More books I have read

'The Night Tiger' by Yangzse Choo

Semi-mystical story set in 1930s Malaya (as ‘twas then). There are two protagonists: Ren, an 11-year-old orphan employed as a houseboy, and Ji Lin, a young woman in her late teens apprenticed to a dressmaker. They do not know each other but from the start are obviously on paths that will lead them to meet each other at some point.

The story centres around a severed human finger, its origins and a quest to reunite it with its owner. The detached finger belonged to a Dr Macfarlane, Ren’s employer. When Macfarlane is dying he asks Ren to find his finger and reunite him with it before 49 days have passed. The body must be made whole again before this deadline, or Macfarlane’s soul will be doomed never to find peace. After Macfarlane dies, and following his instructions, Ren travels to the home of William Acton, a surgeon and friend of Macfarlane’s, bearing a note vouching for Ren and asking Acton to take him on as a houseboy, which he does. It later transpires that Macfarlane lost his finger during a hunting trip with Acton, who donated the finger as a specimen to the hospital where he works.

Ji Lin is doing a secret second job as a dance hall hostess, to pay off the debts her mother has run up playing mahjong. Ji Lin comes into possession of the severed finger from a punter at the dance hall, who dies shortly afterwards. She is later approached by another man at the dance hall, who asks if she knows where the finger is and claims that it’s a family heirloom of his and the first man stole it from him. Later, Ji Lin helps her stepbrother Shin, a medical student, to tidy the pathology storeroom at the hospital where he is working over the summer, and they discover a lot of specimen fingers are missing.

This book was a perfectly enjoyable read but I think I lost the plot a bit (Reese Witherspoon informed me on the back cover that I wouldn’t be able to put it down, but I’m not sure I’d go that far). It was a bit hard to keep track of who had stolen the finger from whom/where. Ren and Ji Lin keep having very similar dreams involving Ren’s twin brother Yi, who died three years earlier. There are five bearers of Chinese names that form some sort of set corresponding to the five Confucian Virtues: Yi (righteousness), Ren (benevolence), Ji Lin (‘ji’ meaning wisdom), Shin (‘xin’ meaning faithfulness) and a mystery fifth element, Li (meaning ritual or order), whose bearer is not identified until late on. Several different people are doing wrong things: turns out Yi has been causing bad things to happen to his brother in the hope that Ren will join him in death; an orderly at the hospital is selling body parts as good luck charms; and a third person is able to bring about other's deaths through force of will. That's quite a talent.

The story makes reference throughout to the legend of the ‘weretiger’, a tiger who can assume human form (or was it the other way around?). The finger is rumoured to have been a weretiger’s finger. There are hints dropped throughout that Dr Macfarlane was a weretiger, but the story stops short of confirming the legend as reality - it does state that prior to his death Dr Macfarlane had been thought to have been losing his mind a bit. This blog post discusses weretigers and mentions Choo's novel under 'The Weretiger in Modern Media'.

'Deep Country' by Neil Ansell

Neil Ansell’s story of his five-year tenancy of a remote cottage in the Welsh mountains. Mum passed this on to me. I’m not as interested as I probably should be in extended descriptions of wildlife and scenery, but was reasonably interested in why Ansell had made this decision and how he had managed to live. As it turns out, it’s never made clear why Ansell moved to such a remote place, but he refers to “having burned what few bridges I had left”. While reading the book I kept expecting that at some point he would explain what he meant and what had led him to choose such a lifestyle, but in fact he never shares what took him to the cottage. Evidently he knows the owners of the estate that the cottage is on, and took over its tenancy from some friends of his who had decided it was a tad too primitive for them. Prior to Ansell’s occupation, the cottage had last been lived in full-time over 40 years previously. He apparently moved in with only a bag of clothes, wanting to “know how lightly I could tread on the earth”.

The cottage seems to have had pretty much no modern facilities, being without electricity, gas, running water or plumbing. He doesn’t go into detail on how he coped with the last, but refers to bathing in local rivers. It seemed incredible that he decided to do without a cooker: he declined to buy the previous tenants’ two-ring cooker, on the grounds that he didn’t want to lug gas bottles up the hillside and instead elected to cook over the fire – I was amazed that he'd managed to successfully cook anything by this method, though I realise that people must have done so in the past. Also incredibly, he managed without a car, relying on hitch-hiking for local travel, and indeed also to get to the cottage in the first place. I had no idea anyone still hitch-hiked.

Ansell is incredibly self-sufficient, living in primitive and isolated (by UK standards) conditions. He seems to have been able to turn his hand to all manner of practical tasks, to the extent that I suspected he must have had some previous experience of backwoodsmanship. He earns occasional money doing chainsaw jobs in the woods, and also did some work (voluntary, I assume) for a local field centre, monitoring bird boxes and the like. He picks mushrooms – he does note that he knows his way around mushrooms – and preserves them in vinegar and herbs. He makes jam, from what I can’t remember. One winter he was snowed in for six weeks, and evidently managed. I was amazed at how well he must have stocked up if, as he relates, he didn’t need to immediately rush to town to buy anything when the thaw came.

There’s a LOT of detail about birds and bird behaviour, which was quite interesting though the extended descriptions didn’t always hold my attention very well. I’m not all that knowledgeable about birds so kept having to Google images of the creatures Ansell was describing, as well as e.g. the relative size of a goshawk vs. a thrush. There’s additionally other, furrier, wildlife: foxes, polecats, stoats, hares.

