Three Books for October

Somehow a few weeks went by, and then it was a year since I last updated this blog. How remiss of me.

Despite this apparent wilting of creativity, the writing side of life has been trundling along nicely, with articles of mine appearing in the Scottish Review (if you haven’t had a look, the SR comes out every Wednesday and is just a brilliant thing).

But the poor blog! Then we hit late September and the first cold breeze of autumn curled around me, and I remembered: what is this blog if not a place of unkempt frivolity? It is a place where only nice things are allowed. I guard the gate against too much reality (there’s plenty of it elsewhere, if you like that sort of thing) and write about joie de vivre, baguette et fromage, and other saucy things.

Especially, I like to write my way through the bad weather. It’s now October, which means we have embarked on phase one of Scottish Winter (it’ll wrap up by April or thereabouts). It’s rough, is it not? By the time we get to the other side, we’re putting all our energies into suspending disbelief about the sun. Little sun orphans, in denial, wearing thermals at Easter. ‘She’s coming back’, we reassure each other desperately. ‘She loves us. She must be coming back.’

If we’re going to get through the cold months, we need a veritable armoury of good, lovely things to keep us going. Here’s my little pamper hamper of nice things (yes, say it with me: pamper hamper. No need to feel silly).

Three books

In the heat of summer, when I was able to contend with dark thoughts, I was reading books about out-of-control technologies and totalitarianism. Which was, eh, not as cheery as it sounds.

I know it’s important to read about all the sides of ourselves, especially the bits we don’t like to look at. It feels like facing monsters instead of running from them – and I think that’s a good thing to do. For a while… while you’re able.

But then.

Then I found my mood starting to dip. There was a queasy feeling that all was not well. Dread trailed through my thoughts when I read the news. The idea of the world as an evil kind of place was settling in. I’m sure, in 2019, that’s a normal feeling we’re all dealing with, but I also know that this state of mind is a kind of paralysis, a deadening of the spirit – and what’s more, it’s not really accurate. I don’t believe that people are all self-serving and vicious. In fact, I know the vast majority are given to acts of generosity, kindness, curiosity and playfulness. See: the humans are adorable meme, which I believe *adjusts spectacles* you can find while surfing the World Wide Web (‘humans are not an aquatic or even amphibious species, but they flock to bodies of water simply to play in it’).

When the evenings started to get darker, I thought uh oh. It was time to do some responsible reading. I needed books that would bring life back in, in all its nuance and joy.

I began with Fludd by Hilary Mantel, which is about a soggy, depressed Catholic town in England, and the arrival there of a priest (or a man pretending to be a priest) called Fludd. He slowly works his sinful magic, persuading people to give in to fleshly desires, giving them permission to enjoy life, and miraculously healing their wounds. It’s a riot. Some see the devil in him, while for others he’s a saviour. Here’s a young nun, under Fludd’s influence, who is on the brink of giving up the convent life that she hates, to run away with a man:

‘Around them was an argentine brightness, solar and lunar, unearthly and mercurial, sparkling from the dead branches, flickering in the ditch, glinting on the cobbles before the church door. The convent windows were washed with brightness, the grimy stonework glowed; high on the terraces, fireflies seemed to dart.

All my life till now, she thought, has been a journey in the dark. But now another kind of travelling begins: a long vagrancy under the sun.’

While I was reading it I kept having to stop and re-read bits, it was so beautiful; and now I know that I, too, would like a long vagrancy under the sun.

After that flirtation with the devil, I was in need of something else with as much life in it, so I got tucked into The Break by Marian Keyes.

‘The thing about personal growth, I’ve discovered, is that you rarely get any choice in it. It only ever happens as a side-effect of some loss or trauma.’

If you want to remember why you love reading – want a book that’s going to flood in to your life and knock you down, and fill up your head and your heart (like a new romance, but without the risk or the awkward texts), then this is the book for you. Marian Keyes has been one of my favourite authors since I read Last Chance Saloon in the 90s (a classic) and I keep a stack of her novels on my bookshelf for emergencies. Keyes’ books have carried me through the rockiest of times. So few books have characters that ring true the way they do in Keyes’ novels. The darkest parts of life are laid bare, with a sensitivity and honesty that always – always – has me in tears. I have caught myself, years after finishing a Keyes book, wondering what the characters are up to these days.

The Break, then, came with high expectations, and it gloriously exceeded them. I went a bit mad, is what happened: racing through the pages, ignoring Netflix, reading while cooking, reading in the bath, surreptitiously picking up the book whenever there was a lull in a conversation with my partner. I turned my back completely on real life, and reader, it was magnificent.

The book is about what happens to Amy (that’s the name of the protagonist, I haven’t veered into creepy third-person confessions about myself) when her husband of 17 years declares that he needs a six-month break from their marriage; or as she angrily calls it, ‘a six month sex holiday’. Then the book delves in to all that happened leading up to the six-month-sex-holiday plan, and your sympathies switch back and forth and all over the place, from one chapter to another. Meanwhile, Amy’s three daughters, and a host of peripheral characters, get up to all kinds of things, and life goes on, as life is wont to do.

When it was all over, I was bereft. Rather than wait for Keyes’ new novel to come out (although, fear not, it will be with us in the world soon) I immediately ordered another book, because I wasn’t ready to return to chilly October feelings. So this is my last feel-good recommendation: the wonderfully titled How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell. For a taste, you can read online the transcript of a talk she gave in 2017, which appears, in adapted form, in the book.

Odell’s writing is lucid and somehow spacious – there’s room to breathe. The book is, broadly, about how to reclaim your attention from social media (and other addictive aspects of the internet) and reconnect with your own body and thoughts, and the physical world around you. She argues for this as a political act of resistance. What struck me, straight off, was her heart-breaking description of the way that online communication robs us of the important physical experience of conversation. Here she speaks of this problem, as it occurred to her after watching social media after the 2016 US election:

‘What was missing from that surreal and terrifying torrent of information and virtuality was any regard for place, for the human animal […] I am not an avatar, a set of preferences, or some smooth cognitive force; I’m lumpy and porous, I’m an animal, I hurt sometimes, and I’m different one day to the next’.

I was fascinated by her description of how very much physical, tangible information is lost when we talk online. At the basest level, it’s easy for idiots to fire death threats at people across Twitter when they’re not thinking of the recipient as an actual person with a body and feelings.

With these three books, I felt my sense of hope and wonder about the world enter a much-needed process of repair.