*According to me
Before we start, because you probably won’t still be reading by the time I get to the end, I’d like to point out that these books, much like those in the previous entry in my series, are in no particular order. There is no single, all-conquering favourite, because that would be bloody mental.
A Farewell to Arms
Ernest Hemingway’s unforgettable novel about an American tenente serving in the ambulance corps of the Italian Army during the First World War and his love affair with an English nurse, Catherine Barkley, is a series of stylistic triumphs: life and death on the front line, passionate convalescence in Milan; the desperate retreat of the Italian army; the lovers’ escape to Switzerland at nightfall.
Its bleak ending is one reason why it lingers so long in the memory and was literally written while Hemingway’s then-wife was giving birth. Knowing that he was channelling his worst fears makes those final scenes all the more compelling, and yet Hemingway is understood to have written at least 47 different endings to the novel, which in itself is incredible. Pathetic fallacy plays a huge part in this story; the rain Catherine fears so much is almost its own character, companion to many of the more sorrowful scenes. A Farewell to Arms is beautiful and honest, sparse, sharp, stylish. Ultimately, it’s heartbreaking, but not without its humour throughout. Indeed, there are a few passages which read as though they could have come from Catch-22: "I have noticed that doctors who fail in the practice of medicine have a tendency to seek one another's company and aid in consultation. A doctor who cannot take out your appendix properly will recommend you to a doctor who will be unable to remove your tonsils with success. These were such doctors.”
The simplicity of the writing propels a haunting, beautiful work of literature, a tender love story hiding within an excoriating treatise on warfare. Not just Hemingway’s best book but one of the best books in the English language.
The Handmaid’s Tale
Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel set in a totalitarian America known as The Republic of Gilead, concerning Offred’s life as a handmaid in a new, terrifying world in which women’s rights are so limited by religious fanaticism that even their reproductive functions are under strict control.
“I almost gasp: he's said a forbidden word. Sterile. There is no such thing as a sterile man anymore, not officially. There are only women who are fruitful and women who are barren, that's the law.”
I’m giving this one the edge over 1984, on account of it being all the more chilling. Yep, it beats rats eating your face. In many ways, this classic work of feminist literature is not science fiction at all, since all of the political, religious and social trends imposed within the novel can be found throughout history in various parts of the real world.
If anything, it was a satire of America when it was published. Now, its warning against puritanism and the misuse of religion for political power seems more like a mirror held up against the more unsettling aspects of modern-day populism.
Like so much great literature, the real problems for our main protagonist, as the secret police begin to take an interest in her, stem from that old classic: falling in love.
Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. Don’t let the bastards grind you down.
Blindness
José Saramago took the idea ‘What would happen if we all went blind?’ and breathlessly ran with it. Authorities attempt to quarantine the unseeing in a disused mental hospital but can’t keep criminality at bay and, as the blindness spreads, one woman guides a gang of misfits through the plagued streets towards hope.
The Nobel laureate was categorically incapable of bad writing and his form of magic realism is a joy to read. The city in which the story is set has no name, neither do the characters beyond a descriptive appellation (The Old Man with the Black Eyepatch, The Doctor’s Wife, etc) and normal punctuation is shown the door. A complete breakdown of society told through the pen of a master.
H.G. Wells got there first with The Country of the Blind and John Wyndham told a similar story of societal chaos after a widespread blindness contagion in The Day of the Triffids and yet they didn’t write anywhere near as poetically about the human condition.
‘...we're so remote from the world that any day now, we shall no longer know who we are, or even remember our names, and besides, what use would names be to us, no dog recognises another dog or knows the others by the names they have been given, a dog is identified by its scent and that is how it identifies others, here we are like another breed of dogs, we know each other's bark or speech, as for the rest, features, colour of eyes or hair, they are of no importance, it is as if they did not exist…’
The Woman in Black
A modern ghost story told like a Gothic classic of old by Susan Hill. Arthur Kipps is challenged to tell a spooky tale on Christmas Eve, and recounts the tale of an old house on Nine Lives Causeway, cut off from the mainland at high tide and haunted by - spoiler alert - a woman in black.
Atmospheric and spine-tingling, the book ticks all the boxes early on: the flickering fireside; the rocking chair in the abandoned nursery; eerie, half-heard screams in the fog. You asked for a ghost story and you got one: Shirley Jackson and Henry James and all the 19th century trappings of style you can shake a maple branch at. The horror is understated, and is felt rather than seen, as it should be.
But the malevolence follows Arthur home, long after he’s left the causeway, and we recall, seeded early on in an opening scene we assumed was mere preamble, a very real spectre in his past.
This isn’t a genre-redefining novel. It did not sweep through the literary award season in the year of its publication. It is a creepy, tender story concerning isolation and mental health that stays with you long after you’ve finished it.
That final page. That damned final page.
“My story is almost done. There is only the last thing left to tell. And that I can scarcely bring myself to write about.”
The Road
Cormac McCarthy’s devastating fable about a father and his young son’s journey across a bleak landscape almost entirely devoid of life is not cheerful, but it is impossibly beautiful. We are never told the reasons for this post-apocalyptic world, but know its survivors are sick and hungry, stumbling through a land in which firestorms wash ‘cauterized terrains’ underneath a ‘banished sun’. The pair spend their time looking for food in a world depleted of resources, and avoiding becoming food themselves to other desperate scavengers on the road. It is a story of father-son love, and human survival. And the writing is phenomenal.
“He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. And somewhere, two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.”
Of all the books in this list, this one comes the closest to godliness in its prose, and all while describing hell on earth. The dark fragility of our existence is laid bare, our animalism, as our two heroes make their slow way amid a harrowing wasteland of humanity’s own doing towards the sea, but it’s a mesmerising and lyrical trek and every footstep deserves to be savoured. Stunning.
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