Books of the Year 2023 / Part Two
Contributors to The Lonely Crowd choose their Books of the Year…
When ‘Wales’, Thomas Morris’ tender story of a father and son, first appeared earlier this year, I was moved by the narrative but also a little disappointed that the author appeared to be closely adhering to the formula of his award-winning debut, We Don’t Know What We’re Doing. I needn’t have worried, however, because ‘Wales’ is a ruse. It’s the equivalent of a successful band returning from a long hiatus with a familiar-sounding, fan-pleasing single before releasing an album that represents a dramatic, stylistic volte-face. If the ten stories that made up WDKWWD were defined by observation and everyday minutiae – a collection of Caerphilly kitchen sink dramas, if you will – then the four stories that follow ‘Wales’ in Morris’ sophomore work, Open Up, are testament to an altered, more surrealistic temperament. These are unanchored works, happy to be ill defined and unplaceable. The book’s epigraph is a quote from Clarice Lister that takes on ever more resonance as the book progresses:
The facts are sonorous but between the facts there’s a whispering. It’s the whispering that astounds me.
Having delineated these ‘facts’ in WDKWWD, Morris now travels deep into the in-between spaces that Lispector alludes to. And it is in the two standout pieces here, ‘Passenger’ and ‘Birthday Teeth’, that this ‘whispering’ really takes over. These pieces assimilate surrealism (something which made a first appearance at the close of WDWWD highlight, ‘Fugue’) so successfully into the Morris style that at times it can feel like you are reading an entirely different author.
‘Passenger’ is ostensibly about a young couple on holiday in Croatia but the male protagonist’s anxiety dreams slowly begin to flood the pages while what we took to be the original concept of the story disintegrates in front of our eyes. It feels simultaneously like the most emotionally mature story Morris has written to date, whilst also being the most experimental. If the influence of Lispector is obvious in ‘Passenger’, then the darkly whimsical surrealism on show in ‘Birthday Teeth’ owes something more to the work of Flann O’Brien. Told from the point of view of a young(ish) man who thinks he is a vampire, it is the funniest story Morris has written and also one of the saddest. While the plot could have featured in WDKWWD the way it is handled belongs entirely to the world of Open Up. As the title implies this second collection of short stories constitutes the flowering of a talent. It is a cause for celebration that a writer of such obvious promise has returned with a volume defined by ambition and vibrant imagination.
The Home Child by Liz Berry is described as a ‘novel in verse’. Like Maggie Nelson in Jane and Mary J Oliver in Jim Neat, Berry has taken real life material and shaped it, creating a compellingly readable story. Both the poems and their ‘heroine’ are sustained by the beauty of the natural world, despite the harsh climate. Like all children removed from their parents, Berry’s home child, Eliza Showell, has to nurture herself with sparse comforts in the face of deep and abiding loneliness. When a chaste friendship develops between Eliza and another home child, a boy from Glasgow, they are quickly separated and he is sent away. Eliza is powerless, a virtual prisoner; ‘A girl of thirteen rolls around/ like a bad penny no one wants to save.’
Kathryn Gray’s Hollywood or Home couldn’t be more different in subject and concept, indeed in the recent Times Poetry Books of the Year, referring to Gray, the point is made that ‘Poets still tend to think their work should be tarted up with gewgaws from Greek myth or Anglo-Saxon’. For those of us (vampires we might be) who watch Netflix documentaries about the Cecil Hotel, Gray is a fan, interpreter and interloper. In ‘Meryl Streep is my Therapist’ she exposes how the same actor becomes a sort of split personality and, as such, haunts the viewers’ psyches, provoking identification and trust: ‘I have done terrible things I will not own. / The dingo took my baby! / Bear with me.’ These are poems filled with voices; it is as if a ventriloquist is bartering borrowed authenticity with truth. Most of us recognise the film scene with the watermelon, while less know who Mrs Lightband is in the poem ‘Bournemouth’. Gray helpfully provides a note – Lightband was the name Rosemary Tonks used when in retreat from the world – and crucially in retreat from herself. These are poems which sing with signs and wonders, with nostalgia and poetry – like Hollywood itself.
