The bedside bookstack – February 2022

What’s teetering on the bedside bookstack this February.

Once there were wolves by Charlotte McConaghy, Hamish Hamilton, 2021

Inti Flynn is the lead biologist on a rewilding project introducing wolves back in to the Scottish Highlands and the locals aren’t happy about it. She’s trying not to get too attached to the wolves, or people, but she has a condition that makes it impossible. She feels the sensations that she sees in others.

I couldn’t put this book down. The wild landscapes and animals endangered by our own wild sense of how we should live offer a climate narrative without the didactic overtones that are often hard to avoid with such an urgent topic. I think the secret is sublime language for landscape and the natural world and a cracking story that keeps you guessing.

On a technical and grammatical note, this is a great example of a narrative which has a lot of backstory that have been effortlessly incorporated. She’s made it so clear – use present simple tense for the main narration and then past simple tense for any flashbacks. What a way to simplify something that can get really clunky when you have a past simple narration and start getting into past perfect territory.

Devotion by Hannah Kent, Picador 2022

Hanne and her family are from a small Prussian village. They aren’t welcome to practice their Old Lutheran religion anymore and so they and other families put their hope in moving to the colony of South Australia.

Hanne lives for the outdoors and can hear the song in animals and plants. She feels different to the other girls her age and spends most of her time alone or with her twin brother. When Thea and her family move to the village, Hanne finds someone who understands her and a love she only understands with distance.

You’re always in good historical hands with Hannah Kent. Her research is watertight but never obscures the story. This is a tale of love, migration, settlement and environment. There is something sacred and hallowed to the language which fits the elegy of the narrative.

Beautiful world, where are you by Sally Rooney, faber, 2021

I had to give this one at least 50 pages before I warmed into it. One of my pet peeves is the writer as narrator. My complaint is, really? A writer? How many writers are even just writers? It just feels a bit lazy and hard to believe. In this, not only is one of the main characters a writer but a ridiculously successful one. Not so hard to believe given that it’s Sally Rooney who is writing. Then I thought, oh no, is this another famous person telling us how hard it is to be rich and famous?

The answer is yes. But it’s OK. It actually works, because after an opening with crazily wooden and forensic detailing of people’s location and movements, things get moving and we’re back in Rooney’s best territory, relationships where people move slowly forwards and backwards again in and out of each other’s orbits. There is a lot of musing on the state of politics, the environment and culture, a feeling of demise but amidst the big picture her characters admit, “Maybe we’re just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing.”

The Mare by Mary Gaitskill, Serpent’s Tail, 2015

Ginger, in her 40s and childless, wants to know if she should foster a child. Through a summer program, she and her husband host Velvet, a young city girl, at their house. There are stables next door and Velvet gets riding lessons and forms a special bond with a feisty mare that she calls Fiery Girl.

There are interesting questions here about motivation and if we’re doing things for the right reasons. Ginger needs Velvet to feel like a mother. Velvet needs Ginger to access her horse.

There are also interesting questions about what we decide we mean to people or animals. Can Velvet understand Fiery Girl because she understands being broken? What can Ginger give Velvet when she already has a mother?

Finally, how has Mary Gaitskill, in her sixties, written this? It has all the energy and preoccupation of teenage desire and all the uncertainty of a midlife stock take.

Love & Virtue by Diana Reid, Ultimo Press, 2021

Michaela gets a scholarship to a college at Sydney University. She’s from Canberra and didn’t go to private school, so she sits outside the usual demographic but is befriended by the charismatic Eve.

Eve likes pushing against her surroundings, Michaela just wants to fit in but they’re both cynics who love to intellectually spar. Michaela is still navigating who she’s going to be in a new independent landscape and there’s a rivalry that ticks in the background of their intense relationship but it’s only after revelations regarding a drunken.

This is a clever book and a great read about the personal and the political, power, consent, entitlement and institutional culture. Reading it, I had as much nostalgia for uni days and staying out all night as I had cringe for being a young woman at that age and seeing how little has changed for them in terms of power dynamics.

When things are alive they hum by Hannah Bent, Ultimo Press, 2021

Marlowe and Harper are sisters. Harper was born with a congenital heart disease and needs a heart and lung transplant but she isn’t allowed on a transplant list because she has Downs Syndrome.

Marlowe is studying in London but goes back to Hong Kong when she hears how sick her sister is. Marlowe has been more like a mum since their own mother died when they were young. She’s so focussed on fixing the situation that she doesn’t listen to what Harper actually wants or consider the ethics of trying to save her by any means possible.

Hang him when he is not there by Nicholas John Turner, Zerogram Press, 2021

This doesn’t call itself a collection and it’s numbered like chapters but some of the cover comments say it is short stories. I’m only three chapters in. It’s definitely not linear narrative and the coming together of threads certainly hasn’t happened yet. Thus, I’m not sure how to describe it. Intellectual, philosophical, experimental? Pretty dense for a bedtime read. Maybe more for a morning commute, when you’re fresh.

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