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A weekly letter from the founding editor of The Browser. Topics may vary. Correspondence and criticism welcome: robert@thebrowser.com This week: Books I have been reading
I wrote last week about comfort reading, and received much lively correspondence in return from readers dismayed that my three principal recommendations were all for books written by men of a certain age. We have since published on The Browser's Letters Page a letter from Mary Ann Sieghart, Chair of Judges for the 2022 Women's Prize for Fiction, together with my reply, which I hope captures the essentials of the discussion. My thanks also to DW, CA, GB, HH, SR, SM, BW, TW, AO, KD, DY, AT, and to other correspondents, for excellent points, all well made, and all well taken by me, not least those concerning John Le Carré. I imagined "comfort reading" by analogy with comfort food. I had in mind reading with a patina of familiarity or nostalgia, which gave immediate pleasure and lasting afterglow, which could be easily digested, which might equally well be kept as a private pleasure or shared with friends. In practice that meant, to me, books whose stories had some significant overlap with my own life (and preferably with some part of my life that I remembered as having been happy); books without too many challenging ideas (for once); books with a fundamentally reassuring message (naive as it might be) about the world. Reaching first for books written by people like me was a short cut; and what can we hope to know of the world if we always take short cuts? I was particularly grateful to my friend and correspondent HH for a concrete example of misplaceable expectations: I think of (arguably) the two greatest American novelists working right now: Rachel Kushner and Jonathan Franzen. One, the dude, writes about the supposedly "feminine" realm of family and the fluctuations of intimacy between blood relations; the other, a woman, writes through a political lens about seismic historical shifts and acts of violence: supposedly "masculine" territory. Were their novels to be read blind, and a reader forced to guess, they'd probably get the genders the wrong way round.
So, this week, I am going to continue with the theme of comfort reading, while recommending books by female authors which have brought me enormous delight and have also persuaded me that reading and writing are even less gendered than I had previously imagined. My experience supports Mary Ann Sieghart's point that both the writing and reading of books should transcend gender; any market failure lies at the level of expectations. Men typically reach less often for books by women; but when they do reach for books by women, they typically enjoy them more. Here are my three discoveries of the week. Wise Children is new to me as a book, though I have long admired Angela Carter as an author; R.F. Kuang and Barbara Trapido are (to my shame) quite new to me as authors.
Wise Children, by Angela Carter (1992) Somewhere in my commonplace book I preserve a definition of magical realism as being "what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe". Is that not Angela Carter in a nutshell? Save that, in Wise Children, it is the characters, rather than the setting, who are "invaded by something too strange to believe", namely, their membership of an extended theatrical family spanning at least five generations and four sets of twins, multiple marriages and remarriages, births in and out of wedlock, abandoned relicts, adopted orphans and co-opted parents. The narrators of Wise Children are one of the book's many sets of twins, retired showgirls called Nora and Dora Chance. The secondary characters include, to quote from the author's own dramatis personae: In no particular order of appearance: rough children, cats, chorus girls, chorus boys, nudes, spear-carriers, comics, fans, Free French, Free Poles, Free Norwegians, soldiers, sailors, airmen of all nations, media personalities, television crews, market traders, pupils of the Italia Conte School, Amazonian tribesmen, photographers, film buffs, the public, extras.
The setting is Brixton from the 1910s to the 1980s, with excursions to Clapham and Regent's Park. Need I say more? Nights At The Circus is generally regarded as Angela Carter's masterpiece. But I rather agree with Ali Smith, in her view that Wise Children also deserves superlatives: “Cheerfully bawdy, it’s Carter’s most glorious, most comic, most fulfilled, certainly her most generously and happily orgiastic, fictional performance. By chance it was also her last novel. She died young, at only 51, the year after its publication, so it takes crowning place in her now recognisably revolutionary literary project.”
Babel: An Arcane History, by R.F. Kuang (2022) "Dark academia" was a new term to me when I encountered it in Kirby Beaton's review of Babel on Oprah Winfrey's website. A sideways glance at Wikipedia brought me up to date: Dark academia is a literary and social media aesthetic and subculture concerned with higher education, writing/poetry, the arts, and classic Greek and Gothic architecture. The subculture is associated with ancient art and classic literature.
