Here are some very short (one-paragraph) unpublished reviews of works of fiction I have enjoyed and would recommend for at least some readers. In the reverse order in which I read them, not of publication, so most recent reads first.
May 2025:
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke:
Arthur C. Clarke famously wrote that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. I see Susanna Clarke in this novel as inverting the statement: magic (if it were real) would be indistinguishable from a sufficiently advanced technology. She imagines a period of a little over a decade in the history of early 19th century England (1806 to 1817) in which two real magicians practise real magic in ways that make a real difference to the country (especially in the conduct of the war with France). But these are not prophet-like men with deep access to ancient wisdom, and the message is not that the universe has more mysterious forces than we know (“there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio…”). On the contrary, these are educated men who are also rivalrous, often petty, often very confused about what they are doing and why. They blunder about, sometimes producing spectacular achievements and sometimes failing ignominiously, bridling at minor slights and worrying more about their standing at court and in society than about their impact on the world. Just like real entrepreneurs, in fact. They fail to understand the underlying causal mechanisms they are setting in motion, and try to reverse-engineer their own skills from the effects they find themselves capable of producing. Rather like the purveyors of large language models of AI in our own time, they are as mystified as the onlookers by the extent of their powers, and they speculate as helplessly about it all as anyone else. Whereas most fantasy writers would have us believe that if magic were real, the world would be profoundly different, Susanna Clarke reminds us here that it might be different only in the details. Perhaps magic really does exist – we just call it “technology”. In the second half the novel becomes more sombre and more spectacular, with magical powers bubbling up everywhere, and the narrative becoming more conventionally fantasy-epic. At 846 pages it’s over-indulgent, but clearly many readers will be carried along. I was more seduced by the economy of her later novel Piranesi (see below).
April 2025:
The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald:
This (like the Austen project below) was also provoked by a publication anniversary (it’s been exactly a century). One of my abiding images is of Gatsby himself, who does not drink alcohol, standing looking out over one of his parties where almost everyone else does; I think we are meant to feel some kind of envy for his sobriety. This reminded me of three things: the first was an evening perhaps 20 years ago at a Michelin starred restaurant in Puymirol (Lot-et-Garonne), where the famous chef Michel Trama came out to meet his guests, saying barely a word to any of them, and it occurred to me that he must be a very shy man who could not bear to talk to people under any other conditions than those of being the star. The second was that in almost all of Jane Austen, nobody enjoys the parties very much except in retrospect. The third was a passage in Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which I am currently reading, where she writes what must be a satire of the parties in Jane Austen: “Surrounded by cross, hot strangers, your chance of rational conversation is equal to what it would be in an African desert. Your only wish is to preserve your favourite gown from the worst ravages of the crowd. Every body complains of the heat and the suffocation. But if it is all misery for the guests, then what of the wretchedness of those who have not been invited? Our sufferings are nothing to theirs! And we may tell each other tomorrow that it was a delightful party”. I wasn’t quite charmed enough by any of the characters in The Great Gatsby to feel their pain more than fleetingly. But for readers who are more moved than I am by Gatsby’s yearning, for authenticy but also for recognition, to be successful while still despising success, I can understand the magic of this portrayal.
March 2025:
Jane Austen at 250: a tragic Marxist feminist?
This subject has its own page here.
December 2024:
Creation Lake, by Rachel Kushner:
At once a thriller and a philosophical novel, about a woman in her thirties whose freelance work is to infiltrate groups of radical activists in America and Europe on behalf of state or private organisations, inciting them to acts of violence that can then be used to destroy them. She moves to rural France to join a commune that both seeks to escape contemporary agro-capitalism and to commit acts of defiance against it. The plotting is deft and the characterisation subtle, and the philosophy closer to the unphilosophical essayism described here by Agnès Callard. It’s – fortunately – not so much a philosophy of capitalism as a philosophy of character (what she calls “salt”) which tries to identify what remains when an individual has been blindsided by everything life can throw at them. I finished it this morning (December 27th) and I can already sense that passages and scenes will remain with me for a long time into 2025 and perhaps beyond.
November 2024:
The House of Doors, by Tan Tan Eng:
Evocative imagination of a visit to Penang by Willie Somerset Maugham in 1921 that links the histories of Maugham, the first President of Republican China Sun Yet Sen and the convicted murderess Ethel Proudlock (all real people) through the eyes of Maugham’s fictitious hostess Lesley Hamlyn, the wife of a British lawyer. The prose is a little uneven for my taste, teetering between self-conscious poeticism and a sometimes clunking reaching for the aphorism. But the story is well structured, and the sense that all the characters have their multiple layers of secrets makes in the end for a compelling read. Its suggestion that it is the “real” version of events behind the story “The Letter” in Maugham’s The Casuarina Tree , which itself led to Maugham’s being considered persona non grata in the expatriate British community for having betrayed secrets, contributes to the intrigue.
October 2024:
Cent Million d’Années et Un Jour, by Jean-Baptiste Andrea:
A lyrical account of an expedition by a palaeontologist to discover what he is convinced is the site of a complete dinosaur skeleton in a remote valley in the Alps. A man’s struggle with himself, with his few companions and with the natural world. Images of glaciers and tiny men silhouetted against them.
September 2024:
Alice Munro:
NOTE: The news that Alice Munro remained silent over the abuse of her daughter Andrea Robin Skinner by Munro’s husband Gerald Fremlin has made me reluctant to return to the work of Munro, which I began to explore after Munro’s death, as reported in the next paragraph. I will do so in due course.
Since the death of Alice Munro, whose work I didn’t know, I’ve been trying to catch up on what makes this chronicler of small-town Canada so compelling. There seems to be no one place to start, so I’m undertaking a meandering tour of her many short stories in much the same way as she describes herself, her brother and her traveling salesman father making a tour of the rural Ontario countryside in “Walker Brothers Cowboy”, the first story in the collection A Wilderness Station: Selected Stories, 1968-1994. As some perceptive critic (I don’t remember who) pointed out, you don’t remember her sentences but you do remember her scenes. And her moods, I would add, and the perplexity everyone feels when the world doesn’t answer you in the way you’ve come to expect. The second story in the collection, “Dance of the Happy Shades”, is a delicious example of this: it starts with small-town gossip and backbiting and ends in quite unexpected epiphany. Others I’ve admired, and been bewitched by, include “The Beggar Maid”, in the same collection, “In Sight of the Lake”, in the collection Dear Life, and the well-known but nevertheless magnificent “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”, in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. The last two are particularly absorbing, and scary, for those of us with elderly relatives or nearing old age ourselves.
July 2024:
The Winding Stair, by Jesse Norman:
A gripping historical novel set at the end of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and the beginning of the reign of King James I. It charts the rise and rivalry of Francis Bacon and Edward Coke, and along the way makes subtle points about how different visions of the law serve conflicting political and religious agendas. Stylistically owes much to Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy, but still develops a recognisable voice of its own. An intellectually demanding read, but it keeps the story flowing and is never dull.
June 2024:
Columba’s Bones, by David Greig:
A disturbing tale of a community of monks on the Island on Iona, off the West coast of Scotland, in the year 825. They suffer a brutal attack from Viking raiders, in the aftermath of which a handful of survivors try to rebuild their lives on this lonely outpost. Violent but also surprisingly lyrical at moments. Spare prose, with vivid images.
May 2024:
Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke:
One of the most haunting novels I have read in years. Set in a fantastic dilapidated palace whose origin is never specified but whose relationship to the everyday world is radically reassessed as the story advances. Unlike anything else I know. A masterpiece.