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Tinkers
by Paul Harding
Published 2009 191 pages
Tinkers is a character study of a father and son from the perspective of the son on his deathbed. The father, Howard Crosby, is a travelling salesman in the early years of the 20th century, an ineffective sort of a guy with epilepsy and a powerful curiosity about the world around him and a wife that barely tolerates him.
His son, George, is a horologist on his deathbed, looking back on his childhood, his father’s life, and his own experiences with his troubled siblings.
The book alternates modes throughout, from first to third person and from present to past tense. There are sections of seemingly incongruous extracts from books or pamphlets. There are long run-on sentences that I think are meant to sound profound. And there are images that are evocative but incongruous, like a description of a fat man as a “fleshy Olympian pear” or of roadside puddles as the colour of “iron cream”. What the heck is iron cream? Some of the descriptions run on like a fanfic writer who can’t decide on the best way to bring an image to life and so just keeps heaping new ones on.
I finished the book with the powerful sense that Paul Harding is a clever guy with a lot of novel ways to describe things. But I also finished the book with a powerful exhaustion with sentences like these:
Buy the pendant, sneak it into your hand from the folds of your dress and let the low light of the fire lap at it late at night as you wait for the roof to give out or your will to snap and the ice to be too thick to chop through with the ax as you stand in your husband's boots on the frozen lake at midnight, the dry hack of the blade on ice so tiny under the wheeling and frozen stars, the soundproof lid of heaven, that your husband would never stir from his sleep in the cabin across the ice, would never hear and come running, half-frozen, in only his union suit, to save you from chopping a hole in the ice and sliding into it as if it were a blue vein, sliding down into the black, silty bottom of the lake, where you would see nothing, would perhaps feel only the stir of some somnolent fish in the murk as the plunge of you in your wool dress and the big boots disturbed it from its sluggish winter dreams of ancient seas. Maybe you would not even feel that, as you struggled in clothes that felt like cooling tar, and as you slowed, calmed, even, and opened your eyes and looked for a pulse of silver, an imbrication of scales, and as you closed your eyes again and felt their lids turn to slippery, ichthyic skin, the blood behind them suddenly cold, and as you found yourself not caring, wanting, finally, to rest, finally wanting nothing more than the sudden, new, simple hum threading between your eyes. The ice is far too thick to chop through. You will never do it.
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The Yearling
by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
Published 1938 428 pages
The Yearling is the perfect example of a certain kind of story written in the first half of the twentieth century that got turned into a hundred million movies starring Gregory Peck. It’s the quintessential example of a bildungsroman set in the American south. It’s got man vs. wild. It’s got boy vs. wild. It’s got boy + wild. It’s got fathers and sons. It’s got grimy scallywag types. It’s got language you can sink your teeth into. It’s got a character arc that you can see the whole thing right from the very beginning. It’s got no black people. It’s got absolutely zero tension. This is the America that they want to make great again.
The Yearling is the story of Penny Baxter, a pioneer in the Central Florida backwoods (specifically around Ocala) in the years after the American Civil War. The story is told from the perspective of his son, Jody, who is the eponymous yearling, over the course of a single year as Jody grows from a boy to a young man. Penny and Jody navigate difficult relationships with their neighbours, torrential rains, death of close friends, and skirmishes from the wildlife that threaten their existence in the scrub. However, as I say: no tension. Penny is clever and moral and a solution is never far away.
You may have been told that the yearling of the title actually represents a young fawn that Jody adopts midway through the story, and who grows along with him over the course of the year. That’s just a clever rhetorical technique. I won’t spoil anything here but this book was written in 1938 and won the Pulitzer Prize and was adapted for the screen like 8 times, so I think you can see where this story with the fawn goes.
It’s a little trite, and it’s a little predictable, but the world that Rawlings conjures up is so rich you can almost sink your fingers into it. The blackjack oaks and the sand and the split-rail fences and the long beards and the critters. And the food — almost Ghibli-esque in its detail. Tell me you don’t want to sit down to this table:
She ladled food into pans big enough to wash in. The long trenchered table was covered with steam. There were dried cow-peas boiled with white bacon, a haunch of roast venison, a platter of fried squirrel, swamp cabbage, big hominy, biscuits, cornbread, syrup and coffee. A raisin pudding waited at the side of the hearth.
