The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud

After I’d read just a few pages of The Emperor’s Children, Claire Messud’s 2006 novel, I remember thinking “Surely this is what James Wood really means when he talks about hysterical fiction.” I liked it very much, but it was like double chocolate chocolate mousse cake: delightful in small doses, but overpowering taken all at once (and yet, like a rich dessert, there was no other way to consume it). All that wit, all those brilliant one-liners and distressingly accurate observations. The flamboyant descriptions of people and places and the terrible truths about being young/educated/human. The hysterically funny (ok, maybe mildly amusing) part is that I didn’t actually know at the time that James Wood and Claire Messud were a couple.

Messud’s new novel is more measured, more circumspect in its prose (if not in the sentiments expressed by it) than The Emperor’s Children, and, despite my admiration of the earlier novel, this is largely a good thing. There’s not much like that sensation of opening a new book, reading a page or two, and letting out that subconsciously held breath as you think “Here, this—I’ve found something right.” Perhaps, like climbing into a bed made with clean sheets, crisp from the line and smelling of wind and sun instead of fabric softener, good writing like this feels somehow like home, like authenticity. The Woman Upstairs is a great achievement.

The plot has been summarised everywhere. Nora is thirty-seven when the novel opens, an elementary school teacher instead of the artist she always thought she would—should—be. Her life has not gone how she planned, for a variety of reasons: circumstantial (she had to take care of her ill mother) and structural (she has not quite realised—and can we blame her?—that the promise of specialness is no guarantee that society will rally round and make damn sure she fulfils her early potential). When Reza, a beautiful young pupil whose father is spending a year on a visiting fellowship at Harvard, arrives in her classroom, Nora falls in love. When Reza is bullied, this gives her the chance to meet—and crowbar her way into the lives of—his parents. Nora frequently analyses the social boundaries she (or Reza’s parents, Sirena and Skandar) are breaking; of course, Sirena knows that she will be returning to Paris at the end of the year, so for her the rules are already different.

Nora becomes part of their lives, babysitting Reza, renting a studio and working with Sirena, and finding herself mentally and romantically stimulated by Skandar. So if Reza represents potential, Sirena—a real artist who is actually preparing for a show—represents Nora’s foreclosed creative ambition, and Skandar stands for the life of the mind that has slowly shut itself down as well as representing her ideal man. She is in love with the whole family, as she admits, but more than that she wants to actually be them, to have their exciting, artistic, international lives instead of her own small, disappointing one. She is in love with how their very presence, their mere existence seems to have opened up paths through her life that she thought were closed off forever, and she is exhilarated.

In some ways The Woman Upstairs covers a lot of the same ground as The Interestings, except perhaps with Nora displaying less realisation than Jules in that novel that she might not have really had what it takes in the first place. This seems to be obvious when we compare Nora’s art project to Sirena’s: Nora’s is a reconstruction of famous writers’ bedrooms in miniature. It’s small and derivative. Sirena’s, on the other hand, is big, aggressive, bold—much more acceptably confident and masculine.

The honeymoon doesn’t last, of course. Nora has been so caught up in her own thoughts, even though it looks to the reader as though she is utterly obsessed by the Shahids, that she has barely even registered that Sirena and her family will be leaving. Will Nora be able to sustain this image of herself once her life has returned to normal?

A lot of reviews have wondered whether Nora is a victim of circumstances, or whether she has created her own fate. The answer seems to divide along gender lines. But isn’t in only for fictional characters that we invent this kind of dichotomy to “explain” a person’s life? At no point did Nora strike me as a victim or someone to be pitied, nor do I believe she is exactly creating her own fate. Instead she is simply living her life without intention (despite believing the opposite) and struggling with the direction this takes her in. Surely there are many people living in this “would-be” limbo, the situation made suddenly urgent by mid-life crisis. Good intentions pave the road to hellish disappointment and all that. The Woman Upstairs shows human nature in its full messiness and inconsistency, people failing to live each day as they want to live their lives, sustaining themselves through the hard parts with the poor-me tales and dreaming of finally appearing to the world as the person they know themselves to be, even as this dream knocks up against reality and becomes increasingly unlikely. What could be more like life?

Review copy.

(c) All rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated, all blog content, except comments by others, copyright JC Sutcliffe.

