Peaceable Land 27 - Forth, fiction!
A stroll through a year of reading
There have been loads of ‘Best Books 2024’ lists but the format is so zzzzzzz. Instead I thought we might try and fit them all in a city walk. It’s good practice: Dickens walked ten miles a day.
Let us start then, you and I, in Bloomsbury, legendary old heart of British intelligence. We are there to read Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway on the counsel of a friend and colleague. “Ah, there's one week a year. It’s at some point in June, when it’s bright in London, you say to yourself ‘It’s Dalloway week’. Then you read it again and when you walk around town you think ‘Maybe things are okay. Maybe things are better than I expected them to ever be.’”
While in Bloomsbury, though we mean to keep to fiction, we might as well visit Bertrand Russell. He is soothing if lost in life or love. His autobiography, which I read this April, was soothing in those ways, but was also just for the pleasure of watching a genius mind in dance.
I read the Woolf in February and the Russell in April and by June had found a Bloomsbury sublet. The flat was horrible, but my life was exaltant. My commute was a nine minute walk, but I roved endlessly. I love the squares and dark-bricked Regency terraces. Here is a painting of London’s oldest square. If you squint, I hope you will discern Woolf and Russell chatting on a bench.
If you can’t see them, blame the cold; it numbed my fingers and talents. But my heart and cheeks stayed warm, because I was laughing – my partner-in-paint is a devotee of PG Wodehouse.
So we’re sauntering southwest, to Piccadilly and to an Eden, with Jeeves and Bertie Wooster. You know the rudiments – sage manservant, clueless young master – but if you have not actually read the books you should. So funny, so reassuring, so masterful. This year I read Joy in the Morning, and joy is the word. I always love finding out what the stakes will be – Bertie must stop wearing his purple cummerbund, or stop playing his banjolele, or stop dining at the chef Anatole’s table – they are always so happily safe.
Farther southwest, and far, far less safe, though, to the roofs of Chelsea, and World War Two. Here begins Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, the hardest book I read this year. It inhabits the same hyper-ambitious ‘encyclopedic novel’ category as Ulysses and Infinite Jest. I had thought it inaccessible Americana but actually its material is familiar. It’s what Pynchon does with it that takes you into the new. Like the rockets near its core it is relentlessly, dazzlingly pyrotechnical.
We’re riverside and have earned a break, so let’s float downstream. There is the Southbank, where I saw Kazuo Ishiguro speak, and there is the Tate Modern, where I interviewed Ia Genberg.
Yet further east to the flat. My flatmates are sick of me telling people about their witchcraft, but we need to borrow a broom and swing quickly by Salem, Massachusetts, for The Scarlet Letter. It’s not just a song lyric, it’s brilliant. The use of light in particular is very artistic.
Off the broom, tired, and north. Out to Highgate Village, to the former house of the Feddens from The Line of Beauty. Now along North Road, passing the home where AE Housman wrote A Shropshire Lad. That book is great for saying ‘You’ll die soon for love’. My resolution is to turn to the people in my life and ask whom I live beside! Because of this stanza:
Lovers lying two and two
Ask not whom they sleep beside,
And the bridegroom all night through
Never turns him to the bride.
Just a bit further on that road and we’re in David Copperfield. Andrew Marr said “If you don’t like this, you don’t like reading.” I loved it too but didn’t enjoy Steerforth. He is a moody and self-centred adolescent who to juniors seems deep but to seniors is obviously shallow, and who was raised by a very indulgent mother… 141 seconds’ walk from where I was raised by mine.
At last back to the childhood bedroom. Still when my fiction conviction flickers I remind myself of younger me in that bed, hoping to find the needed book. I finished the year with 100k words for novel two, but it’s still far off. In the meantime I’m interested in these 2025 novels. I’ve gotten my hands on two of the three.
I Want To Go Home But I'm Already There, Róisín Lanigan (March)
The Boys, Leo Robson (May)
Glass Century, Ross Barkan (May)
And if you have your own book, stashed in a drawer I’m looking forward to that too. It’s been thrilling of late to meet several people who were willing to confide the book they dreamed of writing. I want to say that I know I am very junior, but if there is ever some way I can help you in your hopes, ask at once.
GM