“If I’d of knowed you was comin’,” she said, “I’d of cooked somethin’ fitten. Well, draw up.”
Or this description of killing a deer, which lays forth the brutality of the wild in such few words:
He took his knife from its scabbard and went to the deer and slit its throat. It died with the quiet of a thing to whom death is only one short step beyond a present misery.
Why can’t we write like this anymore?
Stray observations
- The edition that I read (pub. Heinemann, 1969), besides having perhaps the perfectly broken spine, also featured these fantastic engraved illustrations at the start of every chapter:
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Project Hail Mary
by Andy Weir
Published 2021 496 pages
Ryland Grace, an American middle school teacher with an annoying name, wakes up from a coma in deep space. His mission, remembered only at intervals due to coma-related amnesia, is to uncover the mystery behind an interstellar bacterium which has infected the sun and is causing it to slowly go out. Shortly he meets an alien from another star system on the same mission. Together they get into a bunch of The Martian-esque science hijinx and sort out the mystery.
That’s the book.
It doesn’t feel like a story so much as a series of problems that Grace and his extraterrestrial buddy, Rocky, have to solve. Which I guess some people quite like; but as for me I never felt like anything was in danger of happening. Most of the book is: something has upset the status quo on the spaceship; Grace & Rocky fix it; the status quo is restored; something else has upset the status quo on the spaceship.
Usually the solution involves gratuitous descriptions of pressing buttons or cycling through screens or attaching things together. This doesn’t feel like narrative to me. It is to narrative as descriptions of what someone is wearing is to character. Yes, Grace is doing things — but nothing is happening. I don’t need three pages of explanation of how some xenonite chain is designed and constructed; just tell me that you did it.
I will say that Rocky is a terrific character. He’s physically expressive, a bit of a himbo, helpless and simultaneously capable. I do wonder how much of Rocky’s lovability is because he’s like a dog that can communicate. Do we like Rocky because he's basically Grace’s daemon?
There are a couple of story beats right at the end of the book that do feel like something is happening — but they come a little bit too late:
The first explains why Grace is on the mission, despite being a middle school teacher and not an astronaut. I wouldn’t call it a twist, but it sort of reorients your perspective of characters in a way that makes zero material difference. I think it was included to give Grace a character arc, but it’s not an effective arc because the shift in character happens off-screen, while he’s out with his coma+amnesia; he goes to sleep at one end of the arc and wakes up at the other.
The second did surprise me, so I’m not going to write about it here — but the book runs out of pages to explore the consequences of what was effectively only the third or fourth actual thing to happen in the whole book.
Still I thought it was fun.
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A Pennine Journey
by A. Wainwright
Published 1986 213 pagesThe Story of a Long Walk in 1938
I’ve walked parts of Wainwright’s Pennine Journey and found it a little rough around the edges — though not necessarily in a bad way. There are sections that follow greenways and high moorland tracks like the most well-trod of the long distance trails here in England; but there are long tracts that meander across fields and over stone walls and through farm courtyards in a way that I think Wainwright might have liked.
Wainwright’s original journey, however, followed very little of the modern signposted route; in 1938 the relatively infrequent motor traffic down what are now designated B-roads meant that he could walk along the roads and lanes and see almost no one. At one point he walks five miles up the road from Alston to Hartside Cross, a voyage no one would dare to undertake by foot these days for danger of being plastered by a BMW X9 operated by a wealthy family from Coventry out on their bank holiday weekend jollies.
A Pennine Journey (the book, not the trail) is a book of two faces.
On the one hand, Wainwright writes loftily of the freedom of the hills, dales, and wideopen lonely places in the north of England; he brings the reader with him into towns that have scarcely changed in hundreds of years, stone walls and flagstone roofs and modest kitchens with a little coal in the grate.
He makes his opinion well-known: Blanchland is out of a fairy-tale; Weardale is industrially depressing; Wharfedale is a secret beauty; the Eden Valley sucks. He writes at length and with unmitigated wonder of Hadrian’s Wall (although inexplicably totally omits any mention of Sycamore Gap (RIP In Peace)).
