History of Wolves, by Emily Fridlund

Ahhh, the first bum note of the Booker Shortlist 2017.

Normally, narratives about cults and communes are right up my street. Coupled with the isolated woodlands of Minnesota, I was fairly confident that this was going to be a winner for me. How very wrong I was.

Linda, aka Mattie aka Madeline, now 37, remembers a pivotal summer when she was 14. The summer the Gardners moved into the neighbouring cabin on the lake. Apparently the perfect city family, glamorous Patra and toddler Paul are awaiting the arrival of husband/father Leo when Linda initially befriends them. Part babysitter, part governess, Linda teaches the upfront, oddly serious three year old about the woods, survival and nature, as well as keeping him out from under his parents’ feet. Leo is a controlling and manipulative Astronomer, dubbed a genius by his doting, fawning wife. A wife that is 11 years his junior and a former student.

It is hinted at, then referred to as the book goes on that there is something wrong with Paul, something that, in the future, Linda will be quizzed about. Her actions, responses and thoughts will be analysed and assessed in minute detail. These later events break into the summer narrative periodically, recounted by a much older Linda.

During her narrative, Linda bounces from topic to topic, from decade to decade. There’s a teacher arrested on pedophilia charges; her 20s spent living with a Canadian girl, a mechanic boyfriend; the summer she babysat for the Gardners; lots of meandering through the beautiful but somehow uninteresting forests; writing to the pervert teacher; a sudden death. I did find it quite hard to keep track of what age Linda was supposed to be in which scenes, perhaps because the storytelling was kind of sloppy, perhaps because I wasn’t super bothered.

Even the woods were stripped of their magic by the detached Linda and her unvaried treks through familiar trails. The lakeside woods were simply an unremarkable reality, her known landscape. No more unusual or noteworthy than buildings or roads. The same cycles went round and round, bringing their own tasks, challenges and temperatures.

I found this book dull and pretentious- there was no atmosphere, no suspense. I don’t know what the wolf business was about. The subplot with the teacher and Lily was entirely divorced from the Gardner’s plot.. The structure was abrasive, the characters forgettable, dull and lacking in any kind of agency. Linda was incredibly irritating, her inner monologue unbearable. She seemed periodically obsessed with Patra, with classmate Lily, with Wolves...all intense but transient. She had no motivation, no interests, no convictions, no opinions, no identity. She seemed thoroughly damaged, fantasizing about doing something (anything) shocking or inappropriate, then invariably standing there like a silent lemon wrestling with her thoughts. She’s socially awkward, emotionally distant from her family. She seems to have no friends, and she delights in pranks and stunts, cruel or inexplicable letters. She was obviously very lonely and isolated, left behind with her presumed parents after the breakdown and drifting off of their commune community. I just couldn't care about her at all. An unlikable character is not always a deal breaker, but I didn’t find the prose particularly beguiling and I was glad to finally have done with this tedious story.

Autumn, by Ali Smith

Autumn begins with a trippy out of body experience- there’s definitely a beach, possibly a dead body, definitely a copse and trees, sand and leaves and nature. It’s ethereal and floaty, dreamlike and disorientating. Having read Lincoln in the Bardo, this summer I was expecting it to be some kind of purgatory, because it seemed oddly familiar. We eventually learn that this is Daniel Gluck, one of two characters that will recur at different times, at different ages throughout the novel. The next time we see him, slightly more corporeally, he is 101 and clinging to life in a soulless care home.

Next we meet Elisabeth Demand, a thoroughly modern just-about millennial, over educated and under employed. Scraping an existence as a casual contract lecturer in Art History, she seems harassed, unfulfilled and adrift in a world that she no longer recognises. The first time we meet her is to observe a farcical, almost Fawlty Towers-esque ordeal with the bureaucratic minions at the Post Office involving head sizes, deli tickets and the humourless jobsworths that work there- the erosion and decay of Public institutions and social bankruptcy are recurrent themes throughout. The Post Office, on this visit, is full of homeless people as the library has closed. The book declares itself to be the first post-Brexit novel, and it captures the melancholy betrayal of a divided and abandoned nation, one that is confused, angry and adrift. I loved the book just for how disappointed it is in people. It’s not really a hopeful story, there’s no suggestion of a conclusion and that fits how us official 48% feel about pretty much everything.

As a child, Elasabeth lived next door to a late 70s aged Daniel- their friendship was an odd one, encouraged by Elisabeth’s mother when she needed a babysitter, recast as suspicious if she thought about it too hard. The sprightly for his age Daniel taught his young neighbour to think, to imagine, to wonder. To see things that weren’t there and change things that were. He seems to be one of the first people to really recognise Elisabeth’s intelligence, and he treats her like an equal. We also get a glimpse of his immigrant backstory and his lost sister, a woman that Resisted and was promptly never heard of again.

