2025/128: A Memoir of my Former Self — Hilary Mantel

You can control and censor a child’s reading, but you can’t control her interpretations; no one can guess how a message that to adults seems banal or ridiculous or outmoded will alter itself and evolve inside the darkness of a child’s heart. [loc. 5001]

A selection of Mantel's short non-fiction, ranging from book reviews (originally published in the New York Review of Books) and film reviews (originally published in the Spectator), through articles about writing and reading, to a delightful review of perfumes and a piece about stationery. ('...comrades, the hard-spined notebook is death to free thought. Pocket-size or desk-size, it drives the narrative in one direction, one only, and its relentless linearity oppresses you, so you seal off your narrative options early.' [loc. 5349]... I, with my plethora of discbound notebooks, wholeheartedly agree.) 

Also, of course, quite a bit about the Tudors: a variety of pieces written during the long gestation, writing and publication of the trilogy beginning with Wolf Hall. This volume also contains the full text of her 2017 Reith Lectures, exploring the art, craft, possibilities and constraints of historical fiction: I confess I found her voice a little grating when I listened to the Lectures, but it's much mellower in my head as I read!

Mantel the reviewer takes no prisoners. She is acerbic, informed and precise. I'm not familiar with everything she reviewed, but appreciated her admiration of Annie Proulx's 'inarticulate characters' and her critique of Wild at Heart ('not a film you should recommend to the vicar'). More interesting for me were her thoughts about writing, and about reading. She hypothesises that she internalised saintly Cousin Helen, from What Katy Did, and delayed seeking medical advice because of Cousin Helen's dictums about never complaining, never showing your pain, making a virtue of immobility... I am certain that an impressionable child (as I was) can be damaged by their reaction to a book, however innocuous the book might seem to others.

Many of these essays are available online, but it's nice to have them collected, to dip into from time to time. I intend to reread some pieces at times when the writing-well seems empty, or poisoned, or inaccessible. "You have to keep shocking your psyche, or nothing happens in your writing – nothing charged, nothing enduring. It’s imaginary encounters with death that generate life on the page..." and later, "bad art and good art feel remarkably the same, while they’re in process".

2025/127: The Haunting of Hill House — Shirley Jackson

“I could say,” Eleanor put in, smiling, “‘All three of you are in my imagination; none of this is real.’”
“If I thought you could really believe that,” the doctor said gravely, “I would turn you out of Hill House this morning. You would be venturing far too close to the state of mind which would welcome the perils of Hill House with a kind of sisterly embrace.” [loc. 1870]

Reread, for comparison to A Haunting on the Hill: my original review from 2016 is here.

I'd forgotten a lot, of course. I'd forgotten about the vision of a long-ago picnic, and Theodora looking back and screaming. I'd forgotten about Mrs Montague, the self-proclaimed psychic who is the only person oblivious to the supernatural disturbances. ('“There’s a definite cold spot just outside the nursery door,” the doctor told his wife hopefully. “Yes, dear, very nice.”') I'd forgotten about flirtatious Luke, who will inherit Hill House... This would be such a different novel if we knew what the other characters were experiencing, thinking, feeling. Instead, we're trapped inside Eleanor's thoughts, and she is a liar and a fantasist who is desperate for somewhere to belong. Unfortunately, she has found it.

And I had forgotten the songs: Hill House does, in both novels, enjoy a song.

Eleanor turned and looked at the empty center of the room, where someone was walking and singing softly, and then she heard it clearly: Go walking through the valley, Go walking through the valley, Go walking through the valley, As we have done before ….

edit to add: who is doing the haunting? is it the house, or is it the visitors?

2025/126: A Haunting on the Hill — Elizabeth Hand

“If you’re scared, channel that into Tomasin.”
“He’s a demon. He doesn’t get scared.”
“So tap into that. You’re a demon in a big spooky house—you should feel right at home.”
“I do...That’s what scares me.” [p. 176]

This isn't exactly a sequel to The Haunting of Hill House: it's more of a tribute, with a rather different ambience. Instead of the tight third-person narrative of Eleanor, there's a first-person narrative from Holly Sherwin -- a never-quite-successful playwright working on a play about witches -- as well as third-person chapters from the perspective of Holly's girlfriend Nisa, a singer-songwriter; Amanda, an ageing actress with a murky past; and Stevie, Holly's best friend, who's acting in the play and doing the sound. Holly finds Hill House when she's on a weekend break with Nisa, and it seems the perfect place to rehearse and workshop her play -- despite the odd decor, the peculiar housekeeper, the knife-wielding neighbour... 'It felt like it was always the middle of the night, and not in a good way' [p. 198]

Gradually, the characters' flaws and failings are revealed, and tensions rise. The ambience isn't the brittle gaiety and flirtation of Jackson's original, but each of the characters experiences something strange, and each reveals a darker side. Perhaps it's the house ('demented', says Melissa the housekeeper), or the huge black hares (cue Nisa singing about hares on the mountain), or the deafening sounds that don't register on Stevie's recordings. Or perhaps it's the pressure of Holly's expectations, or the secrets that all of them are keeping.

