ReviewSaturday 1 May 2021 – Issue № 171

Personal Best Alison Bechdel on love, creativity and exercise addiction — By Emma Brockes

‘Travelling makes you feel solitude more keenly. It touches deeper parts of you. It makes you ReviewSaturday 1 May 2021 – Issue № 171 question who you are.’ — Jhumpa Lahiri, page 23

Contents The week in books ...... 04 The books that made me by Daljit Nagra...... 05

COVER STORY Witness the fi tness: Alison Bechdel’s new graphic memoir ...... 06

Book of the week: Second Place by Rachel Cusk ...... 12 Nonfi ction reviews The Foghorn’s Lament: The Disappearing Music of the Coast by Jennifer Lucy Allan...... 14 The Accidental Footballer by Pat Nevin ...... 15 Pedro and Ricky Come Again: Selected Writing 1988-2020 by Jonathan Meades ...... 16 Fiction reviews China Room by Sunjeev Sahota ...... 18 Circus of Wonders by Elizabeth Macneal ...... 19 Male Tears by Benjamin Myers ...... 19 Civilisations by Laurent Binet ...... 20

INTERVIEW Jhumpa Lahiri ...... 21

BOOKS ESSAY Childcare issues: the new nanny novel ...... 24

The best books to understand football and money, plus Tom Gauld ...... 26

COVER ILLUSTRATION Alison Bechdel Saturday 1 May 2021 The Guardian 3 ¶ Forewords

writing by infl uential The week in books women. The former prime minister Gordon 1 May Brown will be among those tackling some of the urgent questions of our time in a series Sonic booms world. With audiobooks, of lectures, with C op26 Some good news : we all there’s a feeling that it’s president Alok Sharma bought a lot of books an additive.” Hear, hear. talking on the climate last year. The Publishers Sian Cain crisis, and Every day Association reported Sexism founder Laura this week that the total Who, when, Wye Bates leading dis cus sions income from consumer From Reverend Richard around the eff ect of sales was £2.1bn in 2020 Coles speaking about Covid-19 on motherhood. – up 7% on the previous grief in the time of “Restrictions m ay have countryside, with one year, despite bookshops Covid-19, to poet Lemn robbed us of an IRL protagonist confi ned to shutting during the pan- Sissay marking the one- audience, but there are a strange mansion and demic. Fiction, non fi ction year anniversary of some gains: this will be ano ther travelling the and children’s books George Floyd’s killing, our most sustainable and world writing viral social were all up year on year, more than 200 speakers accessible event yet,” media posts. but the biggest boom by are lined up for this year’s said Hay’s Christopher The shortlisted novels far was in audiobooks, Hay festival. The free Bone. “Hay festival 2021 are The Vanishing Half by which rose by 37% to digital literary event, is a marker and a prom- Brit Bennett; Piranesi by £133m, becoming the which will be broadcast ise: stories matter and Susanna Clarke; Unsettled fastest-growing sector in from Richard Booth’s the conversation cannot Ground by Claire Fuller; publishing . Fionnuala Bookshop in Hay-on- be stopped (so long as we Transcendent Kingdom by Barrett, editorial director Wye , kicks off on 26 May, remember to unmute).” Yaa Gyasi (above); How of audio at HarperCollins, and will run for 12 days. Alison Flood the One-Armed Sister told the BBC last year: Authors set to appear Sweeps Her House by “Nobody is running range from Ali Smith and Women’s prize Cherie Jones; and No One scared from it, in com- Colm Tóibín to Michael shortlist announced Is Talking About This by parison to the similar Rosen, Marian Keyes and In a year of widespread Patricia Lockwood. The moment for ebooks Mario Vargas Llosa, while inertia, three cheers for a winner will be announ ced where there was that actors including Kate Women’s prize for fi ction on 7 July, and there is a fear that they were Winslet and Vanessa Red- shortlist that transports one-in-three chance that cannibalising other grave will be perfor ming readers from Barbados to it will feature twins.

JOHAN PERSSON/PA; HENRIK MONTGOMERY/TT/PA HENRIK PERSSON/PA; JOHAN formats in the book at a gala event sharing Alabama to the English Katy Guest Lobbying WORD OF THE WEEK Since it emerged that vacuum-cleaner émigré James Dyson was texting Boris Steven Poole Johnson last year to clarify that there would be no change to the tax paid by his workers, in the UK temporarily to build medical ventilators, the issue of political “lobbying” has once again come to the fore. But why is it called that? A “lobby”, from the Latin lobi um, was originally a cloister of the sort found in monasteries, not much frequented by the present prime minister. After its introduction in the 16th century it began also to be used to describe any kind of corridor or anteroom . As Polonius says of Prince Hamlet (left): “You know sometimes he walks four hours together / Here in the lobby.” The political sense is fi rst given in 1640, describing the public entrance hall of parliament: “The outward Room of the Commons House, called the Lobby.” This was designed to enable interviews between MPs and non-members. So when people ask legislators to change the law in their favour, they are “lobbyists”, fi rst recorded in the mid-19th century (along with “lobbying”) for petitioners of the US Congress. Happily, modern technology means you don’t have to stand in an actual lobby to be a lobbyist, but can do it all over WhatsApp.

4 The Guardian Saturday 1 May 2021 The books that made me ¶

so far only read sections of it. It’s such a forbidding ‘Shuggie Bain had me in bits’ venture that hopefully it’ll keep me from retiring. Daljit Nagra The last book that made me cry The fi nal scene between mother and son in Shugg ie Bain by Douglas Stuart has a triple deployment of loo roll; by the fi nal use, I was in bits. Whoever uses the leitmotif of loo roll to excite tears in the reader ? The book I am currently reading The last book that made me laugh Poetry in a Global Age by Jahan Ramazani. His key Vahni Capildeo’s Measures of Expatriation is compli- argument is that poetry is inherently constructed by catedly funny, and I love the unexpected moments a network of global engagements, this being the most of wit. generous way to appreciate a text. The book I give as a gift The book that changed my life Richard Scott’s Soho is the most gripping portrayal of At the age of 19, I found William Blake’s Songs of Inno- queer lives I’ve read so far. It always wins me gratitude cence and of Experience in a bookshop in Sheffi eld; it for my gifting skills. was the fi rst time I’d read poetry and I’ve yet to stop. The book I’d most like to be remembered for The book I wish I’d written In an attempt at humility, I declare an indiff erence to Philippa Perry’s The Book You Wish Your Parents Had the value system of legacy! I’d rather focus on the joys Read . It is annoyingly insightful about parenting; of scribbling my next book. each time my wife mentions it, I’d like to say : “Oh, My comfort read that book I wrote!” John Milton’s Paradise Lost is one of those rare The book that infl uenced my writing moments in poetry when language is inside-outside Derek Walcott’s The Star-Apple Kingdom. Discovering the central tones of English, and I feel at home in this an exciting poet of colour and one who employed choppy music. Me, highbrow? I wear a bow tie as voices gave me licence to be linguistically licentious I compose these answers. (archaic meaning of this word only, please!) The book I think is most underrated The book that changed my mind All About H Hatterr by GV Desani is the precursor I was freed from the embarrassment of my Indian to Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and begins heri tage by Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks: an exciting strand of literature by writers of Indian “For it is implicit that to speak is to exist absolutely heritage. This could also be my answer to “the book for the other.” that made me laugh”, but placing it here gives it the The book I’m ashamed not to have read grandeur it deserves. Sometime in the future, when I retire, the fi rst book I’ll

ANTONIO OLMOS/THE OBSERVER OLMOS/THE ANTONIO read is The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser , having Daljit Nagra is the chair of the Royal Society of Literature.

Saturday 1 May 2021 The Guardian 5 ¶ Cover story My sporting life

As her new memoir comes out, Fun Home author Alison Bechdel talks to Emma Brockes about the power of exercise, being seduced by a fan, and marrying twice: fi rst as a protest and later in love

he fi rst obsession, for Alison Bechdel, One side eff ect of a lifetime spent chasing the endor- was with karate. In her early 20s and phin high of hard exercise is that Bechdel, at 60, looks 20 fresh out of college, the artist and years younger than her age, appearing via Zoom from her writer turned up on a whim to an all- home in Vermont. “I have my Zoom fi lter, my Vaseline women’s karate class (this was the lens, on!” she says jokingly, but the fact remains, she Tearly 1980s in New York), became must be the world’s fi ttest cartoonist, an artist with the swiftly addicted, and a year later, after stamina of an ultra-marathon runner, whose obsession training fi ve nights a week, popped out the other end with fi tness runs almost as deep as with work. The ques- with a black belt. After that, in swift succession, came tion of the book is how the two are connected, and what, fanatical attachments to skiing, cycling, yoga, running, precisely, Bechdel thinks she’s been doing all these years. climbing, aerobics and weight training. “Due to space That physical and mental fi tness are linked is not a constraints,” she writes in The Secret to Superhuman new idea, of course, not least in modern times, when Strength, her graphic memoir about these obsessions the notion that fi tness is next to godliness is heavily and the quest for enlightenment that drove them, “I promoted by the gym industry. As in previous books in have not touched on my passion for in-line skating.” which she marries memoir with literary history, she This is Bechdel’s third graphic memoir, the fi rst of fl ips between an account of her own life and that of which, the 2006 blockbuster Fun Home, brought her other writers: William Wordsworth (hung up on walking the kind of fame not usually conferred on cartoonists. as a short cut to the writer’s sublime); Jack Kerouac With mordant humour, Bechdel detailed growing up (once climbed a mountain in in rural Pennsylvania in a family that, if it didn’t turn ‘If you had told tennis shoes, provoking a her into a writer exactly, certainly bequeathed her me that I would natural high as powerful as a life-long wealth of material. (In short: Bechdel’s some day become any brought on by drugs); parents, who were teachers, ran a part-time funeral tired of talking and Margaret Fuller, the home, and just as Bechdel was starting to come 19th-century feminist who out as a lesbian, her closeted gay father died in a about myself, I worked alongside Ralph presumed suicide.) A few years later, an obscure would not have Emerson on notions of reference she’d made in a cartoon strip to misogyny believed you’ transcendentalism in nature. in movies was rediscovered and the Bechdel Test, Between these writers, as it became known – the require ment that a movie Bechdel traces a “chain should include at least one scene in which two of infl uence”, one that she women talk to each other about something other follows all the way to recent than men – made her a household name. booms in physical fi tness.