Who could not be in favour of such a project? It sounds exactly like what used to be called "academia" when I was younger. If there must be a qualifier, then I suppose "dark academia" beats "light academia". Let us first judge R.F. Kuang's book by its cover. The title in full is, Babel, Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution. This must be the best title ever given to any book on any subject at any time, and Kuang's book more than lives up to the extravagance of its naming. It is a cabinet of wonders, a fusion of steampunk and alchemy, an historical fiction both magical and realistic, not much smaller than a King James Bible and by no means worse written. There is no shortage of darkness here, nor of academia. One imagines a witching coven of Philip Pullman, William Gibson, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Donna Tartt, Angela Carter and J.K. Rowling muttering incantations over the manuscript as it departed Kuang's pen. The magic in Babel is real magic. To quote again from Beaton's review: Translated words are etched onto silver bars to produce miraculous results, such as carriages that don't need horses to power them, previously untreatable diseases that can be instantly cured, and weapons that can destroy enemies on the other side of the globe.
But these miraculous results are only forthcoming when the translation is perfect; making the company of translators in Oxford, responsible for the matched pairs of words, a venerable company whose stature compares with that of the Vatican, the Royal Society, and the Académie Francaise compounded. Bear in mind also that the power unleashed by the Oxford Translators is the power used by the British Empire — we are in a counterfactual early 19th century — to conquer and colonialise the globe. These linguists and lexicographers are in a similar position, you might say, to the mathematicians and physicists working on the Manhattan Project a century later. Did they have états d'âme? Given Kuang's own choice of title, it counts as no spoiler to say that, ideologically speaking, the translators at Babel were not all on the same page.
Brother Of The More Famous Jack, by Barbara Trapido (1982) Actually, to revisit the assertion I made a few paragraphs back, perhaps there is such a thing as "light academia", and perhaps it is a good thing after all. For here is Barbara Trapido's heroine, Katherine, fresh from her "genteel North London day school" and hoping to study philosophy at university. She sparks with her prospective director of studies, Professor Jacob Goldman, who waves her through an interview with a minimum offer. She is romanced by a man whom she meets later in the day at Dillon's University Bookshop, and who takes her off for a weekend in the country. There, her hosts prove to be none other than her prospective professor, his wife, and their five or six children. Enough, you say. Too many coincidences already. This man in the bookshop: Isn't he a bit creepy? (Yes he is, as a matter of fact, though also in many ways likeable.) And the professor: What's his game? By the standards of 1982, things then get a bit naughty. While Katherine's virtue is respected, the Goldman household is so bohemian that even to spend a weekend there is to receive an éducation sentimentale. To say nothing of what follows. By the standards of 2022, on the other hand, everything in these first encounters appears almost unbearably innocent: Here are people of different ages and backgrounds mixing in a social setting untroubled by social media, mobile phones, dietary restrictions, social distancing or microaggressions. They smoke, they drink, they display affection, they use bad language, they poke fun at one another, and at no point does anybody start an argument about politics or religion. The Goldmans' two teenage boys, when not preoccupied with swearing and throwing food at one another, sing Purcell and play the violin to their mother's piano accompaniment. Neither Professor Goldman nor his soon-to-be-student Katherine have any cause to worry that the mere fact of their being together by chance on a social occasion might be considered moral jeopardy in her case and cause for dismissal in his. I could say that I sense a touch of Iris Murdoch here, a touch of Howard Jacobson there, notes throughout of David Lodge and of Jane Smiley and of Rachel Cusk. These are the peers alongside whom I would rank Barbara Trapido, and it amazes me that, before coming across a review of her work in Conversation, I had never thought of reading her books. She has written seven novels, and she has never won a major literary award. Well, neither did William Shakespeare. Nor John Keats. Nor Jean Rhys, Nor Barbara Pym. I can't claim that Brother Of The More Famous Jack should have won the Booker Prize for 1982, rather than Schindler's List; but I do think it should have been short-listed. By way of reparation, perhaps a CBE?
— Robert
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