The Herald - The Herald Magazine
Foul deeds in
been trying to do a job based on a premise he didn’t believe in. Now, he acknowledged, there would need to be a reckoning for the way Trump had captured so many voters’ imaginations. “We better wake up as a society and recognise that there’s a problem,” he said. “We need to make the lives of those 76 million Americans more aspirational so they can drop [Trump].”
Scaramucci goes to the heart of what is ailing the United States (and indeed other countries around the world) and threatening further conflict and polarisation. When a group’s aspirations are to stay as they are in the face of inevitable change, they become vulnerable not only to despair but to extinction – and to violence as a survival tactic. Without a vision of the future and without political beliefs and ideals of the kind of society we want to be part of, we are truly lost. As Scaramucci urges, we need to find a way of making people believe in a new future, a future that includes them and will be shaped by them and to which we can all aspire.
Trump’s most powerful weapon has been the lies he has told. Will Joe Biden be able to create new hope for a future in which people do not need to rely on lies but can be told the truth?
Coline Covington’s new book, For Goodness Sake: Bravery, Patriotism and Identity, is published by Phoenix, £26.99 (Black Thorn, £8.99)
Writing under the name Ambrose Parry, Chris Brookmyre and his wife, anaesthetist Marisa Haetzman, follow up 2018’s The Way of all Flesh with another 19th-century Edinburgh-based medical thriller. It’s 1850, and Will Raven, a protégé of the renowned Dr James Simpson in the previous book, has returned from Europe to become Simpson’s assistant. His love interest, Sarah Fisher, has progressed from maid to nurse, but has also married, making their reunion somewhat awkward. Nevertheless, they join forces to try to clear Simpson’s name when he is accused of negligence resulting in a patient’s death and get drawn into a plot based on a real-life murder case. Brookmyre and Haetzman have crafted a compelling story that sees its heroes struggling not just against a scheming murderer but also the prejudices of their age, and they don’t forget to pull away the rug just when you think you’ve got it figured out.
CUTTING EDGE Edited by Joyce Carol Oates
(Pushkin Vertigo, £10.99)
In a bid to find out if there is a specific, distinctive voice to noir fiction when written by women comes this collection of short stories by 15 authors, augmented by six poems on macabre themes by Margaret Atwood. Not surprisingly, the authors (who include Aimee Bender, Elizabeth McCracken, Edwidge Danticat and Oates herself) overturn the generic archetypes of femme fatale and victim, updating them with empowered women taking control of their narratives in a variety of roles. Men, for once, become objects of the female gaze – and, because it’s noir, in dark and chilling ways. The one story with a male protagonist, Bernice L McFadden’s “OBF, Inc”, is slyly and wittily subversive. All of the writers here have risen to the challenge with relish, repurposing the tropes and cliches of noir in diverse ways and bringing a shot of sharpness and vitality to a tired old genre.
OUTRAGES Naomi Wolf
(Virago, £16.99) Outrages began life as a thesis on the gay Victorian poet John Addington Symonds, ending up as a study of the 19th-century moral hysteria surrounding sexuality. The shine was taken off its initial publication when it emerged that Wolf had misinterpreted court records to mean that dozens of men had been executed for sodomy. Still, even taking her errors into account, she deserves credit for such a full account of a climate in which state intrusion on the body manifested itself not merely in literary censorship but in harsher legislation on homosexuality, divorce and prostitution and new measures under which women could be detained and intimately examined to prevent the spread of disease. While it focuses on Symonds, Outrages draws Whitman, the Rossettis, Swinburne and Havelock Ellis, alongside others who dared dream of a more tolerant society, into a story that cries out to be heard.
ALASTAIR MABBOTT
KATIE JENKINS
THE STRANGER TIMES CK McDonnell
Bantam Press, £14.99 (ebook
£7.99)
This is Irish comedian and author Caimh McDonnell’s new novel, his first writing under the pen name CK McDonnell. It is a darkly comedic sci-fi/crime/fantasy crossover, where The Stranger Times newspaper bridges realworld Manchester with the shadowy supernatural. Alternating between sinister and silly, McDonnell’s writing is intelligently witty. The story lopes along at an easy pace that swiftly immerses you in its bizarre happenings, with a motley crew of loveable eccentrics jostling for fan favourite. After a slow start, McDonnell’s fantasy world begins to bloom – and there will doubtless be no limits to where it’ll take us in future.
REBECCA WILCOCK
ORDESA
Manuel Vilas Canongate, £11.99
REVIEW BY STEPHEN PHELAN