Escapist tales that even a pessimistic grump can enjoy
I’ve noticed a pattern to this column in recent weeks. I have featured books about the end of the world, serial killers, the climate emergency and the future forced mass migration of the human race. So, before you discover exactly the sort of misanthropic pessimistic curmudgeon I am, I’d better throw in some light to counterbalance the darkness.
During the early part of Covid, I was frequently asked by people to recommend books that would distract them from the world they were dealing with every day. Anything that might act as an antidote to the news alerts, the worry, the hardships and isolation, the screaming existential clamour of all of our social media feeds.
I suggested a certain sort of book. Low stakes, lacking hard dramatic tension and usually with protagonists who were, even though it can feel like a dirty word these days, gentle. After all, when the world around you overwhelmingly feels like bad dystopian fiction, what better way to leave it for a while than to enter a world of genuine escape?
I didn’t realise I needed fiction full of gentle characters where the other shoe never dropped until I read Rónán Hession. His first two novels, Leonard and Hungry Paul (2019) and Panenka (2021) both foreground characters who might be incidental in anyone else’s work. They have lives, loves and cares; things happen to them, but they deal with it all with such a quiet decency that it felt like a revelation.
His new book Ghost Mountain starts with a dash of magical realism when a small mountain appears overnight in a field near a town. It understandably creates ripples in the lives of everyone there — the locals, a dog, the town drunk and people it attracts from further afield. Ghost Mountain is a step on from his previous books; it digs into the cracks in people and into what occurs when you apply pressure to them. His writing has a sort of Wes Anderson quality to it which makes it feel almost more real than it would otherwise. I know that makes no sense, but it says everything about the individuality of his storytelling that this is the only way I can describe it. His books are a balm for the modern age, you should seek them out.
In Jerzy Kosinski’s satire Being There (adapted into a brilliant film starring Peter Sellers) it’s the early 70s and Chance has lived all his life in a city mansion working for the ‘Old Man’ as a gardener. He has never left since his mother died in childbirth and the Old Man took him in, and all he seems to do is garden and watch TV. He is a “simple man”. After the Old Man’s death, he’s forced to leave the only home he has even known and experience the real world alone and on his own terms for the first time. Because of his simple naïveté and through his frequent silences and people projecting what they want on to him, he becomes suddenly famous, courted by the rich and politically influential.
As with Being There, I discovered The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin by David Nobbs through an adaptation — the Leonard Rossiter TV version that seemed to be constantly repeated on the BBC in the early ’80s. Reggie is a standard-issue middle-aged businessman who commutes into London every day from a standard suburb on a standard train that’s always late for random reasons like “staff issues at Hampton Wick”. He’s a manager for a dessert company in a dull job issuing dull memos to his secretary, Joan, until one day he decides to lose his grip on reality, and everything changes. It’s both very of the time and yet completely universal.
Far more modern is Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman (translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori). Kieko is in her mid-30s and has worked happily in a Tokyo shop since she was 18, but her family and friends want a “normal” life for her with a husband, better career and kids. She moves in with a useless fellow employee as both try to put on a front of being in a relationship and quietly live the lives they want to live. Kieko is utterly content with her dull, repetitive, quiet days yet society says that’s not enough for her. I loved it, and it opened up a whole world of similar contemporary Japanese literature for me.
Finally, one of the absolute gems of Irish writing in the last decade is Sara Baume’s brilliant debut Spill Simmer Falter Wither. A lonely 57-year-old man adopts a one-eyed dog he sees advertised in the widow of a shop and they live very much alone until circumstances drive them to a road trip of sorts. It’s a study in isolation, companionship and of a man who is, as he says, “too old for starting over, too young for giving up”. I read this years before I had dogs myself, but the end made me have a little weep. I fear that if I read it now, I might not emotionally survive it.
See? There was always bound to be a little darkness from me in the end.