book-review

Angela Carter (1984 [2006] Nights at the Circus.

Angel Carter’s Nights at the Circus explodes on the page in the form of six-foot-two, eyes of blue, fourteen stone Fevvers, a feminist icon, who has wings and really can fly. Or so it seems, she’s an aerialiste that needs no high wire. The high-flying star of Colonel Kearney’s circus—a fool and his money are easily parted; never give a mug a break—courted by Royalty, The Prince of Wales, painted by Toulouse Lautrec. She’s the toast of Paris, of Berlin, of Europe. Her tour will take her from smoke-filled London of 1899 to the beginning of a new century, and to dazzle St Petersburg and onto the cold wastes of Siberia.

Magical Realism hadn’t been invented. American reporter Jack Walser finds himself trapped in her London dressing room after another wildly successful show. He plans to include her in a series of stories about the great humbugs of Europe, but the questions he asks isn’t the questions she answers. Her constant companion, Lizzie, is also an unsettling presence. He’s befuddled and intoxicated in more ways than he knows.

‘Lor’ love you sir! Fevvers sang out in a voice that clanged like dustbin lids. ‘As to my place of birth, why I first saw light of day in smoky old London, didn’t I! Not billed “the Cockney Venus”, for nothing sir, though they could just as well ‘ave called me “Helen of the High Wire”, due to the unusual circumstances in which I came ashore—for I never docked via what you might call normal channels, sir, oh, dear me, no, just like Helen of Troy was hatched.

Hatched out of a bloody great egg, while Bow Bells rang, as ever is.’    

Angela Carter’s short-story, Lizzie’s Tiger, begins in a quieter way. ‘When the circus came to town, and Lizzie saw the tiger, they were living on Ferry Street, in a very poor way’.

Nights at the Circus has tigers and Princess and a strongman rapist but ever stronger women, who tend to stick together. After all, Fevvers (a nickname derived from the feathers that sprouted on her back) was raised in a brothel and then adopted. Lizzie breastfed her, but she had a multitude of mothers who were well aware of what men were like in close quarters.

Lizzie had to step down from her harlotry and become a housekeeper because she asked too many awkward questions as Angela Carter does of her readers. ‘What is your name?’ ‘Have you a soul?’ ‘Can you love?’

With subcategories that tend to be didactic. Attitudes to ‘white slave trade?’; ‘rights and wrongs of women?; ‘universal suffrage?’; ‘the Irish question?’; ‘the Indian question?’; ‘republicanism?’; ‘syndicalism?’; ‘abolition of the House of Lords?’.

‘Nothing can come from nothing?’ And the question that Othello dare not ask adds a learned Shakespearian tone to what is in essence a love story as Walser goes incognito and joins the circus as a clown and travel to St Petersburg to find out the real story about Fevvers.

Essence is a theme. ‘Singularity,’ where gravity become strong enough to bend spacetime, where physics breaks down, but this is what Lizzie urges her not-so-little Fevvers to avoid, to keep her essence, to keep her singularity and not become the property of a man, any man, including the clown Walser. To keep her wings. To keep her singularity so that she can be who she is and fly and be herself.

An explosion of colour and depth, with an emphatic understanding of what it means to be poor. (The rich tend to be villains.) Well worth reading. I haven’t captured the essence. I’ll be reading more of Angela Carter’s works.

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Vasily Grossman (2010) The Road. Translated from the Russian by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler.

I haven’t read Vasily Grossman’s best-known novel, Life and Fate. It took around twenty years after his death for Soviet authorities to sanction its publication in the 1980s. His stature as one of the Great Russian writers seemed confirmed. But he was born 12th December 1905 in the village of Berdichev to a Jewish family, which is a Ukrainian town. His mother and family and the large Jewish population of over 41 000 of an aggregate population of around 54 000 were murdered by the Nazis outside their town. ‘Shoah with a gun’, Grossman termed it.

Ironically, Grossman would surely have followed the same fate by the Soviet authorities he served. Stalin’s Jewish purge after the so-called doctor’s plot was on its second wave, which would have swept him away if Stalin hadn’t died.

His article, The Hell of Treblinka, he termed ‘Shoah by gas’ was approved by Soviet authorities. He also wrote about the siege at Stalingrad being the turning point of The Great Patriotic War.  

