ANT007 - Children will rule the world
Happy new year! To bring in 2024 on a positive note, this issue is about children, the people who will make the world a better place.
The New Year has just drawn in, London buzzing with banging fireworks and beeping horns. I stand alone for a moment on the balcony, looking North over Tottenham and Enfield. The horizon crackles left to right with rockets from thousands of gardens. From this vantage point it looks like a singular, orchestrated whole and I am taken by a new appreciation for this society. All of these individual displays, all the people who have taken the time to set them up, come together to make something much bigger, to make colours as far as the eye can see. People shout from the streets and others join in from balconies. Even the local teenagers, usually a nuisance, are cheered as they fire roman candles over the canal’s oily water.
In moments like this, humanity seems wonderful after all.
I have always loved New Year. It is a time for dreaming, for imagining better futures. But it is also a bittersweet time, for reflecting backwards and considering the short time we have. An overwhelming time, one that forces us to consider this rock we spin around the sun on, just how small it all is in the grand scheme of things.
Standing on the balcony, I realise my thoughts in this moment are more positive than any other year. That is down to the baby sleeping soundly through two walls - my daughter. I once worried about the world we were bringing a child into, I still do in ways, but her sudden existence makes me feel better about the future. It is my hope that little girls like her will take over the world and I believe it will be a much better place for it.
I featured Sandro Verenesi’s The Hummingbird in the very first issue. In it, the main character’s daughter names her own child Miraijin, a Japanese word meaning ‘man of the future’. When the child is born, a girl, she remarks, “See Dad? We’re off to a very good start. The Man of the Future is a woman.” That comes to mind now.
I step back inside and head straight for her, opening the door quietly but not caring if she wakes, secretly hoping she will. I kiss her on the cheek and she opens her eyes, smiling at me sleepily before turning back over and letting me soothe her back to slumber.
This issue is for the children, the tiny humans who will grow up to make the world a better place. Books about them and through their eyes, the best way to look at the world.
“Old men can make war, but it is children who will make history.”
Ray Merritt
It’s impossible to write about novels through the eyes of children without mentioning Harper Lee’s classic debut To Kill a Mockingbird. A thought provoking novel that explores racist attitude in the deep south, the injustice of its plot is like a punch to the gut. Even more so for its sense of reality, with many noting the similarities to Lee’s life and Lee commenting herself that it is an example of how an author "should write about what he knows and write truthfully." Much of its brilliance is down to the child narrator, Scout, a six year old who’s innocence exposes the hypocrisies and evils of adults.
Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of (another)... There are just some kind of men who - who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.
Harper Lee - To Kill a Mockingbird
A lesser known debut from a more recent time, Kit De Waal’s My Name is Leon is an endearing novel full of heart. Nine year old Leon attempts to look after his baby brother alone after his mother has a nervous breakdown, losing him when they are both placed into foster care. An observant, witty voice, it’s hard not to bond with Leon and he and his situation are both made intensely real by De Waal’s work around and direct experience with foster care. It is hard and gritty, but ultimately a tale of human decency as he becomes immersed in a local allotment community.
She smiles at Leon and he knows that she's kind and that she'll look after the baby when he isn't there. The baby has the smallest fingers Leon has ever seen. He looks like a doll with its eyes closed. He has silky white hair on the very top of his head and a tiny pair of lips that keep opening and closing. Through the holey blanket, Leon can feel baby warmth on his belly and his legs and then the baby begins to wriggle.
"I hope you're having a nice dream, baby," Leon whispers.Kit de Waal - My Name is Leon
Translated from French, Adeline Dieudonné’s Real Life is a cutting novel of violence and darkness amidst dull pop-up suburbia. The narrator, an un-named ten year old, is just about surviving a horrid childhood with an abusive father who despises her and a mother who has become speechless with fear. Surrounded by the big-game carcasses of her fathers hunting, family life bounces between tense and explosive as she grapples with the emotions of witnessing a bloody accident and attempts to save her brother from the demons she believes are taking him over, convinced that one day they can start their real life together. This must come with a trigger warning of graphic violence, but it wouldn’t be what it is without it.
My mother lived in dread of my father. I think that’s pretty much all I can say about her, leaving aside her obsession with gardening and miniature goats. She was a thin woman, with long limp hair. I don’t know if she existed before meeting him. I imagine she did. She must have resembled a primitive life form—single-celled, vaguely translucent. An amoeba. Just ectoplasm, endoplasm, a nucleus, and a digestive vacuole. Years of contact with my father had gradually filled this scrap of nothing with fear.
Adeline Dieudonné - Real Life
The exact premise of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves shouldn’t be revealed too early. It is about an unusual family torn apart by tragedy, questionable decisions made in the name of psychology and science, a child’s deep love without prejudice. Rosemary lost her sibling, Fern, and is dealing with it in her own way. It’s a book that’s both incredibly easy and wonderfully complex, full of a love that is impossible to untangle from difficult questions.
“It seems to me that every time we humans announce that here is the thing that makes us unique--our featherless bipedality, our tool-using, our language--some other species comes along to snatch it away. If modesty were a human trait, we'd have learned to be more cautious over the years.”