I didn't find A Haunting on the Hill as unsettling as The Haunting of Hill House: perhaps because we know what everyone in the house (or, at least, the quartet of viewpoint characters) is thinking and feeling,  or perhaps because the setting is more modern and familiar. But I did like the way that Hand, like Jackson, never points the camera directly at the source of the unease, never tries to explain it. There are hints of the house's history going back to Eleanor, and further: deaths, suicides, a lost child, a poisoning. The novel's denouement is more explicitly horrific than Jackson's ending, more of an intrusion into the physical world. Paradoxically, this reduced the chill factor for me. But this time, at least, we get to see what happens afterwards.

2025/125: The Corn King and the Spring Queen — Naomi Mitchison

All I can say is that this is a very strange country, and that one has evidence of things occurring here which would certainly be against all the laws of Nature at home. [p. 412]

Reread, with perhaps a better understanding now of the Greek elements: I thought I'd read it quite recently, but it turns out that was in 2015 (review here).

I'd forgotten a great deal: just how murderous Erif and Tarrik are; the snake that protects Kleomenes; the death of Harn Der. And this time around, more interested in the Greek (and especially the Spartan) elements, I found Kleomenes' story fascinating. I don't think I'd noticed before that the pictures of Kleomenes' last days that Berris creates are foreshadowings of Christian imagery: 'the feast at the prison, the last eating together... three windows across the back of his picture. The King was in the centre, with Panteus beside him, leaning against his breast' recalls the Last Supper, and there's a young man on a colt riding through crowds, and a body on a stake with a cross-piece... Perhaps, in Mitchison's imagination, these pictures -- hidden away by slaves and helots -- were passed down as a kind of folk memory.

That's just one aspect of Mitchison's exploration of comparative religion. "Taking a living man and mixing him with pain and death — yes, mixing him—like a cook — and making a god," muses the dissolute Ptolemy IV Philopator, revelling in the death of Kleomenes. "I have made a god that way. A new form of god. Dionysos-Sabazios has shown himself again on one man, a torn man. Like Pentheus in the play." Erif feels a sisterly kinship with Isis, who is also a Year Queen. Tarrik, meanwhile, expects to be killed and eaten when his time is up: though perhaps, by the end of the novel, times have changed enough that the rituals will be kinder.

I was struck by this line in Mitchison's Introduction, written about sixty years after the novel's 1931 publication:

...my account of what was happening in Sparta or Athens or even Egypt, is all based on real history, but the view was moulded by what I—and many another person—was thinking in the Europe of those days, with Mussolini and his fascists in Italy and already the shadow of Hitler in Germany. [loc. 72]

2025/124: The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America — David Baron

It is an inspiring epic of human inventiveness. It is a cautionary tale of mass delusion. It is a drama of battling egos. Ultimately, though, it is a love story, an account of when we, the people of Earth, fell hard for another planet and projected our fantasies, desires and ambitions onto an alien world. [Introduction]

This is an account of Percival Lowell's obsession with the planet Mars, and its profound consequences for the human race. Following the observations of Schiaparelli -- who described a network of long straight lines on the planet, 'canali' (channels, but mistranslated as 'canals') -- Lowell, a wealthy businessman, published a number of books about his observations and his interpretation of them. He also founded the Lowell Observatory, and inspired a generation of scientists and science fiction authors.

The first part of the book, 'Century's End - 1876-1900', recounts Lowell's early life, and the context in which his astronomical work was received: his first books were published in the 1890s, in a period where science and technology were celebrated. Several reputable figures had asserted that life was not only possible but probable on other planets, and there was much discussion -- in parallel with the fashion for spiritualism -- about how to communicate with the inhabitants of our nearest neighbour. Nikola Tesla was convinced that his work in 'wireless telegraphy' (radio) would enable him to signal Mars.

In the second section, 'A New Civilization - 1901-1907', the sense of the limitless possibilities of the new century is strong. Mars became fashionable: everything from stage plays to dance tunes, advertising, and a plethora of stories in the popular press. (Meanwhile in London, Edward Maunder, an assistant at the Royal Observatory, conducted a study at the Royal Hospital School in Greenwich, showing that schoolboys perceived straight lines on images of Mars if seated at a certain distance from the pictures. Closer, and they could distinguish the lines and curves that made up those 'straight lines': further away and it was all a blur.) 

The third section, 'The Earthlings Respond - 1908-1916', describes the waning of popular enthusiasm for Lowell's ideas -- although he continued his lecture tours until his death in 1916, maintaining that "the difficulty in establishing the fact that Mars is inhabited lies not in the lack of intelligence on Mars, but rather the lack of it here." What he lacked in scientific rigour, he made up for in sheer stubborn belief.

