Turning over a new leaf: First literary gems to kickstart the year
Manhunts in the wilderness, philosophical experiments and spooky forests. Francesca Carington highlights four debut novels to put on your early 2020 must-read list
AS the adage goes, when it comes to writing a novel, it’s often best to stick to what you know — an evergreen scrap of advice that a new crop of debut novelists have, on the whole, followed. Take the polymathic Sophie Ward, an actor, short story writer and PhD (on the use of narrative in the philosophy of mind), whose deliciously titled and deeply philosophical first novel, Love and Other Thought Experiments (Corsair, £14.99, out February 6), is possibly an extension of her degree.
This layered, clever novel revolves around a Dalston-dwelling, Rachel Cusk-reading couple, Eliza and Rachel, who are considering having a baby. One night, Rachel wakes up and is convinced that an ant has crawled into her eye and is living inside her head. She asks
Eliza, a scientist and a rationalist, to believe her: “I need you to know what I know. To have faith in me.” Eliza says she will, they have a baby, Arthur, get married, move house — then Rachel is diagnosed with terminal cancer.
Each chapter explores a classic thought experiment in philosophy, through which this simple love story is refracted and reconceived. Thought experiments are devices of the imagination used to investigate the nature of things, we’re told.
“I could be a thought experiment”, thinks the winkingly fictional Rachel, “something Eliza has dreamed up to challenge her hardened reading.” It’s a fantastic opening. The chapters that follow are each narrated from the perspective of several, always superbly individualised characters — Rachel’s parents, Arthur, the ant — which at times undermine, overlap and overrule each other. There are shifting and alternate realities, there’s a stint in space, and plenty of big, universal questions. How do you explain death to a child? Can a computer know what love is? (Yes.) How can we know what it’s like to be another person?
This last question is at the heart of many of the thought experiments: when we’re all living our own reality, how can we connect with others? The ant — perhaps the best of Ward’s excellent creations — is especially anxious to communicate to us non-ants what ant-hood feels like, listing experiences that humans might have had, like glimpsing “the eternity of the stars”, which reveal “the smallness of your place in the world”. Later, this careful, verbose ant (in a new form…) echoes Rachel’s appeal to Eliza: “I am making a simple request, that I shall be known to you”. Love and fiction and philosophy, all of which try to understand another person’s existence, are tied together in this small ask.
Ward has achieved something quite extraordinary: a super-smart metaphysical romp that’s also warm, wistful and heartfelt. A book that declares, winningly, that just because it’s all in your head, it doesn’t mean it’s not real.
Beijing-born, creative-writing-MFA-bred and Paris-based An Yu’s debut comes with another beguiling title. Braised Pork (Harvill Secker, £13.99, out now) is an elegant, dream-like tale of a woman’s self-realisation, set in contemporary Beijing.
It starts with a body in a bathtub: Jia Jia finds her not especially loveable husband dead in the bath; next to him is a sketch of a fish with a man’s head. Jia Jia, an artist who stopped selling her work because her husband thought it “looks bad”, is left with an apartment, very little money and an obsession with painting the fish-man.
She struggles to connect with her father and tries to summon memories of her dead mother:
“She could not remember the details, only the existence of details.” She starts seeing a bartender called Leo, she has strange dreams about being lost in a world of water.
It’s a superb character study of a woman unrooted, whose life has brought about the slow erosion of her identity. Even when she’s alone, Jia Jia cries in silence.
“It’s like I’ve been walking up the walls of a tower my whole life”, she tells Leo. “My body parallel to the ground, and then, the world turns and I’m standing straight up, and the tower is lying flat on the ground.” Jia Jia’s world has been turned upside down — but she was never the right way up to begin with.
Yu’s writing has an arresting, unadorned lyricism. Watery images are threaded through the novel and become central to
Jia Jia’s emotional journey. She’s never been able to paint waves: “There was something about the movement of the ocean and the semi-translucency of the water that she could not grasp; some balance between mystery and simplicity.” Water has conflicting associations: danger and isolation, but also beauty and serenity — and a link to Jia Jia’s mother. It’s a dissonance encapsulated in the aquarium that catches fire in the family apartment. In this searching, slippery novel, ambiguity is everything. A half-remembered missing mother is also at the centre of Francine Toon’s Pine (Doubleday, £12.99, out January 23), one of two new debut novels set in the wilderness. Toon, an editor and poet, is from the Scottish Highlands, where her pacey, horror-tinged novel is set.
Lauren is 10 and a half years old, and lives with her father in a tiny village on the edge of a huge, forbidding pine forest. Her mother, a healer, disappeared when she was a baby, and her father is an alcoholic with an anger problem.
Rumours swirl around their family, “like text messages travelling from one kid to another”. On Halloween, a bloodied young woman stumbles on to the road and Lauren and her father take her home. The next morning, she’s vanished. Things get freakier from then on — the woman keeps appearing, and everyone except Lauren keeps forgetting her; stone circles materialise mysteriously; Lauren’s teenage friend Ann-Ma
rie goes missing; the narrative moves, inexorably, into the woods Toon’s strength lies in her atmospheric evocation of place. The village, where everyone knows everyone, is claustrophobic; the forest, “the wild-inverse to their man-made space”, unknowable. Toon’s shrewd choice of a pre-teen protagonist adds another layer of mystery — Lauren’s already gappy understanding is obstructed further by evasive adults, as she tries to “grasp at something she doesn’t even know the shape of ”. Even with the strange and supernatural goings-on in the woods, it’s the rage and grief and darkness of grown-ups that’s the biggest mystery of all.
Stuck in another forest full of messed-up grown-ups, a teenager in Rye Curtis’s debut novel Kingdomtide
(Fourth Estate, £12.99, out February 6) states, baldly: “Everyone I’ve met over 30 is a low-grade psychopath”.
Set in 1986, the narrative alternates between two women: Cloris Waldrip, a 72-year-old woman whose plane crashes in the Montana wilderness, and Debra Lewis, an alcoholic park ranger determined to find the old lady.
Cloris is a Methodist retired librarian from the Texan Panhandle with a bitchy streak, an unlikely but likeable subject for a survival story. She ventures deeper into the wilderness, kept alive by a masked man who may or may not be the so-called “Arizona Kisser”, wanted by the FBI.
Her would-be rescuers are a motley crew — Pete, whose wife left him after contracting syphilis from a 19-toed lounge singer, the exceptionally creepy Bloor, who has chalky hands and a mullet, and Claude, obsessed, as one character puts it, with catching “a ginger-headed cyclops that rides a goddamn armadillo”.
They’ve all lost something, and they’re all searching for something, but Curtis’s lost-and-found theme is heavily weighted towards the former (set, in a darkly funny turn, to Cyndi Lauper’s Time After Time).
There’s a low thrum of menace throughout, with moments of outright gore — from the grimly described dead bodies in the plane to the demise of more than a few unlucky animals.
You’ll need a strong stomach for the gruesome parts, but also for the intense nihilism that runs through the book. The writing, however, can’t be faulted, even when it’s depressing.
Take Cloris’s poignant mediation on grief: “The stages of grief are myriad and you could not endeavour to name them all. A stage for every recollection, for every ever-failing memory, and these stages are nameless and they are many, so that cast before you is a measureless spectrum of unparticular nostalgia and loss.”
Curtis writes that he intended to write a “tale of survival with more doubt in it than hope. Maybe even no hope at all”.
There’s certainly little in the way of hope in Kingdomtide. But at least there’s plenty in the way of good writing.