Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead.

 

- This magnificent novel won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, along wth Hernan Diaz's Trust (which I reviewed here). Two magnificent achievements. 

- Kingsolver was inspired by Charles Dickens’s classic David Copperfield when she holidayed in the UK in 2018 and stayed in a Victorian guesthouse that had once been Dickens's seaside residence. She became inspired by ‘…his impassioned critique of institutional poverty and its damaging effects on children in his society. Those problems are still with us.’

- Her setting is the US states of Kentucky and Virginia. Demon, the young narrator, is a mixed-race Melungeon, with dark skin, light-green eyes, and red hair. His father died the summer before he was born, and his mother is now a junky living in a dilapidated trailer - 'trailer trash' by definition. Demon tells his story - from the day he was born - in sharp, punchy, robust prose which is a pleasure to read. 

- Foster parents and cruel abusive men are front and centre. And the experience is ugly in the extreme. Kids are treated as slaves and Kingsolver does not spare us any details. She is relentless. 

- Demon is sent from one foster home to another, some good most bad, but one saving grace is the other kids he meets and the lasting friendships they make. These become the core of the novel. 

- In Middle School he gets very good at football but suffers a bad knee injury which ends a promising future. His treatments include strong pain-killing drugs, and their common availability results in opioid addiction. Many of his friends become victims. He refers at one point to Charles Dickens and the ‘kids and orphans getting screwed over and nobody giving a rat’s ass’. 

- His art teacher at school knows he has real creative talent, and tries hard to get him to resume lessons and develop his craft. A local librarian helps him set up a website and brand for his popular comics. There are adults in this unsavoury journey that do care. And they end up making a real difference. Some kids grow up to be mature adults, but so many others fall away, and die. 'A whole generation of kids were coming up without families'. 

- Kingsolver has written a long book - 550 pages - and one that buries you in an ugliness that is often overwhelming. But there are saviours and survivors, and they lift you up. And you will be immersed in the beauty of her writing. 

For the kids who wake up hungry in those dark places every day, who've lost their families to poverty and pain pills, whose caseworkers keep losing their files, who feel invisible, or wish they were: this book is for you. (Acknowledgments) 

Han Kang, Greek Lessons

 

- This new novel from the Man Booker International Prize winner Han Kang is very unlike her winning novel The Vegetarian, which was a superb and savage critique of South Korea’s abusive political, social and cultural conservatism. Greek Lessons is more a drama of personal fragilities and social isolation. 

- An unnamed Korean woman in her mid thirties, living in Seoul, suddenly loses her ability to speak. She suffered this condition as a child but recovered. She is referred to throughout as 'the woman'. She has an eight year old son who was brutally taken away from her by the family court to be raised by her former unsympathetic husband. 

- The other main character is an unnamed language teacher. He went to Germany with his parents when he was fifteen and spent seventeen years there. Now in his thirties he has returned to Seoul and taken up an academic position as a teacher of ancient Greek. In the first person tense he reflects about when he fell in love with a young deaf woman in Germany. She was the daughter of his ophthalmologist and totally rejected his advances. His eyesight was seriously deteriorating. 

- The 'woman' has been seeing a therapist for her speech issue but after five months there has been no change. What she found most intolerable was his claim that he understood her. She decides not to see him again and just live with her condition. She does enrol however in an ancient Greek course at a local academy. 

- The man's letters to his younger sister Ran, who is still in Germany, are very engaging. He details how he is coping with his increasing blindness. But we also learn of their distance from their abusive father who was 'a heartless man'. His brilliant friend Joachim died at the age of thirty six. He had long suffered from serious ailments, but he was a deep philosophical thinker with profound and beautiful thoughts and ideas that challenged the man on all levels. Sensual frailties never got in the way of the important sources of vitality and meaning. 

- The final part of the novel explores the developing relationship between the woman and her lecturer, and the ways each deal with their fragility. They’re both very aware of nature, the seasons, and the bustling streets, lights, and traffic of the city. And, alone, they walk around a lot. They seem to be celebrating the senses they still have and the joy they give them. The man doesn't recognise colour, only different shades of black. 

- Entering the academy one evening he trips and falls, cutting himself and breaking his glasses. She sees the incident and rushes to his aid. She takes him home, a small apartment, where over the course of the night he opens up to her about his anxious uptight mother and his brusque father. As Asians they experienced constant racism in Germany. 

- Hang has given us a novel that explores so many levels of personal travail and sorrow. Alongside profound reflections on Plato, Socrates and Greek philosophy in general, we're immersed in very different shades of darkness, whether deep family wounds or failed aspirations and dreams. In contrast to beauty.

- The novel ends with a loving embrace between the man and the woman. It is very tender and emotional. Beauty is deep within us and around us and will never be extinguished. 

- The novel is so well written and flawlessly translated it is a real joy to read. Sheer poetry. 

Shaun Prescott, Bon and Lesley.

 

- There's absolutely no doubt that Shaun Prescott is a brilliant, inventive writer. His first novel The Town blew me away. Absurdist in style and focus it conveyed the meaninglessness and emptiness of provincial lives in typical small towns in Australia. It's a common theme in Australian literature. The darkness underneath, the dead heart, and the desperate escape to the edge, the coastal cities, for community and salvation. 

- Prescott's new novel Bon and Lesley continues this focus, but with deeper meaning and richness. 

- Bon gets off the train at the desolate town of Newnes, adjacent to a forest in mid-Western NSW. He wanders around and meets Steven Grady and his younger brother Jack who are holed up in an abandoned weatherboard on the town's edge. The garrulous Steven tells stories, and Jack is very strange and quiet, absorbed in the surreal world of the dark internet. ‘He only ate chips, he only drank Coke or beer. He was rake thin and sallow’. 'He thinks he knows everything', according to Steven.

 - Another stranger, Lesley, enters their lives. She is also lost and searching. The conversations are stilted but another layer of poetic and ethereal strangeness is added. As Steven says 'You know how we’ve quietly passed into a new real? I’m not an idiot, Bon. I know there’s something sinister about the mood around town’. 

- The walk every day into the town to buy stuff, mainly beer, chips and junk food. And rum, which they get drunk on every night. They live abysmally meaningless, nihilistic lives. No religious beliefs, no political allegiances, no societal critiques, no current affairs awareness, no news watched or read, no serious relationships, no careers. They are excruciatingly boring. But Lesley does have dreams and aspirations. She yearns to discover a portal to the small town of her dreams, Sofala, 'because once we're there, none of us will have any problems'. And she will have two children, a boy and a girl, and lead a satisfying and happy life. 

- There are many things dotted throughout the novel that add to its rich existential texture, and we're treated constantly to Prescott's insights and thrilling prose: ‘most truths were best left tangled in ambiguities’. 

- I hope I'm not giving away a spoiler here but towards the end of the novel, in 'Part 3', Lesley and her mother and Lesley’s two young sons called, ironically, Stephen and Jack, are living in a regular industrial suburb of a larger thriving town. She loves her children and is very protective of them. Pubs and drunks are a common feature of the town of course but the more mature Lesley is warm and wise and happy and a delightful conversationalist. ‘…so we allowed the tide to carry us wherever it saw fit’. 

- And in the last few pages Bon finally leaves Newnes and walks back to the large town, his home. He peers in through a window. ‘His children were inside and so was she’, his wife. A hint that Bon and Lesley married and had two kids. And perhaps the quick sexual episode when they shared a bed in Newnes was the most productive thing they ever did. 

- Prescott has written a difficult book that demands you stay with it. You will not be disappointed. His writing is on another level altogether.