Good Kids by Benjamin Nugent

Josh Paquette is fifteen when we meet him and Khadijah, who are flung together when they discover Josh’s father and Khadijah’s mother having an affair. The teenagers’ relationship is emotional but tentative, and is ripped apart, pre-internet, when Khadijah’s mother separates from her husband and moves away. Before the move, the two sign a contract that they will never cheat on their partners. Thirteen years later, Josh has spent time (and money) in a band, trying to make it as a musician. Cash starts to come in when one of the band’s songs is used on a Pepsi advert, but by then most of them are done with the tiring insecurity of the work and have drifted away. Josh meets Julie, who presents an animal programme on TV, and despite her conservative background they get together. The discussions between them are handled well, and it’s an interesting commentary too on how, between people of a similar (entitled, educated) class, political differences are not as divisive as we’d like to think. If everyone is happy to take whatever they can get, does it matter whether their views are progressive (“everyone should be able to have this, whether or not they are born into privilege”) or politically selfish (“not everyone can have this, but they have a chance if they work as hard as I do”)? Josh and Julie seem like a solid couple, despite Josh’s occasional hankerings for Khadijah, until Khadijah comes back into Josh’s life.

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There’s a nice scene in Good Kids where the families of Josh (from a small, liberal, west coast college town, inevitably Democratic) and Julie (both parents immigrants, now wealthy, reactively Republican) meet at a restaurant. It’s hard to imagine this kind of thing happening in public in quite the way it does in the novel, with each side a little more willing to be both vulnerable (actually discussing dangerous topics) and polite (not instinctively trying to come out on top) than seems entirely realistic, at least in my experience, but sometimes that’s part of the fun of fiction—enjoying the wit and sparkle of a debate that could never happen. At the restaurant, Josh’s sister Rachel talks about her work with homeless people in Massachusetts. The two families meet up later at a party to celebrate the third season of Julie’s show. After the party Julie goes back to the hotel with Josh, Rachel and their mother. Nugent sets up this comic set piece with the sister and the girlfriend getting along famously, finding things they can agree on, really trying and succeeding, until Josh’s mother turns on the television to check the weather and catches an interview Julie gave at the party, during which she mocks Rachel’s work by saying if the show is cancelled she’s going to move to Massachusetts to become homeless, since she’d just heard there’s a scheme there that has shut down homeless shelters and instead instigated a scheme to pay the rent of anyone who can’t afford it.

Julie, of course, was simply using the material to hand as comedy material (while knowing she was trading on goodwill), but it totally wrecks the cosy moment. The whole day of the families getting together is probably the high point of Nugent’s novel. He makes you think he’s about to demonstrate an enviable knack of skewering people, whether Republicans like his future in-laws or organic yuppies, but pulls his punches at the last minute to do something altogether more unpredictable and interesting, which is find the good in people in a non-saccharine way. When the two mothers meet, for example, he has been predicting, explicitly and implicitly, while directing us also to expect, hostility and antagonism. But instead we get this unexpected gentle perceptiveness:

It was time to face the Oenervians like a man. I swallowed and called Julie’s name. My mother’s face took on the same amusement and triumph it’d taken on when Khadijah had called in 1994. When I introduced her to Vanda and Samson, she and Vanda exchanged smiles that were mildly incredulous, as if they were saying “We actually birthed these people.” I could feel myself floating to earth; there were stores of humility and selflessness in our mothers’ faces, a variety of feeling I had forgotten about.

Good Kids seems to have been barely reviewed. I’m not sure why this should be the case. Sure, it covers fairly familiar territory, but plenty of less skilful novels working the same ground have made a bigger splash. It’s a long time since I’ve read Nick Hornby, but Good Kids could be a more nuanced version of Hornby’s books, with less reliance on name dropping, shared references and stereotypes. One of the blurbs on the back describes it as “catchy, like a hit song,” which seems just about right.

Review copy.

(c) All rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated, all blog content, except comments by others, copyright JC Sutcliffe.

Four books, four countries

I’ve been so busy recently that it’s no longer the to-be-read pile staring balefully at me from the shelves, but also the to-be-reviewed pile. Shoving the read books in a cupboard solved the problem only temporarily, so I promised myself I’d post an omnibus edition of mini-reviews before I started the next big novel.

