I’m Back, Thanks to Melissa Harrison’s All Among the Barley

When I unceremoniously stopped writing posts for this blog in mid-2014, I knew my absence was temporary. Even so, I wondered for more than five years what would bring me back. I nearly returned a year or so ago thanks to Virginie Despentes’s Vernon Subutex 1, in Frank Wynne’s grittily wonderful translation, but time felt like too much of a problem. Time feels like (slightly) less of a problem now, so when I started reading Melissa Harrison’s All Among theBarley on New Year’s Day, I knew it was time to resurrect the blog. I bought the novel last year on the recommendation of a helpful salesclerk at Waterstones Piccadilly: all he really had to say was “crushing tragedy.” I do love a good crushing tragedy (the salesclerk likely intuited that based on my other purchases) and Harrison’s beautiful and quietly brutal coming-of-age story set in rural England, between the world wars, does everything I like a novel to do.

Edie Mather, fourteen years old, tells her own story in language dense with the flora and fauna at and around her home, Wych Farm. On the first page of the prologue, she’s lying awake at night, “remembering the day the Hunt ran me down in Hulver Wood,” adding in the next paragraph:

“As I walked, a white owl kept pace with me, drifting silently at head-height on the other side of the hedge; perhaps it hoped I would startle some blood-warm creatures from its tangled base.”

A landrail, a.k.a. corncrake.

There are plenty of unsettling elements here: the apparent insomnia, the Hunt, and the eerie owl who seems to be seeking out a warm-blooded snack. Harrison has already established a lot: Edie is clearly telling her story when she’s older (I’ll avoid major spoilers but will say it turns out her narration is made many decades later) and there’s already a very strong sense of nature, hinting at the relationships between predators and prey. Cycles of life for humans, animals, and plants, including crops, will be an important motif throughout All Among the Barley, and Harrison’s choices can be very colorful. I wasn’t familiar with all the plants and creatures – Jack-go-to-bed-at-noon and fritillaries among them – but somehow that gave the text even more mysterious allure than bits of witchcraft. (Maybe nature is the ultimate witchcraft? I think so.) There are also landrails, birds I wasn’t familiar with; Edie cares for one, which is very sweet but oh, we know it won’t end well.

The same – both mysterious allure and “it won’t end well” – goes for writer Constance FitzAllen’s presence in Elmbourne. She’s come to learn about rural life. Connie’s appearance in the area, where she interviews the locals, bring in an outsider who exposes differences of opinion on “whither England?” Early in the book she declares that “soon the peasant class will all be gone” and Edie tells Connie much later that she shouldn’t expect “old ballads and harvest traditions; the olden days are long gone.” In many senses, they are, though the past is complicated: in these between-the-war years, fallen soldiers are still remembered. Alongside those memories, though, is resentment toward certain outsiders. Again, I won’t reveal much other than to say that nearby squatters provide an opportunity for Edie to hear and discuss prejudice and anti-immigrant demagoguery.

This, too, fits with the predator/prey motif (unsurprisingly, the word “parasite” comes up, too), particularly since Harrison so skillfully describes various types of communities and circles that nest and overlap: Wych Farm, the Mather family, neighbors, the nearest town, the country, the rest of the world. What’s particularly admirable about All Among the Barley is that Harrison’s story of Edie’s maturation reflects both her insularity – she’s a bright, dreamy child who loves reading, traces witch marks, feels different from others, and lives in the country – as well as her interactions with her siblings, parents, Connie (an outsider), and a rather predatorial suitor. Most remarkable, Edie is a literary character who bears a lot of meaning but still feels very real.

Differences are what lead to the crushing tragedy the kind man at Waterstones mentioned, and that tragedy, at least in my reading, ripples through nearly everything in the book, from Edie’s fate (revealed at the end of the novel) to a way of life that is weakened and susceptible to demagoguery. Those tragedies are accompanied by cycles based in biological nature – crops, clutches of landrails, growing up, adolescent suitors – as well as cycles of a historical nature. We know what the demagoguery in the book presages, less than a decade after the book’s primary action as well as later, now. I don’t believe All Among the Barley is currently available in the U.S., though hope it’s on the way.

