Book Reviews: Two bangers

Last night I finished a book that I not only loved, I have Big Thoughts about, so naturally a review was inevitable :-) I thought I would also take the opportunity to share some impressions of the previous book I finished, which I also really enjoyed. This books could not be more tonally different, but both were very high on engagement and both used the tried but true Late Reveal technique perfectly. I think both are excellent reads - or, rather, listens, as I consumed both as audiobooks (which I think added very positively to the first, but had less impact on the second).

First up, the book I finished first - Ann Patchett's Tom Lake. I had never previously read anything by Patchett, which now strikes me as an odd omission (the good news being there is a long backlist to dive into!) This work, narrated by the wonderful Meryl Streep, was a perfect introduction to the Patchett oeuvre.

Tom Lake is, loosely, the story of Lara Nelson (nee Kennison), told from her secure and happy mid-life, as narrated to her three adult daughters, Emily, Maisie, and Nell, who are home on the family cherry farm riding out Covid lockdowns and waves with their parents. 

Lara was, relatively briefly, an actress in her youth, a career that is also the aspiration of the sensitive, creative youngest daughter, Nell (the eldest, Emily, plans to take over the cherry farm, while the balanced, capable middle, Maisie, is studying to be a veterinarian). It was through her acting career that Lara met Joe, the then-director, later-cherry farmer, who would become her husband and the girls' father. It was also in that time that she met, and for part of a summer, dated, a later-famous and now recently-dead Hollywood star, Peter Duke, while both were performing in a summer repertory theatre production of the classic Thornton Wilder play, Our Town.

The rhythms of this story were beautiful. Gentle, yet propulsive, Lara's narration carries the reader along on what feels like a journey of memory and discovery. Some hard things happen to Lara - Duke's cheating and abandonment definitely being one of them - but there are no "crocodiles in the water", as one of my friends describes the sudden interruption of themes of violence, especially sexual violence (not an uncommon, or indeed unrealistic, component of stories about young actresses). I felt able to trust the story not to sandbag me, and that very much increased my enjoyment of the experience.

One of the elements that I most related to (and thought that Patchett delivered absolutely bang-on) was the portrait of a imperfect but happy family, with adult daughters who are close to both their parents and each other, but also have all the little rubs and grievances of real personalities rubbing against each other. Lara's absolute love for her daughters illuminates the text, and the decisions she makes about what to include and leave out in her retelling are always made with thought for what it's appropriate for them to know and how information will impact their relationships. Joe's commitment to Lara and to their girls is also luminously apparent, as is the ride-or-die bond between the sisters.

The settings (primarily on the cherry orchard, with past components being at Tom Lake, Los Angeles, and NYC) are also beautifully sketched. Patchett has such a strong feel for place - every location Lara describes is vivid, individual, and precious in its own way. At the end of the book I had a faint hankering to go spend a picking season on a cherry orchard in Michigan, which is not a sentence I ever expected to write!

I know there are mixed views about the reveal(s) at the end of the book, but I think Patchett nailed them - they met my core three criteria for good reveals in fiction, which are a) it has to be consistent with the story and the characters as we have come to understand them; b) it has to have had "fair" clues provided before it is revealed; and c) it has to make you feel that something meaningful is now explained about a character or a plot arc. For me, as a reader / listener, the story ended exactly as it should have, and I was completely satisfied.

Rating: 8.5/10

McEwan's new book relies on a structure that will be very familiar to any fellow fans of one of my top ten books of all time, A.S Byatt's Possession. (For that reason alone, I was predisposed to love it :-) The first, and longest, section is an academic / literary treasure hunt involving a (fictitious) famous poet, while the second section is a contemporary account from the period being hunted, which upends everything the academics thought they knew about what happened and what it meant.

Beginning in the contemporary (in this case, 2119, post climate catastrophe and global breakdown, in a new, albeit constrained, era of calm), the first section of the book focuses on Tom Metcalfe, an academic in the remainder British Archipelago whose research field, and abiding interest, is the years 1990 - 2030 (immediately "pre-derangement"). 

Tom's especial fascination, and the quest that drives the whole of the first section, is the search for a lost poem, written by famous (fictitious) poet Francis Blundy and spoken aloud at his wife Vivien's birthday dinner in 2014. Blundy, recognised as one of the greatest poets of his era, wrote a Corona ("crown of sonnets" - a linked series of fifteen sonnets with a complicated line-repeat pattern) addressed to Vivien, and only produced a single copy, which he presented to her after the reading as her gift. The poem was never seen again after that night, despite many attempts to locate it.

In the first part of the book, alongside Tom's own mild personal life (including his romance with, marriage to, and subsequent separation from, his academic colleague and later co-treasure hunter, Rose), the focus is fair and square on the Blundy milieu, and, as Tom says, what we can know about it (hence the book title). Because Tom has access to a wealth of material about the Blundys and their circle (emails, text messages, media, social media), his surmise is that we can know a lot, and where we don't have direct evidence, we "know" our historical subjects well enough from their written records that we can make conjectures to bridge the gap. Quite early in this first section, though, McEwan is starting to seed some doubts about that proposition. Tom voices some of this uneasiness, but there's a lot more of it embedded in the subtext; it's part of McEwan's incredibly skilful use of language that my spidey senses started tingling from about chapter four, and my conviction that something was fundamentally awry with Tom's picture of the past became overwhelming, well before the revelatory second section began.

The first section is also where McEwan paints his picture of both life in the relatively calm, if limited, remnant Britain of 2119, and his description of how humanity got to that point. There are some awkward and clunky exposition dumps about climate change, sea levels, nuclear hostilities, national breakdown, AI gone mad, refugee crises and so on and so on. I understand the perennial dystopian problem of trying to give global backstory without taking the reader out of the text, but I do not think McEwan nailed it in this regard; it's one of the weaker elements of the book. On the other hand, the portrait of 2119 is nicely done, and gives a plausibly human feel for what that kind of future might look like. I especially appreciated that 2119 was by no means a Mad Max style hellhole; there was beauty (some of it very profound) and food (although less varied) and shelter (although less private / spacious) and movement (although much more limited) and wildlife (although reduced in biodiversity) and academic research (although even more heavily STEM-skewed than what we have now) and love and human connection (which looks reassuringly the same).

Tom and Rose's discovery, at the Blundys' one-time rural farmhouse home, of a buried and preserved package is where the first section ends and the narration of the second section, in the words of Vivien Blundy, takes over. Tom and Rose had been seeking, and thought they were finding, Francis Blundy's lost Corona poem; to say anything more about section two would be an unconscionable spoiler, but I will say that the twists and turns are compelling, entirely consistent with the content and forebodings of the first section, and utterly material to the outcomes.

I will be thinking about this book for a long time to come. It spoke to me on every level - as a poet (now determined to try a Corona, because I like torturing myself); as a historian by training (who often struggled with the question of what it was possible to really know about past people and their internal lives); as a lover of speculative fiction; and as devotee of big ideas played out through tightly-focused lenses. All the way through, I had complete trust that McEwan knew where we were going and was going to get us there triumphantly, and he absolutely repaid that trust. One of the best books I have read this year.

Rating: 9/10