Thank you SouthEast for the new thread, which popped up while I was drafting my post, and thank you as always for enabling this chat throughout the year. You deserve key worker status in my world!
Welcome to all new joiners - this is definitely the most calming but interesting place on the internet. I intend to live here for 2021 with occasional lurking on Style and Beauty.
Congratulations Piggy on finishing W&P.
Remus, have you read any Margaret Mahy? She doesn't tick your boxes for Victorian/Gothic setting but I loved her as a teen, especially The Tricksters and The Changeover. They've got that YA formula right where you have the straightforward childhood emotions (love, fear, courage) mixed with the more ambiguous emotions of adolescence, and awakening adult feelings hand-in-hand with an awakening awareness of the supernatural.
We were all talking about Cynthia Harnett a couple of weeks ago - were you in that conversation? If so, apologies as you will already have read her books which are good adventure stories set in Medieval England. In a similar vein although different time periods I would recommend the Tre(ec/as)es, Geofrrey Trease ( Word to Caesar ) and Henry Treece ( Viking Dawn ), who was a poet and a teacher as well as a children's author. I haven't re-read these as an adult so I can only report that I found them gripping as a child.
Here are my final updates for 2020:
93. Apeirogon, Colum McCann
Widely reviewed here and elsewhere. You probably already know that this is the story of two bereaved fathers, one Israeli, the other Palestinian, who lost their daughters in the violence and conflict that runs through the region. The fathers, and their daughters, are real people - Rami's 13-year-old daughter Smadar was killed in a suicide bombing in Jerusalem while out shopping with friends; ten years later, Bassam's 10-year-old daughter Abir was killed by a rubber bullet fired by a teenage Israeli soldier outside her school. The two fathers met through the Parents Circle, a peace activism organisation run for and by bereaved parents from both sides, and have become friends and co-campaigners for peace. McCann includes interviews with them but, as he explains in his introduction, he has also imagined and embroidered.
This was the third of McCann's books that I have read, having loved the other two: Let the Great World Spin (which is the story of a tightrope walk between the twin towers in New York, but at its heart a story about 9/11), and Transatlantic, which pulls together the story of the first attempted non-stop flight across the Atlantic in 1919, a visit from the anti-slavery activist Frederick Douglas to Ireland in the 1840s, and Senator George Mitchell's journey from the US to Belfast to contribute to the Northern Irish peace talks. McCann's great skill (as those summaries suggest) is picking diverse stories and pulling them together in a way which brings out their connections, their universality; illuminating both the familiar story and the unfamiliar through putting them side by side.
So, then, to Apeirogon, which as well as being the story of Rami and Bassam, Smadar and Abir, is also a story about migrating birds, about the experiences of an Irish priest's doomed attempts to explore the sites of biblical cities on the Dead Sea, about bible stories and the tales of the 1001 Arabian Nights, about the long history of conflict in the area, about life in modern Israel and Palestine, the experiences of negotiating checkpoints and surviving a prison hunger strike, about the Holocaust, stories from the Bible, echoes of the two novels I mentioned previously (both the tightrope walk Petit and Senator Mitchell being linked to the Israel-Palestine area - and through whom McCann opens little narrative windows through which we can consider how the Troubles and 9/11 are linked to the stories of Rami and Bassam). All of this cleverly done through a structure of 1001 chapters, deliberately reflecting the stories of the Arabian Nights, and with the testimony of the two fathers at its heart.
An apeirogon, in case you were wondering, is a shape with a countably infinite number of sides - from this you might correctly deduce that there is more than one side to any story. Maths and Islamic art run through this book, which is constantly reflecting, repeating, looping back on itself. The stories jump back and forth in time so that the girls seem to be at the same time not yet born, alive, recently killed and long dead - it's a technique that worked powerfully to make their deaths seem both inevitable and avoidable, both a part of history and painfully recent, and to show the lifelong, never-ending grief and trauma visited both on their families and on the wider communities for whom these are only two deaths amongst many thousands.
