24/02/17: David Keenan – This Is Memorial Device (2017)

I’ve never read anything like this before. It’s a novel that takes the form of a biography of an obscure band, Memorial Device, based in Airdrie, western Scotland, in the early 1980s. Assembled by fan Ross Raymond, the book consists of various recollections, interviews and essays by people associated with this micro-scene. It digresses wildly and the group supposedly at the core of the story never comes into focus. This isn’t a failing of the book. It seems to be a deliberate reminder that the more deeply you probe into history looking for answers, the more questions you will find. It also makes the point that the group was far less important than the sense of community it briefly inspired. Possibly, the scene was so fragmented and insignificant that it never even counted as a scene – except to those who invested their time and emotions in these characters and who need to sustain their myth.

In the hands of a lesser author, this could so easily have become cheery, blokey nostalgia for men of a certain age who grew up with punk and post-punk. Instead it’s something much more realistic and savage.

Various appendices extend the illusion that this is a real biography. There’s a list of bands in the scene: “A Necessarily Incomplete Attempt to Map the Extent of the Post-Punk Music Scene in Airdrie, Coatbridge and environs of the Post-Punk Music Scene in Airdrie, Coatbridge and environs 1978–1986”. There are accounts of the major and minor players in the story. And there’s even a 25-page index – deliberately itemising the contents of the novel in ridiculous detail.

Parts of it are incoherent and hard-going, but that's presumably deliberate. When it clicks into place – such as chapters 17 and 24 – it’s so compulsively readable that you wish more of the book had been presented this way.

04/02/18: Deborah Levy – Swimming Home (2011)

Shortlisted for the 2012 Booker Prize, this is a short, funny and disturbing novel about mental illness. Two English couples, one with a 14-year-old daughter, holiday in a villa near Nice. As the back cover explains: “Joe sees a body in the swimming pool. But the girl is very much alive. She is Kitty Finch: a self-proclaimed botanist with green-painted fingernails, walking naked out of the water and into the heart of their holiday. Why is she there? What does she want from them all? And why does Joe's wife allow her to remain?”

This book reminded me of The Accidental (2005) by Ali Smith, which also sees a mysterious stranger moving in with a family and transforming their lives. And the intense relationships unfolding by the pool of a hot holiday villa made me think of The Pregnant Widow (2010) by Martin Amis.

Kitty Finch, we soon learn, is “mental”. As the story unfolds you know it can’t end happily. It’s a hugely intelligent piece of work that distills the complexity of human human behaviour into economical sentences.

03/02/18: Ottessa Moshfegh – Eileen (2016)

“Those people with perfect houses are simply obsessed with death. A house that is so well maintained, furnished with good-looking furniture of high quality, decorated tastefully, everything in its place, becomes a living tomb. People truly engaged in life have messy houses. I knew this implicitly at age twenty-four. Of course at twenty-four I was also obsessed with death. I had tried to distract myself from my terror not through housekeeping, like the housewives of X-ville, but through my bizarre eating, compulsive habits, tireless ambivalence, Randy and so forth. I hadn't realized this until sitting at Rebecca's kitchen table, watching her crack open a peanut, lick her fingers: I would die one day, but not yet. There I was.”

Shortlisted for the 2016 Booker Prize, this is a hugely atmospheric, claustrophobic, wintry novel that takes on a noirish/Hitchcockian element and becomes highly compelling.

Eileen lives a life of quiet desperation and self-loathing with a grim job at a boys’ prison. Her home life is a prison too, as she thanklessly cares for her dangerous alcoholic father. Then she meets the beautiful, charismatic Rebecca Saint John and her fortunes are transformed. You become aware that her life is about to change drastically, and the anticipation of the defining event is what the entire book builds up to. The novel is slow to get going but that’s precisely the point: she makes you feel the painful reality of isolation and loneliness.

But this isn’t a depressing book, nor a worthy slice of “misery lit”. The narrator’s sharp observation and the darkest possible wit – plus the old-person-looking-back-at-their-life perspective and steadily escalating tension – give it a strong narrative pull. By the final 100 pages I was transfixed.