6 The Guardian Saturday 1 May 2021 Cover story ¶ OLIVER PARINI OLIVER

There are a lot of things to unpack in all this, not Alison Bechdel ‘Is it believed you, because I had least the delusion, present in most of us when we possible to engineer this boundless need to be exercise, that we are at some level staving off death. a creative fl ow? The understood and recognised. (As Don DeLillo put it in Underworld, evoking a scene short answer is no’ And yet I reached a point of people running on treadmills: “They were training during the Fun Home hul- to live forever.”) For Bechdel, mortality “is the cen tral laballoo when I really started to feel overexposed.”) anxiety. Every little anxiety we have can be boiled The impact of her background surfaces most down to fear of death, or of disease and dependence. starkly, as it does for many people in relation to their So why not just try to deal with it head on?” childhoods, in Bechdel’s intimate relationships. Part There is also the question of creative work and the of the project of her new book was for Bechdel to look frame of mind best attained to achieve it. “Looking at back over her relation ship history and see how or why these other writers in periods when they had great she behaved in certain pivotal ways. There are some excitement and periods of being really depressed, wild episodes. In her 30s, while living in Minnesota, she or addicted, or stuck, wondering is it possible to received a fan letter from a woman living in a farm- engineer that creative fl ow?” The short answer, she house in rural Vermont, and decided on a whim to says, is no: when an artist is stuck, “the only thing move out there (and, incredibly, to move in with the you can do is do the work, which is really hard and letter writer, sight unseen). “That was a very strange you have to get through a lot of bad stuff before it gets period of my life,” she says, “and I was seduced. It was a good”. On the other hand, she says: “For me, that’s fan letter and I just … I let myself fall for that. That was where the exercise comes in. It’s a short cut, a cheat, a very narcissistic thing. And I’m hoping as I’m going to get some of that feeling of fl ow.” through my life I’m less self-absorbed in that way.” For decades, Bechdel worked in relative obscurity, The paradox of this new-found attitude is that it which, apart from occasional money worries, suited runs entirely counter to the slant of Bechdel’s work, her just fi ne. Her long-running comic strip, “Dykes to in which self-absorption powers every story. The Watch Out For”, ran in scores of alternative news- point, she says, is that the details of her life, when papers across the US and she had a large, loyal examined in granular enough detail, provide a gate- following. The publication of Fun Home, which was way to deeper and more universal discoveries. In The later made into a Broadway show, changed all that Secret to Superhuman Strength, she calls her fanatical and made Bechdel startlingly famous in a way that exercise a form of “metaphysical fi tness”, and likens she still hasn’t entirely grown used to. (“If you had the trance-like state it brings about to one writers have told me,” she says, “that I would some day become been documenting since the beginning of time. (Dislik- tired of talking about myself, I would not have ing an author, in Bechdel’s view, is no prohibition 

ILLUSTRATIONS Alison Bechdel Saturday 1 May 2021 The Guardian 7 ¶ Cover story Alison Bechdel

8 The Guardian Saturday 1 May 2021 Cover story ¶

Saturday 1 May 2021 The Guardian 9 ¶ Cover story Alison Bechdel

10 The Guardian Saturday 1 May 2021 Cover story ¶

 to enjoying their work in this regard. Take “Dykes to Watch Out For” was one of the fi rst Kerouac, “a real jerk”, she says. “He’s a very unpleas ant representations of lesbians – and in particular butch person, and ever ything I knew about him made me lesbians – in popular culture and it’s a source of kind of hate him. But I read his book The Dharma amazement that, since its inception in 1983, not a Bums in my 20s, when he was out in the wilderness, whole lot has changed. “I used to explain it in terms and it was like going on a hike with a good friend. I of just capitalism and commodifi cation,” says felt I’d been let in on that magical experience.”) Bechdel. “Most products are aimed at selling She describes using exercise as a way to eclipse the something to men, and men don’t want to see ego and achieve an abnegation of self, a useful state masculine women. But I don’t think that’s entirely for the artist to enter. Surely there’s a tension here, it.” She thinks for a moment. “I feel kind of fi ne about too; to vanquish the ego because it creates a better it. I don’t want to become commodi fi ed more than I condition for creative work, is itself an expression of have been, so it’s a way of being outside of that ego? Bechdel laughs. “I know. Yeah. It’s a paradox. system in a way that’s really wonderful.” But I do feel like something happens when you have One thing you notice about Bechdel is how, over turned yourself over wholly to a project, even though the course of her two previous memoirs (six years you have a mercenary goal at the end of it. Something after Fun Home, she wrote the loose follow-up Are You else happens. If it’s a genuine process, you somehow My Mother?), her depictions of herself as a child are – I’m very bad at talking about these intangible ideas con sistent with the way she is now. She grew up in a – but you do become free of yourself, at least for a con serva tive place at a conservative time, but she short period of time, and it’s such an ecstatic feeling. was permitted to be herself from the get-go. “I feel It’s worth whatever it takes.” like that was a gift from my parents. I was allowed to Sometimes, this experimental attitude of Bechdel’s be an intact self, in a way that probably wasn’t super doesn’t pan out quite as planned, particularly in her common at the time.” Her relationships. In her 40s, she had a crack at poly- ‘When you have parents may, occasionally, amory, dating a woman called Holly, who had another turned yourself have forced her into a dress, girlfriend. It seemed to Bechdel, briefl y, like a good fi t. over wholly to a but most of the time she “When I met Holly, and she told me she was polyam- project you was allowed to run around orous, it seemed like a perfect solution: I could be in boys’ clothes, with short polyamorous with my work, and she could have her become free of hair and the freedom to other partner.” In fact, it didn’t work out like that. yourself, and it’s pursue her obsessions. Instead of feeling free to work, Bechdel felt, as she such an ecstatic One of these was puts it in the book, “jealous and distracted”. feeling. It’s worth muscles. As a child, she sent She also realised something during that period: whatever it takes’ away for a pamphlet on how “that my work is not my life. That I do have a life apart to pump iron to achieve from my work.” Eventually, Holly gave up polyamory, them. “Part of why that and she and Bechdel are now married. “There’s some- whole muscle-man fantasy thing very appealing politically, and philosoph ically, was so potent for me as a child, was that it was really about polyamory; there is this great, expansive about being self-suffi cient; about not needing my openness that it promised. I like to think that I’m still parents, or anyone. That’s part of my whole intimacy a little bit polyamorous theoretically, if not actually.” struggle; I can’t just be with someone. It’s a challenge In fact the act of getting married – which only for me to stop doing and just be.” Bechdel still goes became legal for gay people across the US in 2015 – running, something she found “salvational” during struck Bechdel as surprisingly radical. She’d been the pan demic. But, after living with Holly for 13 married once before, as a protest. “In the early 2000s, years, she thinks she’s fi nally making a little progress some American cities did these civil disobedience on the art of being still; of “learning what it means to weddings and I happened to be in San Francisco with actually be present and truly open to the other person my partner, and we got very swept up into this excite- – not trying to turn them into some kind of extension ment.” Alongside a crowd of other couples, they got of myself”. married outside City Hall, an act, she says, that was It is the kind of paradox Bechdel has spent a career mired in “paradox: that neither of us had ever wanted brilliantly exposing; stillness as an indication of move- to get married – we thought of marriage as this back- ment. At 60, a fully grown adult by any measure, does ward concept, and we were all about abolishing mar- she ever feel sheepish still to be searching for the riage – but somehow it felt very radical, in the moment, truth about herself? “You’re not fully grown! We keep as two women, to go get married.” That marriage, and on growing! There are identifi able developmental all the others conducted that day, were eventually stages that proceed into old age, and most of them annulled by the state. But the feeling of radicalism involve becoming less focused on yourself.” Not remained, she says, and in 2015, “when it suddenly everyone does it. But for Bechdel, “that’s the exciting became legal, it seemed transgressive in a way. That’s thing about life: the constant opportunity to grow” • how I rationalised it to myself. I guess I’m able to hold that tension; it feels like a comfortable kind of dis- The Secret to Superhuman Strength by Alison Bechdel sonance for me to think of myself as a married person.” is published by Vintage.

