I’d sworn off big books for a while, but I had this on order at the library, and when the library calls, you must answer. I’ve read pretty much everything by this author, and although nothing has quite reached the heights of The Poisonwood Bible I’d never let a book by Kingsolver pass me by. This was a hefty and beautiful object with a haunting design printed on what I now know is called the fore edge. It is loosely based on David Copperfield and you can find a couple of instances online of Kingsolver talking about her nights in Dickens’ house. Quite spine-tingling stuff.
This is a long read and not so much a novel as an immersive experience. I discovered so much about that part of America (Virginia) and the people who live there. The elements of David Copperfield fit well into this modern story and at times it was only knowing how things end for David that kept me going with Demon, so bleak and hard was the journey. It was full of detail, rich in atmosphere and almost sensual in the details of poverty in a rural landscape. Demon is a fine narrator of his history: you want to know him, you want to love him. At times he reminds us he’s now an adult looking back and that’s a distancing device that makes it bearable to go on reading. I wonder if I’ll read anything more remarkable and memorable this year?
This year I’m reading more mindfully to counter the many threats to my attention. This book was a challenge and a balm. Hari describes the serious problem we’re facing. He starts with the choices we make as individuals, to which there are individual solutions. We can control and confine our internet use. We can become aware of when we’re being used and manipulated (angry words excite the algorithm.). We can use our laptops without the internet and even lock our phones in portable safes and set the time for release. Beyond the individual though, there’s a mass of evidence that we’re all losing focus, at a time when we need to work together to solve the most pressing problems. Hari suggests it is a dreadful recipe at work. Stress, sleeplessness, poor nutrition, pollution and poverty are all working together to make us “cognitively degraded.”
I certainly learned a lot and will apply much of the advice to my own use of devices. And the good news is, we can calm down. We can focus, and what better way than reading?
Anthony Horowitz is a prolific writer of screenplays, books for children, and a couple of series for adults. (You can see his other series brought beautifully to life on BBC at the moment – Magpie Murders.) In this book, like the others in this series, he appears as the central character. I sometimes find the other character, a former policeman called Hawthorne, rather hard to take. He’s rude to Anthony (“Tony”), withholding the solution to the crimes and withholding his own story too. He’s maddeningly good though. This novel takes the meta to a new level as Anthony writes a play and a critic gets murdered. Of course, the writer is the main suspect. Horowitz is so, so good at this. His plots are dense but not heavy, his characters utterly believable and he plays so deftly with the conceit of the novelist as character. There are in-jokes – mostly at Michael Morpurgo’s expense in this novel – and even the acknowledgments are in character. Don’t hesitate to find a grown-up Horowitz if you haven’t read them yet, and it is worth getting them in the right order.
You’ll know Katie Wix, even if you think you don’t. She’s a writer and comic and has appeared in many top tv shows over the last ten years. I thought this was a memoir with cake as the organising structure. Not quite. There is cake, but there’s no sweetness. There is confection, but not much lightness. That’s not to say it was a difficult or unpleasant read – Wix has the gift of observation which the best comics share. She captures the feeling of the most difficult days in her/our lives with cool clarity. She’s not concerned with protecting herself and she lays bare the terrible pain she carries, or carried at the times in her life described in this book. It is incredibly moving. I wanted to know more about her tv career and her many victories and successes but that would be a different book.
It was rash to consider Demon Copperhead the book of the year, or even the month, when I had this waiting in my library pile. I don’t know why I chose it, particularly when I’m trying to read shorter novels and this was over 600 pages. But it took root from the first pages and hasn’t left, even now. Like Kingsolver’s book, it was an eye-opener and a challenge to what I thought I knew. It is about trees, and the way we need them and they need us. At least one of the main characters is based on a real person – possibly more than one but I didn’t search. The structure of the first section bothered me at first and I considered stopping. That proved impossible. The separate stories of individuals were so full of detail they felt biographical and microscopic. Then the story widens out, the characters from the first section move out into their worlds before they are drawn back together, by trees. I hope that doesn’t sound simplistic, it really is a remarkable and complex book that is still easy to read, passionate, and moving. It will change the way you look at trees, and the world they make for us.
Suzy D Harris 