Review Saturday 12 June 2021 – Issue № 177

‘The pandemic has changed us all’

Neuroscientist Karl Deisseroth on the new science of emotions “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 ‘I still believe One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez is the Review greatest novel written since Saturday 12 June 2021 – Issue № 177 William Faulkner died.’ — Bill Clinton, page 5

Contents The week in books ...... 04 The books that made me by Bill Clinton ...... 05

COVER STORY Rewiring the brain’s response to the pandemic ...... 06

Book of the week: Seven Ways to Change the World: How to Fix the Most Pressing Problems We Face by Gordon Brown ...... 10 Nonfi ction reviews (M)otherhood: On the Choices of Being a Woman by Pragya Agarwal ...... 12 Let Me Take You by the Hand: True Tales from London’s Streets by Jennifer Kavanagh ...... 13 Madhouse at the End of the Earth: The Belgica’s Journey into the Dark Antarctic Night by Julian Sancton ...... 14 Rememberings by Sinéad O’Connor ...... 15 Fiction reviews Barcelona Dreaming by Rupert Thomson ...... 16 Assembly by Natasha Brown ...... 17 The Great Mistake by Jonathan Lee ...... 18 Science fi ction and fantasy books of the month ...... 19

INTERVIEW Meg Mason ...... 20

INSIDE STORY True to nature: Melissa Harrison on children’s books ...... 23

Julian Barnes on writing The Sense of an Ending, plus Tom Gauld ...... 26

COVER ILLUSTRATION Bratislav Milenkovic Saturday 12 June 2021 The Guardian 3 ¶ Forewords

argue, fi ction written by confl agration – at least The week in books women con tains multi- until a reprint is needed. tudes. “Women are Alison Flood 12 June neither a genre, nor a single exper ience,” res- A perfectly peculier ponded Chocolat author celebration Joanne Harris. Yes, pub- Crime writers are fam- Forward for poetry world that turns out to lishers can get it wrong – ously a friendly bunch, so We know that the year – be not very far from our remember the bikini shot it’s fi tting that the Theak- and more – of the pan- own and from Selima of Sylvia Plath on a collec- ston Old Peculier crime demic has been a time Hill there’s a seven-part tion of her letters ? – but writing festival promises when we have needed to meditation on the never- as many in the industry to be the fi rst major book be exposed to the power ending puzzle of women pointed out, Winterson’s festival of 2021 to be held of the imag i nation . and men and their publishers will have fol- in person. Writers will The short lists for the complicated mutual lowed the usual proce d- include Richard Osman, Forward prizes 2021 are a misunder standings. ure of gaining her appro- Mick Herron, Ann remin der that the poetic The winners will be val for covers and blurbs . Cleeves, Mark Billingham imagina tion isn’t wholly announced in October. As both readers and and Val McDermid, who introspec t ive ; it is bold, James Naughtie authors recommended once called this “small limitless in ambi tion and the #wimminsfi ction corner of Yorkshire … it touches every part of Winterson on they love, Winterson’s paradise”. As for its our lives . In the shortlist ‘wimmins fi ction’ new jackets look set to audiences, the festival for best collec tion, Kayo Jeanette Winterson stay the same, despite her has an enormous new Chingonyi will take you antagonised a host of tent with increased to the Zambezi River women’s fi ction writers seating space to ensure and back ; Tishani Doshi when she announced on social dis tan cing. This explores the elastic Twitter that she “abso- year’s program ming chair margins between those lutely hated the cosy Ian Rankin says: “I’m so who sur vive in our soc ie- little domestic blurbs” looking forward to ties and those who think on her rejacketed back- reconnecting with fellow them selves lost; and list. “Noth ing playful or authors and crime fans Luke Kennard writes a strange or the ahead of after so long apart. It’s long, elegiac but sharply time stuff that’s in there,” going to be a real thrill to fashioned riff on Shake- she wrote, just “wimmins be able to bring people speare’s sonnets (and fi ction of the worst kind”. together.” The festival you thought you knew So she set them on fi re. runs at Harrogate’s Old them!). Stephen Sexton But as her fellow female Trial by fi re Swan Hotel from 22 to

GETTY; TWITTER GETTY; explores a fan tastic writers were quick to Winterson’s books 25 July. Katy Guest Delta WORD OF THE WEEK The politics of naming plague variants was fraught even before Donald Trump Steven Poole began talking about “the China virus” . Spaniards were not thrilled at being nominally blamed for the 1918 pandemic of “Spanish fl u ”, now known as H1N1 . But strings of numbers and letters are hard to keep track of, so perhaps there is a middle way between those and the demonisation of perfectly innocent geographical areas. Just because a nasty new bug is fi rst noticed in a place doesn’t mean it originated there. It is for such reasons, indeed, that biomedical offi cialdom has decided to start using more neutral names for what are euphemistically called “variants of concern”. The “Indian variant” of the Sars-CoV-2 virus, now the most prevalent in the UK thanks to Boris Johnson’s liberal policy with the borders he took back control of, has been renamed Delta , being the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet. (Kent was alpha, South Africa beta and Brazil gamma.) Sad to report, many sections of the press continue to refer to “the Indian ‘Delta’ variant”. Meanwhile, the American airline Delta is probably looking forward to the discovery of Epsilon.

4 The Guardian Saturday 12 June 2021 The books that made me ¶

‘I always wanted to be a writer, The last book that made me laugh Janet Evanovich’s latest book. Stephanie Plum but doubted my ability to do it’ always makes me laugh. The book I’m ashamed not to have read Bill Clinton Ulysses. I love Irish poetry, prose, and nonfi ction. I love Joyce. But I always give out and give up before I get through it. I’ll keep trying. The book I am currently reading The book I’d most like to be remembered for The End of Everything by Katie Mack. The theoretical So far My Life, for the reasons Larry McMurtry stated physicist explains the fi ve most likely endings for our in his review: it’s a story of my life and times; an expanding universe, hopefully an unimaginably long account of what it’s like to be president when so time from now. It’s witty, clear and upbeat. much is happening at once with fuller explanations The book that changed my life of events such as Black Hawk Down that you won’t Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death made me rethink see anywhere else; and a testament of what I believe the roots of our deepest fears and insecurities . and why. The book I wish I’d written My comfort read One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García I fi nd comfort in thrillers with interesting characters Márquez. I still believe it’s the greatest novel written and good stories. I really liked Stacey Abrams’s While since William Faulkner died. Justice Sleeps, all of Louise Penny’s Gamache books The books that infl uenced my writing and Sara Paretsky’s VI Warshawski books. And I love I always wanted to be a writer, but doubted my ability my co-author James Patterson’s books . I hope our to do it. From my senior year in college to my fi rst new book, The President’s Daughter, makes other year in law school, I read fi ve books that made me people’s lists. I like the characters and the story. think it was worth a try: North Toward Home by Willie The book I think is most underrated Morris; The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Probably Ron Chernow’s Grant. With the latest Styron; You Can’t Go Home Again by Thomas Wolfe; eff orts to discredit the 2020 election, pass voter The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin; and I Know suppression measures and kill the January 6 Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou. commission, and the changing composition of the The book that changed my mind supreme court, we are reminded of what Ulysses That’s a great question. I think Isabel Wilkerson’s S Grant knew: the risks of making our union more Caste and Adam Grant’s Think Again forced me to perfect includes the possibility that the inevitable rethink how deeply embedded our unexamined reaction can rob us of our democracy altogether. preconceptions are . The last book that made me cry The President’s Daughter by Bill Clinton and James

REDUX/EYEVINE Sooley by John Grisham. Read it, you’ll want to cry too. Patterson is published by Century.

Saturday 12 June 2021 The Guardian 5 ¶ Cover story ‘We would all love to be called to action during coronavirus. But there’s not much any individual can do’ The pioneering neuroscientist and psychiatrist Karl Deisseroth tells Richard Godwin how we process social interactions, why we have struggled with Zoom, and why for some, the conditions of the pandemic have induced an ‘altered state’

he coronavirus pandemic has been when he turns individual neurons on or off . a disorienting kind of emergency. It This is the basic methodology of optogenetics , a is a generation-defi ning cataclysm, technique that Deisseroth pioneered in 2005 with his but for many of us the day-to-day team at what is now the Deisseroth Lab at Stanford reality has been lonely, even dull. University. It has been widely recognised as one of T It is a call to action, but the most the great scientifi c breakthroughs of the 21st century. useful thing most of us can do is In essence, he found a way to activate or deactivate stay at home. Covid-19 is a disease that attacks the individual brain cells with incredible precision – which lungs, but it has also worsened mental health while in turn has brought about a revolution in neurosci ence. causing a drastic reduction in patients seeking care Optogenetics is now its own fi eld, its techniques and for depression, self-harm, eating disorders and principles used in hundreds of laboratories across anxiety. Whatever path the pandemic takes from the world to advance understanding of the circuits here, says Karl Deisseroth, the pioneering American of the brain and the consequences of conditions neuroscientist, psychiatrist, bioengineer and now such as schizo phrenia, autism and dementia. Mostly author, “coronavirus has aff ected us all and it has this is done by running experi ments on animals – changed us all. There’s no doubt about that.” literally dialling up or down the circuits that control Deisseroth, 49, is talking in the lush, squirrel-fi lled aggression, for example; garden of his house in Palo Alto, northern California, ‘I was always how ever, the possibilities where he has spent much of the pandemic looking intrigued by appear almost endless. Last after his four young children. But he has had much how words stir month, the Swiss neurologist else on his mind. He has been fi nishing his book emotions, how Botond Roska published Connections: A Story of Human Feeling, an investiga- they can lift us a study that showed how tion into the nature of human emotions . He has up and bring us he had used opto genetic been meeting with psych iatric patients over Zoom down, how they principles on a human as well as putting in night shifts as an emergency hos- retina to partially restore pital psychiatrist . And he has fi tted all of this around serve as very the sight of a blind person. his day job, which is using tiny fi bre-optic cables to potent symbols’ Deisseroth has another fi re lasers into the brains of mice that he has infected great leap forward on his CV, with cells from light-sensitive algae and then obser- too: see-through brains. In ving what happens, millisecond by millisecond, 2013, his team fi gured out a