This tendency of forming a strong opinion of what is basically just grass and stone and tree is what has made him a national treasure (and an MBE). It’s charming and captivating and breeds a sense of romance into the country.
Oh, how can I put into words the joys of a walkover country such as this; the scene that delight the eyes, the blessed piece of mind, the sheer exuberance which fills your soul as you tread the firm turf? This is something to be lived, not read about. On these breezy heights, a transformation is wondrously rot within you. Your thoughts are simple, in tune with your surroundings; the complicated problems you brought with you from the town or smooth away. Up here, you are near to your Creator; you are conscious of the infinite; you gain new perspectives; thoughts run in new strange channels; there are stirrings in your soul which are quite beyond the power of my pen to describe.
On the other hand. He is a little bit too free with that opinion when it comes to women. And his journey brings him into contact with all sorts of women: his MO is basically to rock up as the sun is setting and find someone to take him in for the night. Usually this is a private home (but sometimes an inn) where a woman looks after occasional boarders, and always does A.W. have something to say about these women.
Usually it’s condescending. Usually it reads like something from r/menwritingwomen. Sometimes it’s outright offensive. He flirts with all of the younger ones, despite having a wife of seven years and a son back home; he passes judgment on the elder.
And he holds a pretty high opinion of himself; I quite suspect that he was a miserable person to be around (which is lucky, because he liked to walk on his own). I’m conscious that A.W. wrote this when he was young (but not that young); he may have let judiciousness get the better of his free opinions in his older age. But I’m also conscious that his wife left him after suspecting him of infidelity, and for his lofty pronouncements about “The man has not been born, who does not want a son to follow him”, he left nothing to his son when he died.
So! The scales have fallen from my eyes. Will I still read his Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells in the idle moments between fell runs? Uh yeah I will. Am I going to read another one of his narrative walks? Uh probably not.
Stray observations
- Wainwright stops at the Kirk Inn in Romaldkirk and his description heavily implies that it’s haunted or cursed or something; that despite the solicitousness of the widow who runs the joint there’s a shabby sense of bereft laid over the place like a cloak. He speculates that it will very soon go out of business but: it didn’t! It’s still around. Sam and I visited last weekend and found that the curse still lays upon the place: it is dark and cluttered even on a sunny day, serves only a single beer from a brewery I have never heard of, and remains perennially empty even on a Friday evening, while the (larger, more upscale) pub across the street is fully-booked. The solicitous proprietor remains: the pub does not take cards but does take a promise to return within the hour with a crisp polymer tenner.
- I got the book off World of Books and when it arrived it was battered but whole; by the time I finished it went the way of A.W.’s shoes, by which I mean the adhesive had totally perished and the whole thing came pretty much totally apart.
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Postwar
by Tony Judt
Published 2005 878 pages
You know, for a nearly 900-page book covering the history of Europe from 1945 to the new millennium (or thereabouts), Postwar is a remarkably easy read. A long read, for sure — but an eminently manageable one. If anything, its straightforward telling-of-events narrative very nearly spoils it; Judt leaves it a little bit too much up to the reader to connect the dots.
Maybe I'm just a idiot. Maybe the average reader of a 900-page history of a continent should be up to the task of finding the common thread that weaves that history together.
Luckily Judt puts it right at the end of the book:
All the same, the rigorous investigation and interrogation of Europe's competing pasts—and the place occupied by those pasts in Europeans' collective sense of themselves—has been one of the unsung achievements and sources of European unity in recent decades. It is, however, an achievement that will surely lapse unless ceaselessly renewed. Europe's barbarous recent history, the dark 'other' against which post-war Europe was laboriously constructed, is already beyond recall for young Europeans. Within a generation the memorials and museums will be gathering dust—visited, like the battlefields of the Western Front today, only by aficionados and relatives.
If in years to come we are to remember why it seemed so important to build a certain sort of Europea out of the crematoria of Auschwitz, only history can help us. The new Europe, bound together by the signs and symbols of its terrible past, is a remarkable accomplishment; but it remains forever mortgaged to that past.
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