Saturday 1 May 2021 The Guardian 11 Where the Outline trilogy centred the act of listen- Book of ing – the narrator often receding while the people she met recounted the details of their lives – Second Place the week re-establishes a more singular viewpoint, taking the form of either a letter or a slightly breathless address to someone called Jeff ers. The narrator is never named, and Jeff ers is neither seen nor contextualised . It’s a telling balance of opposites in a novel devoted { Fiction } An exploration of art, to the diffi culties of feeling complete. Alone in Paris, privilege and our relationship the narrator happens across an exhibition of paint- ings by an artist she refers to as L. The experience is with property unlocks some revel atory, transcendent. There is no doubt in her exquisitely cruel home truths mind that L must be the next artist she invites to inhabit the Second Place. After some delays and Sam Byers distractions, L accepts. Accessed by invitation only, the Second Place allows for a carefully managed titration of human If you wanted to locate a contact into the narrator’s calm but distanced world. defi ning preoccupation in L, though, upends this mechanism of order by the consistently remark- bringing someone with him – a young and beautiful able, formally daring fi ction companion called Brett. Even before meeting her, the of Rachel Cusk, you might narrator senses in this uninvited addition a profound well alight on the issue of and destabilising danger. “It wasn’t at all how I’d property. Cusk is obsessed planned it!” she tells Jeff ers. “I feared, suddenly, that Second Place with houses. Her revelatory my belief in the life I was living wouldn’t hold, and by Rachel Cusk, Outline trilogy, completed that all I’d built up would collapse underneath me Faber, £14.99 in 2018 with the publication and I’d be unhappy again.” In its apparent excess, of Kudos , faltered on the her panic is telling. This is a person for whom control awkward class politics of its central volume, in and comfort are eff ectively the same thing. which the narrator’s eff orts to renovate an ex-council Her fear is horribly confi rmed. When she meets fl at are undermined by the inconvenient working Brett for the fi rst time, Brett fi rst scrutinises, and classes living below. then, in an act of brazen disregard for personal Now, in her fi rst novel since the trilogy’s reimagin- boundaries, touches the narrator’s hair, fi nding it ing of novelistic form, Cusk gives us not just a dream “really quite dry”. Painfully, the narrator is made home but a dream home with a second home attached aware of “the feeling of invisibility I very often had, – the “Second Place” of the novel’s title. And it’s not now that I lived a life in which I was very rarely just any old place either. It is, says the narrator, “a commented on”. She drives home “like an animal in place of great but subtle beauty, where artists often dumb torment”, barely able to stop herself from seem to fi nd the will or the energy or just the oppor- screaming and lashing out . With just a touch and a tun ity to work ”. Indeed, she says, “people often say word, the smooth and ordered surface of her life has this is one of the last places”. been disturbed. She has been seen, and the The Second Place began as a “parcel of wasteland” experience of being seen is agony. adjoining the main property. The narrator and her By the next morning, though, that agony almost husband bought it “to prevent it from being misused”, seems welcome. Through Brett’s uncaring, youthful or to put it another way, to prevent any disturbance scrutiny, and by the unpredictable, at times confron- to the boundaries of their idyll. With the help of a tational presence of L, a kind of charge has been det- group of men “who all help one another when there’s onated. “My whole life,” she tells Jeff ers, “had merely physical work to be done”, the cottage on the property been a process of controlling was renovated. Now the narrator invites artists to use Cusk slowly myself and holding things it as a kind of retreat, or, as she puts it, “a home for the reveals the in.” Now, “strange, violent things that weren’t already here – the higher things ”. wound implied impulses were coming over On the surface, then, this is a novel of glaring by the novel’s me, one after another. I privilege, steeped in a mode of middle-class wanted to lie down and existence so rarifi ed that the “lower things” must title: the hammer my fi sts on the grass never be allowed to intrude. This is, however, a Cusk uneven, deeply – I wanted to experience a novel, and in Cusk novels the surface, as experienced gendered complete loss of control.” by reader and characters alike, invariably proves too experience Untethered from her fragile to be trusted. Second Place, it turns out, is a of freedom own self-protective novel less about property, and more about the boun- instincts though she daries and misplaced emotional investment for has become, the narrator which property is a proxy. instinctively grasps what

12 The Guardian Saturday 1 May 2021 Book of the week ¶ RICHARD SAKER/THE OBSERVER SAKER/THE RICHARD

she stands to gain. “This loss of control held new Stylistic poise after a failed relationship, possibilities for me, however angry and ugly and out Rachel Cusk she tells her “she would of sorts it had made me feel so far, as though it were always be able to fi nd a itself a kind of freedom.” But a freedom from what? white man to be obliterated by, if that was what she From “my own compartmentalised nature. All these wanted”. The line is typical of Cusk’s tonal method. compartments in which I had kept things, from The novel’s emotional nuance, its stylistic poise, has which I would decide what to show to other people been as perfectly and painstakingly constructed as who kept themselves in compartments too!” the life it describes, only to be blown apart by a fl at In this moment, for reader and narrator alike, and shattering statement, weighted around a central, the true function of property is laid bare. A home immovable truth. is nothing more than a compartment in which we Towards the end of the novel, the narrator says of contain ourselves, and by which we keep others out. L, whom she both admires and loathes, and by whom L, of course, has no time for it. Through his semi- she knows herself to be loathed in turn: “ He drew me transient life as an artist, he says, he has “watched with the cruelty of his rightness closer to the truth.” the people of his acquaintance create homes that We might say the same of Cusk , our arch chronicler were like plaster casts of their own wealth, with of the nullifying choice between suff ocation and humans inside. Those structures sometimes explosion. Her genius is that in deliberately blurring a exploded and sometimes merely suff ocated boundary of her own – that between a writer and her their occupants.” subject, between the expectation of autobiography It is through these diff ering relationships to so often attached to writing by women, and the property that Cusk slowly, agonisingly, reveals the carapace of pure invention so often unthinkably wound implied by the novel’s sly pun of a title: the aff orded to men – she tricks us into believing that uneven, contested, deeply gendered experience of her preoccupations and failings, her privileges and freedom. L, the epitome of the arrogant, entitled, apparent assumptions, are not our own. By the time unconstrained male artist, experiences property we realise what has happened, it is too late: our own not as a place or possession at all, but “as a set of surface has been disturbed, our own complacent inalienable rights attached to himself. His property compartment dismantled. It is a shock, but as the was the radial sphere of his own persona; it was the narrator of Second Place reminds us, “shock is environs of wherever he happened to be.” For the sometimes necessary, for without it we would drift narrator, it is all so much more fragile, more tenuous, into entropy”. Cusk is necessary too – deeply so, and both hard won and easily lost. And the cruellest irony Second Place, exquisite in the cruelty of its rightness, of all is that she knows, in the end, that neither her reminds us why. property nor her fearfully defended way of life will protect her. Encouraging her daughter to move on To buy a copy for £13.04 go to guardianbookshop.com .

Saturday 1 May 2021 The Guardian 13 obliteration” of the foghorn and its emotional eff ect Nonfi ction on the audience triggered a quest to understand its power. As well as visiting many archives, Allan spends time in Lizard , Cornwall, and a month staying at Sumburgh Head lighthouse in Shetland. The foghorn fi rst appeared in the 1850s, although Allan discovers that its history is more complicated than it seems. She links the story with maritime { Music } From Shetland to history, industrialisation and post-industry, San Francisco: in praise of the colonialism, cartography, acoustics, engineering, folklore and psychogeography. coast’s most monstrous and Allan’s background is as a journalist specialising melancholy sound machines in experimental and avant -garde music. She is less interested in the machinery or the engineering, or Amy Liptrot indeed the horns themselves, than the monstrous and melancholy sound they create. She has had a long aff air with “weird” sounds and lists some fav- The word obsession is ourites: “Buddhist monks chanting for exorcisms”, overused. People say “fi eld recording of icebergs melting” and “brass they are obsessed with stretched out into hour-long multiphonic drones” . something when what they But foghorns have been the biggest revelation to her – mean is they have a passing each has a diff erent sonority: “There is no other sound interest. But Jennifer Lucy tied so deeply to a type of weather, and no machine Allan is truly obsessed sounds quite that massive,” she notes with awe. The Foghorn’s with foghorns, those near- Allan is particularly concerned with how these Lament: The obsolete warning honks sounds are connected to identity and emotion. Disappearing around our coasts – not to Listening to the horn at Sumburgh, she realises: “I Music of the Coast be confused with ships’ had thought of the foghorn as a lonely sound, a big by Jennifer Lucy Allan, horns. This fascination has melancholic beast echoing into the vastness of the Orion, £16.99 taken her from Shetland to open sea, often to nobody at all. But it isn’t. This San Francisco, to a PhD on heaving machine is the sound of somebody else, foghorns, a radio programme and now this original the sound of civilisation and safety … ” and absorbing book, which is much more interesting We are led through the development of foghorns, than a study of foghorns has any right to be. including alternative alert systems such as underwater Particularly entertaining are her investigations into bells. Along the way, there are lots of inter esting and modern coastal folklore. Allan explores rumours that often beautiful ideas about sound. When writing about a decommissioned foghorn was used by a rave sound sonar, Allan observes: “The topography of the sea system, that lighthouse keepers developed speech comes to us in sound waves and the topography of the patterns to fi t around the horns’ blasts, that “sounds land comes through light and sight.” And we learn that, of second world war battles are still bouncing around in San Francisco, where the sound of fog horns is so in deep-sea trenches”, and that “fog money” was paid familiar, “the fogs them selves are said to be singing”. out to keepers who endured their din. The Foghorn’s Lament is a book to fi le between Her interest began in 2013 when she witnessed mem oirs of lighthouse Foghorn Requiem, an open-air performance by brass Lighthouse and keepers (“foghorn bagging” bands, ships and foghorns around the cliff s at Souter foghorn at Sumburgh being a more niche strand Point lighthouse in South Shields. The “aural Head, Shetland. of “light house bagging”, where enthu siasts attempt to visit as many as possible) and books about music, expanding the defi nition by exploring the territory between music and noise. Foghorns have now been largely superseded by GPS onboard vessels, and a backup system of beeping electronic fog sirens further out to sea. The death of the foghorn is linked to the demise of industry, thus the honks evoke nostalgia. This book is a lament for a disappearing way of life – numbers of former lighthouse keepers diminish each year – but also an appeal to listen deeply. It shows how there can be “a whole world to discover in just one sound”.

