31/07/20: Sarah Waters – The Little Stranger (2009)

This 500-page novel, shortlisted for the 2009 Booker Prize, initially frustrated me. I don’t like to give up on books, but for 200 pages I found it fairly uninvolving. A couple of times I nearly hurled it across the room. Only as I approached the halfway mark did it begin to come alive and hook me in.

The story deals with a country doctor becoming involved with the Ayres family (a mother, her son Roddy and her daughter Caroline) and the fading Warwickshire stately home in which they live. It pretty soon becomes apparent that supernatural forces permeate the house and influence events there – with tragic consequences – but the doctor refuses to accept this possibility and attributes everything to mental delusion. His relationship with the house and family is further complicated when he falls in love with Caroline Ayres.

The supernatural material is handled expertly and with real subtlety. Allowing everything to be explained away, the author enables her narrator to doubt the very events he is observing. But it is infuriating to only see the world through his dull, unimaginative eyes. He’s a stuffy, rigid character, and while the story clearly needs his scepticism, his inflexible worldview does make for a less interesting authorial voice. He’s also there to draw out the theme of class inequality. His attraction to the family is ambiguously tied up with his own social aspirations.

By the end of the book, the slow pace has become transfixing. You know that more bad things are going to happen and sure enough they do.

09/05/19: Steve Toltz – A Fraction of the Whole (2008)

A long (700-page), shaggy-dog story of a book that stretches from Australia to France to Thailand and back to Australia, this covers three generations of the Dean family, focusing on Terry (a vicious murderer), Martin (Terry’s genius-madman brother) and Jasper (Martin’s equally eccentric and rebellious son).

As with the work of Kurt Vonnegut, this is very funny and full of philosophical questioning and insight about life, love and religion – but in such a dry, self-deprecating manner that it never feels ponderous or remotely preachy. It’s also quite savage in its social satire. It’s a novel that praises individuality and rages against conformity.

There’s huge intelligence and wisdom at work that challenges lazy thinking. I wanted to copy out several passages because what they communicated was so profound. I also want to read it again.

04/03/19: Deborah Levy – Hot Milk (2016)

“I was beginning to understand Ingrid Bauer. She was always pushing me to the edge in one way or another. My boundaries were made from sand so she reckoned she could push them over, and I let her. I gave my unspoken consent because I want to know what’s going to happen next, even if it’s not to my advantage. Am I self-destructive, or pathetically passive, or reckless, or just experimental, or am I a rigorous cultural anthropologist, or am I in love?”

I enjoyed The Cost of Living so much that I wanted to read more Deborah Levy. This Booker Prize-shortlisted novel features more of the same dry wit. And it has a similar “voice”.

Excellently plotted, it details what happens when anthropology student Sofia accompanies her mother from England to Spain for treatment at a specialist health clinic. In the sultry idyll of the hot beaches where jellyfish sting swimmers, Sofia begins two relationships – one with a man and one with a woman. As her mother’s mysterious ailment is explored by the enigmatic Mr. Gomez, Sofia reflects on her relationship with her mother and her place in the world.

It’s the best novel I’ve read for a long time. Deborah Levy weaves the threads together with such subtle humour and expanding richness that it’s a joy to read. Recurring motifs – the medusa jellyfish, an embroidered shirt, a taxidermy exhibit, the screensaver image on a broken laptop – resonate throughout and become increasingly laden with symbolic meaning. They combine to create something that feels mythically powerful.

11/08/18: Muriel Spark – The Driver’s Seat (1970)

This made the shortlist of the “lost Booker Prize” of 1970, which was retrospectively announced in 2010 and won by J.G. Farrell’s Troubles.

It’s a disturbing short novel about a woman who travels to another country and arranges her own murder – a study of mental illness and alienation. There are flashes of wit and social insight, but the knowledge that it will end in a violent death – and the cold, clinical way that the protagonist seems to engineer this – makes for a rather nasty read.

