Elmet by Fiona Mozley

First published in Great Britain in 2017; published by Algonquin Books on December 5, 2017

Elmet is a gut-wrenching story of a proud family living at the edge of society, fighting for their right to be left alone. The story is narrated by Daniel, a 15-year-old boy who knows little of his absent mother because Daniel’s father is silent about Daniel’s mother and most other things. Daniel’s bond with his father is strong but their communication has little to do with language.

Daniel’s father, John, is a bare-knuckle fighter, a man of almost mythical stature, the toughest man in England and Ireland. Daniel lives with his father and his older sister, Cathy, who learns to protect herself (and Daniel) with her fists, although her school did not approve of girls who fight back. John consequently took the kids out of school and moved away from their home town. Daniel’s father trusts Vivien, a neighbor, to teach the kids things that he can’t.

John lives an isolated life with his children, eschewing the company of neighbors. He talks little about his past, but he makes clear to his children that they are his world. He works hard to toughen them, to make them strong so they can withstand the hardship they will inevitably face.

Despite his isolation, John helps people in the surrounding villages and farms. His philosophy is, “You take care of people and it always comes good in the end.” To that end, John helps people in their protest against Price, the wealthy landowner who acts as the landlord for most of the people who live nearby. He also helps them stand up to the landowners who refuse to pay fair wages for the work done by those who farm their land.

Price owns the land on which John has built his family’s home. John will no longer do the dirty work requested by Price, so the family faces an uncertain future. Helping the powerless stand up to Price only makes the family’s future more precarious. The plot builds slowly to a conflict that can’t be resolved with fists alone.

Elmet’s theme involves the resentment that members of the working class (or the barely-working class) feel when land that was once community owned is deeded to rich landowners, who rent it to the same people who have always occupied it, while refusing to make improvements or repairs. Other themes spotlight the virtues of honesty and directness, and of standing up for principles even when the battle cannot be won.

Fiona Mozley’s graceful prose contrasts with the broken dialect of the novel’s main characters. Her observant descriptions of land and scenery create a rich atmosphere that connects the present to the past: “The soil was alive with ruptured stories that cascaded and rotted then found form once more and pushed up through the undergrowth and back into our lives.” The novel’s powerful ending is as unexpected as it is inevitable.

Elmet made the longlist for the 2017 Man Booker Prize. The winner, Lincoln in the Bardo, is another fine novel. Elmet is a more traditional example of storytelling. Both books tell a moving story, but I think I would give the edge to Elmet. In any event, they are both rewarding novels

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Autumn by Ali Smith

First published in Great Britain in 2016; published by Penguin Random House/Anchor on October 17, 2017

Autumn is set in England, where “Thatcher taught us to be selfish and not just to think but to believe that there’s no such thing as society.” Issues like immigration and Brexit divide people, and it “has become a time of people saying stuff to each other and none of it actually becoming dialog.” Anger is worn like a shield and race hatred is prevalent. The news “makes things spectacular that aren’t, and deals so simplistically with what’s truly appalling.”

Against that backdrop, Daniel Gluck, having reached the age of 101, lies in a hospital bed, sometimes believing he’s on a beach littered with corpses, sometimes believing he’s inside the trunk of a Scotch Pine. Daniel once wrote songs that are no longer remembered. He seems unaware that Elisabeth Demand visits him daily, reading to him during the “increased sleep periods” that his nurses consider a prelude to death.

Elisabeth’s friendship with Daniel began when she was his 8-year-old neighbor. In flashbacks, we see Daniel as an aging man with an obvious interest in linguistics and art who imparts bits of wisdom dressed up in the kind of silliness that might appeal to a young girl whose mother is less than an ideal parent. Daniel taught Elisabeth how to make up stories that would help her understand the ways in which life can be shaped and the world can be changed. That makes him a pretty wonderful character, the opposite of selfish people who do not believe in society and prefer to shout their own opinions instead of listening to the opinions of others.

Daniel represents an earlier time, while Elisabeth, now a lecturer in art history, is just coming to comprehend the role that time plays in life. Daniel’s descriptions of paintings when Elisabeth was a child eventually lead Elisabeth to understand Daniel’s great secret, which helps her understand something about life. Through Daniel, Elisabeth becomes interested in the pop art of Pauline Boty, which leads her to contemplate Christine Keeler, who was central to the Profumo Affair. The sexual liberation that began in the 1960s came to be manifested in many ways, one of which is expressed by this thought: “A great many men don’t understand a woman full of joy, even more don’t understand paintings full of joy by a woman.”