Disclaimers: Although I bought my copy of All Among the Barley, I did receive a copy of Vernon Subtex 1, which I mentioned briefly in this post, from MacLehose Press at a bookfair in 2018. Vernon is available in the U.S. from FSG. Many things about Vernon struck me, particularly Despentes depiction of aging.

Photo credit: by Rachel Davies - Flickr: CORNCRAKE!!!, CC BY 2.0, Link

Life Elsewhere: Mr. Lynch’s Holiday

Catherine O’Flynn’s Mr. Lynch’s Holiday is a quiet, enjoyable novel that dissects contemporary migrations and alienation, offering up the story of Eamonn, a lonely, lost, barely employed expat man who lives in Spain, whose father, Dermot, a retired bus driver, comes to visit from England. It wasn’t so much the plot or backstories that mattered to me in Mr. Lynch’s Holiday—Eamonn’s wife, for example, left him to return to England and Dermot came to England from Ireland as a young man—as O’Flynn’s small touches, things like Skype as replacement human contact (some people fall asleep by the screen!) and the ghostly feel, predatory neighbors, and stray cats of Eamonn’s underpopulated coastal Spanish town.

O’Flynn works in, to good effect, lots of quiet and sad humor: Dermot, for example, never got over nouvelle cuisine all those years ago, and Eamonn ponders “El Cóndor Pasa,” specifically “I’d rather be a hammer than a nail” and the use of panpipes, while drunk at a party. Mr. Lynch’s Holiday is gentle, spare, and occasionally sharp—a very decent combination—but also a bit predictable, particularly in the outcome of Dermot’s visit and a “one year later” epilogue that usurps a perfectly good (and, I thought, thoroughly appropriate) open-ended finish.

Disclaimers: I received a review copy of Mr. Lynch’s Holiday from publisher Henry Holt, thank you very much!

Up Next: Donald Antrim’s The Hundred Brothers.

Making Up For Lost Time: A Month in the Country & Two Others

This has been a strange summer for reading: lots of work, lots of abandoned books, and lots of distraction from travel and big changes in the weather. To get caught up on past reading, here are quick summaries of three books I’ve read (and even finished!) over the last month or so: I enjoyed all three, albeit in very different ways, though, hmm, I can’t help but notice that all three books are first-person narratives with very strong voices.

My favorite of the bunch, by far, was J.L. Carr’s A Month in the Country, a lovely and lively short novel about a World War 1 veteran, Tom Birkin, who goes to Oxgodby, Yorkshire, to restore a mural in an old country church. Of course Birkin restores himself from the trauma of the war in the process but the book didn’t feel predictable at all, thanks to small twists, like a hint of madness in a lovely local lady, Birkin’s feelings about religion and faith, and an organ-shopping expedition. I particularly enjoyed some of the descriptions of Birkin’s work, like these lines I found when I opened the book at random:

It was a splendid medieval gallery—nearest me, an almost Spanish head of the stricken Christ caught amid the leaves of a gallows tree; further along, a golliwog devil thrusting his grinning head between a couple trapped in the wrong bed; finally, a plump woman holding a blue shield of lilies. It proved what every church-crawler knows—there’s always something of surpassing interest in any elderly building if you keep looking.

I’d recommend A Month in the Country to just about anyone. I’d recommend Jerzy Pilch’s The Mighty Angel, which I read in Bill Johnston’s translation from the original Polish Pod Mocnym Aniołem most to readers who enjoy Eastern European novels about drinking: Pilch’s not-so-angelic narrator, Jerzy (hmm…), tells tales of life as a rehab recidivist. He tells the tales of (and for) others on the ward, too. No novel about drinking is complete without references to Venedikt Yerofeev’s Moscow-Petushki, a.k.a. Moscow to the End of the Line, and Pilch fits Venya in early on, on page 11, when Jerzy mentions some teetotalling days:

“Why on earth don’t you drink?” my brothers sitting at the bar would ask, and they were angry, and the ghost of Venedikt Erofeev hovered over their heads, and their volitionless tongues spoke with his tongue, and I wrote down a few lines under his influence, and having paid homage, I released myself from his influence.