Baron's epilogue, 'Children of Mars', celebrates Lowell's legacy. He suggests that the reason the American public were so ready to believe that Orson Welles' radio production of The War of the Worlds was real news was that many could remember all the newspaper reports about life on Mars. And, more importantly, 'intelligent eyes really had been watching human affairs keenly and closely': not aliens but children* who grew up hearing stories and theories about other worlds. A young man in Luxembourg was enthralled by Lowell's Mars: his name was Hugo Gernsback, and he is regarded as a key figure in the rise of science fiction as a genre. H P Lovecraft attended one of Lowell's lectures aged 16; H G Wells met Lowell and discussed Mars with him (this fact established by Baron's own research); and Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars featured canals, deserts and dry lakes, just as Lowell had suggested. Burroughs' Barsoom, in turn, inspired another generation of writers and scientists, including Carl Sagan, Ray Bradbury and Arthur C Clarke.

This was a great read, full of fascinating detail and copious illustrations. Baron's authorial voice is unobtrusive: his accounts of his research expeditions are interesting but very much secondary to the main narrative. There's a good bibliography and extensive references. And I did like his conclusion:

... I thought I had set out to tell a tale of human folly, about how easy it is to deceive ourselves into believing things simply because we wish them to be true... I discovered another, perhaps more powerful takeaway: Human imagination is a force so potent that it can change what is true. Thanks to Lowell's Martian fantasies that helped inspire the early space age, visiting the Red Planet has become a potentially realisable goal for today's children. [loc. 3031]

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK Publication Date is 26 AUG 2025.

* same thing?

2025/123: Drop Dead Sisters — Amelia Diane Coombs

"Should I be offended that the most you’ve ever agreed with me is over how to deal with a dead body?" [loc. 1421]

Remi works as a community moderator for a games company. She hasn't dated for a while, and she doesn't have many (any?) friends. At the opening of the novel, she's heading for a family reunion: her hippie parents are renewing their vows on their fortieth wedding anniversary, and Remi -- the odd one out, the introvert in a nest of extroverts -- is going to have to see her two elder sisters, Maeve and Eliana, for the first time in seven years. 'If our lives were a video game, we each adventured off on our own side quests nearly a decade ago and never returned to the main storyline.'

The microaggressions start almost as soon as the sisters are reunited, but soon they have something more important to worry about: a dead body. They're not sure who committed the crime, but their attempts to cover it up are foiled when the body disappears. Then they learn that there's a fugitive on the loose, and that their (rather flaky) parents have been doing drugs in a state park... Remi's nascent crush on a park ranger named Leo seems likely to be derailed before she can do more than swap numbers with him.

This was a quick fun read: I did not guess the final twists, and I liked the happy ending. However, I can't help feeling that the authorities' response to the body's eventual reappearance was anticlimactic and, to be honest, unprofessional.

2025/122: Of Wind and Wolves — J M Elliott

"... in this country, tombs are the only permanent thing we build. Only the dead have ceased their wandering -- their bodies have, at least." [loc. 2343]

The setting is Scythia -- here spelt Skythia -- in the fifth century BC. Araiti's father has betrothed her to the ageing king of the Skythians, Ariapeithes, in order to forge a lasting peace between their tribes. Araiti, fostered by her mother's Amazon tribe, has earnt her status among her father's people, the Bastarnai: she's a formidable horsewoman and has been trained in the arts of war. The Skythians recognise her for what she is, androktones -- man-killer -- and decree that she may not marry the king until she has killed an enemy in battle and taken his scalp. She's sent out with the warband, led by the king's son Aric, to patrol the marches.

At first shunned by the Skythian warriors, Araiti gradually makes a place for herself, and revels in the freedom that few women have. She manages to conceal her 'spells', which seem to be epileptic fits, and gains respect for her wise counsel and her courage. She despises most women (it's mutual) and can't understand why Skythian women don't ride or fight -- as apparently they used to do. Creeping Hellenisation is changing their world, with Greek colonies springing up where they shouldn't be, and Aric's brother Skyles making deals with Hellenic traders.

The author is an archaeologist and a horse-trainer, and both these skills have coloured her narrative. I was fascinated by Araiti's descent into a plundered tomb, and more generally by the wealth of cultural detail.  (Herodotus is cited as a source: Ariapeithes and Skyles are historical characters.) And the horses are more vivid characters than some of the humans... 

There's a romantic element to the novel, but it's also an engaging piece of historical fiction. I did find some of the dialogue too colloquial ('What's that supposed to mean?') and some of the prose a little florid, but I enjoyed Of Wind and Wolves enough to be keen to read the second in the Steppe Saga.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK Publication Date is 01 SEP 2025.