In, reading
I’ve read seven books since my sabbatical from out there began. Five of them are works by black authors. Not deliberate choices at the time, but looking back, I think I was tuned into the prevailing mood more than I realised. In my life Black lives have always mattered but in recent years the movement has re-ignited a desire in Publishers to publish more black voices and I in turn am delighted to read them. As a rule, I’ll read anything which intrigues me and kindles an interest, whichever diaspora the authors hail from. Fiction or non-fiction, I’ll read anything at all. Except graphic novels. I’ll read graphic novels on the day I find one which passes the page 99 test*. (Are there graphic novels with more than ninety-nine pages?… I know there are, I’m just being a cheeky madame. And if you have some titles to recommend to me please do.)
*The page 99 test is our way of testing whether a book is any good or not. My partner David invented it. We’ve shared the method with so many friends I won’t be at all surprised if one day someone excitedly tells us about it. The test: Pick up a book which looks interesting, turn to page 99, start reading. Does the text grab your attention? Is it well written? Do you want to know more? If the answers are yes, read the book.
Toward the end of February, I bought a copy of ‘The Guest List’ by Lucy Foley. She’s the popular bestselling author of ‘The Hunting Party’ and previously wrote for Grazia, Vogue, and the Times Style section. These were early clues to the content, had I been paying attention, which I wasn’t. I didn’t even do the page 99 test, which it spectacularly fails, a fact I discovered while reading it.
What was I thinking? I’ll tell you what I was thinking. There I was, standing in my favourite shop, browsing the books and gorgeous pretty things, determined to buy something on my last day out before the Pandemic of the century hit us. And I wanted to read a book. Murder mystery set on a remote island, tick. No.1 Sunday Times Bestseller, tick. A five-star rating on Waterstone’s and rave reviews, tick, tick. I thought why not, should be good, surely? Then I read it. I found the book to be mediocre at best. Literally, it was OK.
The Guest List does intrigue me though. What does everyone else see that I don’t? It’s been showered with accolades. It’s on the longlist for the Crime Writer’s Association Gold Dagger Award and is being described as the ‘biggest crime thriller of 2020’. Sales wise, I don’t doubt it, but the best whodunnit of the year? I don’t think so. The biggest crime story of 2020 is the UK Government’s lethal handling of the COVID Pandemic. But I digress. Have these people never read Val McDermid or Anne Cleeves or Elmore Leonard, or a whole bunch of other crime geniuses I could mention? Allow me to present the case for the prosecution m’Lud.
The quality of the writing is set for a mainstream audience. The prose is flat and uninspiring, the dialogue is predictable. The story as a work of crime fiction is weak; it is scattered with massive coincidences that have been woven into the story to make it work as a crime. It would make a great Vera episode, apart from the absence of the northern working-class people and working-class backdrop, the battered Defender, the brown mac, and the gritty freezing north. Back to the book though, which incidentally does include the awful weather. Without divulging any spoilers, the story centres around a wedding in Galway on the fictional Cormorant island, just off the Connemara coastline on the we[s]t coast of Ireland.
The Guest List is very white, literally.
In the story we’re treated to a boat load of aspirational posh white people who descend upon an aspirational private island hotel to attend an aspirational Instagram-friendly wedding, all dressed in aspirational prêt-à-porter. To be fair there is one black person in the book, a male guest. He appears, as if by magic, tall black and mysterious, with no dialogue to speak of but utterly cool and gorgeous and very black. There he stands amidst aspirational speculation over his prowess in bed and the aspirational size of his genitalia. This is just one of the many cringeworthy tropes the characters have been furnished with. There’s Johnno, the best man, who’s poor and from Croydon and who only got into the cohort’s posh private school because he was good at rugby and they head-hunted him dangling the carrot of a free scholarship. The book’s cast of stereotyped characters are the two-dimensional cardboard cut-outs of people I would never invite to dinner, never mind my wedding.
The artfully woven in product placement is a thing to behold, Bollinger Champagne gets its first name-check on page four just before Guinness gets a nod. Discover for yourself the full list of prestige brands mentioned in The Guest List, they’re the same brands you will find in any fashion or lifestyle magazine.
But we must talk about the death, it is a crime and there is a murder, although I can’t for the life of me remember who was killed, or why, or by whom. And as I write this I could find out, the book is sitting right here beside me, but honestly, I can’t be bothered.
I want to get on to writing about the bloody brilliant books I read while I was reading in, isolating from out there. The books you must read too, because they were so good, they make me want to end every sentence about them with an exclamation mark, and that really is not like me at all.
Here they are. Go and buy them right now. I insist.
Girl, Woman, Other. Bernadine Evaristo.
The Mercies. Kiran Milwood Hargrave.
How to Argue with a Racist. Adam Rutherford.
Reviews to follow, they all deserve a blog entry of their own.