6 The Guardian Saturday 12 June 2021 Cover story ¶

way to drain away the opaque fatty matter in a Deisseroth follows Connections is Deisseroth mouse brain and instead suspend all the brain cells a lucid line of coming “full circle”, he in a scaff old of hydrogel, a transparent, jelly-like scientifi c inquiry says, back to his “original substance that allows for extraordinarily detailed and greatest love” – writing. brain imaging – a signifi cant leap forward from the It is a revelatory book. Peppered with quotes from standard fMRI scan. He came up with the concept Jorge Luis Borges and Toni Morrison, it leaps from while changing a nappy. wasp evolution to autism, the origins of mammalian Shaggy-haired and unhurried, Deisseroth more fur to self-harm in borderline personality disorder resembles a bassist in a west coast rock band than patients, music to dementia, casually blowing apart a leading scientist – and the way he tells it, all of his any crude arts-science dichotomies as it does so. hi-tech questing grew out of his childhood ambition At times, it recalls the case histories of Oliver Sacks , to be a poet. “That was my fi rst love and vocation – at times the sweep of Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens – I wanted to be a writer,” he says. He once crashed though Deisseroth says a closer model is The Periodic his bicycle as he was attempting to read a volume Table by the poet-chemist Primo Levi . He writes with of Gerard Manley Hopkins while pedalling. “I was an evident love of words – but also, with a lucid line always intrigued by how words stir emotions, how of scientifi c inquiry. What are feelings? How do they they can lift us up and bring us down, how they serve work? Why do we have them? How do new feelings as very potent symbols. If you look at it, one route to evolve? And why are they so often maladapted to understanding how those symbols are transformed our circumstances? into feelings might be looking at how the brain works. “Feelings are responses to information in the So I got very interested in neuroscience.” world – but as we all know, they follow their own But he arrived at neuroscience via psychiatry. The trajectory,” Deisseroth says. “They coalesce and two fi elds are usually seen as distinct – brain v mind – disappear with time. Sometimes we’re not even but the insights gained in consultations with patients conscious of them.” While we are still far from even have seeded many of Deisseroth’s experiments. a sketchy understanding of the physical nature of “Anybody can read a diagnostic manual and see a list feelings, optogenetics is beginning to give us a handle of symptoms, but what really matters to the patient on how and why they arise. “We can not only record is a diff erent story,” he says. “It’s what allows me to from the activity of tens of thousands of neurons think: what are the correspondences that we can do in while the processes that correspond to feelings are the laboratory? How can inspiration fl ow both ways?” happening – we can directly turn up and turn 

PHOTOGRAPH Jessica Chou/The Guardian Saturday 12 June 2021 The Guardian 7 ¶ Cover story Karl Deisseroth

 down the representation of these feelings with in Europe, that her husband had been interned in a great precision. We can make an animal more or less Chinese concentration camp (she had to infer this from anxious or aggressive or maternal or hungry or thirsty. phone conversations with her parents, who couldn’t And all of that neurobiology maps on to this funda- risk telling her directly). As an extreme extrovert, mental question of what a feeling is.” the loss of her deep social bonds had destroyed her. There are many moments where Deisseroth’s Meanwhile, Charles, who was on the autistic case histories echo the strange times we are living spectrum, shrank from human contact: he had panic through. One of the more perplexing stories concerns attacks in social situations and could not meet any- Alexander, a wealthy, well-adjusted American man one’s eye, associating eye contact with a “negative- with no history of mental illness whose retirement valence subjective internal state” (ie feeling bad). happened to fall around the time of 9/11. Alexander Deisseroth was able to treat his anxiety and panic was nowhere near New York when the attack hap- attacks, but the eye contact issue was unchanged. pened and knew no one involved. But two weeks However, through talking to Charles, he was able to afterwards, while on holiday in Greece, he began to get to the “real essence” of the problem. It wasn’t that display “classic mania”. He was extraordin arily joy ful; eye contact made him anxious. It was that too much he drastically cut down on his sleep (he felt no need); social information was conveyed through eye contact he had increased libido. When he returned home, he – and Charles found this overwhelming. volunteered for the US Navy and started training for “Hearing him state this was a transformative war, climbing trees, practising his aim, reading moment for me. We were able to bring those ideas to military strategy, insisting to his baffl ed wife and the laboratory and study and even quantify in bits children that he was better than he had ever been. per second how certain changes that happen in For Deisseroth, the case was a sort of parable autism can aff ect information handling in the (Alexander turned out OK, by the way). “Why does this mammalian brain. It kind of unifi ed all the threads susceptibility to mania exist? Is there a value to it – if very powerfully in a way that a paper or a study or not to the person, then to the community, or to the a questionnaire would never have been able to do.” species? Is that something that was more valuable at It’s no surprise that the pandemic has been very a diff erent time in the long march of evolution?” He challenging for those of us who, like Aynur, have speculates that the manic state – “in some ways the deep social bonds with friends, family and highest expression of what a human can be” – was a colleagues. Computer technology, which reduces circuit in the brain waiting to be tripped; and perhaps our multi layered, multi sensory human interactions such states have helped humans cope with war, sometimes to a single bit of information – to like or famine, climate emergency or pandemics in the past. not to like? – is a poor shadow of our usual social What we think of as mental illness may be an evolu- contact. “One reason Zoom meetings may be so tion ary adaptation – or an attempt at an adaptation – exhausting is we have to work much harder to create that helped past communities survive. “Nothing in our model of the other person – and that’s before we biology makes sense except in the light of evolution,” get on to multiple people,” Deisseroth says. “Social as the great geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote. interaction is one of the hardest things to do in biology. This leads Deisseroth to ponder the case of Joan of Think of all the information coming in, not just the Arc in medieval France – a female teenage peasant language and body language but the model you form who, like Alexander, of the other person’s wants and needs, which you appeared to be an Stanford University, then have to adapt as the conversation progresses – inappropriate vessel California, where it’s a huge information processing task. Zoom makes for such mania, but the Deisseroth that much harder.” nevertheless managed to Lab is based However, for people like Charles, communicating make a national impact. “The altered state has been historically important. Even if it’s mala dapted for the individual it can be transformative for the community.” It’s hard not to think of the thousands of people triggered by conspiracies – imagined emergencies concerning 5G masts, vaccinations, the deep state. “This is the complexity of the world we live in contrasting with the distant and recent past. But the context is all wrong. We would all love to be called to action during coronavirus. But there’s not much that any individual can do.” In another chapter, Deisseroth contrasts two patients with extreme “social and non-social brain states”. Aynur is an extraordinarily friendly, open and and talkative U yghur woman who started to exper-

DAVID BUTOW/CORBIS VIA GETTY VIA BUTOW/CORBIS DAVID ience suicidal thoughts when she learned, while living

8 The Guardian Saturday 12 June 2021 Cover story ¶ remotely can have its benefi ts. Deisseroth believes ‘One reason A lot of people are con- it is wrong to see autism as a limitation of the mind. Zoom meetings cerned by that. These “People with autism do have challenges forming a may be so companies have a veneer model of what’s going on in the minds of others. But exhausting is of public service – and the it’s not a fundamental limitation . They have certain tools that a com pany like structures and arrangements in their brain that can we have to work Google has made available work it out – but it is hard for them to keep up with much harder have had a posi tive impact. the information rate of a social interaction. In a to create our But even Google Maps, as diff erent time scale, there is so much they can do model of the we well know, still serves to thrive.” Digital communication that does not other person’ their interests. We have take place in real time, for example email or chat to understand that.” functions, can be of huge benefi t – and some people For all the pressures with autism have indeed found the slower pace of of the pandemic, he has lockdown benefi cial. relished the time he has had to spend with his Meanwhile, the reach of mental health treatment children, who are aged fi ve to 12, “exercising, solving is now far greater thanks to the adoption of digital math puzzles, writing poetry, trying to come up with technologies. “Unquestionably we’re going to suff er cures for diseases …” He also has a son from an earlier a tsunami of mental health issues as a result of the relationship, who is now in medical school. It was pan demic, but in the long run I hope that accessibility only while writing the book that he realised how much of mental health care will be greatly enhanced by the experience of being a father had infused his work. what we’ve gone through. If there is a silver lining, He made the breakthroughs in optogenetics while that might be it.” struggling with single fatherhood; he describes an Deisseroth believes that another lesson we should early clinical encounter with a girl who had brain learn is not to focus all of our scientifi c eff orts on cancer as the inspiration for his work; and it so narrowly defi ned goals – such as treating a particular happens that his wife, Michelle Monje , is now a disease. “Our instinct is always to keep our funding specialist in brain cancer in children. streams and our support eff orts directly aligned with “All of these experiences are very charged with those needs of the moment. The danger of that is, emotion, because of the things I was experiencing at fi rst of all, our understanding is so incomplete that the time. But I didn’t realise how tightly they were that level of targeted eff ort usually won’t work. And linked to the challenges of single fatherhood and we won’t make the enormous, transformative change the emotional storms that come with that until I that upends everything.” Connections is, among other had written the book. I came to see how this was a things, an argument in favour of the cross-pollination unifying theme in my life: the child that might be of ideas and of scientifi c freedom – following science lost, the child that might be found.” for the sake of science. The great leap forward of Indeed, optogenetics has helped bring about a optogenetics rested on a 19th-century botanist’s deeper understanding of parenthood itself. “It really notes on the light-sensitive algae he had found in does change you. That structure is there just waiting a saline lake in Kenya – “and he was studying them for the switch to fl ip. It’s not a new connec tion that’s because they were beautiful and for no other reason” , formed, it’s there, waiting to be activated.” When new Deisseroth says. “One could never have predicted parents talk of being “rewired” or “reprogrammed” that this would one day give us the ability to turn on after birth, they are being more accurate than they and off cells in the brain and come to a causal under- realise. He points to the research of Catherine Dulac standing of which connections and projections set up at Harvard, who has mapped out parenting circuits in our motivational structures. And stories like that turn mice. “There is one connection that governs the drive up again and again in science.” to fi nd the young if they’re separated and another Situated as he is in the heart of Silicon Valley, I that governs the drive to protect and care for the wonder if it’s a source of frustration to him that so young. The overall state of parenting is assembled many of the fi nest minds of his generation have from all of these various parts. That is just beautiful. decided to train their intellectual capacity on selling That’s inspiring.” online advertising for the tech giants – as opposed to Throughout the pandemic, Deisseroth has been bettering the health of humankind. attempting to come up with a unifi ed theory of the self He gives a wry smile. “It is a little … disconcerting. by studying dissociative states. What truly excites him You’ll see brilliant people from Stanford going into are the “big principles” of the brain. “Anything can very high-powered jobs all focused on getting some have parts. The real magic is how the properties of small fraction more clicks on some little piece of the system arise from the parts. We won’t get to a advert ising. I’ve spoken to some of them. They don’t truly deep understanding potentially for decades. necessarily feel that good about it.” But we’ve at least set the stage. And we have to push He is particularly con cerned about the enormous it as far as we can” • investments that Facebook and Google are now making in brain science. “That is not altruistic. They Connections: A Story of Human Feeling is published  are not doing this for us. They are doing it for them. by Viking on Thursday.