My third choice goes some way to explaining the seeming schizophrenic differences that abound in contemporary poetry. After watching the recent documentary, Being Kae Tempest (2023, BBC iPlayer) I was reminded that Berry and Gray are more alike than they may seem. Usefully, Beyond the Lyric: A Map of Contemporary British Poetry by Fiona Sampson, does what it says on the tin. Sampson is great at explaining difference. Her chapters arrange British poetry into ‘schools’ – but as with all classifications, individual poets have not opted into any given team like football fans. In ‘The Touchstone Lyricists,’ Sampson notes that region is an old concept – especially when, in order to speak of and to the whole of the British Isles, you can only use its one shared language: English. More pertinently for Wales, she states that the old concept of Anglo-Welsh literature is defunct: ‘Since the advent of Welsh-language media, and with Welsh-medium education the norm in large areas of the country, Wales no longer needs to be spoken up for by English language verse.’ In the light of recent reductions to funding for English language journals this struck me as ominous. Who ‘speaks up’ for the English-speaking Welsh?
I had to go to another book to find respite and sense in these deeply troubling times. In the first essay of The Government of Tongue, I found Seamus Heaney to be a thoughtful and gentle guide. After describing a night with a musician friend in a Belfast recording studio, when bombs caused sirens to create an ‘implacable disconsolate wailing’ he recalls that ‘to sing … when others were beginning to suffer seemed an offence against their suffering’. Meditating on this, he says, ‘Art and Life have had a hand in the formation of any poet … yet both are often perceived to be in conflict… He or she begins to feel that a choice between the two … would simplify things.’ Heaney means, of course, how can we write or paint or perform while war rages and children are slaughtered, yet how can we not?
In a year filled with wonderful books, a couple have resonated well beyond the final page. Victoria Mackenzie’s For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain pulled me in with its title, after a customer ordered a copy at The Grove Bookshop, where I work. ‘You must read it!’ she said, and I was sold. It’s a long time since I studied this period of history. In this slim debut, Mackenzie brings to life two extraordinary medieval women, living at a time of plague and revolt: Margery Kempe, who had visions of Christ and was tried for heresy, and Julian of Norwich, an anchorite confined to a tiny cell. These women’s inner lives are richly evoked through Mackenzie’s prose, and we get a sense of them as intellectual adventurers, whose deviation from orthodox thinking is deeply dangerous. The novella culminates in a meeting between the two, and a beautifully-judged ending.
For very different reasons, I adored Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. This book is such a tender portrait of friendship, love and creativity. I do love a book with a big heart, and these were characters I could root for. I knew from the first couple of pages that this story would speak to me: it starts in the 1990s, or as Zevin calls it ‘the waning twentieth century’, with a brilliantly strange conversation about The Oregon Trail, a computer game originally designed to teach children about settlers travelling westwards by wagon in mid-19th Century America. It happens to be a game I once loved, despite – or perhaps because of – its clunky, pixelated graphics and basic game play. Sam and Sadie bump into each other at a crowded station and stand in front of a Magic Eye puzzle. Their friendship, which began as children over a shared love of computer games, is reignited and evolves into a lasting creative partnership. I’ve recommended this book to so many people.
In a year of fast-moving, indescribably horrific global events, it’s impossible to feel up to the job as writers. How can we begin to find words in the flux, when impressions will not slow or distil to anything that can be framed, especially if we’re some of those lucky humans who are not directly familiar with war in our lifetimes; a lottery win that can only be imagined by vast numbers of people? If we don’t give up trying to write, how then to write when it’s hard to settle a mind in the midst of knowing that hell has been happening on earth, caused not by natural disasters, but by actions carried out strategically by humans, just not in our region?
