I can see this being a stuttery sort of post, as I haven’t blogged since December and so I’m out of practice. But I have finished reading a few books since then, and I know that thoughts about them will keep nagging me until I write them down.
One of them was a novella I read on the Kindle, Anita Brookner’s At the Hairdresser’s. It’s part of a series called Penguin Shorts, which consists of short works published exclusively in digital format. It breaks this year’s resolution to only read books I already have, as I downloaded it a few weeks ago. But part of my brain seemed to think it didn’t count, because it was an ebook, it was cheap, and because at that particular moment I really, really needed to read Anita Brookner.
I read two of Brookner’s books, Leaving Home and The Rules of Engagement, some years ago. I found her style relentlessly intense and focused, and her analysis of the minds and lives of lonely, reserved women piercingly accurate and resonant. I don’t think I’ve ever read anyone else like her. At the Hairdresser’s satisfied my Brookner craving. It’s narrated by Elizabeth Warner, an older woman living alone in a basement flat in London, who, stuck at the hairdresser’s one day when it is raining heavily outside, is driven home by a young man who runs a car service, Chris. Her experiences from then onwards cause her to decide to make some changes to her life. The plot is very predictable, but Elizabeth’s musings on her past, and the ways it has influenced her present, are sharp, frank and often sad. It’s been said of Brookner that she writes the same book over and over again, with the same protagonists. This might be true, but because she is an expert at what she does, and because I am fascinated by her subject matter, I don’t mind, and will gladly return to reading her again and again.
Another book I finished was (a library copy of) another recently published book, The Coward’s Tale by Vanessa Gebbie. It took me quite a long time to read, and not for any negative reasons. It is a rich book, precisely written, and full of poetic and apt description. Its presentation of characters is warm and completely without judgement. It never once flags or loses its way, and so deserves to be read with care. It is set in a former mining town in Wales, and explores the tragic legacy of an accident that happened in the Kindly Light pit. The stories of the town’s surviving inhabitants, idiosyncratic, semi-mythical and shot through with almost unbearable sadness, are related by Ianto Passchendaele Jenkins, a beggar who sleeps on the steps of the town chapel. His stories are gobbled up by Laddy Merridew, a young boy who has been sent to live in the town with his gran while his parents are having problems.
The novel is (perfectly) structured around these stories, which Ianto will tell to Laddy and any other curious bystanders if they provide him with food (mainly toffees) and drink (coffee with two sugars). At the beginning of each story, I felt I needed to settle down in a comfy place with a big cup of tea and give it my full attention, because I was going to be in for a cracking (but heartbreaking) journey each time. In the interludes between stories, we find out some of what goes on in the present-day town, and learn Ianto Jenkins’s own sad story. Essentially, The Coward’s Tale is, like the feathers that one of characters keeps trying to make out of wood shavings (for his own important reasons), beautifully crafted, fragile and special.
So, two very good reads to start the year. I’m now currently reading and enjoying Hilary Mantel’s memoir Giving up the Ghost (on the Kindle), and Ali Smith’s There but for the (I only got it for Christmas, but couldn’t resist diving in.)


