Six months of the year has slipped away, we’re on a shallow
slope heading towards Christmas, and my book of the year so far? It’s been a
good six months. Plainsong by Kent
Haruf, The Son by Phillip Meyer and The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt, Pig Iron, by Ben Myers, Dark Star by Alan Furst.
But my book of the first six months of 2015, by some
distance, is Station 11 by Emily St.
John Mandel. It takes a genre subject – an apocalyptic flu wipes out most of
humanity – and treats it in a contemplative, melancholy, compelling way. It
makes you nostalgic for a life you haven’t lost, a life involving phones and
flights and oranges. King Lear is woven into the narrative, but so is an
invented comic book, and Star Trek Voyager (not even the original series.) We
follow different characters for a while, leave their stories, return to them,
and I found myself convinced, believing in this beautifully evoked world. Most
of the characters were decent people, which is something that I enjoyed, it was
a quietly optimistic book, or not glibly, cynically pessimistic anyway. It was
the mood though, and the style, that most engaged me, I felt like I was liable
to wake up and find myself living in this world.
Is it a bad thing that the first five books I mentioned are
all by men? Maybe it is, I do read more men than women, I think, and I don’t
want to close myself off to that whole other perspective on the world. And as a
male writer I want to be read by women as much as by men, (or by girls as much
as by boys, since I’m now writing a Young Adult novel). I know a guy who’s
reading nothing but women this entire year, having noticed that he’s only been
reading men for a while. I don’t want to do that, I don’t think I do, but I am
reading Elizabeth is Missing by Emma
Healey next, and perhaps I’ll catch up with How
to be both by Ali Smith after that and is The Green Road by Anne Enright in paperback yet? God, I love reading.