Viviane Elisabeth Fauville, by Julia Deck, was published last year in France and is currently being translated for an American publisher. It’s the kind of book that will do well in English-speaking markets—it’s a dark novel that combines the terrifying insanity of new motherhood with an intriguing crime mystery; the sort of intellectual European export, like The Killing or The Dinner, that we seem to eat up. The novel opens with the protagonist, Viviane, waking up the day after a visit to her psychiatrist—a man whose dead body is discovered in his office shortly afterwards. Viviane Elisabeth Fauville is an interesting exploration of mental health and human relationships, as the stories Viviane tells herself and the police are proved false over and over again. Viviane convinces the police of her alibi to begin with, but she can’t keep away from the crime scene or the other suspects, and her lies start to catch up with her. An intriguing novel.

Simon Okotie’s Whatever Happened to Harold Absalon? is like no book I have ever read before. We all know people who talk in exhaustive detail about the minutiae of their lives; we have ways of distracting them or cutting them off. But there’s no distracting the private detective and former colleague of the titular Harold Absalon. Everything is analysed at extreme length. This takes some getting used to, but then starts to become poetic. It’s like Proust going through a teenage existential crisis, stating the obvious, but then interrogating the literal meaning of every single word and phrase until it loses all meaning. The narrator is supposed to be tracking down Harold Absalon, his former colleague and transport advisor to the mayor, but appears rather to be trailing Harold’s wife, the beautiful Isobel. Harold never does turn up, but through the seemingly random footnotes we start to work out why this might be the case. Several weeks after finishing the book, I can actually no longer recall the precise details of how it all works out, but the tortuous (and sometimes torturous) meanderings of the narrator’s brain are fixed in my mind. It’s experimental in the sense of literally trying to apply a theory to practice: how far can you go—how far do you have to go—before you can be truly sure that the words you say are genuinely communicating the message you want them to?

The lead title from House of Anansi this season is Saleema Nawaz’s Bone & Bread. This novel takes Beena and Sadhana, sisters from a short story in Nawaz’s collection Mother Superior, and makes them the subject of her debut novel. The novel is far from happy and upbeat all the time—the sisters lose first their father, then their beloved mother, and Sadhana suffers from anorexia from her teens until her premature death—but something about it feels fresh and spring-like. The writing is alive, lyrical without being cluttered. For a first novel it’s very well done: it’s well structured and fully rounded out, and it neither skips over the tricky bits or skimps on essentials such as character or plot.

A recent One Story offering was an extract from Amity Gaige’s new novel, Schroder. The extract was pretty much perfect in terms of pacing, structure and depth, and it stood on its own as a short story. In the novel, which charts the marriage and separation of Eric Kennedy (the protagonist) and Laura, his ex-wife and the mother of his daughter, Meadow, Eric is driven close to despair by the thought of losing his child. The two of them disappear for several days, but are ultimately forced to return, and Eric has to face the very serious consequences of abducting his own daughter. While they are on the road Gaige ruminates on the meaning of loss, the grief of the non-cohabiting parent after a separation, and how to have a relationship. Gaige also introduces a secondary plot–the fact that Eric has been concealing his identity for many years. He thought his past was over, but it’s about to catch up with him. Unfortunately for me, the One Story extract was so good (and so successfully encapsulated a much larger story) that the novel itself was a little disappointing, feeling sometimes like a longer version—diluted, even though it contained a great deal of new information—of things I already knew. It’s quite an achievement to make a novel extract work well as a shorter piece (as some of the less successful extracts in the Granta Best of Young British Novelists make clear), but it’s made it surprisingly difficult to comment on how well Schroder works as a novel.

Ghana Must Go by Taiye Selasi

The Granta Best of Young British Novelists list was announced in April. There was a lot of hype around it, as well as some predictable ennui from certain quarters, with comments like “Their record of spotting good writers is poor. Why is everyone so excited about this?” I had to check after that. Of the three previous lists, 1983, 1993, 2003, I counted twelve (out of sixty) authors that I hadn’t heard of, with even some of those unknowns seeming vaguely familiar even if I couldn’t name a book by them. Is eighty per cent really a poor record?