MILAN GONDA/ALAMY GONDA/ALAMY MILAN To buy a copy for £14.78 go to guardianbookshop.com .

14 The Guardian Saturday 1 May 2021 Nonfi ction ¶

the subject of red-top kiss-and-tells from celebrities { Memoir } The charismatic such as Dollar’s Thereza Bazar. His career quickly Glasgow-born winger and stalled. Nevin, by contrast, attended plays at the Royal Court theatre, Herzog retrospectives on the music obsessive recalls South Bank, ballet performances at Covent Garden. football before riches arrived Independent music was his real passion. He wrote a column called Hooknotes for the Chelsea club Sukhdev Sandhu newspaper, the better to champion the likes of This Mortal Coil. After a game against Manchester United he visited the Hacienda rather than return to the In the 1980s, Pat Nevin was capital with his team mates. He befriended The referred to as a “weirdo” by Dur utti Column’s Vini Reilly, who took him to see his teammates at Chelsea. Morrissey. (They had a kickabout in his garden.) For Slight, good-looking and all the goals he scored and player of the year awards fond of wearing a leather he won, he seems to have been at his happiest when jacket and ripped jeans, he helping out with the paperwork for his hero John was sometimes mistaken Peel’s radio show. The Accidental for Johnny Marr. His Nevin’s quiet charisma, his anti-commercial ethos, Footballer favourite writer was Albert his belief that a love of football and leftfi eld music by Pat Nevin, Camus and he read Anton could co-exist made him a proto-infl uencer . He was Monoray, £20 Chekhov on match-day something of a hero for a generation of young football coaches up to Newcastle. fans – the kind who thought it possible to be into He was a mesmerising winger, but when an NME Dave Haslam’s fanzine Debris and spikily intelligent journalist described him as “the fi rst post-punk football fanzines such as The Absolute Game and footballer”, it was the word “footballer ” against When Saturday Comes . Of these publications, which he chafed; he saw the game as an activity Nevin judiciously comments: “It is hard to know how rather than an identity. In In Ma Head, Son! (1997), import ant they were in saving the game, but those a book-length collaboration with psychologist who tell you it was down to Sky TV and the Premier George Sik he published towards the end of his League for changing the career, he worried about becoming an ex-player: For all the goals atmosphere are way off “It’s a bit like people who continually go on about he scored, Nevin the mark.” the war. They can’t stop talking about it. It was their seems to have The ban on English fi nest hour.” been at his teams playing in Europe Nevin would go on to be a respected writer and after the Heysel Stadium broadcaster, but his career – not least his articulacy happiest when disaster in 1985 ensured and ambivalence about it – still possess a mystique helping out with Nevin would never play in that makes this new memoir a pleasure to read. His the paperwork Europe. His transfer from childhood was especially formative. He grew up in for his hero John Everton to Tranmere in an eight-person, three-bedroom tenement fl at in Peel’s radio show 1992 meant he missed out Easterhouse, Glasgow, a working-class area whose on the riches of the Premier rough-hewn character comes across in his memory League era. Money was of a boy’s match that had to be stopped on several never an obsession though: occasions “when gangs of maybe fi fty lads chased he had started out part-time at Clyde so that he could each other back and forth across the pitch; they were continue his BA at Glasgow Tech, received wages of carrying baseball bats, golf clubs and the odd sword”. £180 at Chelsea, and did without an agent for most of Egged on by his father, who volunteered as a local his career. youth coach, he was able to do 10,000 keepy-ups by It is hard to imagine Nevin would be comfortable the age of eight. with the marketing and brand management that Nevin’s parents were socialists and Catholics. surrounds today’s players. He is happy, though, His hatred of sectarianism informed his politics, not that they don’t have to splash around on muddy or only as a teenager but also his later stand against waterlogged pitches, can rely on referees to protect racism. He and his siblings never swore, used “the them from kneecapping defenders, and don’t, as best English we could”, and were educated to be he once did, play two games in two days – and seven “apart”, though not “above”, the “madness” they in 15. It should go without saying that he would hate grew up in. the idea that the 1980s represented his fi nest hour. Nevin joined Chelsea in 1983, heading down to Still, The Accidental Footballer, so modest and self- London at the same time as another gifted Glaswegian eff acing, so decently socialist, evokes the national – “Champagne” Charlie Nicholas. Why champagne? game in a period of transition, to which he himself The ex-Celtic Arsenal striker developed a fondness contributed with style and with soul. for mullets and leather trousers, gravitated to nightclubs such as Tramp and Stringfellows, and was To buy a copy for £17.40 go to guardianbookshop.com .

Saturday 1 May 2021 The Guardian 15 ¶ Nonfi ction

appoint oneself part of that knowing cadre which { Criticism } From Duchamp lacks conviction,” he admits in the preface to this to Orwell, fascism to Brexit … new collection of journalism and speeches, “I lack the conviction to do so.” He does not, like some one of the world’s best haters celebrity pontifi cators, award himself a gold star for blows raspberries at the faithful his ability to identify junk. He is too busy enjoying himself blowing raspberries. Meades sees faith Steven Poole everywhere, and loudly despises it everywhere. Nationalism, for one thing. “Like all causes, all denominations, all churches, all movements, Jonathan Meades is a sceptic. nationalism shouts about its muscle and potency yet Not in the debased sense reveals its frailty by demanding statutory protection of someone who gullibly against alleged libels,” Meades wrote in 2006. The parrots the claims of shills coming of Brexit did not moderate this view. “The and the deluded that global nationalist urge to leave was a form of faith,” he warming is a hoax, or that observed in 2019. “A faith is autonomous. A faith masks don’t mitigate the requires no empirical proof ... Taking Back Control Pedro and Ricky spread of respiratory viruses. was a euphemism for the Balkanisation of Britain, for Come Again: Nor in the idly egotistical atomisation, for communitarianism based in ethnicity, Selected Writing sense Meades himself iden- class, place, faith. A willing apartheid where the other 1988-2020 tifi es as “the English bents is to be mistrusted – just like in the Golden Age when by Jonathan Meades, towards spiritual sloth and we drowned the folk in the next valley because their Unbound, £30 intellectual incuriosity, what word for haystack was diff erent from ours.” we dignify as scepticism”. Dr Bruce Banner used to warn: “You won’t like me But in the fi ery and ancient sense of scepticism: he is when I’m angry” , but the afi cionado of Meades is not just a man of little faith but an enemy of belief always hoping for the inevitable transformation, the itself: a jeerer at creeds, a sneerer at doctrines of all dandyish Hulk rampage. One of the foremost prose fl avours, metaphysical and otherwise. stylists of his age in any register, Meades has an He has too much sly wit, of course, to identify especial ear for the brutal music of invective. He is himself as such: “While it would be beguiling to surely one of the planet’s best haters. The present

16 The Guardian Saturday 1 May 2021 Nonfi ction ¶

the Nazis “started out as resentful hicks. Cities are man kind’s greatest collective achievement; it is (back to) nature that is unnatural.” It shouldn’t be thought that this book comprises nothing but screeds. There are, too, fi lthy jokes in French and fond obituaries of the celebrity cook Jennifer Paterson and writer Lesley Cunliff e. Meades likes the writing of Elizabeth David, the novels of HG Wells and Flann O’Brien; he writes admiringly about Simon Jenkins on churches, Julian Barnes on art, and the satirical cartooning of Steve Bell and Martin Rowson . The latter he dubs “fast art”, though not all fast art is found worthy of his attention: he is not much