He’s not overly heavy on the introspection, but of the snowy winter just mentioned, he notes “it felt liberating to wake in the morning and know that today there was no chance whatsoever that I would see anyone, nor tomorrow either”. There are some interesting reflections on thinking you know yourself and discovering that there is, perhaps, no fixed self. It’s certainly an amazing amount of time to have spent alone – he occasionally meets local farmers/farmworkers during daylight hours, but relates spending most evenings staring into the flames of his fire.

Ansell lived in the cottage for five years. In the latter stages of his time there he developed what sounds like a pretty serious thyroid condition, involving hospital treatment, and reluctantly has a phone installed as a consequence. It’s not clear though that even this illness was what made him revert to living in a town. As he relates it, after five years, he felt he had to move back to ‘normal life’ if he was ever going to, or he would end up staying at the cottage permanently.

‘Deep Country’ was published in 2011. In this Guardian piece from the same year, Ansell expands a bit on his life prior to moving to the cottage and on his reasons for leaving it.

'Solitaire' by Alice Oseman

Alice Oseman is my OU colleague Guy’s niece, and secured a six-figure publishing deal for Solitaire when she was still a teenager. I wouldn’t usually put Young Adult fiction on our book group list, but I was quite curious to see what sort of book a publisher buys from a teenager. (Guy actually recommended Alice’s later novel Loveless in preference, but I’d already put Solitaire on our list by then.)

The story: Victoria ‘Tori’ Spring is in Year 12 at Harvey Greene Grammar School for Girls, or ‘Higgs’. There’s also a boys’ grammar school in the town, which Tori’s brother Charlie and his boyfriend Nick attend. ‘Higgs’ accepts boys into the sixth form, so some boys have transferred over, including Tori’s primary school friend Lucas Ryan, and one Michael Holden, with whom Tori becomes friends, albeit she seems unwilling to think of it in those terms.

‘Solitaire’ – or rather Solitaire.co.uk – is a blog which is initially blank but then messages start appearing on it. It comes to the school’s attention when its creators start playing music over the school tannoy, putting posters up around the school and hijacking the school's computer systems. As the messages progress, Michael observes to Tori that they seem to be particularly relevant to her. Things eventually turn sinister at a house party, when a post appears on Solitaire inciting the partygoers to beat up one of the Year 12 boys present. Bothered by this, Tori decides that she must stop Solitaire.

Tori’s brother Charlie, who is in Year 11, has had various issues including an eating disorder, obsessive-compulsive behaviour and self-harming. A couple of the others expressed reservations about the relative ages of Charlie and Nick, in that Charlie is only 15. I can’t say that aspect of their relationship bothered me overly, or indeed had even occurred to me (they’re only one school year apart, for God’s sake – it’s not as though Nick’s 35) but other aspects of it didn’t seem entirely healthy, namely the degree to which Nick seems to be expected to look after Charlie and the pressure put on him; Tori’s blaming of Nick after Charlie’s brief relapse seems entirely unfair. (Slight sidebar: this might be my age showing but a world in which the school rugby captain can have a boyfriend, and this not be worthy of remark, seems like Utopia to me. Is this really how it is in schools these days? Or was this slightly rose-tinted thinking on Oseman’s part?)

Tori thinks her classmates are all soulless conformist idiots and that she’s miserable because she has some sort of deep insight that her parents and friends lack (actually, in fairness the latter part isn't stated explicitly, but you get the strong impression that that's her view). She appears to be in a bit of a down phase of recent-ish onset: her grades have slipped since entering the sixth form, perhaps due to some sort of fallout from her brother’s problems; perhaps due to difficulties with her friendship group, albeit that her ill-feeling towards her best friend Becky is pretty transparently due to envy of Becky’s social standing. Becky is evidently still fond of Tori, as evidenced by the final storyline where she runs to the school still in her pyjamas to try to rescue Tori from whatever it is she’s planning to do. Despite studying A-level English Literature Tori hates books and doesn’t read them, because none of it is real – though she loves films, which she admits herself is illogical. (At one point I found myself thinking, in grandma fashion, that she’d probably be happier during the day if she didn’t stay up all night watching films.) 

I thought Solitaire was an OK read. I didn’t hate it, and it was quite interesting to get a taste of the sort of thing that the modern teenager might read. An important message seems to be Tori’s discovery that everyone’s a bit miserable really, or certainly a lot of people of her age. There was plenty that was irritating about Tori, but that’s not to say she’s an atypical portrayal of a teenager - she's probably pretty spot on. And I did keep trying to bear in mind that I’m hardly this book’s target audience.

Oh, and I've never read The Catcher in the Rye, so have no idea whether the comparisons are remotely justified.

Postscript: Solitaire was first published in 2014. The first thing you encounter on opening the edition I read was an author’s note from Alice Oseman dated 2020, urging her readers to ‘Please read safely and responsibly’. At this, I muttered that reading is not meant to be a “safe” endeavour – it’s meant to expose you to new ideas and sometimes to scary or unpleasant things. The note appears directed at readers who are fans of Oseman’s more recent graphic novel series Heartstopper, which has been picked up by Netflix. It sounds rather as though she has made some edits to Solitaire for her Heartstopper audience – are they younger? I don’t know.

Postpostscript: do UK secondary schools now have tannoys? I mean, they might do for all I know. V. American. Also, it's a bit odd that the term ‘sixth form’ is even still used given the switch some while back to American naming of school years – I mean, it made sense in my day when the last two, non-compulsory, years of secondary school WERE actually the lower and upper sixth, but less so now that they’re termed Years 12 and 13. (As far as I can gather the UK has still stopped short of adopting the US terms for the final four years of secondary (high) school (freshman, sophomore, junior, senior) but perhaps it’s only a matter of time.)