Saturday 12 June 2021 The Guardian 9 undeniably impressive in its scope and detail, though Book of occasionally leaves you feeling bludgeoned by its sheer volume and unrelenting force, rather as Brown tended the week to leave audiences feeling after his speeches. Brown’s forte as a politician was his combination of clear moral purpose with a mastery of technical minutiae, which sometimes resulted in an air of book- { Politics } Not just another ish detachment. But on the page, some sentences – such as: “And we must reduce the diff erential between Davos bore ... complex issues, the education-poor and the education-rich by ensuring that the supply of highly educated people and thus the morality and vulnera bility opportunities for social mobility rise, that more people from the former PM move from low-paid jobs to higher-paid jobs and that … ” – simply reminded me of what Blair described as William Davies Brown’s “great clunking fi st” at the dispatch box . Given that the policy issues Brown is grappling with are, by their very nature, complex global ones, The question of how British and that he has clearly engaged deeply with them, I prime ministers should and wasn’t entirely sure who his imagined readers were. shouldn’t behave after Many of his interlocutors and sources are those elite- leaving offi ce has recently dominated global institutions: McKinsey, the IMF, become a hot one. Property the World Bank, the United Nations. Then there are magnate and policy guru those campaigners and intellectuals who get a hearing Tony Blair has refused to in such institutions: Greta Thunberg, Steven Pinker, Seven Ways to step out of the limelight and Bill Gates. Too often, Seven Ways to Change the World Change the World: Theresa May has cashed in, off ers something like the view from Davos, not in an How to Fix the reportedly charging more ideological sense but in its rarefi ed global reach, which Most Pressing than £100,000 for a speech . purports to transcend every national, cultural, political Problems We Face And now, of course, there is and disciplinary divide. If the bosses of Goldman Sachs by Gordon Brown, David Cameron, harassing or the European Central Bank were to pick up a copy for Simon & Schuster, £25 civil servants during the their next long-haul fl ight, this would undoubtedly darkest days of April 2020, be welcome, but Brown presumably hoped to off er begging them to throw his failing venture a bone, more than elite airport literature. with reports that he personally stood to make £200m Where Brown diff ers from a regular Davos bore is had Greensill Capital made it to fl otation. that he clearly holds deep-seated moral views regard- By contrast, Gordon Brown’s post-Westminster ing the responsibilities of wealthy countries to less career has been a moral exemplar. He has surfaced to wealthy ones, combined with a sense that true justice take a position in referendums – on Scottish indepen- (a word that recurs throughout the book) is never dence and Brexit – but otherwise been largely invisible, adequately achieved, but needs constantly pushing focusing on charitable work, particularly on the for. It was observed in the past that Brown’s intellec tual expan sion of education in the global south. While it and political project was to unite Adam Smith’s The addresses political questions of the greatest contem- Theory of Moral Sentiments (an analysis of our natural porary urgency, such as the management of the pan- tendency to sympathise with others’ suff ering) with demic and the response to nationalism, Seven Ways to The Wealth of Nations (the founding work of liberal Change the World continues in the same spirit, off ering political economy), books that had been too often read a mixture of moral arguments and policy solutions in isolation from one another. Seven Ways to Change the that carefully avoids political con troversy. He is silent World seems to bear this out, in being a call to match on the questions of Scottish independence or Brexit, economic globalis ation with and the current prime minister earns not a single The subplot of adequate political coordina- mention. Only Donald Trump, among recent political Seven Ways is tion, so as to deliver on the fi gures, is explicitly ostracised. of a man looking moral responsibilities of The title and format of the book follow a template back on his the rich to the poor. Brown’s that is familiar from a glut of self-help books . Brown ability to move between has identi fi ed seven areas where greater international career, wishing economic and moral reason- coopera tion is required: global health, economic he’d had it in him ing is a potent one, and more prosperity, climate change, education, humani tar- to make of 2008 than a match for the kind ianism, abolishing tax havens and eliminating nuclear what the allies of smug liberalism of Pinker weapons. Each chapter off ers a historical and moral made of 1945 (whom he engages in a brief diagnosis of the problem at hand, and a set of policies to tussle) or others proclaim ing alleviate it, all of which require states and their leaders that contemporary capital- to act in common with one another. The research is ism is as good as it gets.

10 The Guardian Saturday 12 June 2021 Book of the week ¶ FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP/GETTY FABRICE

Gordon Brown speaks “Most people would rightly his premiership, as the political and fi nancial vultures at Davos in 2009 regard as morally abhorrent were circling in readiness for austerity, he expresses the proposition that a child his regrets: born into the poorest 20% of a population should face a risk of mortality twice as high as a child born into the I should have gone out of my way to explain what richest 20%. Yet that is the reality of the world we now was happening before our eyes: how and why the live in.” Such logic blasts its way through everything. fi nancial collapse had started, what had gone At times the core thesis can seem banal. The belief wrong, who was to blame … I should have shared the that global problems need global solutions is scarcely poignant letters that had come to me from mothers radical, though the book’s historic context – a global and fathers, sick with worry about where the next pandemic, the threat of nationalism and protection- meal for their children would come from, and ism, cooling Sino-American relations, the glimmer explained that the most important thing any leader of hope off ered by the Biden presidency – does make it had to do at this time of crisis was not to balance the timely. There is perhaps a more nuanced thesis smug- books – as if I were a corporate chief accountant – gled in concerning historical opportunities, though it’s but to save livelihoods and lives, as anyone with an not clear how much Brown intends it. The institutions ounce of humanity would want to do. that he seeks to build on are largely legacies of 1945, when a global economic and human i tarian architec- Labour has never really recovered from this moment, ture was developed to prevent the catastrophic conse- and UK politics is now dominated by the national isms quences of nationalism. But the other historical crisis of England and Scotland. Does Brown feel some how he keeps returning to is the one that put him personally responsible for Brexit and the rise of Boris Johnson? in the hot seat, and which briefl y turned him into an Does he think the 2009 G20 summit in London or the international hero: the fi nancial crisis of 2008. While climate change summit in Copenhagen were missed he clearly relishes the opportunity to roll out a few opportunities to avert President Trump or climate insider anecdotes from that time, the more interesting catastrophe? He doesn’t say. The book is a blizzard of aspect is the sense of regret that he clearly feels for not heady slogans, plans and statistics. But it also betrays a having exploited the crisis more vigorously to push for kind of vulnerability that “world leaders” rarely reveal, international reforms, and for not being more aware of a restless search for answers and reassurances that of how damag ing globalisation had already been. The continues long after one has lost the power to act on subplot of Seven Ways is of a man looking back on his them. Brown’s moral keel was always constituted career, wishing he’d had it in him to make of 2008 partly by self-doubt, or at least self-ques tion ing. It’s what the allies made of 1945. a shame his successor lacks the same quality. Late on in the book, Brown becomes possessed by this esprit de l’escalier. Refl ecting on the fi nal year of To buy a copy for £21.25 go to guardianbookshop.com.