The language of Johnston’s translation, both in terms of vocabulary and cadences, is lots of fun to read; it feels like it was fun to translate, too. Finally, Ben H. Winters’s Countdown City, the second book in a planned trilogy about pre-apocalyptic America, narrated by an ex-cop living in New Hampshire, didn’t catch me as much as the first book, The Last Policeman (previous post), which won an Edgar Award earlier this year, but it still kept me turning pages, waiting for the end of the world with Hank Palace. This time around, Palace investigates the disappearance of Martha Milano’s husband: Martha babysat Palace and his sister when they were kids. Winters again looks, through the low-key and methodically responsible Palace, at questions of moral duty, wondering, among other things, who has the right to track down the missing when the end of the world is imminent. Winters includes some nice uses of a favorite word, “rummage.”

Disclaimers and Disclosures: I bought my copy of A Month in the Country; I am collaborating on a translation that will be published in a collection from New York Review Books, which published A Month in the Country. I received a copy of The Mighty Angel from publisher Open Letter Books; I always enjoy talking about translations (and not only!) with Open Letter. And I received two copies of Countdown City from Quirk Books… and gave the second copy to my local library. Thank you to all!

Up Next: Antal Szerb’s Journey by Moonlight, which I’m loving… I have so many promising-looking new releases from publishers and used books from the library book sale that I’m not sure what will come after that…

Levy’s Cruel Swim Home

Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home, a 2012 Man Booker Prize finalist, is the sort of book I enjoy: two not-especially-happy couples on vacation/holiday in the south of France have their vacation disrupted by a not-so-happy young woman whom they find swimming, naked, in the pool. I certainly wouldn’t recommend Swimming Home to those legions of readers who seem predisposed to seek out fiction with positive, happy characters and outcomes… but I seem to have a taste for Levy’s relentless dark humor and characterizations.

The gist of Swimming Home is that the nude swimmer, Kitty Finch, a would-be poet and botanist, busts in on what’s supposed to be a holiday near Nice (hmm…) for Joe and Isabel (he’s poet and she’s a journalist who covers “countless massacres and conflicts”) and Laura and Mitchell (London-based purveyors of “primitive Persian, Turkish and Hindu weapons. And expensive African jewellery.”). Rounding out the ensemble are Nina (Joe and Isabel’s profane and menarcheal daughter), Jurgen (caretaker), Madeleine Sheridan (elderly neighbor), and Claude (nearby café guy). Other factors: depression, weaponry, family dynamics, and desire, something that seems so obvious I probably would have forgotten to mention it if I hadn’t reread Tom McCarthy’s brief introduction to the book.

Still, it’s not plot that makes Levy’s writing so appealing to me. It’s her stylistics and the diabolical things she asks her characters to say, think, and do. When I randomly opened the book just now, for example, on the left side I found Kitty, in the company of young Nina, giving Madeleine Sheridan the finger after doing a “spooky” thing that involves leaning backward and shaking her head and hair very fast. Then there’s the line “Kitty Finch was mental.” A new chapter, entitled “Medical Help from Odessa,” begins on the right side. Here’s the chapter’s first paragraph:

Madeleine Sheridan was trying to pay for a scoop of caramelised nuts she had bought from the Mexican vendor on the esplanade. The smell of burnt sugar made her greedy for the nuts that would at last, she hoped, choke her to death. Her nails were crumbling, her bones weakening, her hair thinning, her waist gone for ever. She had turned into a toad in old age and if anyone dared to kiss her she would not turn back into a princess because she had never been a princess in the first place.