Both Daniel and Elisabeth are perfectly drawn characters. Daniel is one of those gentle souls from a kinder era who dispense wise words in unexpected moments, drawing on their vast life experiences to apply the lessons they’ve learned to a new generation’s circumstances. Those characters exist in literature more than reality, but they are always a joy to encounter, in person or in the pages of a well-written story. We never learn much of Daniel’s life, but we learn enough to know his essence.

Daniel’s life is ending and, in a sense, Elisabeth’s is still beginning. By dealing with the mundane (repeated trips to bureaucrats who reject her passport photos because they do not match their precise requirements) and thinking about Boty, she learns to question the value of rules and norms of behavior, including rules that once defined the subservience of women, that are ultimately meaningless. She discovers that the past (Daniel’s song lyrics, for example) can be relevant to the present, even as people and events fade in and out of collective memory, to be lost and rediscovered, again and again.

Time flies, Daniel says, demonstrating by throwing his watch off a bridge. The past is replaced by the present which will be replaced by the unstoppable future. The immigrants who are reviled today will become the bedrock citizens of tomorrow. When so many people see change as something to be resisted, Autumn suggests that the march of time is to embraced, that the present and future can be shaped “with people’s histories and with the artefacts of less cruel and more philanthropic times.” But whether we can shape it or not, Autumn reminds us, time remains in motion. We can join it or we can be stuck. And if we join it, we can choose to bring the best parts of the past into the present, and to create the present in a way that will build a better future. Those lessons, taught in joyful and lyrical prose, make Autumn a valuable addition to the literature of time.

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Darke by Rick Gekoski

Published in Great Britain in 2017; published by Canongate Books on November 21, 2017

Darke is the kind of novel that starts out being one thing and ends up being something quite different. The ending puts the beginning in perspective by casting the protagonist in a penetrating light that removes him from the shadows and illuminates his interior.

James Darke is a former schoolmaster. Now he has arranged his life so that he will never need to leave his home. He can no longer bear the presence of other people, “even to dismiss them.” He has no use for their opinions or jokes. He is intolerant of any preference that diverges from his own (the notion that some people might prefer green tea to coffee is proof of their stupidity and perhaps their Green Party membership). James has had enough and is ready to say no mas to the world like a defeated fighter. The novel is his journal, the thoughts of a recluse who explains how he came to reject humanity.

James does not limit his disdain to ordinary people. In some of my favorite moments, he savages T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Yeats, “that blubbery piss-artist” Dylan Thomas, “that dreadful gasbag” Kahlil Gibran, and Philip Roth, whose characters “speechify” for paragraphs at a time while always sounding like Philip Roth. James has spent years trying to write a monograph about Dickens, a writer he decides is “slobbery” by the novel’s end. Yet as a teacher, James encouraged his students to read literature with an open mind, to consider multiple viewpoints with humility, to “allow them gracious entrance however strident or discordant some of them may sound,” so that “each of these voices will become a constituent part of who you become, an atom of growing being.” Good advice, but James has come to reject his own counsel, having decided that “nothing assuages the pain of being.” In fact, he hates wisdom, and is engaged in the British project of searching for its antidote.

As much as he fears admitting it, James also suffers from loneliness in his self-imposed isolation. Thus he finds himself discussing Dickens with Bronya, his Bulgarian cleaner, who startles him with insights that had never occurred to him. It seems the old dog is capable of learning new ideas, even if he would prefer not to. But will he repair his self-imposed exile from a pained and loving daughter?

How did James Darke become so dark? Much of his journal recounts his past, introducing the reader to the highs and (mostly) lows of his life. The reason for his morose withdrawal from society eventually becomes clear, and the description of the events leading to that point are intense and painful to read. Knowing how his past has shaped his present allows the reader to understand the emotional overload that underlies James’ escape from the world of the living.

Darke is deft in its transition from light comedy to dark comedy to tragedy. Some of James’ humor might be described as socially incorrect; his rant about female tennis players who grunt when they serve is priceless. James also has strong opinions about what a novel should be; he skips past descriptions of trees and searches for “human content,” characters who are passionate or ironic. Which is very much a description of Darke. This is a novel that closely observes people, not the quality of sunsets or the shimmer of a rainy sky.

The novel’s ending, which explains and addresses James’ rejection of his daughter, is powerful. Rick Gekoski sets aside the jokes in favor of a gut-wrenchingly honest examination of a man who was forced to make an impossible decision and then to find a way to live with its consequences. The ending makes it possible for the reader to reinterpret James. He still might not be likable, but he’s sympathetic, a flawed but caring human who is doing his best to confront adversity even if, in his own words, his best isn’t very good.