Saturday 12 June 2021 The Guardian 11 baby daughter, but she also makes a decision. In Nonfi ction Hindu culture, only a male heir can secure rebirth or light a funeral pyre. “For the fi rst time,” says Agarwal, “I began to see that I did not have a future here.” A few years later, now living in England, she fi nds she’s pregnant again. She is in a new relationship and desperately missing her daughter, who is in India with her mother, while she tries to complete her PhD. She { Memoir } A candid account decides to have an abortion, but is later haunted by the of the joys and agonies of decision as she and her second husband try but fail to have a baby of their own. After IVF doesn’t work, they becoming a mother takes aim decide to use a surrogate. When their twin daughters at patriarchal constraints are born in Delhi, eight weeks early, Agarwal smells their heads, “a bouquet of jasmine and monsoon”. Christina Patterson Her experiences of motherhood couldn’t be much more dramatic, and they are riveting. Agarwal writes with searing honesty and tenderness about the joys When Pragya Agarwal and agonies of becoming a mother, of trying and started her fi rst period, failing to conceive again, and then of pursuing a route just after her 11th birthday, to motherhood that’s widely seen as taboo. “Oh, they her mother handed her a come here to buy children,” she hears one of the bundle of blue cloth. For offi cials say (in Hindi) on one of her trips to try and Agarwal, as for so many sort out her new babies’ visas. “I still don’t know,” she girls around the world, the says with admirable honesty, “if I am OK with this.” (M)otherhood: transition to womanhood Recollections are interspersed with facts, fi g ures On the Choices of was sudden and shocking. and refl ections on fertility, motherhood, the expecta- Being a Woman “I had to stop playing tions women face and the degree of control they have, by Pragya Agarwal, cricket on street corners at or don’t have, over their bodies. She is right to point out Canongate, £16.99 once,” she explains. “And that women of colour generally face bigger challenges thereafter I was both visible on many of these fronts than white women . But she and invisible, not seen or heard except to silence and talks about “patriarchal and tease, a provocation and titillation.” ‘What are you social constraints” with a If she was silent then, she has certainly made up going to do today sense of anger that ranges so for it since. A behavioural and data scientist who to make powerful widely it’s some times hard has taught at universities in both the US and the UK, white men to pin down. Agarwal is now a passionate campaigner for racial “As you read this book,” and gender equality. “What are you going to do today uncomfortable?’ writes Agarwal in the intro- to make powerful white men uncomfortable?” her Agarwal’s (white) duction, “you might wonder (white) husband asks her at one point as she writes husband asks if it is a memoir, a manifesto, this book. The short answer appears to be: “a lot”. her as she writes auto-fi ction, or a form of There is plenty of anger in her new book and quite this book political writing.” You might a lot of it is directed against powerful white men. A indeed. Her key point seems fair bit is directed against brown men too, since these to be that women are the were the men who shaped her childhood and youth victims of a system that in India, the land of her birth. It was men who decided conspires to make them feel worthless if they are not that menstruating women were impure and could not mothers. “Infertile women,” she notes, “are seen to be go into a kitchen or take part in any religious cere- unfulfi lled, empty, devoid of meaning.” Really? In this mon ies. And it was men who fos tered the belief that country around a fi fth of women over 45 don’t have a woman “unable to conceive” is “an untouchable” children and most of us had no idea we were meant to who “holds no value for her husband or her family”. feel so bad. This is not the predicament Agarwal face s when This is a book about motherhood that’s very pro- she fi nds herself unexpectedly pregnant as a young motherhood by a woman who had a child, and who wife. She has recently graduated and has hopes of tried to move the sun, the moon and the stars to have broadening her horizons in ways that her mother was more. In the end, it’s about motherhood as redemption, unable to, with her three daughters and alcoholic “my saving grace, allowing me to reconcile all my husband. When her mother-in-law, husband and diff erent selves”. And that’s fi ne. Agarwal writes extended family go off to a wedding, Agarwal is beautifully about her own complicated experience. gripped by “sharp, pulsating rhythms of agony” as That’s what literature is for. But if she could focus her she starts contractions, at just 26 weeks. For the next anger more precisely, she could let the poetry sing . nine weeks, she has six to eight injections a day. “I will always take care of you,” she whispers to her new To buy a copy for £14.78 go to guardianbookshop.com.

12 The Guardian Saturday 12 June 2021 Nonfi ction ¶

{ Society } London labour, sand wich. There are as many soup kitchens and shelters as ever. 160 years on – vivid stories from What made Mayhew’s work so viscerally thrilling was the way he let his subjects tell their stories in the streets offer a modern take their own words. Rather than cutting and pasting on Mayhew’s revelatory study a few choice phrases to give colour and punch to his research and statistics, he simply let them say their Kathryn Hughes piece, complete with pauses, stumbles, repetitions and non sequiturs. The eff ect was vivid and immed- iate and has since become the standard way that oral In 1861 the journalist Henry historians present their work. Mayhew completed London Given the way that Kavanagh emphasises how Labour and the London Poor, her text is in constant conversation with Mayhew’s, a sprawling, four-volume you might imagine that she models her methodology account of life on the streets on his, sidling up to street cleaners and sex workers and on the skids. Here, for and handing them the metaphorical microphone. the fi rst time, was rst-fi But, of course, Mayhew’s methodology – if you can Let Me Take person testimony from call it something so fancy – would be deemed deeply You by the Hand: the kind of people who uneth ical today. Before Kavanagh can interview True Tales from were usually nothing more Robert, the homeless painter and decorator from London’s Streets than a smudge on Victorian Hungary, or Aisha, who sells mattresses in White- by Jennifer Kavanagh, England’s fi eld of vision: chapel, she has to get them to sign a consent form, Little, Brown, £8.99 street-sweepers and shit- a cumbersome document that requires them to give collectors; sellers of wilted their name and address. No wonder so many of the fruit, rotten fi sh and children’s bodies; beggars and people she approaches seize up at this point, or just beadles. Reviewing it, William Makepeace Thackeray scarper, such as the Albanian peanut seller in front of called Mayhew’s masterpiece “a terror of tale and the British Library who, she fi nds out later, hasn’t got wonder”. Charles Dickens, famously, used Mayhew’s the requisite licence. Even if they have an address, database of voices and experiences as a source book people are unlikely to divulge it to the chatty middle- for peopling the odd, dark corners of his novels. class woman with the bright smile who might easily At the end of 2018 Jennifer Kavanagh set out to be an undercover spy from Immigration or Benefi ts. do a Mayhew for our own broken times. With The £10 payment she off ers for their time smells notebook and recorder in hand, she has tramped her like bait. native city, talking to the men and women who live Notwithstanding the fact that Kavanagh is bound and work on its streets. What is at once striking is to work within a modern ethical framework, she how little has changed in the intervening 160 years. manages to access some compelling stories. There There are still street sweepers, fruit sellers and is Caval, who works as a living statue during the even beadles (private security guards by another day and for Amazon by night. He is trying to make name). Many people are dependent on an economy enough money so that he can go back to Romania and of salvaging and repurposing. At night, as lucky take up his architectural studies. What is even more Londoners head for their beds, thousands of others troubling is the number of people with steady offi ce make do with the pavement. Food is still the kind jobs who are nonetheless obliged to wait tables or that you can hold in your fi ngers and eat with busk in order to pay their basic living costs. There are minimal cutlery, but instead of trotters and hot homeless people who run market stalls, professional potatoes it’s more likely to be a late-in-the-day drivers who do car boot sales, graphic artists who draw caricatures for the tourist market. No one in this obsessively productive landscape is allowed to be anything other than on the go, all the time. Kavanagh’s own writing is no match either for Mayhew or for the scores of interviewees who furnish her with their vivid self-portraits. At times her prose is leaden, and you fi nd yourself longing for the next hotel doorman or drug-rehabilitation worker to start telling their story. Even so, there’s no doubting the skill that Kavanagh has deployed in getting people to talk candidly to her. What shines through this wonderfully engaging book is the author’s genuine assumption that every life matters and, if we care to listen, has important things to tell us about our own.

GRAEME ROBERTSON/THE GUARDIAN ROBERTSON/THE GRAEME To buy a copy for £7.82 go to guardianbookshop.com.

Saturday 12 June 2021 The Guardian 13 ¶ Nonfi ction

shared purpose, sets off in the doughty Belgica and { History } A Belgian Antarctic it’s not long before things start going wrong. A booze- expedition offers mutiny, fuelled mutiny is narrowly averted and the ship runs aground before they have even put the tip of South danger and a young Roald America behind them. Displaying the calm decision- Amundsen’s verdict on raw seal making of a leader under pressure, De Gerlache bursts into tears. Not for the last time, the Belgica proves Geoff Dyer resilient beyond expectations and they get clear, moving on to greater, undefi ned dangers. A crew member is swept overboard in a storm. They head While the launch of certain into a world of alien and constantly changing beauty. books was postponed As the journey gets stranger the leader’s log for this because of lockdown, Julian period becomes “a chronicle of slow but inexorable Sancton and his publishers constriction”. The days shorten and soon turn into might have been tempted to endless night. And then they are stuck, with no choice go in the opposite direction: but to wait for the sun to return and the ice to free the bringing forward the release Belgica from its grip. Or to tighten it, and shatter their Madhouse at the of Madhouse at the End of the fragile refuge. Meanwhile the grim ordeal of surviving End of the Earth: Earth on the grounds that it in a place utterly hostile to human life takes its toll. The Belgica’s was the ultimate lockdown They have plenty of canned food and alcohol and at Journey into the read. Or maybe now is the fi rst everyone keeps busy, especially the pair to whom Dark Antarctic Night perfect time to publish it as, we were introduced at Leavenworth, the American by Julian Sancton, venturing gingerly out again, doctor Frederick Cook and the Norwegian Roald WH Allen, £20 we fi nd ourselves succumb- Amundsen. Cook had spent time among the Inuit in ing to lockdown nostalgia. the Arctic and realised the importance of learning from For an account of a Belgian expedition to Ant arc- them . He noticed they did not suff er from the scurvy tica it opens, unexpectedly, in Leavenworth, Kansas, that affl icted his team here, at the other end of the where an unnamed doctor is serving a prison sentence world , and his solution is a diet of raw penguin and seal for fraud. In 1926 he receives a visitor, “one of the meat. Those who adapt to this unpalatable necessity greatest explorers the world had ever known”, and rally; those who don’t sink towards death. At one point they recall events from the deep polar night, almost Cook and Amundsen are seen “sucking warm blood” three decades earlier, when they had formed a life- from a slaughtered seal. “Delicious,” is the verdict of determining friendship. Amundsen, who takes note of every detail, amassing The expedition had been led by Adrien de Gerlache the skills and knowledge that will enable him to beat de Gomery with the intention of fi nding the magnetic Captain Robert Scott to the south pole in 1911. south pole . Belgium was then fully engaged in what De Gerlache, a leader of fl ickering competence, is Conrad would call the “vilest scramble for loot that prone to lyricism. The splendour of the icescape is ever disfi gured the history of human conscience and such that even the austerely pragmatic Amundsen geographical exploration” in the tropics of the Congo. yields occasionally to a sense of the sublime; more The country’s lack of any tradition of polar explora tion typically, having managed a near-death escape, he lent an allure to De Gerlache’s undertaking, how ever writes: “I will not allow my plan to spend the winter it also made it diffi cult for him to raise funds or fi nd on an iceberg to be infl uenced by this.” personnel. He ended up recruiting a ramshackle, Sancton’s own prose serves the reader well as he multinational team of scientists and sailors: essentially negotiates a path through what must have been a sub- anyone who was ambitious, up for adventure or lacked merged mass of documents. more tempting off ers. Before the frost Except for odd moments – The team, defi ned by a lack of national unity or The Belgica in 1898 when the explor ers pass a night in an igloo “shooting the breeze” we are suddenly wrenched into a ling- uistically inappropriate future – he coaxes his material into a watertight narrative. One member of the crew goes mad, the rest are exhausted, enervated, listless, forced to reassert themselves against their captivity when the sun reappears and the slow thaw brings hope and a new set of dangers. We’ll leave them there, two- thirds of the way through this utterly enthralling book. Some of them, we know, will survive – and we also know that by 1926 Cook will be locked up in Kansas. How on earth, we wonder, does he wind up there?