SARAH LEE/THE GUARDIAN LEE/THE SARAH for rock and pop music, which he refers to with a pair of scare-quote tweez ers as prime minister, unsurprisingly, has proved a potent Jonathan Meades “music”, as though it is inspiration. “Boris Johnson’s lovable maverick s htick has an ear for only pre tending to be has been to dissemble himself beneath a mantle of the brutal music music. (Though how?) suet, to pretend to inarticulacy, to oik about as the of invective Meades off ers People’s Primate, to wear a ten-year-old’s hairdo, to intriguing appreciations, laugh it off – no matter what it is, no matter how grave in particular, of two men with hidden depths and it may be – and to display charm learned at a charm kindred spirits. Addressing John Major in print, he school with duff tutors,” he writes. “This construct writes: “You will come to be seen as the last prime is going on threadbare. If one devotes such energy minister who had about him the Tommy spirit of to a simulacrum of oafi shness one becomes an oaf.” the conscript army which won the war: there was Johnson is, he joyously adds, “a blubbery pink pecu- something bolshie and obdurate about you and a lator” who is said to have enjoyed “an assisted siesta sense of eccentricity suppressed – beneath your in Shoreditch”. In that phrase “assisted siesta” we middle manager’s disguise there was a true son of witness the pure poetry of vituperation. the circus, a daring virtuoso who could and did get to A soft target in more ways than one, Johnson is the top of the greasy pole without a safety net.” Do joined in this volume by other bovines more widely Meades’s celebrated suits furnish similar camoufl age? held sacred. George Orwell is a “mediocre novelist” Reviewing the autobiography of Bob Monkhouse, and his mad writing advice has had a chilling eff ect meanwhile, Meades delights in the comedian’s droll on prose style. (“Plain speaking, like plain food, is intelligence (Monkhouse refers to one Oldham venue a puritan virtue and thus no virtue at all,” Meades he played as “a fog of armpits and chip fat”), and in his pronounces.) Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, the urinal remarkable career of slumming it for success. “What sniggeringly exhibited in a gallery, “was a dull jest distinguishes Monkhouse from virtually everyone else then and it remains a dull jest, but it has for a century in illegitimate theatre,” Meades writes (“illegitimate been treated with reverence by morons”. theatre”!), “is the fact that he has a lot to spare. He’s not There are certainly enough morons to go round, stretching himself; he doesn’t believe in it.” Ah, our all spaffi ng the faddish lingo Meades is so expert author embraces a fellow sceptic. “Monkhouse is a at dismantling, for instance the idea in urban- broadsheet posing as a tabloid. He has made a career regeneration circles that neighbourhoods improve out of abasing himself, out of sedulously refusing to when “creatives” move in. “‘Creatives’ in this context realise his potential. And he seems not to possess a is a grossly fl attering epithet for brainstormtroops, pathological need to be loved. When he invented multiplatform contortionists, important synergy himself, he quite forgot about ‘sincerity’.” Elsewhere, gurus nuking an outmoded logo from the face of a Meades claims he too lacks “the light entertainer’s or polo shirt,” Meades notices. “What it does not signify politician’s creepy yearning to be liked”. Which, of are actual makers, writers and artists.” Do not course, is a clever way of making people like you. mean while get him started on “curators” (“achingly Probably we don’t deserve Meades, a man who hip neophiliacs”) or “sustainability” (“Life itself is apparently has never composed a dull paragraph. not sustainable”), or “conservationists” who want What other living writer has a YouTube channel to preserve London’s (lack of) skyline: “sad dorks devoted to low-res digitisations of his TV documen- who yearn for stasis, who can’t acknowledge that, taries that the bootlegging uploaders have literally whatever they do, the future will happen and it will called a place of worship: the Meades Shrine? A be diff erent, it will have to be tall”. Meades loves consistent sceptic would bristle, but then Meades cities, of course. “Townscape is the highest form of himself here praises another writer for his “indiff er- museum,” he insists, and, when writing about the ence to the paltry virtue of consistency”, so I think Third Reich (some fascinating pieces here on that we can make an exception. era’s obsession with esoteric rubbish, as well as its bad architecture), he makes sure to remind us that To buy a copy for £26.10 go to guardianbookshop.com .

Saturday 1 May 2021 The Guardian 17 ¶ Label

brothers. Now, they spend their days doing chores and Fiction waiting for the matriarch, Mai, to tap one of them on the shoulder, thereby summoning her to a bedroom to meet her husband and, it is hoped, become pregnant with a son. The narrative’s most important driver is that, while each of the brothers knows which wife is “theirs”, the veiled young women do not. Sex takes place in darkness ; the rest of the time, segre gation A farm in rural Punjab provides between husbands and wives is near total. the setting for two tales of Until it isn’t. There is a hint of the Shakespearean bed trick about the plot that unfolds, although it is alienation that link a young only lightly sketched, as with much else in the novel. man to his great-grandmother We know, for example, that Mai’s own marriage, and the subsequent death of her husband, infl uences her Alex Clark often callous single-mindedness, but details are scant. We know too that the pressure of political events, many centred around independence movements, It’s a decade since Sunjeev contribute to the tension on the farm; that questions Sahota published his debut of caste, religion and sexuality are always present in novel, Ours Are the Streets, a the background. But these realities are never allowed bravura piece of imaginative to stifl e what is essentially a novel of inter ior life and intensity that took the form sensation. Sahota refuses to let his historical of a journal written by a characters act as though they are in a historical novel. would-be suicide bomber, It is also a dramatically hushed novel, unlike China Room a British Muslim of Pakistani Sahota’s second, the Booker-shortlisted exploration by Sunjeev Sahota, descent, for his wife, a white of illegal immigration The Year of the Runaways, Harvill Secker, £16.99 British woman, and their which teemed with voices and activity. Here, events child. The reader never are glanced at, elaborated discovered whether the planned explosion in a Shef- in fragments and ellip- fi eld shopping centre took place; that was peripheral tically, the reader left to to Sahota’s primary aim of exploring the cultural draw a line from the earlier alienation and isolation that, in this instance, led his story to the life that the protagonist to radicalisation and violence. narrator has lived in the The occasional narrator of Sahota’s third novel, north of England, complete China Room, is also alienated and isolated, though his with its painful incidents of response is to turn his violent unhappiness inward; at exclusion and racism . 18, he is in the throes of heroin addiction. His account Both storylines converge of a summer spent in rural Punjab is interspersed in themes of escape and with the more substantial third-person story of a incarceration, whether lit- young woman in 1929, whom we later learn was his Sunjeev Sahota eral or social and psycho- great-grandmother. logical. The narrator, living The narrator takes up an opportunity to combat alone on the abandoned farm having been shunned by his addiction by visiting an uncle in Punjab before his aunt and uncle, plays out an almost parodic tale of he starts at a London university; he goes armed only regeneration and reconnection that echoes Mehar’s less with whisky and a selection of books “all by or about successful attempts at self-determination; their fam il- people who had already taken their leave”. His read- ial link hovers over the entire story, reminding us of the ing list – Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, Natalia ghost-trauma carried from generation to generation. Ginzburg’s The Little Virtues, a biography of Leon ora Sahota has said that China Room has its seed in his Carrington, poetry by Les Murray – is a summary of own family history, and a photograph at the end of what troubles and interests him: addic tion, family, the book, of an elderly woman cradling a baby , con- memory, surrealism, belonging and unbelonging. Later fi rms an element of documentary about the novel. in the novel he realises that he hopes “reading about But rather than feeling confi ned by whatever real-life life might be a way to overcome it”. elements informed its creation, it exists in a far more But it is the story of Mehar, a 16-year-old bride who indeterminate, diff use dim ension, at times taking on fi nds herself living in the “china room” – a cramped, an almost fairy tale quality. In his three novels, Sahota hitherto seldom used building on a farm, its nickname has demonstrated an ambitious need to adapt the derived from the willow-pattern plates that adorn it, specifi c and concrete to something less easy to pin which once formed part of a dowry – that looms largest down, complete with all the gaps and ruptures that life in the novel. Mehar shares the room with Harbans and provides and art makes, even for a moment, tangible. Gurleen, whom she has only recently met; the three

CHRISTOPHER THOMOND/THE GUARDIAN THOMOND/THE CHRISTOPHER of them have been married, in a single day, to three To buy a copy for £14.78 go to guardianbookshop.com .

18 The Guardian Saturday 1 May 2021 Fiction ¶ Monsters, leopard girls and a { Short stories } Outsiders star-dappled aerialist grip the and ne’er-do-wells populate imagination in an atmospheric these dark tales of men follow-up to The Doll Factory at the margins of society Suzi Feay Houman Barekat

