When reading and writing are integral parts of your degree, you begin to associate them with work, rather than as a hobby or light entertainment. For a long time, I swore off extra-curricular reading entirely, seeing texts as something which required heavy literary analysis. It’s only as I’ve started my final year that I’ve rediscovered the pleasurable element of reading, and the importance of keeping certain novels away from the demands of my degree. It’s also a great way to pass the time – whether you’re kept in bed with a virus, looking for a distraction from stress, or trying to reduce the time spent on social media. When reading casually, I tend to stay away from those novels with sentences which possess, as Woolf once described, ‘a moth-like impetuosity dashing itself against hard glass.’ I prioritise long reads, books with a focus on character and a plot in which you can lose yourself; never thinking too much about grammatical structure or the implication of narrative style.
I have detailed my four current go-to casual reads below, and I believe that each offers a slightly different experience:
The Ultimate Comfort Read – Unless, Carol Shields
I’ve been reading this novel periodically for the past six years, and I always find myself taking it off the shelf when I feel sad or under the weather. All Shields novels are delightfully homely and family-oriented: the dual, sisterly perspective of Duets, the haunting quasi-infidelity of Happenstance, the enchanting Republic of Love. Yet none are as brilliantly immersive as Unless, which charts the life of Canadian writer, mother and wife, Reta Winters. She balances family life in Toronto with her two daughters and husband, Tom, a doctor who is ‘losing his hair nicely,’ while considering the fates of her characters Roman and Alicia, who will feature in the sequel to her first novel, My Thyme is Up. This novel is fantastic partially for its celebration of the female experience – Reta, in between writing fiction, translates the works of French author Dr Danielle Westerman, ‘poet, essayist, feminist survivor, holder of 27 honorary degrees’ who possesses an incredibly sharp mind and a matching eloquence. Reta’s friend group is also entirely female, and Shields details their coffee mornings, their lunches, their supportive conversations, in pleasingly rich detail.
While Shields celebrates female capability, and has an unapologetic focus on suburban life in Toronto, this is a novel with a brittle emotional core. In a startling opening passage, Shields notes ‘Happiness is the lucky pane of glass you carry in your head. It takes all your cunning just to hang onto it, and once it’s smashed you have to move into a different sort of life.’ The cause of the broken glass in Reta’s life is the disappearance of her daughter, Norah, who has left her metaphorically invertebrate boyfriend and university studies behind to live on the streets, pursuing ‘goodness.’ Much of the novel is centred around Reta, as a mother, taking stock of what has happened, and attempting to understand how her daughter has become such a mystery to her; why she is now someone who refuses to speak, to move, to acknowledge her family, and to try and piece together what has led to this sudden transformation.
This is a novel about grief. It thinks about the implications of losing a person who is still alive – of your daughter becoming unknown, of a tragedy infringing upon domestic, suburban life. It also considers the challenges of decision making, and of the specifically female capability to cope with suffering and difficulty. Yet Shields’ biggest achievement in writing this novel, I would argue, is that she never allows her prose or her characters to be fully consumed by tragedy. Their lives hinge on complete sadness, on emotional breakdown, but as the title suggests, and as Reta explains, they are pulled back from it. Unless is an option word, a conjunction which forever offers an alternative: ‘Unless you’re lucky, unless you’re healthy, fertile, unless you’re offered what others are offered, you go down in the darkness…’ Unless constantly thinks about alternatives, and in the same way as the characters in the book, pulls itself through the tragedy in this manner.
For an Unusual Romance – The Only Story, Julian Barnes
Stories about people falling in love have always been considered great methods of relaxation, but they can often feel drearily predictable. This is not the case with The Only Story, the latest fictional offering by Julian Barnes, the master of the perverse variation of the traditional romance. His lovers are always almost happy, or allowed a brief period of happiness – in The Sense of an Ending, a university romance is cut short as the protagonist is left for his more academically impressive friend, leading to a series of events which haunt the group into their adult lives. Talking it Over takes an affair as a matter of course, and exposes the damage of allowing a third party to have knowledge of your relationship.
The Only Story – so called because the protagonist, Paul, believes that his narration is the only story of his life worth telling – comes closer to the traditional ‘boy meets girl’ plot. While at university, Paul spends his summers at a tennis club, where he meets – and swiftly becomes infatuated with – Mrs Susan MacLeod, who is ‘somewhere in her forties.’ Locating the beginning of a relationship on a tennis court feels akin to the Amis of London Fields, who dryly remarked that ‘even on the tennis court, love means nothing.’
We know, before the meeting even happens, that there will be loss. Barnes takes his lead from Tennyson: ‘it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.’ Yet in the hands of Barnes, or rather his protagonist Paul, this phrase resists repetition in the sense of a mindless ventriloquism. It loses its genuine romantic appeal, its consideration of the expression of feelings as a sort of bravery, and becomes almost sardonic: ‘Who can control how much they love? If you can control it, it isn’t love.’ A relationship between a married forty-eight year old woman and a bored nineteen year old student has the potential to be the stuff of juvenile male fantasy, but the sex-obsessed young Barnes of Metroland has disappeared, and Paul does not allow the relationship to be viewed in a positive or admirable light as he narrates it in retrospect: ‘Or you might think French novels, older woman teaching the ‘art of love’ to a younger man, ooh la la. But there was nothing French about our relationship, or about us. We were English, and so had only those morally laden English words to deal with: words like scarlet woman, and adulteress.’