Reading Lori & Joe, Amy Arnold’s second book and a nominee for the 2023 Goldsmiths prize (pipped to the post by Benjamin Myers’ excellent Cuddy) is to be reassured that however overwhelming the world’s events, there is value in the atomic. There is worth in the silent flow of thoughts of a Cumbrian widow as she walks through a landscape ‘that absorbs violence after violence’ after discovering her husband is dead.
Arnold’s writing is musical and immersive. She threads together beads of human consciousness in an unbroken chain of experience and shows what it is really like to be human: to be brave and ambitious while cowering from costly, real change. A marriage’s secrets and half-truths assemble like particles of silt to tip the balance of a memory, which is then looped-back upon, and redrawn, reminding one of Prufrock’s ‘decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse’.
Here is a sample:
You expect a parent to go first, one parent then the other parent, which is how it went with hers, and she hadn’t really had time to get used to the way things were before baby Fergus went too. Down like dominoes all three, Lori thinks. And now Joe. Joe as well. And she stands on the broad top of the fell and she pictures all four of them laid out on the earth, one next to the other. Like the war dead, she thinks, and she looks into the fog and there isn’t anything, and she looks down at her boots, at the black water, the clumps of washed-out matgrass and she remembers how small her mother looked with the life gone out of her. It was as if she’d been an illusion all along, Lori thinks, and she’s never been able to decide on the size of the gap between the living and the dead. And well, no, she can’t, she still can’t.
Lori & Joe reminds us, should we need a nudge, that whatever is happening in the world, there is value in one person trying to love – however conflicted that feeling is – another person. That really is something. There is value is remembering the good and the bad of them and there is value in trying to find words.
This year much of my reading has been research for a second novel, but my bed-side books have also been rewarding.
What is it about the air or the water in Ireland? The best fiction recently has been by Sebastian Barry, Old God’sTime, Anne Enright’s The Wren, The Wren and Claire Keegan’s Foster and So Late in the Day.
And in Irish poetry I am so pleased to see the success and acclaim for a former University of Glamorgan Masters alumna, Jane Clarke, whose new collection, A Change in the Air, is as good as anything from the UK this year:
Because it’s bright till almost midnight
and the days will be short too soon,
let’s stay out here and listen
for the wood pigeon’s five-note tune.
While from Wales there has been an intriguing fable by new author Nathan Munday – Whaling and another strong story collection from Tessa Hadley – After the Funeral.
From the USA the poet Ada Limon’s The Hurting Kind continued her task – ‘to make fire out of ordinary things’.
…until her desire is something
like a blazing flower, a tree shaking off
the torrents of rain as if it is simply making music.
If my eclectic reading of 2023 could be summed up by one theme, when I reflect it seems to be about finding wonder in the most unexpected of places. Wonder was found on every page in the debut fiction book World of Wonders by award-winning poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil. The subtitle of the book is “In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks and Other Astonishments.” And she finds astonishment in lots of places from the open skies of Arizona to the coldness of Ohio in Winter. She shares astonishment and joy with the reader on every page and she finds inspiration in all the creatures she encounters. “What the peacock can do,” she tells us, “is remind you of a home you will run away from and run back to all your life.” The axolotl teaches us to smile; the touch-me-not plant shows us how to create boundaries; the narwhal demonstrates how to survive in the most hostile places. The book is warm and gentle and beautifully illustrated by Fumi Nakamura. The book creates a new sense of wonder in everything around us.
Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead is inspired by Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield but you don’t need to have read Dickens to appreciate the story that Kingsolver tells and she tells it with heart. As she says ‘anyone will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose.’ The book is set in Appalachia, a young boy living a trailer park with his young mother. The community is riddled with poverty and addition and loss. Lots of nonfiction books in the past year have told the story of the America’s opium crisis and in particular its impact in blue collar communities in, this issue runs like a poisonous seam through Kingsolver’s book. Like Dickens, she writes with compassion and righteous anger about the places people are born into and which they often find impossible to escape. The wonder is that some people do.