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The Book of Mirrors by E.O. Chirovici

Published in Great Britain in January 2017; published by Atria/Emily Bestler Books on February 21, 2017

A literary agent, Peter Katz, receives a partial manuscript of a nonfiction work describing the author’s experiences at Princeton in 1987. The manuscript concerns a young man named Richard Flynn who wants to be a writer and whose new roommate, an attractive young woman named Laura Baines, is studying psychology. Laura is apparently working on a secret project with Professor Joseph Wieder. Flynn gets a job cataloguing the professor’s library and promptly falls in love with Laura, but things take an odd turn when, shortly after Laura seems to pull away from both Wieder and Flynn, Wieder is murdered.

Katz is intrigued by the opening chapters and wants to read the entire manuscript, but contacting Flynn proves to be difficult, and it seems like a story to which Katz will never learn the ending. From the reader’s perspective, however, the story is just beginning. It continues with the introduction of John Keller, an unemployed writer/reporter who agrees to investigate Flynn’s story and to write a new version of the book if the original manuscript can’t be found.

Keller interviews sources and hears conflicting accounts of pretty much every fact that pertains to Flynn, Baines, Wieder, and various others who were involved with their lives. The stories are so dramatically different that Keller and the reader are challenged to determine who (if anyone) is telling the truth, what motivations they might have for lying, and (most importantly) who actually murdered Wieder.

The story is told from four perspectives: Katz, Flynn (who speaks through his partial manuscript), Keller, and Roy Freeman, a retired detective who worked on the unsolved murder. While each perspective is written in the same voice, the consistent voice arguably supports the continuity of the story. More importantly, the changing perspectives on the investigation keep the story fresh as the plot advances.

The plot has enough complexity to keep the reader guessing but never becomes convoluted. I like the way important aspects of the mystery are resolved while the reader is left wondering about others. The elusive nature of truth is the novel’s theme, and the plot illuminate the theme in clever ways.

The story does not bog down with unnecessary detail and the pace is appropriate to a literary mystery … quick enough to keep the reader interested, slow enough to give the reader time to chew on the conflicting versions of the facts. Characters have carefully defined personalities and E.O. Chirovici’s writing style is smooth. A Book of Mirrors is a solid mystery and the beginning of a promising career.

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The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells

First published in 1896

The Island of Dr Moreau is H.G. Wells’ novel about a mad scientist who takes the idea of anthropomorphizing animals to an extreme. It is a horror story, but it explores a number of philosophical questions as the horror unfolds.

Edward Prendick, a biologist, is near death when he is rescued from a lifeboat after being forced to abandon ship. When he recovers his senses, he finds himself on a schooner with a drunken captain, a doctor named Montgomery, a deformed man who attends the doctor, a caged puma, and an angry pack of muzzled dogs.

Montgomery, having been booted out of medical school in London, is on his way to an isolated island. Through no fault of his own, Prendick is booted off the ship, leaving him with no choice but to join Montgomery on the island.

The island, of course, is home to the mysterious Dr. Moreau. It’s probably impossible to spoil a story this old, but I won’t say much more about the plot, except to note that Prendick encounters creatures who are “human in shape, and yet human beings with the strangest air about them of some familiar animal. Each of these creatures, despite its human form, its rag of clothing, and the rough humanity of its bodily form, had woven into it, into its movements, into the expression of its countenance, into its whole presence, some now irresistible suggestion of a hog, a swinish taint, the unmistakable mark of the beast.”

That quotation gives you a sense of Wells’ prose style which, to readers raised on genre authors who write eight word sentences and three sentence paragraphs, might seem laborious. Perhaps it is, but it is a style uniquely Wells’ own.

Prendick discovers that human-like beasts on the island are (rather reluctantly) following a set of laws. Transgressions are enforced by punishment that is “sharp and sure.” But, just as the promise of swift punishment does little to deter criminal behavior or misbehaving children, threatening to punish beasts who eat the flesh of other animals (or humans) isn’t likely to change their nature. And like all systems of punishment-based law, the system does no good if those who violate the law are not caught.

Philosophical questions that the novel raises include the difference between man and beast and the justice of a system that forces the island’s inhabitants to live in fear of laws they do not understand. The novel could be viewed as an allegory of legal systems and particularly of religious law, where obedience is coerced by instilling fear of punishment by a higher power. It can also be seen as an indictment of totalitarian government, where the “sayer of the law” uses ruthless tactics to dictate obedience among the masses, who are viewed as incapable of governing themselves (or whose self-governance is feared). And the novel can be seen as a caution against attempts to replace the natural with the unnatural, perhaps a forerunner of the debate about genetic engineering. On a simpler level, while the novel isn’t very frightening when viewed as a horror story, it is an entertaining tale, made all the more interesting by convincing characters, both man and beast (and in-between).

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