Swimming Home is filled with wonderfully nightmarish scenes like these… it’s particularly fitting that its final paragraphs invoke wishes for sweet dreams.

Up Next: Maybe Jerzy Pilch’s The Mighty Angel, another darkly humorous book…

Detectives Times Two: Ishiguro’s Orphans and Mishani’s File

Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans, the third Ishiguro novel I’ve read, has led me to start thinking of Ishiguro as the Meryl Streep of novelists: Ishiguro and Streep both seem capable of taking on any voice from any era. When We Were Orphans is, like Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day, a first-person narrative: private detective Christopher Banks tells the story of how his parents went missing when he was an expat child living in Shanghai in the 1910s, leaving him an orphan. He returns to find his parents in 1937, during the Battle of Shanghai.

What intrigued me most about When We Were Orphans was a fuzziness that begins with language: Christopher’s voice feels a bit formal, wordy, and distant, even in suspenseful allegorical action scenes during the Battle of Shanghai, when he’s trying to reach a house where he believes his mother is being held. He’s already missed his chance to leave the country with a woman who’s invited him to run away with her… she’s an orphan, too, and their attraction is a strange one that seems more predicated on aloneness than anything else. As Christopher sums up in the book’s last paragraphs:

But for those like us, our fate is to face the world as orphans, chasing through long years the shadows of vanished parents. There is nothing for it but to try and see through our missions to the end, as best we can, for until we do so, we will be permitted no calm.

Most of the book describes Christopher’s chases after various shadows: from playing games in Shanghai with his neighbor Akira, a boy from Japan, to research in London about the Shanghai from which his parents disappeared, to the on-the-ground search for his mother when he’s an adult. With those chases comes the creation of personal myths. Those begin in childhood, too, with Akira touchingly reinventing the kidnappers as people who “took great care to ensure my father’s comfort and dignity in all our dramas” during the boys’ role play rescues of Christopher’s father. Christopher describes many aspects of his friendship with Akira in tremendous detail, including an episode where they take something from a servant’s room and dialogues in which Akira calls Christopher “old chap.”

Of course it turns out that not all Christopher’s memories are quite right—though some are surprisingly helpful—and being sentimental gets a bad rap toward the end of the book. But memories are transformative for Christopher, who took on his profession because he felt he had a responsibility to find justice: he sometimes sounds a little like he thinks of himself as a loner superhero. He even carries a magnifying glass. And he says detectives have “little inclination to mingle with one another, let alone with ‘society’ at large.”

Though I enjoyed When We Were Orphans for the almost ridiculously consistent voice Ishiguro creates for Christopher, insights into memory (fuzzy or otherwise), and Christopher’s lifelong existential wanderings, those good technical qualities occasionally made the book feel a little too surgically correct, too hermetically sealed within Christopher’s mind to be as interesting as it might have been.

If you’re looking for a straight-ahead international detective novel, you might want to try D.A. Mishani’s The Missing File, translated from the original Hebrew by Steven Cohen. Mishani’s police procedural novel tracks Avraham Avraham’s work on the case of a missing teenage boy: Avraham is (yet another) heavy-smoking bachelor detective with a territorial streak, and Mishani also gives him a penchant for watching Law and Order and a passion for analyzing detective novels. The Missing File moves along at a decent pace though a detour to Belgium feels a little like it was pasted in for a very specific reason and I thought a strange schoolteacher, one of the most developed characters in the book, caught a bit too much of Mishani’s attention. The novel is absorbing enough though, with some surprises at the end, and the narrative voice is spare in Cohen’s translation, which generally reads smoothly. The back cover of my book, by the way, calls Mishani “a literary scholar specializing in the history of detective literature,” which probably helps explain some of Avraham’s ideas on solving real-life and fictional crimes.

Up Next: Arnon Grunberg’s Tirza, a book I think I’d describe as a combination of “stupendous” and “stupefying.” In a good way. Then Thorvald Steen’s Lionheart.

Disclaimers: I received a copy of The Missing File from publisher HarperCollins, thank you!