Anyway, I’d previously read several of the authors on the Granta list, but not Taiye Selasi. Her novel, Ghana Must Go, has been quite heavily promoted, with “heavily” being a relative term that can stretch from Fifty Shades-esque marketing to simply not being ignored at the more literary end of things. Nonetheless, it was being mentioned in all the usual places, although despite this I could have told you nothing about the story. As it turns out, that’s because plot is not a key component of Ghana Must Go. The novel opens with the death of Kweku, absent husband, absent father, former surgeon, and ends right after his funeral (which we do not actually see take place, a subject I will come back to later).

Between these two bookends we see various the viewpoints of the four children, Olu, Taiwo, Kehinde and Sadie, and from that of the ex-wife, Fola, in particular the different reaction when each family member learns of Kweku’s death and their journey to Ghana for the funeral. Along with this, we also get hefty chunks of backstory: Kweku’s own life, from poor village boy to respected US surgeon to disappointed Ghanaian man, Fola’s trajectory, and in particular her sacrifices to Kweku’s success (finding herself pregnant with Olu in her early twenties, she abandons her place at law school, deciding that one success—Kweku’s predicted one—is all one family can hope for). The children, too, have much to report. Locked in their own worlds, their roles dictated by their place in the family—a place that is perceived differently by each person, but nonetheless forces a certain artificial conformity to what is expected—each child has significant traumas to process. Some secrets that have been buried for years come out; others remain hidden.

The events themselves, along with the characters, are interesting and presented well, but there’s something lacking. Selasi is a gifted short story writer (and her contribution to the new Granta bears this out), but for much of the time Ghana Must Go feels disjointed. The sentences are great; the overall vision and construction less satisfying. Too much—and too much that is important—is alluded to obliquely or glancingly. Some people will call this intentional style, especially in conjunction with the poetic language; to me, in this book, it feels like skipping over the tricky parts. The absence of the funeral itself—we see Fola stop, unexpectedly, to invite Kweku’s second wife, Ama, to the ceremony, at which they already have an urn full of ashes—is symptomatic of the problem: that Selasi is, like many literary authors, great at the back story, at the “what makes this character who they are today” but less confident at pulling the strings and getting characters to act on the page. (This is not so in the Granta story, in which she balances the two perfectly.) Selasi handles characters beautifully when looking back at the past, spreading them open like fans and noticing not only the tiny differences on each elaborate panel, but also how different each panel appears with changes in the light, but all this stops at the present. What this means is that there are many wonderful scenes that examine all manner of difficult subjects, but they never quite add up to more than scenes. If the book was told from the point of view of just one character, this approach would probably have worked better, but the revelations we are waiting for are not essential enough to the story.

In the end this isn’t a huge problem in this novel because other aspects are strong enough to carry it. I enjoyed Ghana Must Go (the phrase refers both to the forced Ghanaian exodus from Nigeria in 1983 and to those enormous cuboid plasticky tartan bags you see in for sale in big cities, in those shops near markets and train stations that sell everything from phone cards to suitcases), and was content to pick it up each time I did so, but once I’d finished it didn’t stay with me for long.

Review copy.

(c) All rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated, all blog content, except comments by others, copyright JC Sutcliffe.

The Three Rs in Translation: Lisa Carter

Lisa Carter, translator from Spanish to English, editor, writer, blogger and bookworm is this week’s interviewee.

How did you learn your source language?

I learned Spanish entirely through immersion. In 1992, right after university, I got a job in the Canadian  pavilion at Expo ’92 in Seville, Spain. Though the lingua franca of the fair was English, I did get enough exposure to fall in love with the Spanish language.

I’d studied French and German and Russian in high school, and as an undergrad, but Spanish was the language that truly became part of me.

Once my contract in Spain was over, I moved to Peru. I initially took a one-year contract but wound up staying in that magnificent country for seven years, followed by a year in Mexico. I returned to Canada and my mother tongue (English) in 2001, but Spanish is still part of my everyday life through my translation work.

How did you come to translation in general, and literary translation in particular?

While working at a language institute my first two years in Peru, I mentored under two women who often did work for the American embassy. These were mostly transcripts, letters of reference and other documents for students applying to study abroad.

I enjoyed this work and slowly added other types of translation. Occasional side projects became a part-time job and eventually I began to work in translation full-time.

Literary was always the goal, even if only in the back of my mind. I dreamed about how great it would be to bring novels I loved to a new audience, but I had no idea how to begin.