Elizabeth Macneal’s best- Benjamin Myers’s fi ction selling 2019 debut of art and is concerned with people obsession, The Doll Factory, at the margins of society. was set against the backdrop His portrayal of Traveller of the 1851 Great Exhibition; culture in his 2012 novel, lurking behind it was John Pig Iron , won the inaugural Fowles’s terrifying The Gordon Burn prize; 2017’s Circus of Wonders Collector, also a spider-and- Male Tears The Gallows Pole, about a by Elizabeth Macneal, fl y battle of the sexes. by Benjamin Myers, band of counterfeiters in Picador, £14.99 Several texts underlie her Bloomsbury, £16.99 18th-century Yorkshire, follow-up, again an atmo s- won the Walter Scott prize pheric Victorian tale: Frankenstein is a favourite of for historical fi ction. Male Tears, his fi rst short-story manipulative circus owner Jasper, while Nell, the collection, is likewise populated with outsiders and protagonist, sees uncanny echoes of her own fate in ne’er-do-wells. One story tells of a farmer’s bitter Hans Christian Andersen’s tale “The Little Mermaid”. hatred of townies, while another features a sadistic Mottled head to toe by birthmarks, Nell is plucked gamekeeper who tortures animals. In “The Whip from her lowly trade of making candied violets to Hand” a fairground impresario gets mangled to death appear in Jasper Jupiter’s Circus of Wonders. To grip by his own waltzer; his psychopathic son assembles the imagination of a freak-sated public, Jasper prides a posse of forced labourers – “a motley menagerie of himself on creating irresistible backstories for his col- men in various states of drunkenness and disrepair”, lection of “monsters”. “Leopard girls” are old hat, so recruited in “smoky back rooms, parole-board Jasper retrains her as a star-dappled aerialist, Nellie halfway houses, gambling dens” – and has them Moon, swinging above the crowd on ropes hauled by build a monument in his memory. Jasper’s downtrodden brother, Toby. Jasper sees him- Elsewhere a hyper-masculine ex-convict turns out self as Daedalus as well as Victor Frankenstein, but to be a secret cross-dresser, and a man covers himself doesn’t pay enough attention to the fate of Icarus. in paint after a row with his girlfriend – a weird cry for In the twists and turns of the narrative, Macneal attention that backfi res horribly. Other stories are explores what it means to exert power over another slightly less lurid. Myers, a former music journalist, individual. Toby, who took up the nascent profession revisits his younger self in “The Folk Song Singer”, of war photography in the Crimea, is equally oppressed about an encounter between a journalist and a veteran by his love for Nell and visceral attachment to his more pop star. Sizing up the critic, the singer observes: confi dent sibling. The performers – Stella the bearded “They never change … Nervy and earnest … their woman, Brunette the giantess, Peggy the dwarf and conversation always undercut with a streak of almost the rest – are exploited by their egotistical ringmaster, confrontational pedantry.” but he has also given them opportunities to shine in a Male Tears has been marketed by its publisher as world that shuns them as objects of fear and revulsion. an exploration of the male psyche – the title nods to The circus setting is a little more hackneyed than the a popular feminist meme – but this is somewhat taxidermy and pre-Raphaelite painting in her debut, misleading. While many of these stories do indeed but underneath the spangles, there’s always a lingering involve men in upsetting circumstances, they con- stink of horse shit and anxiety. For a novel about a tain little in the way of subtle emotional or psycho- vanished, seem ingly alien world, it is also pleasingly logical insight. In keeping with the conventions of contemporary. In the Crimea Toby was chiefl y engaged rural noir and folk horror, the emphasis here is on in the dissemina tion of fake news or spin, presenting atmospherics: for the most part, Myers is less a sanitised version of the battlefi eld. Jasper’s ever interested in depicting his characters’ inner lives more expansive dreams point to mechanisation and than in evoking the eerie menace of moorlands the eventual replacement of disobedient human and forests, be that “the gloaming of an October employees altogether. That Jasper is not a villain, Nell evening” or a whistling wind, “hypnotic and no heroine, and Toby entirely unsuited to the role of malevolent, as if the stones themselves were Romeo, is a mark of Macneal’s subtlety and originality. groaning with pain”.

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

Saturday 1 May 2021 The Guardian 19 Fiction ¶

Accordingly, things go the worse for Christopher Flights of counterfactual Columbus when he shows up. The second section specu lation reimagine the consists of fragments from his comically pious journals. He annoys the locals by abducting their stories of the Vikings, the Incas, people and in due course gets his European posterior Columbus and Cervantes kicked. He ends his abject days as a captive court jester in what’s now Cuba. After Columbus fails to Sam Leith return, the Spanish court loses its appetite for exploratory expeditions westwards. But it’s on Columbus’s old ships that, half a genera- French author Laurent tion later, Atahualpa, known to us as the last Inca Binet is preoccupied with emperor, sets off for Europe. On arrival, he is no less real-life events, AKA history, perplexed by the shaven-headed locals, with their and how we tell it. There weird cult of the “nailed god”, than Columbus was by was the fretful meticulous- the feathered head-dresses on the other side of the ness of his debut HHhH , a pond. Though the Incas are no strangers to human “non fi ction novel” about sacrifi ce, Atahualpa takes one look at the Inquisition Civilisations the assassination of Nazi burning heretics and wonders if these “Levantines” by Laurent Binet, chief Reinhard Heydrich; don’t go a bit far. He has his doubts, too, about the translated by Sam then The 7th Func tion of “little white llamas” – sheep – that the locals let run Taylor, Harvill Secker, Language , a metafi ctional around everywhere. £16.99 thriller about Roland Through low cunning, high diplomacy and the Barthes and his fatal occasional application of brute force, Atahualpa not encounter with a laundry van. Now, still not content only survives but prospers , playing squabbling Euro- just to make up some imaginary characters and have pean factions off against each other and in due course them interact, he presents something that reads more usurping the Holy Roman Emperor. Among the many like a collection of primary sources than a conven- nice touches here is that Atahualpa immediately sees tional novel. What to call it? A historical systems the point of Machiavelli and takes much of his advice novel, preoccupied with the roots of great power to heart. Various counterfactual shenanigans play out. confl ict and the forces that underpin it? Or just a jeu Inca/European dynastic alliances are forged. Atahualpa d’esprit? It’s a bit of both, and it’s tremendous fun. wins hearts and minds by promulgating religious Each of Civilisations’ four parts poses as a historical tolerance and a series of quasi-socialist land reforms document, and the main story runs for most of a 16th that sound a great deal more appealing than what was century that never happened – from when a ragtag actually on off er in Europe in the real 16th century. Inca expeditionary force, fl eeing civil war in South Binet has a lot of fun with existing history. We get America, makes landfall in Lisbon, to the years after Thomas More corresponding with Erasmus about Inca the Battle of Lepanto (which is, spoiler alert, fought theology rather than Luther’s articles, and the narrator between diff erent forces than the real one). drops little references to “the entirely misnamed The groundwork for this fl ight of counterfactual Antoine the Good” or remarks, after introducing a sec- specu lation is laid in the fi rst two sections. First up is ond “The Magnani mous”, that magnanimity was “a a spoof Norse saga, describing how Vikings not only quality apparently very com mon among these princes”. made it to Vinlandia, the coast of North America, but Everything seems rosy, for a while. But then the as far south as what is now Panama. Erik the Red’s supplies of gold dry up and daughter Freydis befriended the local skraelings – as Machu Picchu in Peru, a rival gang of South Ameri- the Vikings called Native Americans – and, crucially, built at the height cans, the Aztecs, appear and introduced them to two technologies: horses and iron. of the Inca empire make them selves disagree- able by massacring their enemies and ripping out their still-beating hearts . Surface details may change, Binet seems to be remind- ing us, but imperial ambition is a historical constant. The closing section nods to the novel’s literary game- playing by following, in mock-heroic form, the travails of Miguel de Cervantes – who loses the use of his hand at Lepanto, as usual, but, in what I’m fairly sure is a departure from the historical course of events, ends up being Michel de Montaigne’s lodger . That detail is splendidly in the spirit of this book, which you could see as a world-historical version of the parlour game where you assemble a fantasy dinner party from the past.

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20 The Guardian Saturday 1 May 2021 ¶ Interview

The Pulitzer-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri tells Lisa Allardice about her ‘nomadic’ existence, her passion for Rome and conquering Italian for her latest novel ‘I have always existed in a kind of linguistic exile’  IBL/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK IBL/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK

Saturday 1 May 2021 The Guardian 21 ¶ Interview Jhumpa Lahiri

humpa Lahiri ’s third novel is the trium- short stories – her fi rst collection, Interpreter of phant culmination of her 20-year love aff air Maladies, won the Pulitzer in 2000 when she was 33 – with Italian, an obsession that led her to belong to the realist tradition. Eschewing the showy move to Rome with her family almost 10 irony of many of her American peers, or the lush years ago. She renounced all reading in prose and epic sweep typical of Anglo-Indian fi ction J English and began to write only Italian. at the time, she depicted the everyday lives of (often Published in Italy in 2018 as Dove mi trovo middle-class) Asian-American immigrants with the – “Where I fi nd myself” or “Where am I?” – it is her same compassionate scrutiny and moral complexity fi rst novel written in Italian. Now she has translated that distinguishes the work of her literary heroes it into English under the title Whereabouts. William Trevor and Alice Munro. The story follows an unnamed woman around an Her fi rst novel, The Namesake, which follows the unnamed city over the course of a year, each chapter fortunes of “Gogol”, the son of Bengali immigrants, an espresso shot of regret and loneliness. In the as he makes his way in New York, was made into a second chapter, “On the Street”, the narrator fi lm by acclaimed director Mira Nair ; and her second bumps into a man, the husband of a friend, whom The Lowland, a family saga stretching from 1950s she “might have been involved with, maybe shared Calcutta to New England decades later, was a life with”: they go into a lingerie shop because she shortlisted for the Booker prize in 2013. Although needs to buy a pair of tights, leading the reader to Whereabouts is a novel, it could be described almost think we have begun a particular kind of story. But as a collection of connected short stories, and so, in many of these streets lead nowhere. The chapters form at least, Lahiri is very much on home ground. relate diff erent relationships or connections: a visit She may be a traditionalist, but surely there is no to her mother; a daily chat with a barista; a fl eeting bigger experiment for a writer than adopting an encounter. The novel asks: “How does a city become entirely new language? Like a 21st-century Henry a relationship in and of itself for the female protag- James heroine, she shunned the US (the Brooklyn onist?” she says now. This is a book about belonging brownstone literary set, of which she was one of and not belonging, place and displacement – questions the most feted) for the old world charms of Rome, of identity that Lahiri has explored throughout her in what she describes as nothing less than an act fi ction, whether set in New England, Calcutta or of “literary survival”. “It is really hard to explain now (we guess) Rome. Follow ing a year of enforced the forces in life that drive you to people, to places, isolation for so many, not least in Italy, this “portrait to languages,” she says. “For me, to a language and of a woman in a sort of urban solitude”, as she then to a place and then to a new life, a new way describes the novel, has assumed an unexpectedly of thinking, a new way of being. Those are very timely resonance. big things.” Today Lahiri is at home in New Jersey: “Mi trovo She has always felt she existed in “a kind of Princeton,” she says. She returned to teach at the linguistic exile” long before she left for Rome. She university in 2015, while maintaining a long-distance was born in London, the daughter of Indian immi- relationship with Rome. “I had two sets of keys. I grants, and the family moved to the US when she had this other life, in this other place,” she explains, was two. Growing up in Rhode Island (her father, until corona virus struck last year; her son was still in like many of her characters, worked at the univer- school in Rome at the time. On the shelves behind her, sity), with frequent trips to Calcutta, she felt her the only visible title is a book facing outwards with story to be “much more complicated” than those “ITALIAN” in large print. Her previous book, In Other of her school friends: “There was always ‘the other Words, was her fi rst written in Italian (trans lated by place’ and ‘the other language’ and ‘the other Ann Goldstein, Elena Ferrante’s translator) – “a sort world’.” Bengali, which she spoke until she was four, of linguistic autobiography”, it is a passionate account is both her mother tongue and “a foreign language”, of her “pilgrimage” to Rome and quest to conquer because she can’t read or write it: it is her parents’ the language. At the end she confesses to a slight language, “the language of their world”. Lahiri and embarrassment at having written such a personal her sister were educated book “ of love, of suff ering”, and I suspect she feels ‘It is hard to in English, which she similarly about giving interviews (which, along with explain the forces came to regard as a reviews, she never reads). She is as thoughtful and in life that drive bullying “stepmother”. composed as you’d expect from reading her fi ction, you to a language “Why am I fl eeing? What with the same quiet humour it might be easy to miss. is pursu ing me? Who “I’m the least experimental writer,” Lahiri told and then to a wants to restrain me?” New York Times magazine in 2008 when her second place and then to she asks in In Other Words. collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, went a new life, a new “The most obvious answer straight to No 1 on the US bestseller lists, prompting way of think ing, a is the English language.” Time magazine to declare a changing of the guard in new way of being’ And yet she loved it, US fi ction. “The idea of trying things just for the sake especially for the world of pushing the envelope, that’s never really interested of books it opened up. “I me.” And it is true that her elegantly melancholy love it still,” she says now.

22 The Guardian Saturday 1 May 2021 Interview ¶

this confl ict between feelings of being “rooted and rootless” applies to everybody. The narrator is a contradiction in other ways, too: a professor in her late 40s, she is alone, yet with many friends and lovers; sometimes she is lonely, some- times she is content; she envies others their intimacy and is envied for her freedom. “She’s at this crossroads. She is a woman who recognises she probably won’t become a mother; she may have other relationships but that is not going to be part of her life. How is she going to come to terms with that?” she asks. So much of writing comes out of imagining alternative lives, diff erent paths, she believes. “So what if I didn’t have this life? What if I hadn’t met the person I did, the day I

PAULA SOLLOWAY/ALAMY PAULA did and this happened and that happened and a child happened and then another “But at the same time, emotionally it represented When in Rome … child?” Although she is this sort of impossible challenge. My relationship to ‘There is this life keen to stress that she is not English was always very much part of the desire as happening right her narrator, and her Italian a child to be fully part of that world.” Paradoxically, on your doorstep’ adventure was very much the fact there was “not even a question of really “a family experience”, belonging” in Italy fi nally freed her from being caught the act of travelling makes “you feel solitude more between two languages, “that is to say, hav ing to keenly ”, she says. “It touches deeper parts of you. choose between two ways of being, two ways of It makes you question who you are.” thinking”, she explains. “In poche parole, in few The novel’s underlying sense of urgency or words, it has given me a true sense of belonging, agitation comes from the fact that it was written in fully recognising that it is ‘a sense’.” the knowledge that they would one day be leaving. Written in bursts each time she returned to Rome, “I always had the return ticket,” she recalls sadly. Whereabouts grew out of her “day-to-day inhabiting The past year has been “an incredibly intense of that city, mostly walking through it”. It is fi tting time”, as she has watched the pandemic unfold in that both the novel’s inspiration and the English title two homes – Italy and the US. But it has also been suggested themselves to her in transit: the idea was one of the most productive: she has just fi nished “born” on a train in Italy when the author became a col lection, Roman Stories, again written in Italian, intrigued by a middle-aged woman she saw sitting which include some inspired by the Bengali immi- alone, “and one looks in the window and maybe grants she met in Rome; she is putting together a one sees oneself”. The title came to her suddenly, book of essays on translation (she recently translated after months of deliberation, on a fl ight to Rome – the novels of her friend Domenico Starnone , Italy’s “whereabouts” is “an incredibly English word: it “fi nest living writer”); and perhaps most remarkably, doesn’t even have Latin roots”. And it is surely no her fi rst book of poetry – in Italian – will be published coincidence that each of the enigmatically titled in June. She has never written a poem in English before chapters – “At the Trattoria”, “In Spring”, “On the and “maybe never will”, she says. Just as she would Couch”, “By the Sea” – begins with a preposition (she never have written Whereabouts in English, she studied “a stupendous sentence” by Alberto Moravia thinks writing in Italian made poetry possible. in order to master Italian prepositions “once and for “When I fi rst started writing in English I felt like an all”). This is a novel “of oscillation and unsettledness interloper. When I fi rst started writing in Italian I felt and shadows”, she says. “I was thinking about that like an interloper. When I was writing the poems I felt idea of what it means to pass through life, to always be like an interloper. But maybe that’s not a bad thing.” moving.” And yet, unlike Lahiri, who describes herself Lahiri hopes to return to Rome this summer, as as “a nomad”, her narrator has never left the city in her daughter is due to start high school there in which she was born. She is “always on the move in September. Each time they visit she can’t wait to get her world, and yet sort of stuck in her world, nervous out into the piazza, “to have that fi rst coff ee and see about what’s on the other side of the border,” she all those people, who are so happy that we are back ”, explains. “The border – what does that mean today?” she says with passion. “There’s this life that is hap- Like her characters, who often “migrate, who pening right on your doorstep that is always changing physically cross borders, who fi nd themselves at and always kind of the same. I miss that.” She keeps checkpoints”, so much of Lahiri’s own experience in touch with friends she made among the many has been “bound up with things like green cards and immigrants from Bangladesh living in Rome. “It’s the naturalisation and passports and certifi cates”. In one place in the world where I speak English, Italian Whereabouts she wanted to imagine what it might be and Bengali on a daily basis.” This “little triangle” like for someone who has never had to consider these of language is part of the magic of the city for her, things, and yet who still feels restless, to show that she says, “and it is waiting for me in the piazza” •

Saturday 1 May 2021 The Guardian 23 ¶ Books essay

here’s a line at the opening of Kiley Nanny states Reid ’s hit debut, Such a Fun Age , that encapsulates the drama at the Charlotte Northedge heart of the recent spate of nanny novels. Emira , a young black woman T dressed for a night out, is stopped by a security guard in an upscale supermarket with Briar, the white child she looks Questions of class after. It’s late, the guard wants to know where Briar’s parents are. He won’t let Emira leave with her. and race, politics “But she’s my child right now,” she tells the guard. “I’m her sitter. I’m technically her nanny …” and power are at the Emira isn’t strictly a nanny. She doesn’t get the perks of a full-time job – health insurance, holidays. Later, heart of a new kind she refl ects that, “more than the racial bias, the night at Market Depot came back to her with a nauseating surge of novel that explores and a resounding declaration that hissed, You don’t have a real job.” But in many ways, Briar is her child. Emira is the one who spends time with Briar, who the complicated under stands her . Alix, a blogger and infl uencer, relies on her daughter’s nanny com pletely, but she is also relationship between desperate to befriend “the quiet, thoughtful person she paid to love [Briar]”. In pursuing a friendship with working mothers and Emira at the expense of her own children, Alix only succeeds in putting further distance between them. As the women they pay to Emira observes, Briar is “this awesome, ser i ous child who loves information and answers, and how could look after their children her own mother not appreciate the shit out of this?” It’s the kind of judgment every working parent dreads, and it is this unique perspective on family dynamics that makes the nanny such a compelling character. From Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre to her sister Anne’s Agnes Grey and Becky Sharp in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, novelists have long under- stood the disruptive potential of the nanny, nurse or governess in a household – often put to romantic pur- poses, upsetting a rigid class system. But with the rise of the working mother has come a new kind of nanny novel. One that explores questions of class and race, politics and power, and has at its heart the compli- cated relationship between the women of the house. “My nanny is a miracle worker,” Myriam tells her friends in Leïla Slimani’s Prix Goncourt -winning Lullaby . But at the same time, returning to work as a lawyer after a period as a stay-at-home mother, “she is terrifi ed by the idea of leaving her children with someone else”. While working late, “she tries not to think about her children, not to let the guilt eat away at her. Sometimes she starts imagining that they are all in league against her.” It is this sense of alienation from your own family, as well as the worst nightmare lurking at the back of every parent’s mind, that Slimani so skilfully evokes. We learn at the beginning of her taboo-busting novel that Louise, the “perfect nanny”, has murdered the children in her charge. It is left up to the horrifi ed reader to piece together the reasons why. “The nanny takes care of children who are not her own. She shares a daily life and intimacy with people who are not her friends or family. She sees everything, she knows everything, but at the same time she is an outsider,” says Slimani, of her fascination with the

