliterating himself. of the passive voice hit Twitter in a week of renewed If I were a man, I might want to put my self back into social unrest about sexual crime. “When you look at the discussion, I might want to do a reality check. But that term, ‘violence against women’, nobody is doing it if I were a man, I wouldn’t be writing this because to them. It just happens. Men aren’t even a part of it!” writing about rape, talking about rape, protesting In his popular TED talk Katz describes men’s ability against rape and being raped are all women’s work. to go unexamined as “one of the key characteris tics This despite the fact that the weekend of protests of power and privilege”. We do not talk about men, in London was also a weekend during which footage because that is the way they like it. For Katz, a ten- was circulated online of an RAF recruit being sexually dency to blame the victim is not about sex or even gen- threatened by a group of his peers brandishing a piece der, it is just what humans do. “Our whole cognitive of military hardware. In America the fi gures show that structure is set up to blame one in six men has been the victim of sexual violence Tributes to Sarah vic tims,” he says. Katz of some kind, as opposed to one in three women, and Everard on Clapham teaches a bystander pro- that 99% of the perpetrators are male. The diff erence Common, London; gramme, in which he urges between the victims, sadly, is that society has long Anne Enright, above men to interrupt other men been happy to blame the women •

Saturday 20 March 2021 The Guardian 25 ¶ Further reading

Victorian Britain. summoning up the Books to help and A Kind of Spark by natural world. Morris’s inspire children Elle McNicoll is set in art is alchemic; a golden, contemporary Scotland, shining thing. Katherine Rundell and tells the story of Finally – for children Addie, an 11-year-old in need of a shot of raw who, on hearing about hope – during lockdown This is a hard time to plantation in Jamaica, the witch trials in her I edited The Book of be a child. The world is and his journey to town, campaigns to Hopes, a collection of already so painfully London – and Race to establish a monument work from 132 writers opaque for children; the Frozen North, an to their memory. The and artists. It has non- a pandemic is a bitter account of Matthew intensity of Addie’s fi ction writing by Piers addition. There are, Henson, an African feeling for the per- Torday (author of the though, books that will American who was secuted women stems magnifi cent Last Wild help. There are books among the team of in part from her autism, – another book, with that will teach children Americans at the pole in a beautiful and fi ery talking animals and a the world is enormous, in 1909. The latter is debut from a writer who bossy cockroach, perfect that history is still alive. published by Barrington is herself autistic. for lockdown); fi ction by We’re in, I think, Stoke, which specialises For sharp wit and Frank Cottrell Boyce; art golden times for child- in dyslexic-friendly, sheer delight, Sharna by Axel Scheffl er … ren’s fi ction – there are short texts. Jackson is one of the It’s a one-book books being pub lished For children whose most brilliant children’s cornucopia. Proceeds every year that tell passion is the envir- fi ction writers in the from the hardback go to children, loudly or onment, The Last Bear country. I haven’t yet NHS Charities Together. quietly, through good by Hannah Gold, with met a child who has These are hard days to jokes or wild escapades: illustrations by Levi not loved her murder be young in, but there dig for the bravery that Pinfold, is a lovely series, which begins are books that will make you did not know you thing: the story follows with High Rise Mystery; the days feel shorter had: reach for your edges April, who travels with and she is also the and the world larger, and push. Archimedes her father to an Arctic author of the Tate Kids and that is wildly yourself. outpost and meets a Modern Art Activity worth having. Catherine Johnson is polar bear. What child Book: make your own the master of historical does not long to do that? Matisse snail, paint the The Book of Hopes: fi ction for children; her And, another kind of shadows of a Turner Words and Pictures prose is warm and wise escape: EL Norry’s Son sunset. to Comfort, Inspire and utterly gripping. I of the Circus is a fi ction- I love The Lost Words, and Entertain, edited love her Freedom , about alised account of Pablo by Robert Macfarlane by Katherine Rundell, Nat, born into slavery Fanque, the fi rst black and Jackie Morris, a book is published by on an English-owned circus proprietor in of acrostic spell-poems Bloomsbury (£12.99).

Tom Gauld

26 The Guardian Saturday 20 March 2021