Soon after returning to Canada, I decided to reach out to an author whose work I admired: Edmundo Paz Soldán. He liked the sample translation I sent and we agreed to collaborate to find an English publisher for his novels. I provided a sample chapter and his agent successfuly found a publisher. Within a few years we published both The Matter of Desire and Turing’s Delirium with Houghton Mifflin (now Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

What does your day look like while you’re translating a novel?

There’s rarely a typical day when I translate a novel. It all depends what stage of the translation I’m at and what other work I have at the time. I can’t exactly send my stable clients away for the four, five, six, seven or eight months it takes to translate a book, so I usually have to juggle a few jobs at once.

But my favorite sort of day when working on a novel looks something like this. First thing in the morning, I read over what I translated the previous day. I smooth and refine the English. Then, over coffee and breakfast (ideally curled up in my favorite chair, in the living room, in the sun), I’ll read the next chapter in Spanish, over and over again. I read with a pencil in hand, jotting notes, underlining tricky words, particular elements of style I want to keep in mind. I keep reading the same chapter until I can hear the English in my head.

At that point, I race to the computer and dash off a draft, fingers flying over the keyboard. I don’t stop to look anything up at all, but simply try to get an intuitive draft on the page. Once I have that, I’ll spend the next few hours researching and revising.

Usually after a chapter my brain simply can’t process anymore, so I’ll take a break or do some other work for a while. Then it’s rinse and repeat the next day!

What are your favourite contemporary books in the source language?

Unsurprisingly, I have a soft spot for Peruvian authors. Santiago Roncagliolo is brilliant. His portrayal of the light and dark in Peruvian society is truly insightful. Red April was translated by the queen of Spanish to English literary translation, Edith Grossman.

Alfredo Bryce Echenique isn’t entirely contemporary (he started publishing in the 1970s), but quite prolific, continuing to release a new book every few years. My absolute favorite title is La amigdalitis de Tarzán, translated into English by Alfred MacAdam as Tarzan´s Tonsillitis. It’s the story of a long-distance love, a friendship via correspondence that lasts for thirty years as both parties live in exile in different countries.

What have you read recently in English that you loved?

Two books I read last summer have stuck with me ever since: The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx and Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann. The writing in both of these is rich and masterful.

I’ve just begun reading Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being. I’m fascinated by both the voice she creates for her teenage Japanese protagonist Nao and the way she introduces Japanese culture through dialogue.

What novel have you translated most recently?

My most recent translation is The House of Impossible Loves, a novel by Cristina López Barrio, due out in June 2013. It’s a family saga of love and revenge, woven through with magical realism, snippets of Spanish culture and history. It’s both complex and yet a smooth, quick read.

What were its particular interests and challenges?

One of the most difficult things in this novel was to maintain the author’s subtle use of magical realism. In this novel, plants are alive, they sprout year round as symbols of hope and fertility. The sea is personified; it is both a man and a father. But all of this is understated, threaded into the fabric of setting and story. My word choice has to be quite deliberate to ensure this aspect was noticeable but not overly salient.

The characters, on the other hand, are exceedingly vivid. Each one has some odd quirk, is in some way larger than life. In the English, I had to make sure these unique characters didn’t sound like caricatures.

Which is your favourite novel of the ones you’ve translated, and why?

I feel almost guilty being asked to choose, like a mother forced to single out one of her children! Each book I’ve done is truly unique and I love them all dearly.

That said, one of the most challenging yet rewarding books I’ve translated is Turing’s Delirium by Edmundo Paz Soldán. It’s a complex, many-layered literary novel with more than one simultaneous plot.

In terms of writing style, there were several distinct voices to master, with chapters being told from an individual character’s point of view. One narrator speaks in second person (you); another is not entirely in his right mind; a third speaks in what was known as l33t speak – like text or chat speak today, but back then was only used by hackers.

Every word, every line, every paragraph and every chapter of this novel required extreme attention to detail. I worked closely with Edmundo to catch all of the many nuances of plot and style.

Do you write (fiction or non-fiction)?

Yes, I write creative non-fiction. I fall most naturally into lyric essays, which are a mixture of poetry, essay and memoir. My main project right now is a memoir of my time in Peru. It’s in the early stages yet, however; I’m still experimenting between lyric and more traditional prose.