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14 The Guardian Saturday 12 June 2021 Nonfi ction ¶

her mother. She once won a prize at nursery school { Memoir } From a pillow fight for being able to roll up into the smallest ball – “but with Prince to ripping up a my teacher never knew why I could do it so well”. She rarely went to school and would steal compulsively: picture of the pope, the singer “If a thing ain’t nailed down, I’m stealing it.” She picked has always done things her way up the habit from her mother, who would take money from the collection plate at mass rather than putting Fiona Sturges it in. Later, she and her mum would steal from charity tins. Full of guilt, O’Connor went to see her local priest who made her promise to give the money back when As a young woman starting she got a job, and that way she’d be square with God out in music, Sinéad (she was true to her word, giving her LA home to the O’Connor rarely did what Red Cross). She eventually left home to live with her she was told. When Nigel father after her mother locked her and her siblings out Grainge, an executive at in the garden all night. She later recalls being sent to her label, asked her to stop a convent boarding school, where a nun bought her wearing her hair short and a guitar and a book of Bob Dylan songs, and Rememberings dress more like a girl, she encouraged her to sing. by Sinéad O’Connor, went straight out and got There are stories from the height of her success, Penguin, £20 her head shaved. While too, most of them underlining the hollowness of the recording her fi rst album, experience. She is summoned to visit Prince , whom she discovered she was pregnant, prompting Grainge she brilliantly calls “Ol’ Fluff y Cuff s”, and who treats to phone her doctor and tell him to warn her against her atrociously. He tells her off for swearing, demands having a baby. The doctor duly told her that women that she eat soup even though she has declined it shouldn’t take babies on tour but neither should and insists on a pillow fi ght. It turns out his pillow they go on tour without them. O’Connor ignored has something solid in it : “He ain’t playing at all.” them both and had her son anyway. In the book’s foreword, O’Connor says that before Then, in 1992, during a performance on Saturday she ripped up the picture of the pope, she never Night Live, she ripped up a picture of Pope John Paul II, had the chance to fi nd herself. “But I think you’ll and blew up her career. She knew exactly what she was see in this book a girl doing. “Everyone wants a pop star, see?” she writes. who does fi nd herself,” “But I am a protest singer. I just had stuff to get off my she writes, “not by chest. I had no desire for fame.” success in the music Rememberings, then, is a tremendous catalogue of industry but by taking female misbehaviour. Music memoirs tend to follow the opportunity to similar trajectories of ambition, success and depravity sensibly and truly lose followed by regret and redemption. But O’Connor her marbles. The thing doesn’t do regret, and redemption isn’t required – at being that after losing least not by her. “I defi ne success by whether I keep them, one fi nds them the contract I made with the Holy Spirit before I made and plays the game one with the music business,” she explains. “I never better.” While her signed anything that said I would be a good girl.” Sinéad O’Connor childhood and rise The writing is spare and conversational, and A protest singer ‘with to fame provide rich reveals O’Connor as self-deprecating, pragmatic and no desire for fame’ material, O’Connor, a sharp observer. She is funny, too. During a tour of who is 54, says she can’t America in 1990, there was an outcry after it was remember much of the past 20 years, “because I reported she had demanded “The Star-Spangled wasn’t really present until six months ago”. Banner” not be played before her gigs. MC Hammer As such, the fi nal chapters, which sprint through made a big show of buying her a fi rst-class plane her marriages, children, a traumatic hysterectomy ticket back to Ireland, while Frank Sinatra said she and spells in mental institutions, are episodic. But should have her arse kicked. People began steam- they remain, like the rest of her book, full of heart, roller ing her albums outside her record company humour and remarkable generosity. The postscript HQ in New York. “Intensely angry old people (with comes in the form of a letter to her father. “Please pointy noses) operating the steamrollers,” she hoots. know that your daughter would have been as nutty In the end, O’Connor put on a wig and sunglasses and as a fuckin’ fruitcake and as crazy as a loon even if joined the throng. When a news crew turned up, she she’d had Saint Joseph and the Virgin Mary for gave an interview pre tending to be from Saratoga. parents and grown up in the Little House on the “They ran it later on the news, with the caption Is Prairie,” she tells him. “So don’t be kicking the walls that her? Running and re-running the foota4ge of my unless it’s just for fun.” ‘interview’. Aha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

DE GERLACHE FAMILY COLLECTION; TERRY O’NEILL/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY O’NEILL/HULTON TERRY COLLECTION; FAMILY GERLACHE DE As a child, O’Connor endured fi erce beatings from To buy a copy for £17 go to guardianbookshop.com .

Saturday 12 June 2021 The Guardian 15 ¶ Label

him with sugary mint tea, gives him money for a taxi Fiction and realises she is hopelessly infatuated. He was half her age and she’d “never seen anyone more beautiful”. In “The King of Castelldefels” former jazz musician Nacho wakes up in a garden he doesn’t recognise, with a hangover. “Everything’s fl oating, fl owing. Brain, skin, lawn – it’s all the same.” Via a series of weirdly plausible events, he is asked to give English lessons to Three linked novellas Barcelona’s Brazilian soccer star Ronaldinho. While offer an unearthly, magical their unlikely arrangement intriguingly colours the surface of the story , the reader is increasingly caught view of a city in all its up in a dark undertow evinced by glimpses of Nacho’s beauty and its shadows fi rst marriage, his relationship with his much younger girlfriend and her son, and his recollections of shared Nicholas Wroe addictions with an old fl ame from his touring days. It is a rare prosaic clunk of exposition when the reader is informed that Ronnie, as Nacho is soon At fi rst sight Barcelona calling him, had scored “26 goals in all competitions, Dreaming, three linked including two against our bitter rivals, Real Madrid”. novellas billed as Rupert But his presence as a ubiquitous celebrity is artfully Thomson’s love letter to the deployed, as Thomson lays down intricate layers of city , appears a somewhat connection between stories, characters and locations. conventional excursion We fi rst spot him smiling down from a huge billboard for the author. His last few advertising gum in Amy’s story, and then her daughter Barcelona Dreaming novels have featured a maker notice s him out jogging . Amy’s friend Montse also by Rupert Thomson, of waxwork depictions of turns out to be Nacho’s fi rst wife. And Montse and her Corsair, £16.99 plague victims in renais- new husband are close to Jordi, a translator of literary sance Florence (Secrecy ), fi ction in the fi nal story, “The Carpenter of Montjuïc”, the voice of a frozen embryo (Katherine Carlyle), whose entanglement with a shady British businessman lesbian artists in the golden age of surrealism (Never unhelpfully impinges on his long, and unrequited, Anyone But You) and vampires (NVK , written under love for a woman he had known since schooldays. the unimprovable pen name of Temple Drake). But Thomson has always been good at assembling dis- although he plainly adores the place, it should come as crete worlds invested with a touch of the unearthly. no surprise that a Thomson love letter is not so much a Here there is a hint of fable, with a slightly skewed starry-eyed document as something sharper, stranger, reality refl ecting the dreams, delusions and often more unsettling and, ultimately, more revelatory. fraught emotions on display. The giant in the title of For Thomson’s inhabitants of the city – and in a Amy’s story actually materialises; a chest of drawers way for the city itself – much hinges on the lingering made of Russian birch “cut by the light of a full moon” implications of old emotions, relationships and exerts a strange pull; Nacho’s perception of the world actions. Wounds stubbornly refuse to close, whether moves woozily in and out of focus. from love aff airs gone wrong or love aff airs that never Yet there is also a hard clarity in the way light and were. Crises present themselves or are engineered. shade, rough and smooth coexist. Yes, there is tender- In the opening story, “The Giant of Sarrià”, we meet ness, and much sex, whether divorced British expat Amy, who one evening hears La Rambla hurriedly in a house under con- someone crying in the car park beneath her apartment. Thomson lived struction or on a carpet of warm There she fi nds a young Moroccan sex worker, Abdel, in Barcelona in pine needles in a forest clearing. whom we later learn has been raped. Amy comforts the mid 2000s But violent rela tion ships, mostly off stage, also cast their shadows. Thomson’s Barcelona is similarly defi ant in its insis- tence on complexity. He lived in the city in the mid 00s, around the time the stories are set, and one assumes he is of a mind with Amy when she explains why she decided to stay on after her divorce: the beaches and the mount ains and the bars; “the quality of light fi rst thing in the morning” and so on. But there is more to it. Thomson is also entranced by dusty forecourts, the cement factory just out of town, the view at night from the Ronda bridge of the six lane coastal highway , the smell of “exhaust fumes mingled with frangipani”.

To buy a copy for £14.78 go to guardianbookshop.com.

