Early Autumn Reading #ReadingWomen

Anneliese Mackintosh’s Bright and Dangerous Objects combines two kinds of female-led stories that are currently very popular; the dysfunctional millennial drifting through her life, and the woman struggling with the realities and fantasies of potential motherhood. However, Solvig, the 37-year-old protagonist of this novel, is a bit different from a lot of her literary counterparts; alongside her internal conflicts, she is also occupied with a skilled and dangerous job, commercial deep-sea diving for an oil company in the North Sea. (This addresses one of my most frequent complaints about this kind of novel, so kudos to Mackintosh for that!) She also toys with what is probably one of the most extreme solutions to her present problems contemplated by any of these literary women: joining the first mission to Mars as a colonist. Bright and Dangerous Objects doesn’t have a lot to say about either deep-sea diving or Mars, so I wouldn’t advise picking it up if your interest really lies in either of those areas, rather than with Solvig herself. However, I thought that Mackintosh’s take on this sub-genre was smarter and more engaging than many I’ve read, especially when she starts getting into the idea that going to Mars could potentially be seen as a suicide mission, given the high death rate anticipated among colonists. While the novel never seems to take the Mars mission totally seriously as an option, this does give it some thematic resonance; is there something appealing for Solvig in bowing out of life when she could still just about be perceived as the maiden, rather than the mother or the crone? Bright and Dangerous Objects, as a piece of work, was too sketchy and brief for me, but it suggests that Mackintosh has the potential to write something brilliant.

I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review. It’s out in the UK and US on October 6th.

Cal has retired from the Chicago police force to a tiny town in rural Ireland, where he spends his time doing up an old farmhouse and enjoying long, casual chats with his neighbours. However, when a local teenager, Trey, whose older brother Brendan has recently gone missing, starts hanging around his property, Cal finds himself being pulled into this community far more deeply and dangerously than he intended. French is known for her brilliant Dublin Murder Squad novels, a series of police procedurals, and it seemed to me that, in The Searcher, she wanted to write about sombody conducting an investigation who can’t fall back on the apparatus of the state; no forensics, no technology, no mobile phone records. This allows French to showcase what she has always been best at – mapping out conversations between two people when one has something to hide and the other wants to find it out, which have before taken place in the interrogation room but are now set in bedrooms, shops and fields. However, thematically, Cal’s lack of formal ties also allows French to explore how this forces him to negotiate right and wrong outside the framework of the police force, and to ask questions about the role of the police themselves that are hugely relevant in the wake of the resurgent Black Lives Matter movement. As Elle says in her review, the conversation that Cal and Trey have about the difference between ‘etiquette, manners and morals’ is absolutely crucial to French’s project, as is Cal tussling with the idea that he once had a personal ‘code’ which he has lost along the way.

However, although The Searcher is an intelligent and immersive novel, it fell a little short for me. Of all French’s protagonists, I felt Cal was the one who is least called upon to truly rethink what he believes. My concern is that somebody who has bought into ideas about the silliness of ‘woke’ millennials might think that they are being vindicated here – with Cal’s comments, for example, about how everyone today is too hung up on using the correct language rather than doing the right thing – and while I don’t think that’s what French is saying at all, I wanted her to back Cal into a tighter corner. Because the narrative ended up being too straightforward, this sits in the second tier of French novels for me, alongside The Witch Elm and my least favourite Dublin Murder Squad novel, Faithful Place. I still miss the supernatural spark that lights up all of French’s best books, and I don’t think her most recent stories have been as enthralling. Nevertheless, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: French cannot write a bad novel, and this is still so worth reading.

I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review. It’s out in the US on October 6th and in the UK on November 5th.

As regular readers of this blog will know, I am aiming to read all twenty-four previous winners of the Women’s Prize as part of their #ReadingWomen challenge before the ‘Winner of Winners’ is announced in November. Helen Dunmore’s A Spell of Winter was the first ever winner of the Prize back in 1996, and at first glance it’s a weird choice, although after I’d thought about it for a little while, I could see that it’s concerned with themes such as patriarchy and motherhood that would have seemed relevant for the inaugural winner of a prize for women writers. Catherine and her brother Rob have grown up isolated from the world in their grandfather’s slowly decaying manor house sometime shortly before the First World War. Catherine’s narration reveals how closely she feels entwined with this building and the land that surrounds it. ‘I knew as much about the house as Rob did. More. I watched it, and he never did. I knew where its walls trapped sunlight and fed it back to you when you leaned against them after dust. I knew where the pears ripened first against the kitchen-garden wall’. Ultimately, her home is overtaken by the natural world: ‘It doesn’t want to be a house any more. It swarms with life… When I went into my grandfather’s room his window was black with leaves.’ I’ve never been especially impressed with Dunmore’s writing before, but here it’s stunning; this book delivers atmosphere in spades, reminiscient of any number of classic novels about lonely girls and old houses, although Catherine’s off-kilter narration reminded me most strongly of Merricat in Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived In The Castle. Unlike that novel, however, A Spell of Winter feels uneasily poised between fantasy and realism, and although the secondary characters are often vivid, I wasn’t as swept away by Catherine’s voice as I felt I needed to be. While reading, I kept on feeling that I was about to be swallowed up by this book, but I never quite got there. Nevertheless, this is a distinctive novel, and I’m not surprised it appealed to the original panel of judges.