Eleanor Frances

My on-going books this week are one non-fiction, a sci-fi thriller, and a family drama. I also finished one short story sort of by accident.

The non-fiction book is Basilisks and Beowulf by Tim Flight, a very approachable examination of monsters in Anglo Saxon culture and thought. It’s also my favourite of the three books that I haven’t finished yet. I’m very interested in the idea that the Anglo Saxon interest in monsters reveals the dynamic of nature and culture and the boundaries therein. I think that we in Britain have a very odd relationship with nature, in the sense that we fetishise it only in its controlled form. The ideal ‘British Countryside’ that we see on so many tea towels and jigsaw puzzles is a very tame and safe place mostly formed of farmland and controlled hedgerows, all very proper and organised and, of course, owned by a wide collection of private landowners. There’s no place for a wolf in that landscape, but wasn’t this his home, too? The impression that I get from this book is that the Anglo Saxons didn’t begrudge the wolf his share of the land.

I’m about halfway through. I had meant to read more on a plane trip, but we were passing over the alps and I got distracted looking at the mountains.

The Sci-Fi thriller is Marginal by Tom Carlisle, which I don’t like. It’s about a man who returns to the abusive cult in which he grew up in order to retrieve his brother’s body and expose their crimes with the help of a plucky young podcaster determined to find a marketable story at any cost. Of course, things are not all that they appear and the two are soon thrust into fatal danger which defies belief and causes them to question all they previously believed.

I’ll probably finish it just to say that I did, but i’m not enjoying myself. The protagonists are very annoying and to be honest I’m finding it hard to care about what’s going on. The first 100 pages went quite quickly but I have certainly hit a wall. I’m reminded a little of the 2018 gothic/folk horror Apostle, which is a sort of descendent of the British folk-horror films of the 70s (Wicker Man, Blood on Satan’s Claw, etc.). The difference here is that the protagonists of those movies were likeable and displayed emotions other than ‘churlishness’. Of course, Rob (the protagonist) has suffered much and is lashing out at those who hurt him, but the thing about people who lash out is that it’s still not very nice to experience even if you do sympathise with them.

Another difference is that classic folk-horror leaned more towards the relationship of man and nature, while this has a much more sterile sci-fi feeling to it that, to me, doesn’t say anything deeper than ‘cults are bad’, which I think we all knew already. The world feels very grey and uninspiring, which makes it unpleasent to be around. I’m just under a third of the way through.

The third fiction novel that i’m reading is Among Friends by Hal Ebbott, which is my Serious Literature for the week. It’s about two well off middle aged married couples and their teenage daughters who meet up at one of the couple’s lovely house to celebrate a birthday. A certain catastrophic event causes secrets to come out and tensions to bubble, and generally everyone is very petty and neurotic.

As someone who is personally also very petty and neutoric, I find this book exhausting, but not unlikeable. It reminds me a fair bit of late Kingsley Amis in tone and subject, but it can’t match Amis’ prose which, even in his most bilious years, was always superb. I will say that the betrayal that sets off the various fuses which Ebbot sets up, Wile-E-Coyote style, like trailing gunpowder leading to a big pile of Acme dynamite, was not was I was expecting. It didn’t really surprise me, but it wasn’t what I thought would happen and I kind of went ‘oh, okay’. I also find the prose somewhat stilted, but the imagery is lovely at times and I like that it’s minimally descriptive of the way things look, as it prevents any sense of exploitation or leering (Amis, of course, was a leerer par excellence).

Everyone in this book is a neurotic overhtinking mess and they all talk to each other in quasi-therapy speak, which might be a middle class American thing, but it’s certainly irritating and I don’t blame them all for having eating disorders and sexual dysfunction if that‘s what they’re surrounded with every day. I don’t like the rapidly shifting perspective very much, but it does make the narrative roll along very steadily (that and the huge typeface). The most compelling character is poor daughter Anna, whose own mother is jealous of her. I don’t really know how to feel yet but I do think that I’ll finish this with few problems. I’m about halfway through.

Finally, I read Joe Hill’s Jackknife, which I really liked and gobbled up quite easily one evening after work without really meaning to. I’ve only read Hill’s Horns before, but I did like it a lot (more than the film, anyway) and I kind of wish I knew where my copy was because it’s been a good ten years or so since I finished it. Jackknife is about a 30 year old college professor living in disgrace after an affair with a student destroys his marriage and career. While in exile in a crappy rented cabin he discovers a cool looking knife embedded in the trunk of a creepy looking tree, and things only get weirder from there.

Hill does a good job writing losers who are compelling to be around. Dennis is certainly pathetic but you can follow his train of thought in order to understand his pervert logic, and so when he gets into trouble I did feel a good amount of tension and suspense. The concept itself is also very creepy – think the scary tree from Poltergeist. If anything I think the scariness potential of trees is underutilised in modern horror (getting back to our earlier discussion of folk-horror).

It occurs to me that all three fiction stories I read this week involve some kind of male loser archetype, but Dennis is the one I find the least annoying even if he is, arguably, the most pitiful of the bunch.

Beyond all that I listened to a lot of Pink Floyd this week and I had Kingsley Amis’ Green Man on my mind. It took me a long time to find a book that I wanted to buy in Waterstones on the day that I picked up Among Friends since nothing really popped out at me among the new releases. The last book I bought before this was something fairly late by Tom Sharpe but I am sad to say that I barely made it twenty pages in before getting too annoyed to go on. Porterhouse Blue is obviously fantastic but the late stuff is unbearable curmudgeonly. Lastly I bought volume 13 of Way of the House Husband by Kousuke Oono, and it was delightful.