16 The Guardian Saturday 12 June 2021 Fiction ¶

that slakes modern Britain’s craving to see itself as A virtuosic debut about a black colour-blind, but leaves her steeped in numbness, an woman preparing for a party observer rather than a participant. “I have everything,” she declares, even as her narration slices surgically examines the disorienting through the notion that there’s any value in what she experience of assimilation has. Her experiences at her high-fl ying City job waver between outright assaults and insidious microaggres- Sara Collins sions. A colleague grabs her shoulders and presses “his open mouth on her face”. She feels “the spray of [her] co-worker’s indignation as he speak-shouts his Here is a short sharp shock thoughts re affi rmative action. Fucking quotas.” of a novel about the kind There is no escape. Not in the world and nor by of person the government’s going inward, where “the ugly machinery that grinds recent commission on race beneath all achievement” is laid bare. In the aftermath would have wanted to of a cancer diagnosis, she undergoes “an untethering profi le in their report. of self from experience”. By the time she arrives at her Natasha Brown’s virtuosic white boyfriend’s family estate for the party in ques- Assembly debut follows a British tion, where his parents – 21st-century stand-ins for by Natasha Brown, woman who is preparing to Clarissa and Richard Dalloway – are “all smiles, close Hamish Hamilton, attend a party, and who is and welcoming”, she has also arrived at this epiphany: £12.99 musing about her life and “I don’t want to be part of it. I want to grab at it, grab her place in the world as its face and pull open its mouth, prise its jaws apart she does. Comparisons with Mrs Dalloway would and reach down, in, deeper. Touch what’s inside.” be neither unwarranted nor, I suspect, unwelcome. This rejection is stunning for being both alienated Assembly fulfi ls, with exquisite precision, Virginia and alienating, and seems to be directed not only at Woolf’s exhortation to “record the atoms as they fall the social milieu she has found herself in, but also at upon the mind in the order in which they fall”, even modern Britain, where “their culture becomes parody though Brown has restricted herself to an astonish- on my body”. It expresses, fi ercely yet meticulously, ingly small quota of words in doing so. To say that the impossibility of ever touching “what’s inside”. Assembly is slight would be an understatement: not Her pained awareness of only is it barely even novella-sized, it is also organised her own code-switching into vignettes, so that its already meagre portion of – the “transformation of language is threaded through what seems compara- style, mannerisms, lightly tively like acres of space. The eff ect is to require aff ected City vernacular” – readers to supply the connective tissue necessary to calls to mind Frantz Fanon’s turn it into narrative – text that is sparse on the page work on the psychic ruptures expands on consumption; it swells like a sponge in caused by the experience the mind. of being colonised, or WE There seems to be a growing appetite for books like Dubois’s idea of double this, as if literature is mutating to fi t attention spans consciousness . Assembly stunted by social media, producing prose we can Atomising language is the kind of novel we ingest in spurts and digest at leisure such as Jenny and thought might have got if Woolf had Offi ll’s Weather and Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Natasha Brown collaborated with Fanon, Talking About This. Yet even though it has obvious except that I don’t think predeces sors, Assembly feels achingly unique as it either ever reined in their sentences the way Brown documents the experience of assimilation though does here, atomising language as well as thought. the point of view of a well-to-do black British woman. This means that when occasionally a single word Where Woolf needed dual perspectives, shifting from slides away from its expected usage – for example, Mrs Dalloway to the shell-shocked Septimus Smith a man opens a drinks cabinet and “reaches, spidery, to achieve her goal of adumbrating “the world seen into the rows of glasses and bottles”, or a train is by the sane and the insane, side by side”, Brown described as “tearing” people together – it introduces plunges us into a single consciousness that is being a degree of instability into the equipoise, reminding us forced to split. In doing so, she pinpoints how being that our narrator is charting her own disintegration: black in modern Britain involves a disorienting “A physical destruction now, to match the mental.” simultaneity Woolf couldn’t have imagined – being Brown nudges us, with this merging of form and cleaved mercilessly between the sane world and the content, towards an expression of the inexpressible insane world, at once. – towards feeling rather than thought, as if we are The narrator’s educational achievements and navigating the collapsing boundaries between lucrative career embody the kind of success story the narrator’s consciousness and our own. about – as she deadpans – “hard work, pulling up

NIKADA/GETTY; ANTONIO OLMOS/THE GUARDIAN OLMOS/THE ANTONIO NIKADA/GETTY; laces, rolling up shirtsleeves, and forcing yourself” To buy a copy for £11.04 go to guardianbookshop.com.

Saturday 12 June 2021 The Guardian 17 ¶ Fiction

of ambition. “He had begun to feel the fi rst stirrings Reimagining the extraordinary of it,” Lee writes, “the longing to transform himself life and death of a visionary into someone new, that special American itch for the future which, even now, so often affl icts the young.” dreamer who determined the In the next decade Green will unmake and remake shape of modern-day New York himself, including a burnishing year in the sugarcane planta tions of Trinidad, which will fi ll his pockets but Beejay Silcox shake loose his certainties. “He loses his understand- ing of the word free, for the newly freed still seem enslaved in all but name.” In a quiet corner of New Green will also meet the eff usive Samuel Tilden, York’s Central Park, there is unabashed dreamer and future presidential candi- a stone bench streaked with date. Tilden and Green will spend the rest of their bird droppings . It’s an unas- lives working to shape New York into the city they suming memorial for the believe it can be. Theirs is a love story wrought in “Father of Greater New steel, stone and silence; chaste and ever-yearning. York” – Andrew Haswell The Great Mistake is pure literary comfort food: yet The Great Mistake Green (1820-1903), a man another tale of gilded age New York, pitiless and gor- by Jonathan Lee, the clamorous, roiling city geous; yet another scrappy, self-made man thrusting Granta, £14.99 has largely forgotten. It was his way up through the social strata; yet another peer AH Green, a lawyer and into the brothels and seedy backrooms; yet another civic powerhouse, who championed the creation heart-hardened cop teetering on the edge; yet of Central Park, and the fi ve-borough infrastructure another contemplation of the fi ckleness of history, that gave New York its modern shape. No legacy is and the grand precarity of reputation. Paradoxically, immune from pigeon poo. it makes for quite the risk; it’s diffi cult to distinguish At the time, the borough plan – a consolidation yourself in the bustle. The lure of the New York novel of a dozen satellite towns into a single mega city – seems much like the lure of New York. “It was a cathe- was reviled as much it was celebrated, publicly dral of possibilities,” Green thinks of his city, “it denounced in 1898 as “The Great Mistake”. Jonathan might remember him or it might forget him.” Lee’s novelisation of Green’s life, written in the Much like its visionary hero, The Great Mistake south-east borough of Brooklyn, steals its title from feels quietly but intently ambitious, and similarly this historical outrage; a tale of blunders, bad luck driven by the quest for a kind of tidy beauty. Lee’s and fateful misunderstandings. prose is so carefully wrought “How do we picture the past?” the British writer This is not a novel it often wanders into aphor- asks, when the present brings much-needed context of grand deeds, ism. Green’s soul-shaking but the past is ever-receding. Fiction can collapse the but of grand year in Trinidad is described space between the two – conjure the past with the imagination, with gauzy, vague beauty, tools of the present. This is what Lee does, with a but the fate of Green’s black great deal of care and wit, in his fourth book. The a novel that assailant, Cornelius Great Mistake is not a novel of grand deeds, but of wonders how a Williams, unfolds in the grand imagination, a novel that wonders how a mind mind like Green’s margins – it’s all too ugly. like Green’s came into being. came into being “There are always at least When the intensely private Mr Green is gunned two histories happening,” down in the street outside his home at the age of 83, Lee writes, “the inner and rumours swirl: “Was it a crime of passion, or a poli- the outer, the private in the tical assassination, or some kind of great mistake?” public.” It is in imagining the Inspector McClusky is assigned to the case: a barrel- bruises and longings of Green’s private history that The chested, heavy-footed fellow who’s worn himself Great Mistake feels entirely its own. It is not an a little existentially thin, like so many literary antidote, but a humane correction to the impene- detectives before him. trable, stone-chiselled histories of impenetrable The Great Mistake skips between McClusky’s stone-chiselled men. fi dgety investigation and Green’s formative years. Central Park, Lee explains, is a “careful fraudu- Y oung Andrew is banished to New York at 15 to earn lence”. The waterways, the rocky outcrops, the his keep, and to have the dreamy wonder knocked wooded glens: all manmade. Landscaping the park out of him. “His family feared he might one day required more gunpowder than the battle of Gettys- succumb to the catastrophe of being a poet,” Lee burg. But none of that artifi ce matters once you’re jests. That’s not all they’re afraid of, and Green will walking there; you’re too grateful for the sheer glorious carry the weight of their unvoiced shame for the rest fact of it. The Great Mistake is the literary equivalent of of his life. (Potted biographies still refer to Green as a that too-cultivated wilderness. Go wander awhile. “confi rmed bachelor” – that tired old code.) Green arrives in New York nursing a tenacious case To buy a copy for £13.04 go to guardianbookshop.com.