24 The Guardian Saturday 1 May 2021 Books essay ¶ role. “She has a huge responsibility – looking after the The archetypal black woman, is available children – and yet very little social recognition.” For fi ctional nanny to fi ll the role of caretaker, the parents who bring a nanny into their home, the fi rst appeared even as she is desperately temptation is to see her (it is usually her) as a super- in the children’s needing care herself.” woman, infallible, perfect (it is no coincidence that Here, the arrangement is the US title for Slimani’s novel is The Perfect Nanny). novels by informal, but in both Reid’s The archetypal fi ctional nanny fi rst appeared in PL Travers – and Slimani’s novels, the the children’s novels by PL Travers – sensible, strict, sensible, strict, procurement of a nanny yet magical – though it’s the sweet ened screen ver- yet magical is described in purely sion of Mary Poppins that is lodged in the hearts and transactional terms: “Alix minds of so many. In Slimani’s novel, Paul, the father had a knack for acquiring of the house, tells Louise “that she is like Mary Poppins. merchandise back in New He isn’t sure she understands the compliment.” Myriam York, and searching for admires how Louise can lose herself in play. She is a babysitter in Philadelphia was no diff erent.” “vibrant, joyful, teasing ”. As Slimani’s narrator wryly In another of this year’s debuts, Ellery Lloyd’s observes: “Louise arouses and fulfi ls the fantasies People Like Her, Instamum Emmy considers fi nding of an idyllic family life that Myriam guiltily nurses.” a nanny via a competition on Instagram, or through In Reid’s novel, Alix becomes similarly obsessed a promotional partnership with an agency, until her with her childminder, eventually realising that she husband Dan insists on doing it “in the conventional has “developed feelings toward Emira that weren’t manner” : fi nding a woman who is “ no-nonsense. completely unlike a crush”. The 25-year-old seems Nannyish, if you will. Someone reliable, trustworthy, eff ortlessly cool in comparison with Alix’s mum- unfl appable.” Or so he hopes. friends, but there’s more to it than that: like Myriam, But for those parents who can aff ord to leave their Alix idealises her nanny to assuage her own guilt, children in the sole care of a nanny, the choice is convincing herself that Emira is far better at looking always a gamble – and one that Slimani explores so after Briar than she would ever be. Alix also lives viscerally in Lullaby. “Not too old, no veils and no vicariously through the younger woman – she reads smokers,” Myriam and Paul agree during their initial Emira’s phone messages, listens to the music she likes, search. Myriam, who is of north African descent, is buys her gifts and invites her to join the family for herself mistaken for a nanny when she arrives at an Thanksgiving dinner. Yet although Emira is present as agency. Yet the issues a t play here are as much about a guest, she slips quickly back into a service role during class as race. Myriam “does not want to hire a north the meal, coming to Briar’s rescue when she is sick. African to look after the children … She fears that a In my debut novel, The House Guest, 25-year-old tacit complicity and familiarity would grow between Kate is invited to France for the summer by Della, a her and the nanny.” In the end, Myriam and Paul charis matic life coach, ostensibly to look after Della’s invite their white nanny to Greece on holiday, eating child ren. But Kate is also encour aged to see herself as dinner together for the fi rst time, and drinking, so a guest, and the boundaries continue to blur as she that “a new light-heartedness blows over them”. bec omes embroiled within the family, even tually cross - Away together, the familiarity Myriam sought to ing a line from which there’s no return. In one scene, avoid grows regardless, and there is a sense on their Kate is expected to serve return that Louise has seen a new way of living from Perfect nanny drinks to the family’s guests which there is no going back. She becomes “haunted The 2019 fi lm before joining them for a by the feeling that she has seen too much, heard too adaptation of Leïla casual dinner. In another, much of other people’s privacy, a privacy she has Slimani’s Lullaby she’s left to rescue Della’s never enjoyed herself”. son from the swimming In order for Myriam to be free, Slimani points out, pool, while Della sits by preoccupied, on her laptop. another woman must be enslaved. It’s what she calls a Kate judges Della for her lack of interest in her own “Russian doll” system: “There is a woman inside a children, just as Emira judges Alix. Though at least woman inside a woman.” None of the nannies or the Emira is allowed to wear her own clothes to the mothers comes out well from these new novels about Thanksgiving dinner – usually, as her boyfriend points childcare, domestic life and motherhood – all of which out, Alix makes her wear “a uniform”. In Alix’s eyes, explore the impossible burden placed on women in the embroidered polo shirts she leaves lying around the modern family. Torn between try ing to be the are a handy way for Emira to keep her clothes clean, perfect mother and the successful employee, the but he accuses Alix of “hiring black people to raise domestic goddess and the fulfi lled woman, Myriam your children and putting your family crest on them”. strives to fi nd another way for her family to be. In Raven Leilani’s debut, Luster , Edie , a drifting Ultimately, she concludes, they will only be happy 23-year-old, is invited into the home of her older, “when we don’t need one another any more. When white lover Eric and his wife, Rebecca, partly in the we can live a life of our own … When we are free” • hope that she will be able to connect with their adop- ted daughter Akila. As Leilani points out : “ This trans- The House Guest by Charlotte Northedge is published action is predicated on the assumption that Edie, as a by HarperCollins on 13 May .

Saturday 1 May 2021 The Guardian 25 ¶ Further reading

in the offi cial FA Women’s day? Well, in 1888 the The best books Premier League in 1994 Football League itself to understand she actually had to “hand emerged after a split over over a fee, for referees, money, in this case pro f- football and moneyey pitches and so on. It es sionalism v amateurs, Nicholas Wroe may have had ‘Premier a tale engagingly told League’ in its title but by Rich ard Sanders in While we wait for the indiv iduals making prof- it certainly didn’t feel Beastly Fury: The Strange inevitable slew of books its from staging foot ball Premier League to me.” Birth of British Football. about the fi asco of the matches, yet ended up as It is therefore perhaps And, although those European Super League, the target of FBI wiretaps. unsurprising that foot ball Premier League clubs not we can familiarise our- Of course the problem memoirs tend to feature invited into the ESL were selves with the luridly for most football clubs is money more than most vocal in their dis approval , complex relationship a perilous lack of money, sporting lives. The stand- the Premier League was between football and not a grotesque surplus ard anecdote remains the likewise born after the fi nance. The most assid- of it. And it wasn’t until young player’s First Big bigger teams broke away uous follower of the comparatively late in Contract, but there are from the Football League, money is David Conn . He the sport’s history that also less orthodox fi nan- to the detriment of was one of the fi rst writers the cash began to feed cial dealings. Jonathan smaller clubs. That early- to analyse, in his 1997 The through, with a maxi- Wilson’s biography of 90s schism is catalogued Football Business, how a mum wage of £20 a week Brian Clough, Nobody in Joshua Robinson and new fi nan cial model was still in place as late as Ever Says Thank You, Jonathan Clegg’s The changing the culture of 1961 . In When Footballers covers not only triumphs Club, in which a con fl u- the game both on and off Were Skint Jon Hender- on the pitch but also the ence of events – economic the pitch. Later, as a life- son recalls an era when less heroic subject of boom, the arrival of long Manchester City players mingled with bungs, the brown envel- satellite TV and a sclero- fan, he was well placed match day fans on public opes stuff ed with cash tically run sport mired in to chart, in Richer Than tran s port and contractual received by managers for violence and squalor – God, how the scruff y disputes could centre on facilitating a transfer. By prepared the ground for poor relations to swanky the club being tight with contrast, in David Peace’s the unimag ined wealth United were elevated its Christ mas cigarette novel The Damned of the foot ball world we into the global elite via allocation. And even United, the Clough have today. The venal the almost unlimited when big money did character is disgusted and ham-fi sted antics of resources of the Abu come, its distribution by fellow manager Don the ESL billionaires and Dhabi royal family. Most was narrow. England’s Revie’s fondness for bankers might have been recently The Fall of the fi rst pro fes sional female stuff ed envel opes to the latest insta lment House of Fifa charted an player, Kelly Smith, bribe offi cials. in a long story, but no organi sa tion that when recounts in My Story that So was it all more one believes it is the formed looked askance at when she started playing whole some back in the fi nal chapter.

Tom Gauld

26 The Guardian Saturday 1 May 2021