Leabhar na hAthghabhála / Poems of Repossession is edited by Louis de Paor and it is an extraordinary work. It is the first full critical anthology of modern poetry in Irish with English translations. It includes everything from poems from Padraig Mac Piarais to modern poems by Biddy Jenkinson. Many of the poems, including Eoghan Ó Tuairisc’s heart-breaking response to the bombing of Hiroshima, ‘Aifreann na Marbh’ [Mass for the Dead] have not previously been available in English. As well as presenting some of the best poetry written in Irish since the 1900’s, this book also provides an interesting challenge to existing collections of modern and contemporary Irish poetry which have not represented as fully as possible writing in the Irish language. Louis de Paor rightly contends that Irish language poetry should be judged according to its own strong and rigorous aesthetic rather than as an interesting off-shoot from the dominant writing in Ireland which is done in English.
Days at the Morisaki Bookshop is an engrossing story by Satoshi Yagisawa and it was translated by Eric Ozawa. It is all about the joy of reading and bookshops and the Morisaki bookshop is a very special place. It is in an old wooden building and the shop is filled to the brim with hundreds of second-hand books. Takako never liked reading even though the bookshop has been in her family for three generations. Her uncle Satoru has devoted his life to it. Takako comes to live with Satoru when she is heart-broken by her boyfriend marrying someone else. She finds new hope and new worlds in the bookshop and these characters discover a new relationship with each other. We all learn a lot about life, love and the power of books in this charming book.
To 2040 by Jori Graham is a quietly powerful collection which challenges us all to be quiet and to listen to the soil breathe, to hear the worms burrowing through the earth. It is Graham’s 15th collection and her focus is now honed on our place in the world. “Are we / extinct yet. Who owns / the map.” These are poems of vision and heart and driven by loss. Wired parrot birds play recordings of their extinct ancestors, it is a vision of sadness and dystopia. She writes like an expert photographer or cinematographer with precise use of sparse lines which are driven by intent. We see some things from overview and some things are intensely close up. We linger at times and she asks us to sit and listen and look. It is an urgent and amazing collection that will leave every reader wiser and also slightly on edge. We have been warned as move to 2040 what the future may hold.
Damian Smyth’s poetry collection Irish Street is, for me, an outstanding publication of 2023. It is a meditation on Smyth’s home-place, a small area of County Down in Northern Ireland. I read it several times: first for pleasure and then to figure out how-did-he-do-that? How did he fashion 123 poems into a cohesive whole? How did he manage his strikingly spiraling method, of advancing in time, say, or depth of scrutiny, and then moving back to touch on some earlier point with added weight before once again launching ahead. As with all the best of such approaches, the poet goes deep and wide. He never loses control of the material. This is a model in how to handle the immediate and near in relation to the past and wider horizons.
I reviewed the book for The Cardiff Review in June but as their website is unavailable, read it on my website.
A book published in 2014 gave me the same craft-orientated relish. I came across Jane Gardam’s The Stories of Jane Gardam in a library. These are her personal selection from her work. They meet one of my criteria for a good short story: they are memorable. If I find myself speculating on the characters’ motivations and playing forward their predicaments, I know a scenario has been created that has become part of me. I applied myself to noting how she had gone about creating such vivid characters, their settings as alive as they are. And the dialogue! A tour de force in this respect is The Great, Grand Soap-Water Kick. The protagonist is a hoary tramp who is so far out on the periphery of society that he has lost the ability to speak coherently. Gardam gives him a gobbledegook of his own, just sufficiently tethered to English to carry his meaning.
says Horsa, ‘Besogood. Give poor tramp glasswater,’ which sings out ‘Wurble-burble-splash-woosh-splot-PAH,’ and Horsa screamed upon, yelled upon, scourged upon, sentonway.
Because we understand him, we feel a powerful sense of identification with this outcast in his bruising yet dignified skirmishes with respectable people. It’s also funny and handling humour takes skill. Highly recommended.