18 The Guardian Saturday 12 June 2021 Fiction ¶

there’s no electricity or gas in the fl at – or anywhere. Books of Soon the water is off . Jed’s father is sure everything will be back to normal in a few days, but as it becomes the month harder to get supplies, Signy decides they must leave for her childhood home in the countryside, where survival might be possible. What she fi nds there is not what she expected. This is an intense, engaging and beautifully written fi rst novel. { SF and fantasy } A Nazi ghetto Rabbits by Terry Miles (Del Rey, £16.99) is the story for childless women, a deadly of K, a self-proclaimed expert on a dangerous under- ground game referred to only as “Rabbits”. He has mind-bending game, and never been a player, yet one night a reclusive tech a police inspector with ESP billionaire – who is rumoured to owe his success to winning an earlier round of the game – approaches Lisa Tuttle him for help. Something has gone wrong, and only K can fi x it. After promising to explain everything, the man disappears. As K struggles to identify the poten- tial problem, and a friend’s interest in the game takes a deadly turn, he wonders if he is going mad , seeing patterns where none exist. Or is the game itself chang- ing the fabric of reality? Quirky, mind-bending fun. Ed O’Loughlin’s fi fth novel,This Eden (Riverrun, £16.99), also plays with coincidence and features a Britain under Nazi rule is a staple of alternate history, mysterious tech billionaire and an existential global but CJ Carey’s Widow land (Quercus, £14.99) makes it threat that can only be stopped with the aid of a fresh again. The story is seen through the eyes of Rose, particular young man. It could hardly be more who, being young, healthy and attractive to men, has diff erent, though, in style and tone. A sophisticated the highest status permitted to women under the literary thriller, it is written with super-cool elegance caste system designed by Alfred Rosenberg, Britain’s and a keen eye for detail reminiscent of the best of Protector. It’s 1953, and the war continues, but Britain William Gibson. Manipulated by the mysterious, is one of Germany’s allies. Rose, who is having an aff air philosophising Towse, Aoife and Michael must keep with her boss in the ministry of culture, is assigned to moving, warned to stay off - rewrite classic works of literature to ensure they align A sophisticated grid or be captured by the with Nazi ideals. Another task brings her into contact literary thriller, sinister agents pursuing with inhabitants of “widowland” – a ghetto for This Eden is them for reasons Towse is childless women over 50 who are treated with offi cial written with not ready to disclose. They contempt and kept on short rations. They have not manage to get from Cali- forgotten the truth about the past and have something super-cool fornia through Africa to to teach Rose about books and resistance. CJ Carey is a elegance and Israel, and then to Europe pseudonym for Jane Thynne, author of a series of spy a keen eye for the fi nal showdown in novels set in 1930s Germany, and she clearly knows for detail Dublin. This is a breath- her Nazis. Rosenberg was a real Nazi ideologue who taking, memorable adven- thought society would benefi t if women were forced ture with a serious heart. to live under a caste system, with older, childless The Colours of Death widows seen as a drain. This is an absorbing, Orwellian (Hodder & Stoughton, dystopia that makes a good case for the subversive £16.99), the debut novel from Patricia Marques, is a power of literature. police procedural set in Lisbon, in an alternate reality For good old-fashioned science fi ction and a in which a small number of people – the “Gifted” – veritable feast for the maths and science nerd, turn to have telepathic or telekinetic powers. One of them, The Martian author Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary (Del Isabel Reis, is a police inspector confronted with the Rey, £20). My own defi ciencies had me skimming over most disturbing case of her career: a man is dead, the calculations, but this is still the most enjoyable probably forced by someone powerfully Gifted to kill hard SF I have read in years: funny, well plotted and himself in a most painful way. Marques plays fair with full of surprises. In addition to enjoying the cracking the reader, and this is a good detective story which story, it was a pleasure to read about people relying on can only work if the reality of extrasensory powers are logic and science as the best way to solve problems. accepted from the start. But the discrim ination faced Susannah Wise’s This Fragile Earth (Gollancz, by the Gifted doesn’t work as a meta phor, and there’s £14.99) is a powerful near-future tale of apocalypse no explanation of why the regulatory system was and survival. It begins quietly in London with the developed, or hints of any other major diff erences ordinary daily routines of Signy, a stalled musical between this Portugal and our world, which seems a composer, and her six-year-old son Jed. One day, missed opportunity in an otherwise intriguing story.

Saturday 12 June 2021 The Guardian 19 ¶ Interview Meg Mason

A hit in Australia, where she lives, Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss tackles marriage and mental health with humour and heart. She tells Alex Clark why she wrote it in secret ‘I was utterly convinced no one would ever see it. It was the last hurrah’

hen Meg Mason took herself which looks set to be fi lmed by the company behind off to her shed to write her the Oscar winners Birdman and 12 Years a Slave. To third book, a certain prag- adapt the well-worn anecdote of the waiter delivering matic confi dence accompan- champagne to George Best, where did it all go wrong? ied her. After all, she knew It was the going wrong, Mason explains to me via W she could do it: there on her Zoom from Christchurch, New Zealand, where she’s shelves were her memoir visiting family for the fi rst time since the start of the of having children in her 20s, Say It Again in a Nice pandemic, that started her on the road to things Voice, and her 2017 novel You Be Mother. The New going right. Chiefl y, it allowed her to feel her way into Zealander, now 43, had built up a career in journal- the character of Martha who, we learn at the ism in the UK and Australia, where she lives, writing beginning of Sorrow and Bliss, has just turned 40 and for outlets such as the Times, Vogue and the New just split up with Patrick, her husband of eight years. Yorker, and felt comfortable with discipline and But from those opening paragraphs, we are aware deadlines. If she sat there for a year, she fi gured, that there is more going on than the end of a something “at least as good” as her previous work relationship: “An observer to my marriage would would emerge. think I have made no eff ort to be a good or better It did not, not even when there were 85,000 words wife. Or, seeing me that night, that I must have set of it. And it wasn’t just that the “untitled Christmas out to be this way and achieved it after years of novel” wasn’t coming together as she’d hoped, it was concentrated eff ort. They could not tell that for most that “it was dreadful, it was awful, and I knew it, and I of my adult life and all of my marriage I have been didn’t stop”. It probably still exists somewhere in trying to become the opposite of myself.” Gmail, she says now, but “I couldn’t open it with a The story that follows includes depictions of gun to my head”. Her feeling at the end of that year intense and frequently painful family dynamics, was overwhelmingly one of failure, of not “being most notably between Martha, her sister and their equal” to the thing that she most wanted to do. mother; the long tail of parental loss and trans- And yet here she is, ready to tell me about Sorrow generational trauma; the innumerable false starts and Bliss, the novel that emerged from the wreckage; of a stalled career; and the emotional demands of the novel that has amassed “must read” pre- both having and not having publication quotes from Gillian Anderson and Ann Meg Mason children. But at the centre Patchett, whose protagonist, Martha, has been Sorrow and Bliss was of it all stands the reality compared to Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, and a ‘post-hope project’ of Martha’s mental 

PHOTOGRAPHY Grant Sparkes-Carroll Saturday 12 June 2021 The Guardian 21 ¶ Interview Meg Mason

 illness, a condition that catapults her into in her mother, Celia, an alcohol-dependent sculptor periods of intolerable sadness, epic self-destruction who has dealt with the demands of motherhood and terrifying isolation. And, for much of the novel, largely by ignoring them, and Celia’s sister, Winsome, it is an illness that is kept hidden not only from the who has married into extreme wealth and cannot reader, but from Martha herself. Even when she is now bear any wrinkles in everyday life. fi nally diagnosed, the narrative refers only to her Mason says she has a complicated relationship condition with two dashes (“‘I wonder’,” a new with Say It Again in a Nice Voice, the memoir she psychiatrist asks her, “‘has anyone ever mentioned published in 2012 : “ They say, never drive angry. —— to you, Martha?’ I moved my hand and said no, I think never write angry is probably a good life thank goodness”). lesson as well.” She had moved from New Zealand Mason’s refusal to put a name to what ails Martha to Australia at 16, and on to London at 22, where she becomes a defi ning feature of the novel. Why did stayed until the birth of her fi rst child. She and her she do it? In the aftermath of her disastrous fi rst husband now live in Sydney with their two teenage start, she explains, she had started writing again daughters . For years after her memoir came out, she with no expectations: “It was a post-hope project. had to parry questions about her family life, and It wasn’t for my publisher, I didn’t tell her I was particularly whether or not she regretted having doing it. And I was truly and utterly convinced that children young. I ask whether she feels prepared for no one would ever see it.” She describes feeling people to ask how much her own life is refl ected in “a bit drunk with it, because I didn’t care. It was Sorrow and Bliss? like making this enor mous meal from everything It is, she says, a work of imagination; she has not you have in the fridge, with no recipe, just throwing experienced the same issues as Martha. But she is it all in. It just doesn’t matter. And it was the last adamant that she wanted to explore the territory, hurrah.” She didn’t even conceive of it as a novel arguing that the estimates about mental health; that material, and the striking ‘They say, never of the proportion of people and turbulent relationship between Martha and her drive angry. impacted by mental illness – sister Ingrid entered, she says, almost “without I think never she mentions one in four – conscious thought”. write angry seem “ridiculously” low: But when she did send it to her publisher, who “When I look around my reassured her that it would defi nitely see the light is probably group of friends and my of day, she started to feel “anxious about the fact a good life family, I can’t see a person that I’d essentially written a mental health novel by lesson as well’ who hasn’t been touched by accident”. She worried about the interpolation of it in some way.” extremely harrowing material with high comedy, She’s thrilled with the and about the way that she’d amalgamated bits and idea of the fi lm adaptation, pieces of real conditions to make a sort of composite she says, but she’s staying portrait of mental disintegration; she was concerned well out of it, feeling that about readers, especially vulnerable ones, following her presence wouldn’t be useful. Sorrow and Bliss is too closely some of Martha’s decisions and behav- set in London and Oxford – an interesting choice for iours. “I felt such a burden of responsibility to any someone who hasn’t lived in the UK for a long time. reader for whom that’s a real and daily battle. To “I’m hugely sentimental about London,” she says. them I’m just a novelist in a shed having, in inverted “In my mind, it looks like a Work ing Title fi lm at this commas, fun with it.” Around this time, she even point, even though I remember it being, particularly suggested to her publisher that she might put it out where I was, a little bit rough. But I think there are anonymously, or at the very least without her own things about the novel intrinsic to it, that can’t work biography, photograph or acknowledgements. “I anywhere else.” She asked British friends to read the wanted it to be allowed to exist on its own without manuscript closely for inaccuracies. that author just dancing in at the end.” There is another novel in the works: “But what A compromise was reached in the form of those I’m doing is I’m sort of checking every day that I dashes, that redacted condition, a creative decision should still be going on with it. And I’m not doing that, as she wanted, worked to serve a broader the same thing I did before, which is just to press ambition: “It’s not the schizophrenia book, the on. So what I’ve learned out of Sorrow and Bliss, bipolar book, the borderline personality book, it’s a even if it’s diffi cult, it shouldn’t be that diffi cult. book about what it feels like to have X or to look after And if you’re not fi nding it interesting, no one else someone with X and what it does to the extended is going to fi nd it interesting.” Assuming that she family and the marriage.” It also allowed her to refl ect doesn’t have to junk it all, how does she think things on situations that commonly exist beyond mental will pan out? She laughs. “It’s so tricky to work out illness as well as within it, including the way that how to simulate that sense of privacy that I had women are treated by the health system, and that before, which is what made the novel basically families create intractable roles and scripts for one successful in the end. It’s much harder this time another. Sorrow and Bliss is Martha’s story, but also to convince myself no one’s going to see it, because an ensemble piece, creating wonderful characters I think they might ” •