It also has some of the strangest jacket copy I have ever encountered:

06/08/18: Iris Murdoch – The Sea, The Sea (1978)

A dazzling novel that understandably won the Booker Prize in 1978. Charles Arrowby is a successful theatre director and playwright who retires to the sea and begins writing his memoirs. People from his past keep showing up and he is witness to strange, possibly supernatural events (I especially liked the haunted-house motifs). He discovers that his childhood sweetheart, Mary “Hartley” Fitch, is living nearby and embarks on an obsessive quest to claim her from her husband – even though it is made clear that she has not aged well.

In fact, we soon question Charles’ recollections altogether: was the couple’s entire youthful relationship something he had idealised and embellished over time? Is he truly infatuated or having some kind of delusional breakdown? Just how reliable is this narrator, who we often see more “objectively” through the eyes of his various visitors? As Charles’ obsession grows, the situation begins to spiral out of anyone’s control.

The sea is described wonderfully: almost a character in its own right. There’s also a lot about food (“Only a fool despises tomato ketchup,” he notes at one point). Iris Murdoch’s fiction often seems emotionally overwrought, but it’s actually that quality that I admire about her writing. Situations and relationships are examined in microscopic detail and with a spiritual, philosophical depth that other authors simply do not attempt. You know from the start that someone is going to drown in the sea, but it’s a mark of the tangled threads she weaves that you can never guess who.

As the book progresses, the plot takes increasingly surreal twists. Murdoch plays with elements of mysticism, melodrama and even farce as she works through to a resolution (of sorts). Like all great art, it works on multiple levels and leaves you thinking.

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.

21/07/16: Emma Donoghue – Room (2010)

Jack, aged five, is imprisoned in a single room with his mother, who was kidnapped seven years ago. This room is Jack's entire world, and it has become a sealed universe of play and learning. His mother protects him from the true horror of their situation. The things and places he sees on TV he believes are all unreal. Reality is the room alone. The book is narrated by Jack and through his impressions we learn how abusively they are being treated by “Old Nick”, their captor. It's overwhelmingly sad – especially since Jack demands so little beyond the love of his mother. You find yourself desperately hoping they will be rescued or escape, but wondering what sort of life Jack might have in a world he cannot believe or understand. Without wanting to spoil the ending, there’s a lot more to it than just getting out of Room… There are many negative reviews of this book on Amazon (partly because it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, which always attracts a backlash), so I thought it was worth addressing some of the criticisms raised:

“Nothing happens.”/“It’s dull.”: This is untrue. Plenty happens. During this novel, Jack and his mother live through the pivotal moments of their life, then have their world turned upside down again and again. The book is centred in Jack's interior consciousness, yes, but that world is going through daily transformation. This is hardly uneventful. I found it riveting – almost painfully so, as I was rooting for the characters so much and so touched by their love for each other.

“It’s depressing and/or upsetting.”: Books about imprisonment and child cruelty are likely to be disturbing. But the true theme of this novel is compassion. The author wisely keeps the love of mother and son at the centre of the story, rather than merely turning it into a thriller. The disturbing elements are integral and necessary, hardly gratuitous.

“Jack’s voice is unrealistic.”: Unrealistic compared to what? He’s not meant to be a typical five-year-old. He's a child whose very existence has been entirely shaped by his situation. He is highly advanced in some ways and extremely limited in others. I found this a heartbreakingly believable expression of his confinement, his insular life and his uniquely intense relationship with his mother – the only human he had ever known. This material makes for one of the most powerful novels I have read. Don't be put off by the horrible cover.

In 2015, Room was made into an excellent film.

20/05/16: Penelope Lively – According to Mark (1984)

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1984, According to Mark follows writer Mark Lamming as he tries to research a literary biography. His research into the unsung author Gilbert Strong gets him involved with Strong's granddaughter, who runs a garden centre in Dorset, sparking off a series of events that culminate in a road trip through France.

