The worst of the winter is behind us. January, what a month – lasts 7 weeks, all of them cold and overcast, and all the big events are disasters. February, short but bitter. Good thing we have books.
This wasn’t a comfort read or comfortable, but highly enjoyable. Set in Kyiv in 1919 it concerns an almost-hero who – like everyone else – is hiding from the authorities, hoping the authorities don’t commandeer his home, surviving on gruel and cabbage. Thanks to a sabre-happy Cossak his ear is cut off. Nothing daunted, he stores the ear in a sweet tin (who wouldn’t?) and after a while discovers the ear continues to hear.
I learned a lot about Ukrainian history, and the gritty, grimy terrors of everyday life were fascinating. The book (by one of Ukraine’s best-selling writers) bowls along like the thriller it is. Highly recommended for something structurally familiar but challengingly different.
Caroline Lucas was for a long time one of my favourite politicians – issue-driven, outspoken, warm and thoughtful. This book is the same. Lucas examines the history of England – not Britain – in preparation for a possible splintering of the United Kingdom. As the daughter of a Welshman and an Englishwoman, I support her view that the regions are different and that England – so often thought of as the same as Britain – actually has the slimmest and faintest sense of national identity (probably for that reason?) Lucas writes with great passion and knowledge; I know much more about the Charter of the Forest, the Diggers and the Chartists than I did before. She’s not afraid to address the two things guaranteed to get right-wing knickers in a twist (slavery and Empire) and she manages to be optimistic and to show us a way forward. The book offers a new view of an old issue with lots of poetry and literature to delight.
What if this book was the best book I read all year? I won’t know until December, but readers are naturally optimistic aren’t we? We don’t know – when we discover a new writer – if we’re starting with the best, or if the best is not yet written. I wouldn’t have chosen this book: I like a small tale, in a compressed time-frame and this novel is spread over centuries, though largely in a single location. A wiser friend sent it to me, and how glad I am that I read it in January. It was the first attack of book-fever this year and I carried it with me everywhere in case there was a chance to read a page, a paragraph. The closing passages made me gasp out loud with wonder and shock, and I read the final sentences over and over again. The writing about nature is beautiful, the images and characters haunting. A beetle is as important as a character who builds a wing on a house. I learned a great deal about history and landscape. The characters move through the novel with agency, changing their states, leaving clues, leading full lives, on and on into the future. Death and destruction are not the end of anything, just a point in time.
If you watched Chewing Gum or I May Destroy You on tv, (or any of her other projects for streamers) you’ll be familiar with Michaela Coel. Her mobile face and sharp writing have delighted and horrified tv audiences. So it shouldn’t have come as a shock when she was invited to give the MacTaggart Lecture in 2018, one of a still tiny group of women since the first one in 1976, (though she was surprised.) This slim book is the text of the lecture bookended with Coel’s story of life before and after the text of the speech. Even if you don’t know her work, you can’t fail to be enraged and inspired and enraged again by her treatment in the industry. She famously refused a million dollars from Netflix, though by working as a poet, musician, actor and writer Coel has reached a worldwide audience and inspired millions.
As well as reading, I also write, and here’s what I produced this winter. I hesitate to include it in such exalted company, but readers are generous, readers are kind, readers are always searching.
Suzy D Harris 