Elisabeth’s mother, the only other character we really see much of is an odd woman, to begin with almost Mrs Wormwood-ish in her brashness and presumed negligence. When her daughter is young, she seems reckless, irresponsible. She lies to her kid about where she’s going and Elisabeth is smart enough to see through it with adult-level cynicism and exasperation. Mum encourages her daughter lie about her homework and leaves her in the practically stranger danger hands of a next door neighbour. Later on she is suspicious of their friendship, wilfully and frustratingly misunderstanding their shared love of art as something sinister and inappropriate. After moving to the village in later life, she becomes this liberal antiques enthusiast, lamenting the hate crime wave and railing against the lies and the wilful ignorance. 25 years makes her unrecognisable. I don’t know what that means, but Ali Smith never makes it seem like a mistake. It’s just mysterious people being mysterious.

Autumn is a non-linear novel that flits around between Elisabeth’s lifetime- the art dissertation she wrote on a forgotten British pop artist, her canalside walks as a child with Daniel, sat at his bedside in the present day reading Brave New World. The prose is beautiful and powerful, a slideshow of images and emotions. It manages to be both playful and furious at the same time, which I was incredibly impressed with. I love books that have art as a central theme, how art makes a person feel. It’s fascinating to have such visceral and personal responses captured in prose, which is one of the elements that I found the most joyous about How To Be Both.

I enjoyed this book hugely, I was absolutely captivated by the world it created- this murky Autumnal landscape of apathy and gloom. I loved Elisabeth and did not find it difficult to empathise with her for a second. I loved how ordinary she was- how responsible she felt for everything, how resentful she was towards her mother’s generation and how guilty and conflicted she felt about being so. It’s not a novel that everyone I going to be able to get on with, but I thought it was witty and playful, with a generous and cathartic helping of righteous Brexit fury

This is Going to Hurt, by Adam Kay

Wow. For 95% of this book, I was imagining how I’d write it up; praising its hilarity, its pace, its wit. I was going to do a big paragraph about how much I loved all the Harry Potter name swaps. I was going to gush about how Green Wing this whole book is in its absurdity and farcical “you couldn’t make it up” vibes… about how entitled some of the British public are. How stoic, how bonkers how utterly unfit for walking the Earth unsupervised and being allowed to operate heavy machinery. I was going to talk about how the author definitely knows how to regale his audience with almost Keaton-esque timing…It’s all in here. But the last entry, the last major incident that Dr Kay deals with in his career as an ObGyn senior registrar is chilling to the point where all of the funny, human warmth of the other 250 pages kind of feels distant and like it happened in a different book. I think the last 5 pages of this book is going to haunt me forever.

What starts off as a hilarious but illuminating peek behind the curtain into the operation of NHS hospitals becomes a very sobering biography of a beloved institution on the brink of collapse- a diary of a man with a scalpel and a wipe-clean hoover desperately trying to keep things running in a system that seems designed to make everything grind to a bloody, crunching halt. Not because of these greedy, workshy doctors that won’t turn up for a Saturday shift and are only in Medicine for the special parking space and the rivers of cash, but because there are simply not enough doctors to do all of the things that need to be done so that people don’t die. The ratio of work to sleep/home/sustenance sounds like something out of a PoW camp. The normal rules of workload, work/life balance and being awake enough to function simply do not apply and it is both horrifying and fascinating.

I’m worried now that writing this so soon after finishing the book (within 30 minutes) has made me err on the side of glumness, so I just want to reiterate what a (and I do not use this phrase lightly or without a trace of self hatred) laugh out loud book this is. I read half of it in one sitting, sat in a plastic chair in the King’s Mill Hospital A&E waiting room, watching the giant, rusty, beloved behemoth that is the NHS in motion. I marveled at the smiley, efficient nurses as I tried to stifle snorts about the likelihood of French holiday homes, or hold in a horrified WTF face at the “degloving” story. But I was always, always amazed at the commitment, the proficiency and the sheer iron will of Adam Kay and his colleagues, who soldiered on long after any normal person would have understandably collapsed in a snotty, tearful mess. These people are superheroes that don’t even realise they are extraordinary.

I urge everyone with eyes to read this. Partly because it’s painfully funny, partly because it’s pretty much the whole of human experience wrapped up in scrubs and then bled on. Mostly though, because nobody could read this, this dispatch from the frontline of an NHS hospital and fail to recognise what an asset it is, what a good thing we have here and how ESSENTIAL it is that we protect it. Nobody could read about these men and women repeatedly jeopardising their own home lives and happiness for the wellbeing of total strangers and not feel compelled to defend and protect the NHS and all who sail in her with their last, gurgling breath. READ IT!!