Barnes delights in the power of memory, particularly the powerful persistence with which moments can return, and exploring what is forgotten. In The Only Story, memory, and the lapse of time, seem illuminating when instances are returned to. Paul remembers, with considerable derision, how he risked it all for his sexual fantasy: expulsion from the tennis club, a breakdown of relations with his family, a chance at a stable marriage and children. He becomes involved in Susan’s domestic life: the periodic abuse she endures from her husband, her two children, her purchase of a freshly boxed diaphragm. If this were a normal romance, the sexual fantasy would disappear, the two would surely lose contact, Paul would have married a woman his age and started a family.
Yet the power of The Only Story is that Barnes does not allow this to happen: ‘Occasionally people would ask him, either slyly or sympathetically, why he had never married; others assumed or implied that he must have been, back there, back then.’ The affair, the nineteen year-old impulse, (which Paul later chalks down to the psychological notion of a rescue fantasy) haunts both of them throughout their lives. When the romance has dissipated, the book explores the decay of personality on a spectacular level, and questions whether you can ever really know someone in the midst of an affair.
The Only Story is, of course, not the only story – it is not the only way to tell a romance. Yet it is a fascinating exploration of the dark side of attraction and sexual impulse, and the impact of succumbing to both.
For An Escape – Cities of the Red Night, William Burroughs
My inner escapologist occasionally wants to read something bizarrely immersive, and Cities of the Red Night, recommended to me on the basis of my interest in paranoid literature, certainly offered just that. For those familiar with the style of many Beat texts, from the obscenities of Allan Ginsberg’s Howl to the drug-fuelled The Naked Lunch, Burroughs’ non-linear narrative, much of which hinges on opioid erotic fantasy in various locations.
I have never been a fan of Burroughs, and therefore did not expect to enjoy Cities of the Red Night. I was surprised – mostly by its freeflowing narrative, where I found something pleasantly Joycean: ‘The methods of death most commonly employed were hanging and strangulation, the Transmigrant dying in orgasm, which was considered the most reliable method of ensuring a successful transfer. Drugs were also developed, large doses of which occasioned death in erotic convulsions, smaller doses used to give sexual pleasure.’
This book is not to be read for its plot, as there is nothing wholly substantial, but what vestiges of narrative there are will pull you along. This is the least static novel I have ever read, and a perfect contrast to Shields – rather than focusing on the detail, Burroughs touches upon hideous cases of cholera, malaria, of painfully un-lubricated sodomy, of medical professional Doctor Pierson who ‘was a discreet addict who kept himself down to three shots [of opium] a day,’ before moving away from them. It is a novel of snapshots, of heroin-induced intensity, and an overriding worship of Ix Tab, who is the Muse of Strangulation. The one constant in the text is its perverse obsession – in various locations – of autoerotic asphyxiation.
This sounds a repulsive premise for a novel. And yet Burroughs’ talent is that he manages to cultivate extraordinary beauty out of such a preoccupation. The descriptions of the various locations, in particular, are something to behold – Lima’s ‘purple twilight,’ or: ‘the music went on playing in my head, trickled down mountainsides in a blue twilight, rustling through glades and grass, twinkling on starlit streams, drifting down windy streets with autumn leaves.’ Amidst the constant relocation, and steady drip of drug use and sex, these quiet moments really make the novel.
For an intense read/tour de force – Sin, Josephine Hart
Each of Josephine Hart’s short, sparely written, but fiercely intense books would have been a suitable recommendation. I have chosen Sin, because it is the first of her works that I read, and the one which has left the most lasting impression on me. This is an excellent choice if you want something to make time pass more quickly; although it is by no means designed as a page-turner, it has an immense emotional pull.
Damage had already been written by the time that Hart started work on Sin, yet the theme of damage seems perhaps more evident in this novel than it did in her first. Ruth, the steely protagonist and the corrosive voice of the book, says of her adopted sister: ‘She was my mother’s first child. Though not her first born. A terrible injustice to me. Her name was Elizabeth Ashbridge. And I even envied her that.’ It is a testament to the emotional ripeness of Hart’s works that each can be encapsulated by a noun – Damage as adultery, The Stillest Day as infatuation, Oblivion as guilt, The Reconstructionist as memory, and, with sad irony, The Truth About Love as death.
It is only right, perhaps, that a novel titled Sin should focus on one of the cardinal sins – and it is undoubtedly, unapologetically concerned with envy. From the opening, Ruth and Elizabeth are separated into darkness and light. Ruth awakes after a nightmare as a child, revealing ‘something black in my room. Black.’ She finds her way downstairs where Elizabeth is still awake, being doted on by their parents: ‘Her golden hair is spread out and down her back. A halo of light.’ It is evident, as the story continues, that Ruth never recovers from infringing upon such an outpouring of love.
Hart is relentless in pursuing Ruth’s envy throughout the text, from the force of its fire until its dwindling embers, when she no longer has cause for it. It is not an aspect of the tale, but the very essence of the tale itself: Ruth seeks to ruin Elizabeth, through her marriage, through her family, through trying to take everything she owns – purely to reclaim her believed birthright. Ruth’s jealousy is due to a perceived injustice that can not – and will not – ever be righted, which is the true power of Sin.
words that burn 