What’s your third R, and why?

For me, life is all about Reading, Writing and yet more Reading. I am constantly gobbling up the written word: works I need to translate, works I want to translate, works to make me a better translator and a better writer, works I critique in all women’s international online writing group I belong to, works that simply interest or inspire me. I read all day long for work, into the evenings and on weekends for pleasure. I may be the very definition of a bookworm!

The Three Rs in translation: Nick Caistor

How did you learn your source language?

I translate from French, Spanish and Portuguese, and learnt each of them in very different ways. I studied French through school (the only foreign language taught) and then through university and as a post-graduate: so I had a lot of formal teaching. I learnt Spanish by going to live in Argentina, and so learnt it ‘on the hoof’ ( or ‘sobre el pucho’ as they say in Argentina). I started translating from Portuguese when I suddenly found I had to translate a soap opera from Brazil for television in Britain.

How did you come to translation in general, and literary translation in particular?

After living in Argentina during the dictatorship, when I returned to Britain I was involved in human rights work on Argentina, Chile, El Salvador and other Latin American countries. This involved a lot of translation work, and that led on to translating Latin American writers forced to live in exile.

What does your day look like while you’re translating a novel?

I try to leave at least half a day completely free so that I can concentrate on my translation, and set aside another hour to read what I have done the day before.

What are your favourite contemporary books in the source language?

Anything by Javier Marias (translated by Margaret Jull Costa);

An Englishman in Madrid by Eduardo Mendoza (which I translated)

What have you read recently in English that you loved?

The Emperor’s Tomb by Joseph Roth, translated by Michael Hofmann.

What novel have you translated most recently?

If I Close my Eyes Now, by the Brazilian author Edney Sylvestre.

What were its particular interests and challenges?

The main challenge was the way the book talked about race and its problems in Brazil in the 1960s in a quite oblique but convincing way.

Which is your favourite novel of the ones you’ve translated, and why?

Invidious to say.

Do you write (fiction or non-fiction)?

I write non-fiction based on the journalism I have done on Latin America. My latest book is CASTRO–A CRITICAL LIFE, with Reaktion Books, London.

What’s your third R, and why?

Gardening.

The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner

The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner

There’s a great feeling that comes when you start to read a book that is ostensibly historical fiction, yet doesn’t feel like it; the kind of book that adds wonderful period detail to inner lives that both convince us that they are of their time while also resonating with current sensibilities; the kind of book that research imbues with lightness and confidence rather than drag and bombast. Rachel Kushner’s second novel, The Flamethrowers, is precisely this kind of book.

The Flamethrowers is predominantly about a young artist and motorcycle enthusiast, recently moved to New York in the seventies and wondering how to meet people and make her mark (“I’d thought this was how artists moved to New York, alone, that the city was a mecca of individual points, longings, all merging into one great light-pulsing mesh, and you simply found your pulse, your place”). The narrator—known as Reno, after her hometown—becomes the girlfriend of Sandro Valera, wealthy son of the owner of a large motorcycle company. Reno, supposedly an artist making films about movement and speed, but in fact more interested in the speed itself and the machines that produce it, has the chance to drive a Valera bike on the Utah salt flats, breaking the women’s land speed record. Soon she is invited to Italy by Valera, but Sandro, who does not care for his late father’s business, still less for his girlfriend’s involvement in it, tries to prevent her from travelling. The two end up going to Italy, staying with Sandro’s insufferably prejudiced mother. It’s a period of intense labour disputes and struggles, and Reno becomes unintentionally involved in dangerous politics after a sudden rearrangement of her situation.

This is an incredibly thin summary for a fascinating novel. In addition and at the same time, the plot encompasses so many different things: New York, Italy, the seventies, motorcycles as both a working-class hobby and an expensive sport, art, the pretentiousness of the art world, business, love and betrayal, labour and class warfare, Futurism, machinery … the list goes on. Even better is Kushner’s ability to really know—or make you believe she knows—exactly what it’s like to be in a war, or a violent protest, or to be a man, or to be in jail, or to live during a decade she can’t personally remember (or so her photo suggests). The Flamethrowers is about all these things, but is also, quite simply, about people and about now. It is a dazzling achievement.

Review copy.

(c) All rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated, all blog content, except comments by others, copyright JC Sutcliffe.