22 The Guardian Saturday 12 June 2021 Inside story ¶

couple of years ago I found myself True to nature gazing at the cover of a book I’d loved as a child: the 1942 Carnegie Melissa Harrison medal-winning The Little Grey Men, by the naturalist, illustrator A and sportsman Denys Watkins- Pitchford, who wrote under the name B B . The charge it carried felt electric, and even From Watership Down to opening the cover felt risky; I braced myself in case its magic had faded in the 40 years since it had been The Animals of Farthing read to me at bedtime. The Little Grey Men was published during the Wood … leading authors misery of the second world war, with destruction all around and a sense – familiar to us today – of a discuss the children’s world in terminal decline. I remembered it as an utterly luminous evocation of spring, summer and books that inspired autumn in the countryside, seen through the eyes of the very last gnomes in Britain: “honest-to-goodness gnomes, none of your baby, fairy-book tinsel stuff , them to write about and they live by hunting and fi shing like the animals and birds, which is only proper and right,” as BB the natural world wrote. As a child I loved that businesslike tone, with its fl attering dismissal of other, “babyish” stories; I loved BB’s illustrations, the precise and detailed rendering of the natural history in the book, and most of all the feeling it gave me of a secret world 

Branching out Kingfi shers in Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris’s The Lost Words JACKIE MORRIS JACKIE

Saturday 12 June 2021 The Guardian 23 ¶ Inside story

 to which I was being granted privileged access. I needn’t have worried. As I turned the pages I found myself enchanted all over again, and I began to think about the other nature novels I’d loved: Fiver, Hazel and Bigwig’s fl ight from ecological destruction in Richard Adams’s Watership Down; the glorious Devon riverscapes of Henry Williamson’s Tarka the Otter; Wulfgar gnawing off Teg’s paw to free her from a snare in Brian Carter’s A Black Fox Running. I could clearly see how those early animal stories had shaped my adult interests and sympathies, but when I tried to fi nd modern books that might awaken children’s interest in nature – perhaps written by a more diverse range of voices than those I had grown up with – I was surprised by how few there were. Working in secret in case I couldn’t pull it off , I began to write By Ash, Oak and Thorn, an updated story inspired by, and in homage to, the magical world created by BB. “I believe that the most powerful books a person reads are when they’re making decisions about the kind of human they want to be,” says MG Leonard, author of the bestselling Beetle Boy, Beetle Queen and Battle of the Beetles – all-too-rare examples of nature-based fi ction for today’s children. “I write in the hope that my readers, once they’ve fi nished my books, won’t subscribe to the assumption that bugs are dis- gusting or terrifying, and will marvel at the amazing little creatures that run this planet.” Leonard’s books off er children a way of seeing the world and relating to other creatures – one that may prove vital in overcoming the ecological challenges we face. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden was the nature novel that changed Leonard’s life. “I read it several times as a girl and loved it, but it wasn’t until I was in my 20s and struggling with depression that the message hit home,” she recalls. “It was one of the reasons I began gardening; at fi rst planting a window box of lavender, then, slowly, gathering containers of plants on the steps up to my fl at, which brought ‘I hope that once the bugs, and they attracted the birds. It made me they’ve fi nished happy.” Books are tool kits: the things we learn from my books, my them can change our own lives, as well as the world. readers will The extraordinary success of Robert Macfarlane marvel at the and Jackie Morris’s The Lost Words: A Spell Book is amazing little also proof of a growing hunger for writing that con- creatures that nects children to nature. It was created as a response to the Oxford Junior Dictionary’s decision to delete run this planet’ dozens of nature words from its pages, and a way of M G Leonard celebrating those that had been culled. “Keeping everyday nature alive in the words and stories of children in particular – who are the ones who will grow up and decide what to save and what to lose – seems to me vital,” Macfarlane wrote at the time. So what were the books he read as a boy? “Colin Dann’s The Animals of Farthing Wood series activated an early sense of the problems of human-animal confl ict,” he says. “I got deep into Brian Jacques’s Redwall series, and like many people my age I still shudder at the memory of General Woundwort from Watership Down. I also pored over B B’s Brendon

SABENA JANE BLACKBIRD; SOPHIE O’CONNOR/MACMILLAN/NETFLIX SOPHIE BLACKBIRD; JANE SABENA Chase, and details from it – including that honey

24 The Guardian Saturday 12 June 2021 Inside story ¶ buzzards scrim their nests with fresh beech leaves, indelible impression on generations of children. as the young leaves contain a natural insecticide – Mary Colwell , the author of Beak, Tooth and Claw: are with me still.” Living with Predators in Britain, is a conservationist I fell in love with Tarka the Otter when I was too and the campaigner behind the growing call for a young to know anything about its author’s postwar natural history GCSE. “I felt grown up,” she says. PTSD, or his later fascism – as did the farmer and “I had a diff erent demeanour reading them than I bestselling author of The Shepherd’s Life and English did with books that were obviously for children. Pastoral, James Rebanks . “I was deeply aff ected by They awakened my serious mind . It was as though the beauty of the pictures Henry Williamson painted everywhere there were little eyes, sharp teeth and with words,” he says now, “and there was a radical fl uttery wings – and they were in the same place as aspect to its eff ect on me, because I was beginning I lived! I just had to look, and a cast of incredible to realise that if nature was beautiful and literary, characters would be revealed.” then who saw it more directly than me, a kid who David Lindo, an author, broadcaster and wildlife worked in fi elds all day long?” Portals, as well as tool tour leader, was behind the poll to fi nd Britain’s fi rst kits: nature stories can leave marks that change lives. national bird. Writing as the Urban Birder, h e aims Macfarlane makes the point that the books that via his books, campaigns and events to connect a fi rst open the door to nature need not be fi ction at all: diverse range of people, “What we might call ‘fi eld guides’ can be a form of from beginners to experts, imaginative literature, especially to a child’s mind. to nature in towns and cities I still have, and still turn to, the Reader’s Digest all over the world. In his Guides , which I bought with hoarded money and case, it was conservationist book tokens, about one a year: their combination Gerald Durrell’s memoirs of artwork, identifying ‘facts’ and a compressed that proved an early inspir- poetry of description sharpened my eyes and fi red ation: “As a child I wasn’t my mind.” Helen Macdonald , author of H Is for Hawk , read to at night nor encour- was also a fan of guide books: “They were full of aged to read fi ction – but I characters that I could learn to recognise and name, did indulge in factual litera- and then, if I were lucky, strike out and see them ture,” he says. “Read ing My living in the real world around me,” she recalls. Family and Other Animals Like me, she loved BB ’s books, too: “I obsessed over really fuelled my future lust Wild Lone, his biography of a fox; and Manka, the Sky Clockwise from for travel and discovery.” Gypsy, about an albino pink-footed goose. I identifi ed below: The 2018 There has never been a with the animals in their pages, and rooted for them TV adaptation of sh ortage of books featuring as they went through all manner of perils.” Watership Down; animals, of course – they Not quite fi eld guides, Ladybird’s classic and Beetle Boy; The are a staple of children’s recently updated What to Look for … series, originally Ladybird Book publishing from board illustrated by the great Charles Tunnicliff e , left an of Pond Life books on, and stretch all the way back from Aesop to Babar the Elephant and Peter Rabbit. But these are often not the kind of nature books that inspire children. They are simply “ourselves in fur”, as the critic Margaret Blount put it. One of the things we do to animals “is tame them”, writes Clare Pollard in the brilliantly illuminating cultural history Fierce Bad Rabbits: The Tales Behind Children’s Picture Books. “We also tame children. The similarity between these two processes does much to explain how common animals have become in picture books, especially farm animals or pets. We make these creatures walk upright, like circus ponies. We put Anubis in mittens and use him to teach three- year-olds how to behave.” She is right, of course: I may have enjoyed the Babar books as a child, but it was stories about real animals in their own habitats, such as the vividly observed A Black Fox Running, that made me the writer and nature lover I am today – and made me want to inspire other children in turn •

Melissa Harrison’s By Ash, Oak and Thorn is published by Chicken House.

Saturday 12 June 2021 The Guardian 25 ¶ How I wrote

When I fi nish a novel, would have two speeds: ‘I learned to I usually forget its origins, in the fi rst section, the do more by processes and pains: pace, or anti-pace, of they are no use to me memory, while the longer say ing less’ now. I know that early second section would Julian Barnes on, I wrote down the move in “real ” time. name of a friend I’d been What I do remember I published The Sense of she do that, you wonder? close to at school and well was the problem an Ending in 2011, when So in my novel, there is then lost touch with; with the title. I came I was 65. Various things an opening section of only to discover, when up with The Sense of an change you as a person about 50 pages, then a I was around 50, that Ending and tried it out and a writer as you age. gap of 40 years, and then he had killed himself on friends. Most liked it, You think more about a hundred pages more. a quarter of a century but one pointed out that time and memory; I wouldn’t have risked previously. It was not the there was a work of liter- about what time does to that in younger years. death itself but that long, ary criticism by Frank memory, and memory The second thing is a eerie unknowing ness Kermode with the same does to time. You also realisation – shared with that played into a central title. I hadn’t heard of it, mistrust memory more other artists – that you strand of the novel. I also let alone read it (and than when you were don’t have to put every- knew that I wanted the still haven’t). I thought, younger: you realise thing in. There are novel to be at the same a little cavalierly: “Well, that it resembles an act painters who in old age time meditative and a there’s no copyright in of the imagination rather allow the canvas or the psycho logical drama. titles, he’s had it for than a matter of simple wood to show through Two modes, just as it nearly 50 years, it’s mine mental recuperation. their markings. Verdi, in now.” When the reviews And when it comes to his later years, scored came out, several pointed writing, two things may more sparingly; as he put out that my book was happen, and with luck it , “I learn ed when not to “in conversa tion” with do. The fi rst is you have write notes.” And I think Kermode’s, either a greater confi dence in I learn ed when not to put working out his ideas, your ability to move in those unnecessary or perhaps providing through time. The great sentences. It’s not a a riposte. Intertextuality, ex emplar here is Alice loss of physical energy you see. Aaaarrgggh. Munro – you can read a (though that is also Well, that’s one lesson story of hers, 30 pages unignorable), more a the book taught me, or so, and realise that, recognition that you can at least. almost without your often do more by saying noticing, a character’s less. While at the same The Man in the Red Coat whole lifetime seems to time inviting the reader by Julian Barnes is out in have passed. How did to fi ll in the gaps. paperback from Vintage.

Tom Gauld

26 The Guardian Saturday 12 June 2021