10/04/19: Penelope Lively – Heat Wave (1996)

Middled-aged copy-editor Pauline was once cheated on by her husband. She now sees the same thing happening to her daughter.

This is a clever novel that weaves together a mother/and-daughter story, a saga of past and present relationships and a study of rural vs. urban living. It’s set in the English countryside and the nature around the characters is vividly brought into being as a metaphorical mirror of what is happening to them.

It's such a slow-burner that I was surprised when it concluded in a moment of sudden action, albeit a satisfying one.

05/04/19: Deborah Levy – Early Levy: Beautiful Mutants and Swallowing Geography (2014)

This is a bind-up of two short, early novels.

Beautiful Mutants (1989):

A bunch of seemingly unrelated characters often given nicknames (The Banker, The Anorexic Anarchist, The Innocents and so on) float through the narrative seemingly without purpose.

This is an unusual novel in that it seems so disjointed, with surreal and often violent episodes depicted in poetic language. The way the characters speak is completely unrealistic – and presumably intentionally so:

“This fish has the possessed eye of a poet and tastes just as useless. In fact it tastes like a melancholy misfit. I have always hated poetry, I prefer hard mathematics or even hard drugs. Do you really think that in consuming this pescado I would consume its ideas? I have spat them out again and again. And what is The Idea? That there are thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird? Give it to me, I’ll take it to the market and show you sixty ways of looking at it. Poets are fuckwits. They try and legislate with language but they don’t have the roubles to bribe. On my aunt’s salmon farm they stroke the belly of hen salmon to squeeze out their eggs for breeding. Well, I have squeezed you out too.”

Certainly no one speaks like this:

“I own a prestige apartment facing the sparkle of the river, with south-facing views, a private car park, porter, video security, entry phone, swimming pool and a sauna to nurture my health, which is after all my wealth. I am given all this for good reason. I am valued; I am an irresistible proposition to men in parliaments and tycoons on committees and entrepreneurs of all kinds; my condom case bulges with the promise of liaison and adventure. I am the new pioneer; the great adventure of my generation is to destabilize everything and everyone.”

I don’t think it’s meant to be realistic. It’s a novel of ideas, constructed out of experimental language, jamming in jarring images, phrases, situations and thoughts. But I found it too incoherent to get much out of it, which I accept may be my failing as a reader.

Swallowing Geography (1993):

The second novel is no more rewarding. J.K. (a reference to Jack Kerouac) travels through seemingly unrelated scenes and locations. Again, it’s very disjointed. If anything, it becomes even more abstract as it goes on. There are characters called B, H, X, Y and Z. Levy may be trying to deconstruct identity and reveal it to be fluid and ever-shifting. But once that point has been made, what of it?

Again the language is poetic and even beautiful, but the fragmentary conversations and observations don’t add up to a great deal.

I loved Swimming Home, The Cost of Living and Hot Milk, so found this very disappointing indeed.

01/04/19: Helen Krasner – Midges, Maps & Muesli: An Account of a 5,000-Mile Walk Round the Coast of Britain (1998)

“I wasn’t particularly interested in fulfilling an ambition, nor did I want the great feelings of achievement people thought I must be seeking – this just wasn’t the way I looked at walking, or indeed at life.”

In 1986, Helen Krasner became the first woman to walk around the coast of Britain. This is her tale. Rather than present a day-by-day account, she simply reports back on the interesting bits – a wise decision, as this makes for a far more compelling narrative. There’s a visit to Sellafield nuclear power station, where she commits the faux-pas of carrying a camera. She passes Paul McCartney’s farm at the Mull of Kintyre. And she looks for the monster at Loch Ness.

She is unpretentious and easy to like, with a relaxed view about the “rules” of the walk. She undertook the journey for pleasure, not for the sake of setting a record. Plus, there can be no definitive route. It’s not as simple as keeping the coast on your left. How literally do you take this when paths come and go? Even if the path followed the coastline strictly, where is the “coast” anyway? It depends on dynamic factors including tides, ocean currents, times of year, weather and erosion – an infinitely complex matter. You realise that she is absolutely right to interpret the route the way she does.

She only suffers one blister on the entire trip and the book is refreshingly free of gripes about the pain of endurance. She does it for fun, and that cones across well.

Along the way she depicts an older and more innocent Britain – one without computers, GPS technology and mobile phones. On one occasion she has to call for some medical results (foot X-ray to rule out suspected fracture) and only had 10p to use in a phone box. Keen to hear about her walk, the radiographer is slow to get to the point and reveal the good news: “She had told me in the nick of time. The pips went, and we were cut off.” There must be generations now who have no idea what the pips even means.

I particularly liked the way she refuses to play the role others expect from her. By the time she completes the walk, returning to Brighton, she has become weary of retelling the same story endlessly and generally disappoints the press by not issuing the kinds of memorable statements they expect to hear.

Only one real criticism: the book would have greatly benefited from a map showing Helen’s route route. Amid the barrage of obscure place names, I found I was often looking up locations online to see how far she had travelled. That said, she does end with a day-by-day listing of each stretch she completed and a running tally of distances covered – in fact, a journey of 4,922 miles from the start of March 1986 to the end of January 1987.