#new romantic philistine is cute

[shotsofsalvation]

this is the best thing i've ever made to this day

[pea-green]

August’s books! Prime Suspect by Lynda La Plante, The Passion by Jeanette Winterson, The Hare With Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal, Pages for You by Sylvia Brownrigg, Nimona by Noelle Stevenson and How to be Both by Ali Smith. 

I borrowed Prime Suspect from a friend I was staying with after I ran out of books, and I never saw the ITV version, so I didn’t know what to expect. It was written in 1991 and I still think of the 90′s as being a couple of years ago but holy shit we’ve come a long way - it feels like The Fall (specifically Stella Gibson’s refusal to ‘divide the girls into virgins and vamps, angels or whores’) was written as an antidote to the attitudes that everyone including the protagonist Jane Tennyson has towards the female victims. The plot’s more of a procedural than a whodunnit, and the story’s interesting enough even though all the characters but Jane (and sometimes including Jane) are utterly unbearable. It’s not gay at all except that a) Helen Mirren, when asked recently about what she thinks Jane’s doing these days, said she’d have gone gay and would be living with a very attractive partner, and b) I read this on the train and for a few stops around Doncaster I sat opposite a girl who was also reading it and we had a ~moment (your NHS nametag said Sophie and you were cute).

The Passion is set (mostly) in Venice, a treat because Winterson’s writing is beautiful, and her descriptions of what her character calls the city of mazes and madmen were so perfect I took half a dozen pictures of my favourite passages:

It rains too, mournfully and quietly, and the boatmen sit under sodden rags and stare helplessly into the canals. On an afternoon when the Casino didn’t want me and I didn’t want myself, I went to Florian’s to drink and gaze at the square. It’s a fulfilling pastime.

The book is split into 4 sections which initially seem unrelated, but the characters and events converge, and the two protagonists are sympathetic and well-developed. Although Villanelle is bisexual and has a relationship with her married neighbour, same-sex romance is a theme rather than the subject of the novel. Also despite the beautiful writing, some of the subject matter is truly awful, and some passages could have been taken straight from Patricia Highsmith’s Little Tales of Misogyny.

The Hare with Amber Eyes is part art history, part family biography. The author comes into possession of a collection of Japanese netsuke and goes on a journey to find as much of their history as he can. My friend lent me this because I loved the nesuke on display at the British Museum but I’m a huge philistine who knows nothing at all about art (I literally liked them because they were cuuute) and have enough of a chip on my shoulder to resent everyone upper-middle-class or above by default. It took a few chapters to overcome my distaste for de Waal’s ability to to just decide to spend a few months travelling the world investigating his family history for funsies, but by the time I hit the segment where it’s WWII and his family is ripped apart by Nazi Germany I took it all back. The times and places jump around a little, but the book took me from knowing actually nothing about art, to knowing one or two things, so I’ll be presenting thinkpieces on BBC4 in no time.

The back of my copy of Pages for You describes the novel as “the story of the beginning, blossoming and falling apart of [a] delirious love affair”, so when I talk about how they break up in the end you can’t shout at me that it’s a spoiler because it’s right there on the cover. Nominally a student/teacher romance, but less creepy because it’s a university student/her TA so everyone’s an adult, Pages for You was first published in 2001, but has been rereleased this year to accompany the publication of its sequel, Pages for Her. I was put off reading this before because I’d been warned about the purple prose, and while it wasn’t as bad as expected, it is pretty florid in parts. Unusually for a YA book (especially one written 16 years ago), there’s little hand-wringing from protagonist Flannery about her same-sex escapades, but although the term lesbian is thrown around to describe their relationship, the word bisexual is conspicuously absent, especially since (having read the synopsis for the sequel) it’s actually the label that applies to both women. The beginning of the book is sweet; Flannery’s hopeless crush on a beautiful older woman gradually becoming less hopeless is gratuitous wish fulfillment and I Love It, but the relationship breakdown at the end was by far the best part.

Nimona is a comic based on the webcomic of the same name by Noelle Stevenson, co-author of Lumberjanes (ps. you should read Lumberjanes). I can’t find the tweet, but I’m 90% sure Stevenson tweeted before that people should “assume all my characters are gay unless otherwise stated” which is a great starting point for any story. Nimona is the co-protagonist, a twenty-something shapeshifter who announces herself to be the new sidekick to supervillian Lord Blackheart as they try and take down the oppressive and mysterious Institution. Stevenson’s art style is adorable and draws you into the tale of dragons and knights and good vs evil before turning the story on its head and making you realise that you care about the characters much more than you’d expected to.

How to Be Both won a ton of awards when it was published, and I’ve never read anything by Ali Smith before, so I figured it’d be a good one to start with (also the title sounded promisingly bisexual). I lent it to my mum who couldn’t get into it because it was ‘too postmodern’ which is a good description; it flicks suddenly between a time before and after the death of the protagonist’s mother, speech marks are eschewed entirely, and the final third of the book is (as far as I could tell) an entirely different story. There’s three full pages at the start of my copy of undiluted praise for the bold creative choices and innovation, so I think the problem is probably my traditional sensibilities (/me being kind of dumb??), but while I enjoyed the story of adolescent love and loss, the weird stuff didn’t really add anything for me. But there is both an incredibly sweet and real romantic friendship between the protagonist and her female best friend, and a strange relationship between the protagonist’s mother and another woman so there is actual wlw content! If anyone has recs for other Ali Smith books please let me know :)