Ann Leckie’s new novel, following the triumphant success of her multiple award-winning novels Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword and Ancillary Mercy, is Provenance, and it is not at the same level. Her invention and world-building are still top quality, but the plot of Provenance sags, and the characters feel like marionettes, moving without feeling. Yet I read to … Continue reading Ann Leckie’s Provenance
I've been having trouble with Penelope Lively lately. I love most of her adult novels that I've tried, with the glaring, embarrassing, exception of Booker-winning Moon Tiger which I found dull. I now have two theories as to why Moon Tiger is in all the charity shops, but few of her other novels are. The … Continue reading The trouble with Penelope Lively: Oleander, Jacaranda
Note for 20th-century linguistics historians: in his introduction to this issue of Penguin New Writing John Lehmann remarks on the number of neologisms that have occurred in the tiny lifetime of the magazine. ‘The last ten years have been an express formative period in the English language, new words, new expressions have become acclimatized in … Continue reading Penguin New Writing 36: into 1949
The great English-Australian novelist Elizabeth von Arnim is the star of this Really Like This Book podcast series scripts catch-up. Her real name of Mary Annette Beauchamp was forgotten as soon as she married a Prussian count, and became doubly lost when she had her first best-seller with her first novel, Elizabeth’s German Garden, in 1898. This was … Continue reading Violent objections to the outdoor life: Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Caravaners
I’ve read two biographies of Naomi Mitchison in the past week (working up some conference papers). Both lean very heavily on Mitchison's published memoirs, and note that her record of her interwar life, You May Well Ask (1979), is deliberately vague about some important matters. Jill Benton’s Naomi Mitchison. A Biography (1990) is both rather too personal and unsettlingly … Continue reading The two biographies of Naomi Mitchison
The South African novelist Laurens Van der Post is author V in the Really Like This Book podcast series scripts catch-up, and he is an awkward writer. He used to be very famous, but after his death in 1996, and after a detailed biography that revealed him to have been a liar and a fantasist … Continue reading Laurens Van der Post and A Story Like The Wind
Today’s letter in the Really Like This Book podcast series A-Z is I, and I have moved out of fiction, and to the intriguing biography by Molly Izzard, of the Middle Eastern traveller and woman of letters, Freya Stark. Stark made her name in the 1930s as the first western woman to travel in some very remote … Continue reading Unpicking a life of glamour: Molly Izzard’s Freya Stark