I have to admit that, despite my admiration, I did find this book hard going, not so much because of the subject matter (which I was prepared for, and in which death and violence are mixed with other stories of beauty, resilience and love) but because of the structure, clever and effective as it is. I wasn't feeling well over the Christmas period and sometimes felt that I was wading through treacle reading this - it has little or no forward momentum, you wonder whether it would work as a conceptual novel where the 1001 chapters are printed on separate cards and picked up at random (I think probably not, but certainly you could consider it). I think I would have struggled less if I hadn't been fighting my own brain fog at times, but I do think this book needs a slow, reflective read with the expectation that you won't travel from A to B in the narrative - you'll start at A and end up at A, but with excursions to B, C and many other (often unexpected) letters in between.
94. If I Had Your Face, Frances Cha
After finishing Apeirogon, I whipped through this one in a single day. Absorbing, disturbing book about a group of young working class women living in modern-day Seoul.
Ara is working as a hair stylist in a busy salon, and dreams naively of meeting her K-Pop idol: the daughter of domestic servants, she has been mute since an incident in her childhood which is left as a mystery until later in the book. Her flatmate and childhood friend/protector is Sujin, whose ambition is to have extensive facial surgery so she can become a highly-paid room salon girl, employed to drink with rich male patrons. Across the hall live Miho, an artist whose scholarship to an American college has thrown her into an unfamiliar world of upper-class western-educated Koreans, and Kyuri, who is living the life that Sujin dreams of - she's a "Ten Per Cent" girl, working in an exclusive room salon where only the most beautiful and sought-after 10% of girls are employed. Finally, their neighbour Wonna, who has escaped an abusive childhood through marriage to a kind but poor man who she doesn't love, and remains haunted by unhappiness and demons of her past.
On the surface, this book is chatty, gossipy, full of scenes in bars and food houses, female friendship and support networks, light-hearted talk of clothes, make-up and hair. However, the picture that Cha paints of the lives of the young women is a bleak one. Even low-paid jobs are found through contacts and networking, and there is little opportunity for social or financial advancement. Ara and Wonna fear losing their jobs despite being hard workers - they know that without contacts they will struggle to find another place. Sexism and bullying are rife, and employee protections scant. Marriage isn't an easy option either, with low-status young wives frequently treated badly by their husbands and their inlaws. Kyuri is making good money through her room salon job, but it's humiliating, dehumanizing work where the girls are expected to submit to every whim of the rich, male customers - Kyuri has worked her way up from the red light district but even as a Ten Per Cent girl she is still expected to offer sex to her customers. With the highest rate of cosmetic surgery in the world (some estimates suggest that 1in 3 South Korean women between 19 and 29 have had plastic surgery), both the young women themselves and everyone around them is obsessed with appearance and beauty, while corruption, nepotism, rigid class structures, and sexism stifle the young women's opportunities and leave them with limited options, not just for social advancement but even for simple happiness.
I read an interesting comment in a Goodreads review, that while a reader would not think of a writer such as Eileen Mosfegh (whose characters he compares to Cha's in being unlikeable and appearance-obsessed) as representing a rounded view of American society, there is a risk that Cha's book is seen, because of a lack of English-language books about life in Korea, as being completely representative of Korean culture. I'm not sure that I agree that Cha is deliberately presenting unlikable women here - I felt that we were supposed to be sympathetic to their situation rather than repulsed by their characters - but certainly I came away wondering how realistic a portrait this is of modern Korea. If anyone can recommend any useful further reading please do (I'm starting here www.theguardian.com/books/2020/apr/23/south-korea-female-writers-rise-up-cho-nam-joo and here theculturetrip.com/asia/south-korea/articles/a-century-of-tumult-ten-important-modern-korean-authors/ )
95. Hercule Poirot's Christmas, Agatha Christie
Only partway through this one but listing it here as I think it will be my final read of 2020. So far a large and estranged family have gathered for Christmas at the request of the obscenely rich and deeply unpleasant patriarch. As well as the sons and their wives there are an important sprinkling of outsiders including a servant who goes pale at the mention of the police. The requisite murder has taken place. I'm going to settle in and enjoy Poirot doing his thing.