@DuPainDuVinDuFromage great review of The House on the Strand, my feelings are very similar to yours!
@PermanentTemporary that was a kick-ass review of the Burton/Taylor book! I remember going to see their film version of The Taming of the Shrew when I was young, and it had a lasting impact. They were just so damn sexy.
@ÚlldemoShúl I'm enjoying your reviews of the Women's Fiction Prize longlist as I'm reading some of those books myself!
A review dump (I confess I've spent the past week reading rather than working, argh):
12 Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte 5/5
A strange and disturbing book, much more disturbing than I had remembered from a long-ago teenage read. Amazing though. Class, race, the Gothic: this novel has everything. In some ways it reminded me of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (I’m definitely not the first reader to think of this): both the framing of the story by multiple narrators (Mr Lockwood and the servant Nelly), and the notion that ‘othering’ someone can create monstrosity (though Heathcliff is much less sympathetic than Frankenstein’s monster). It’s interesting that both famous Gothic stories of monsters were written by women: creatures on the margins inventing and writing about other creatures on the margins. I lost my way a bit at the start with the two Catherines and the Earnshaw/Linton families, and referred frequently to the handy family tree provided in my edition of the book (Oxford World Classics). Heathcliff and Cathy are a dark pair of lovers: caught up in their own relationship to the exclusion of everyone and everything else. The way that generational trauma plays out in the lives of their children is compelling and chilling. And the moor is like a character in its own right. [Autobiographical aside: I was home educated, and it was lonely, so part of me wants to read this book as ‘This is what happens when you keep your children at home in a high-stress, dysfunctional family and don’t let them interact with wider society! Psychological turmoil ensues!’ But that’s just my own personal and admittedly self-dramatising take. I do recognise that being home-educated in California in the 70s and 80s is not actually very similar to being stuck on the 19th-century Yorkshire moors, ha.] Nah, I don’t plan to see the film. I’m grateful to the film though for motivating me to read the book.
13 Wild Dark Shore, Charlotte McConaghy 4/5
Women’s Prize longlist. I loved many elements of this novel: the Australian island setting, the varying perspectives of father and children, the climate change theme. It was well-written and a page-turner as well. At the end though, there were so many dramatic/implausible plot twists that it fell short of a bold for me. I would recommend it however.
14 Dominion, Addie E. Citchens 3/5
Women's Prize longlist. The language of this novel spoke to me as I grew up in fundamentalist evangelical America. The author’s mastery of religious discourse is flawless. The setting in a Black community in Mississippi also feels very authentic (though that’s not a context I’m familiar with). However, I was frustrated by how one-dimensional the male characters in the novel seemed to be. It’s satisfying to see abusive men brought down, but while the women in the novel are complex, the psychology of the male characters isn’t really explored. I can’t help thinking of James Baldwin and how skilfully he shows that patriarchal Christianity damages men as well as women.
15 The Proof of My Innocence, Jonathan Coe 4/5
A very entertaining read with my neighbourhood book group. Coe sets his novel in the brief period when Truss was PM, but there are substantial flashbacks to 1980s Cambridge. The novel playfully/metafictionally brings together three different genres: cosy crime, dark academic and autofiction. I liked the way Coe mingled real-life politics and fiction (some of the names and events in the book are real, some not). The political satire is a bit heavy-handed as the extreme right wing of the Conservative Party is depicted as utterly ruthless (though my fellow book group members pointed out to me that this depiction is likely to be accurate, alas). Coe never seems to be taking himself too seriously: the pitch is comic, playful and light-touch, which I appreciated. Yet the characters ultimately feel more like types than like well-rounded people. There are some great set pieces though, such as an episode where people are queueing after the death of the Queen. In short, an enjoyable novel by an accomplished and ingenious writer.
16 Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood 4/5
Read for my work book group. This novel was almost a bold for me, as it’s so thought-provoking, but I want my ratings to reflect not just how powerful a work is as literature but also how much I enjoyed it. And dystopian fiction is really not my thing. I just find it unremittingly bleak and a real downer (George Orwell, I’m looking at you). I prefer Atwood’s non-fantasy works (she calls the Oryx and Crake trilogy ‘speculative fiction). The Handmaid’s Tale is speculative fiction as well, but that work has dystopia PLUS characterisation: a masterpiece. Anyway, Oryx and Crake is set in a landscape where the hero (Jimmy/the Snowman) is living in a world where nearly everyone has been killed by a plague. His present-tense point of view alternates with past-tense flashbacks, where we discover a world dominated by ruthless capitalist scientists, including his genius friend Crake (and the former sex worker Oryx, whom both of them lust after). As I said, it’s bleak. Much interesting stuff about living in the wake of trauma, and about how toxic a patriarchal gender system can be.
17 The Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood 4/5
Despite my mixed feelings about Oryx and Crake, I have an insatiable desire to know what happens next, so I read this second volume of the trilogy, which covers the same time period as Oryx and Crake. In terms of writing style, it feels inferior in some ways to its predecessor, but it focuses (especially at the end) on relationships between women, and this made it much more powerful for me. It’s about an eco-religious group called God’s Gardeners, who are vegetarian and pacifist. Atwood wrote this in 2009 and it seems eerily prescient in some ways. The sections of the novel are interspersed with sermons (by the God’s Gardeners leader) and hymns. I confess I skimmed over these bits a bit quickly. An uneven book but worth reading as a less male-centred counterpart to Oryx and Crake. The end was very moving. Not sure I want to read the final volume of the trilogy yet as two dystopian works in a row have not been good for my mood.