This is another hugely intelligent, entertaining Penelope Lively novel. It's funny in places and contains gems of social observation. Particularly well drawn characters – such as Mark's controlling and super-controlled wife Diana – make this a real pleasure to read. Lively flits between perspectives, sometimes approaching a scene from an unexpected point of view and sometimes revisiting the same events to give another person's take on them. This is unusual and refreshing: so much fiction takes a more static line on whose perspective a book is from. She makes it work very freely and accessibly.

The book asks some deep questions about identity. It can also be read as a straightforward novel about human relationships. I came to this soon after the more serious Booker-winning Moon Tiger and was not disappointed.

28/03/16: Penelope Lively – Moon Tiger (1987)

What a great novel. Claudia Hampton, now a 76-year-old woman, lays dying in her hospital bed. She recalls episodes of her history (sometimes dovetailing with world history) and the people she shared it with – her daughter, her brother, her partner and the true love of her life, killed in action in World War II. As fragments of memory drift in and out of focus, the story of her life emerges in patchwork form. It's a very satisfying approach. Although the perceptions are fundamentally Claudia's, the author also allows us inside the minds of the other characters for a more multilayered texture. There's a huge intelligence to the writing and it's a joy to read something of this quality and richness. One of the most enjoyable of the Booker Prize novels (it won in 1987), this is a book that stays with you.

27/12/15: Richard Flanagan – The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013)

The Narrow Road to the Deep North is the story of a surgeon who endures time in a Japanese PoW camp in WWII, helping to oversee the brutal construction of the "Burma Death Railway". He's a complex man who becomes regarded as a great hero almost despite himself. The narrative moves forwards and backwards in time, telescoping the years brilliantly, examining how the defining relationship of his life changes everything that follows. The book works on multiple levels. It's especially good at conveying the utter wretchedness of life in the PoW camp – the insane cruelty that somehow became ordinary routine. It takes an elegiac tone as it follows up on various lives after the war ended, showing that for many of the individuals scarred by these experiences it never really ended at all.

It's a deep book that takes some getting into – moving slowly in places and then racing through the years in other sections. It's a wise book, too, understanding that the moral choices we make are never simple.

As a work of literary construction it's impressive. It won the won the 2014 Booker Prize and you can see why. It's not "difficult", by any means (although you might want to look away during some scenes of brutality), but it's rich enough that you would probably get more out of it on a second reading.

05/04/15: Tim Parks – Europa (1997)

Booker Prize-shortlisted, Europa is a ferociously intelligent and witty novel. The brilliantly sustained first-person stream-of-consciousness narration comes from Jerry Marlow, who – struggling with a mid-life crisis of sorts – finds himself on a coach to Strasbourg with other Milan University staff (including a woman with whom he had recently had an intense affair) to petition the European Parliament about employment rights.

The characters are extremely well drawn. You can read this as political satire and/or as a study of excruciating human situations. I was sorry when it ended and am now keen to try out more by this author.

09/06/13: Ali Smith – The Accidental (2005)

A brilliant novel. A family takes in – and are taken in by – an uninvited guest, who goes on to change all their lives in different, profound ways. Ali Smith realises the value of ambiguity and deliberately doesn't over-explain motives. She leaves enough mystery so that the unfolding story – told from all five characters' points of view – stays fascinating throughout. There are some beautifully written passages, too, so parts of the book have a very special, almost dream-like atmosphere.

05/01/13: Nicola Barker – Darkmans (2007)

“Beede was the original architect of the unflinching stare. Beede’s stare was so steady he could make an owl crave Optrex.”

Shortlisted for the 2007 Booker Prize, this is a seemingly chaotic sprawl of characters and situations that somehow starts to fit together. The characters are particularly strong. It's funny, too. Nicola Barker has a real gift for language and phrasing that at times recalls (early) Martin Amis. It's a long book and is best read in big chunks so that you can digest the hugely imaginative scope of it and become totally immersed in the world it creates.