Elmet

Elmet was the dark horse of the Man Booker short list and after reading an intriguing review I found a copy at my library. Side note:  History of Wolves and Exit West were also nominated and I looooved both of those - although so was Lincoln in the Bardo and I swear to God I cannot get through that thing.  Although everyone else is going absolutely nuts over it so who am I to judge? 

"Elmet", it should be known, was the name of the wild country of northern England back in the 5th century and also the subject of an epic poem by Ted Hughes. (Favor a challenge? Read the Wikipedia page on Elmet. Sample sentence: "In the Tribal Hidage the extent of Elmet is described as 600 hides of land, an area slightly more than the total of the wapentakes of Barkston Ash and Skyrack." Whaaaaaaaaaaaa?)

Fiona Mozley is a young, British author and this is her first book. She writes lovingly of a small, odd family composed of "Daddy", Daniel, the narrator, and Cathy, his sister.  They're sort of like squatters and build a house on someone else's land and mostly live off the land, eating wild animals and trading with people in the nearby village.  Daddy occasionally engages in a fist fight for money.  Most of the book is allotted to the almost devotional descriptions of the home and the food eaten in the home.  The family's house build completely by them, covered in moss, evokes a feeling of deep contentment, even despite Daddy's occasional dark periods when Daniel and Cathy retreat to the outdoors to give him some space to expel his demons.  Interspersed throughout the book are very short passages that indicate Daniel is chasing a woman - one can only assume it is his sister - and it is unclear why or how this came about.  As Daniel runs, his narration becomes even more poetic - he is almost animalistic in his single-minded pursuit:

I see bovine silhouettes shift steadily across meadows, hulking their uneasy weight from trough to furrow, and elsewhere, I see the dusk settle on the fleeces of grazing ewes like sparks from flint to tinder. I watch the land glow and the sky burn. And I step through it with a judicious tread.

I pass from Elmet bereft.

Jesus Christ!  Right????  Although, to be honest, I personally do not like the otherwise over-all style of this book which is heavily stylized prose composed of short, Hemingway-esque sentences in the past tense.  It reminded me of Kazuo Isiguro's Never Let Me Go which I really, really hated.  But, he just won the goddamn Nobel Prize for literature, so what do I know? But, I mean, look at this:

We arrived home and Daddy went straight out into the woods with his tools. The shell of our house was sealed tight against the winter but the insides remained rough. Daddy was working on the lining and on the floors. Wood was the material he used as much as he could. It was right there in the copse. Trees of different ages and different kinds.

I mean, honestly.  However, unlike Isiguro's much lauded novel which goes absolutely nowhere, Mozley's book is building to this completely bonkers ending that I am still mildly in shock about several days later.  Also, it cannot be forgotten that what's she's doing is building upon a great literary tradition and drawing connections between people who occupied her country in the 5th century to the way we live today, bringing up important questions like what it means to inhabit a land... what is "home"... the role of collective history and memory, and what is it that composes our very society?

It's pretty much worth reading just for that insane ending, if you enjoy being tortured by literature and then literally shocked out of your senses and... who doesn't, amiright?

Under the Harrow

Under the Harrow is Fylnn Berry's first novel and a winner of an Edgar Award this year.  It takes
place in England but Berry is an American.  You know I love my British Lady Mystery writers!

Early spoiler and possible trigger warning:  a dog dies.

Nora arrives at her sister's house to find her sister (and her dog) murdered.  She reels.  Actually, a good part of the book is Nora recovering from the shock of discovering the gruesome murder and the loss of her sister.  Nora isn't aware of anyone who would want to harm Rachel - however, her sister was the victim of an attack when she was younger by a stranger.  The police tell Nora that it's statistically unlikely that a woman would be the victim of two attacks by strangers in her lifetime - they look, of course, to old boyfriends and, eventually, to Nora herself.

As a narrator, Nora is a bit unreliable - she forgets things and, though the reader seems privy to her most solitary moments, something like the hotel manager coming to say the other guests are complaining that the noises (presumably her screaming and crying) are disturbing.

Unsurprisingly, Under the Harrow confronts misogyny and violence toward women.  Accusations are levied against Rachel for her behavior, the hour, her clothing in her first attack, and after her death Nora is cautioned to avoid talking to the press lest they expose "the worst parts of her" to the world. The team that was this sisterhood is not the sentimental fluff you might expect from a "sister novel" but a complex, deep relationship. It is fierce and devoted.

Here's a particular passage I related to - on losing her Yorkshire accent during college: I changed my voice the way I would have chewed off my leg to get out of a trap. Every time I heard my cool, even accent, I thought - I've left. I'm gone.

As mystery's go... it's one of those that's virtually impossible to solve yourself, but it's more about the journey that Nora takes to find justice for her sister.  Berry's a really fantastic writer and I love the way she puts her sentences together.  She crafted a great story here that had me skipping back pages to re-read the careful unravelling.  Really quite an amazing first book!

By the way, "under the harrow" is from a CS Lewis book, A Grief Observed.  Even if you don't know what it means, it's evocative.  Berry explains more in this interview.

Sing, Unburied, Sing

Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing is a painful but rewarding novel about a young boy, Jojo, and his family in Mississippi.  Jojo and his baby sister are being raised by his grandparents because his mother is a meth addict and his father is in jail for cooking meth.  His grandparents are loving, gentle people, but his grandmother is dying of cancer and things are falling apart.  Jojo's mother, Leonie, comes in and out of their lives - when she needs something. Her children are, at best, inconsequential to her, and at worst, active sources of resentment.

Leonie's parents practice what I believe is Santaria - her mother is very knowledgeable about herbs and was a midwife and both she and her husband make "gris-gris" bags - small pouches to protect against evil spirits.  The grandmother hears spirits and prays to some kind of sacred feminine.  Ward's goal is not to educate the reader on this religion - it's just part of the rich history of this couple, which makes it all the more agonizing that they have this gifted daughter who turns out to be a terrible mother and makes horrible choices.

Leonie drags her children a long journey to  retrieve her boyfriend from Parchman Prison - a place where her father and uncle also were incarcerated in the early 20th century.  I was horrified to find out this is a real place and is in fact, still an operating prison.  In case you're not aware of this place, for many years it operated as an extension of slavery well after slavery was outlawed in the United States, and black men and women were arrested for minor crimes and then forced to work long days under inhuman conditions.  Anyway, all kinds of crazy shit goes down during this trip, with Leonie desperately trying to use her kids as props in what she imagines will be the joyous reuniting with her boyfriend while entirely ignoring their physical and emotional needs.

What I haven't mentioned is that Leonie and her son also have the gift of sight - what we are to understand from the Grandmother as the ne plus ultra gift, the one that she herself does not have.  Leonie sees her brother, Given, who was killed by white men in his community, and Jojo sees his uncle Richie, who died in unknown circumstances in Parchman.  Both are overwhelmed by these visions and unsure how to deal with them, and neither mention these occurrences to anyone.  What these spirits, or unburied souls, come to exemplify is the literal embodiment of the destroyed black body in our terrible shared history.  Unable to escape this history, which for Leonie and Jojo lurks and the peripheral of their nearly every moment, they remain plagued by the history of violence and heartbreak that wracked their community.

Sing, Unburied, Sing (that title!) has rightly been nominated for the National Book Award and I think will continue to do very well. Ward's lyricism and tight control of these many and various complex themes is so impressive.  I hope you'll give this powerful book your attention.