Karen Joy Fowler - We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
Max Porter’s debut novel, Grief is the Thing with Feathers, was scintillating. Completely unique and surprising, wasting no words in its heart-wrenching and yet darkly comic grief. He clearly has so much fun with language that it’s joyous and infectious in many ways, yet I remember finding the off-beat prose-poetry a distraction at times. In his second, Lanny, he pushed this even further in ways and yet, I believe, found its balance - rhythmic, tactile and off the wall yet completely in service of a story that tugs you in from its first words and thunders along.
In comes Lanny clicking and murmuring like the peculiar transmitter device he is.
At its heart, Lanny is about a boy. A special boy. He is free-spirited, idiosyncratic, charismatic, but also something else - his mother alludes to an unusual magic in him that is easy to put down to her overwhelming love but still lingers within our understanding all the same. Despite the range of voices Porter draws on, it is Lanny himself that sucks you into the story, a vivid depiction of a little boy who you desperately want to exist. Porter’s excellent characterisation of children, so acute in their sadness in Grief is the Thing With Feathers, takes a different but no less brilliant turn here, celebrating the wonder and innocence that makes them closer to the natural world.
“And she laughed, and said she understood, and then off she drifted in that nice way she has. Responsive to the light, I would call it. The type of person who is that little bit more akin to the weather than most people, more obviously made of the same atoms as the earth than most people these days seem to be. Which explains Lanny.”
Set in a small village just about within London’s commuter belt, it feels as if the entire scene is watching Lanny, drawn to him, but it is not his voice that takes centre stage. Instead, we see him through the eyes of the people closest to him: his devoted mother; his bewildered father who barely knows what to make of his own child; Mad Pete, an eccentric artist treated with suspicion by the conservative villagers, who becomes his teacher and friend. We also see him through a wide cast of villagers, their voices bubbling up out of nowhere in wriggling passages that give us a sense of the wider place surrounding the immediate web of characters. In this way, we become a voyeur to the closed door conversations of a place as Porter gets in and amongst the very fabric of middle England.
He’s been here as long as there has been a here. He was young once, when this island was freshly formed. Nobody was truly born here, apart from him.
Most intriguingly of all though, we see Lanny through Dead Papa Toothwort, an old woodland spirit who gives the novel its strange re-imagining of folklore. It is on his guidance that we can to drift on the wind, smelling the varied dinners on the stoves and tasting small details of village life. His words refuse to conform to common structure and this is where the novel form is tested to its extreme as they visually twist on the page in leaps of typography, stop for page long breaths, scatter themselves to far corners. All of this would be trite in lesser hands but creates a dazzling energy here.
Dead Papa Toothwort wakes from his standing nap an acre wide and scrapes off dream dregs of bitumen glistening thick with liquid globs of litter.
When Lanny goes missing, it is immediately apparent that Papa Toothwort has something to do with it, that they are connected. With the lovable strength of Lanny’s character, it is impossible not to feel deeply invested but also trusting that he will be ok, carried through by his innocent wisdom. There is a sense that something is afoot that involves him but is not necessarily against him, that he will be ok. This, for me, is Lanny’s true feat, how it balances a sublime and dark tension with so much creativity and experimental ingenuity but most of all an undeniable feeling of wonder and good will.
“Which do you think is more patient, an idea or hope?”
Max Porter - Lanny
David Whyte’s touching poem, What to Remember When Waking, is a nice way to bring in a new year.
To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.
Elif Shafak riffing off a quote from Charles Dickens in The Chimes - “A new heart for a new year”
And so we better create a new balance this year, holding opposite approaches in each hand. Constructive pessimism and sombre optimism. We are going to need both.
Part therapist, part planner, my Klarheit calendar is my most cherished possession throughout the year but comes into its own even more so at New Year, when it guides me through thinking about life and goals. Get it direct from their (German based) website or from Amazon.
In your life right now: what would you do differently, if you had the courage to do so?
Internet thinker Toby Shorin’s reading list is largely non-fiction but otherwise incredibly varied and worth a browse for anyone looking to delve deeper into psychology, philosophy, language and all the different ways of thinking about life.
Read it in one sleepless night in the middle of a research retreat. Great atmosphere and frankly a lot more depressing than Blade Runner.
(on "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”)
A fascinating look at Toni Morrison’s research notes, by notebook aficionado Jillian Hess.
As Morrison described it, the idea for Beloved began when she read a newspaper article about Margaret Garner—a 19th-century woman who fled slavery with her children. Facing capture, Garner killed one of her children and tried to kill the others. Death, she decided, was better than enslavement.
How do we evaluate Garner’s choice? Morrison “decided that the only one with the unquestionable right to judge was the dead child herself.”
Speaking of young women taking over the world, singer-songwriter Raye’s recent performance at the Royal Albert Hall was sublime. Backed by the house orchestra and conductor Tom Richards, who rework her Mercury nominated album My 21st Century Blues into a majestic piece of stage music, she struts with a true jazz-diva aura while bringing a distinctly modern twist of sassy rap to touch on addiction, mental health, body image, abuse and climate change. The difficult themes are given hope and made enjoyable by her clear love and passion for the music she’s performing, her disbelief at where it’s taken her and how the orchestra have bought it to new levels. Watch it free on iPlayer.
Thanks for being a part of A Novel Tribe as I consider how to evolve it and deliver more value into the New Year. If you’d like to give any feedback it would be very welcome and useful, just hit reply.
I hope 2024 is good to you!
MQ.