The Scheme for Full Employment

In The Scheme for Full Employment, Magnus Mills imagines a world where everyone is employed. You might think everyone would be happy in such a world, given the security of a regular income, the routine of daily work, community with colleagues and the like. But not everyone wants the kind of job that is so routine that it doesn’t allow for individuality. And such a set up inevitably becomes an inefficient, unwieldy way of doing things.

Percival Everett by Virgil Russell

How to review Percival Everett by Virgil Russell? It’s a novel that confounds. On the face of it, it’s a conversation between an aging father and his son. Or perhaps it’s an aging father saying the things he wished he’d said to his now-dead son. Or perhaps, as claimed by the father, it’s a novel written by him in the style he thinks his son would use if his son was a writer. Or maybe it’s the son imagining a conversation with his now dead father.

It’s a book about loss, regret, grief and letting go. It is dedicated to Percival Everett’s father, also Percival Everett, who died three years before its publication. It questions reality and examines writing as an act of creation, taking ideas and spinning them into something more, something that allows both author and reader to change, to also become more. Or less, depending on the context.

Verdigris

Like a Bryan Adams song, Verdigris takes place over a single summer; the summer of 1969. Unlike a Bryan Adams song, Verdigris squirms with horror and questions what makes reality. In that summer of ’69, the novel’s narrator Michelino is 13 and a half years old (the half year is important to him) and spending the holiday with his grandparents in Nasca, Italy. Neither grandparent takes an interest in the boy, and he is left to entertain himself. That entertainment doesn’t include buying a guitar and starting a band. Michelino is far too esoteric for that.

The Making of a Marchioness

The Making of a Marchioness by Frances Hodgson Burnett is the story of Emily Fox-Seton, a young woman from a lesser branch of a wealthy family who was plunged into penury when her mother died. Emily works for others, her sweetly innocent nature and willingness to help others a commodity among the rich and selfish. She is resourceful, living within her means, keeping herself stylish and making the most of life. It’s a delight of a book.

The Mirror and the Light

It is nine years since I wolfed down the first two books in Hilary Mantel’s trilogy about Thomas Cromwell. I read those two books in quick succession, coming to them late thanks to the television dramatisation of 2015. It is four years since The Mirror and the Light was published and it has been languishing on my e-reader all that time. I decided that I wanted something familiar to read, so finally picked it up.

Reading Mantel’s prose is like slipping on a comfortable pair of shoes. I had loved her writing style in Wolf Hall and the way it took me into Cromwell’s mind, and The Mirror and the Light did the same. It opens in the aftermath of Anne Boleyn’s execution, with Henry VIII already betrothed to her replacement, Jane Seymour, and Cromwell steering the ship of state through the wake of the scandal, drawing on his network to keep tabs on those jockeying for position, both in favour of the king and against. He is rewarded by the king for ridding him of his unwanted second wife, elevated to a Lord, holder of the Privy Seal.

Tomb of Sand

In northern India, an 80-year old woman takes to her bed after her husband dies. Her children try to bring her back to their land of the living, but she is tired of being the breath they all breathe.

Tomb of Sand won the International Booker Prize in 2022 and I bought a copy because I haven’t read much Indian literature and wanted to support the independent publisher Tilted Axis Press, as well as read more books by women writing in a non-European language translated by women.

This is a big book, in more ways than one. It is 735 pages long and deals with the nature of tradition and convention, the position of women in patriarchal societies, the borders that exist everywhere, who polices them and whether the barriers they represent are insurmountable. It explores one woman’s experience of Partition and the immediate impact the separation of India and Pakistan had as well as its long reach into the 21st century. It considers family structures and the unspoken rivalries and power plays within them. It examines what it is to be a woman of a certain age whose body is changing in ways that feel like an entirely new person is squatting in her brain. And it talks about the tension between humans and the rest of nature and how our species would do well to listen better to those that have evolved differently to us.

The Underground Railroad

The Underground Railroad follows the fortunes of Cora, a slave born on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Colson Whitehead constructs a framework for his novel that is grounded in history, but is more allegorical than factual, a sort of Pilgrim’s Progress through the worst of American history mixed with the satire of Gulliver’s Travels.

My historian brain battled with this, struggling to place the narrative in a fixed time period, questioning the veracity of the experiences Cora has, confused by seeming representations of American history that sources I checked couldn’t verify. There are anachronisms and a prefiguring of certain post-slavery methods of controlling black lives in among the events that have their roots in fact.

Hometown Tales: Highlands and Hebrides

Hometown Tales is a book series from the Orion Books imprint of Weidenfield & Nicolson. There are eight books in the series, each pairing a new writer with someone more established from the same region.

I bought the Highlands and Hebrides volume at a Mull Historical Society gig in 2018, because one of the two stories it contains is by Colin MacIntyre, the musician and writer who records under the MHS moniker. I’d read his novel The Letters of Ivor Punch not long before and enjoyed his fictionalised rendition of his home.

Kaikeyi

Vaishnavi Patel’s Kaikeyi is a retelling of the Hindu epic Ramayana from the perspective of Queen Kaikeyi. It begins in Kaikeyi’s childhood, when a brutal disruption leads the princess to seek the help of the gods to put things right again. That help is not forthcoming, but what Kaikeyi discovers about herself in the process transforms her life. She ceases to be the overlooked only daughter of a king and becomes a woman who will do anything to make a better life for herself and other women.

The Sixth Gun Volume 9

After finishing Volume 8 of The Sixth Gun, I couldn’t wait to complete the series, so jumped straight into Volume 9 on New Year’s Day. The final volume brings together the three concluding chapters in this epic, marshalling all the forces with an interest in The Six together for the final battle.

The Six are an ancient force, forged in the early history of mankind. They have taken many forms, and have been used to end and recreate the world many times. Over the centuries, they have evolved, becoming near sentient, able to manipulate their bearers to ensure that, with each remaking of the world, they remain active within it. But their existence is the cause of wars, enmity, power struggles and misery for those caught at the edges of conflict. In Volume 9, Drake Sinclair and Becky Montcrief have set themselves the task of remaking the world without The Six in it. But first they must stop the Grey Witch, Griselda, from remaking the world in her image.