His highly acclaimed short fiction, such as In the Town of Berdichev was admired by other Soviet writers such as Isaac Babel. And Babel appears in a later story, Mama. The latter was a kind of warning, not to get too close to those in power who are themselves purged as Babel was by the forerunners to the NKVD.

I was largely unmoved by Grossman’s fiction. I know I was meant to feel some kind of awe. The historical weight also added a kind of taken-for-granted consensus that this was great fiction. I get it that. I’m meant to like stories and plays like Anton Chekov’s The Lady and the Dog and The Cherry Orchard, but really they just bore me like something you had to revise for some exam I’ll never pass. Life is more than that as Grossman understood.

I prefer his essays and reports. The Hell of Treblinka, based on first-hand experience and second-hand reports to him from those that had been in Hell, was ahead of its time. It told how it is and how easily the world slipped into Fascism. For the moron’s moron Trump and his supporters, it sounds a familiar clarion call to hate and despise others based on eugenics and geography.

People became unpeopled. In the conveyor belt of Treblinka, they were robbed of citizenship, their home and their freedom. They were transported to a wilderness. Penned and squeezed into a station and robbed of their belongings, papers and photographs of loved ones. They were stripped naked and shaved. No one was sure what human hair was harvested for, but psychologically, it pushed them into compliance. Lined up in rows of five. Surrounded by barbed wire on ‘The Road of No Return’ with the black uniform of SS guards on one side and grey Wachmanner conscripts on the other. They were beaten with the butts of machine guns and rubber hoses. Alsatian dogs trained to attack the genitals were released. For the guards this was just another day. 20 000 to 60 000 unpeople were piling up and carriages shunted down the tracks were waiting to be brought for processing into the station. Schneller. Schneller.  

Grossman suggests that Stalingrad did not change the way—mostly—Jews were murdered, but how they processed the raw material, their bodies. Himmler himself visited Treblinka and had a look at the hundreds of thousands of rotting corpses covered over in pits. He ordered that they should be exhumed and burned. Germany and Germans who had participated in and committed these atrocities were no longer sure they would not be held to account. The un-people might be given a voice. Himmler’s strategy was to burn the evidence.

Some monsters were more monstrous than others. SS Sepp, for example, delighted in murdering small children.

‘Evidently endowed with unusual strength, it would suddenly snatch a child out of the crowd, swing him or her about like a cudgel and then either smash their head against the ground or simply tear them in half.’

Others carried sabres and whips and heavy gas piping. They would fling children still alive to roast on death pits.

‘We hear of women trying to hide little babies in heaps of blankets and trying to shield them with their own bodies.’

Ironically, as an atheist, who disavowed his Jewish heritage, Grossman finds consolation in the image of hope in humanity of The Sistine Madonna. He avows it shows, although tortured and crucified, ‘what is human in him continued to exist’.

I hope it continues to exist in us, but I get less sure. Amen. Read on.    

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Deborah Levy (2016) Hot Milk

Sophie Papastargiadis, aged 25, and her mother, Rose, aged 64, are in Almeria, Southern Spain. A desert where immigrants work long hours in greenhouses at well over one-hundred degree Celsius heat and in humid conditions to produce tomatoes for stores in Europe. They are not tourist. They have rented a small beach-front property. Rose has re-mortgaged her London house to attend the Gomez clinic in the hope of a cure that has left her unable to walk. Sophie is her legs.

Sophie is the narrator. She has given up studying for an Phd in Anthropology to become her mother’s carer. She is making a study of her mother’s illness     

‘History is the dark magician inside us, tearing at our liver.’

Rose’s medical history is the art of clinging to belief and disbelief. Like Carl Sagan’s baloney test about the ‘fire breathing dragon in my garage’, her symptoms are tested by Dr Gomez, but for every physical test, Rose offers an alternative view of why it hasn’t worked. She clings to her illness. Her daughter’s part of the fallout.

A Greek tragedy, like her marriage was, but with hints of matricide and rebellion.  

Dr Gomez seems like a charlatan. A purveyor of false beliefs and miracle cures. Yet, he warns Sophie not to begin limping after her mother. He tells her mother’s symptoms are ‘spectral, like a ghost, they come and go. There are no physiological symptoms’.

Rose depends on Sophie. Sophie has become dependent on her mother. An unvirtuous circle in the hellish heat of the Spanish sun in which something has got to give. Read on.

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Ewan Lawrie (2024) Bronte’s Inferno.

Ewan Lawrie (2024) Bronte’s Inferno.

Writers create versions of themselves on the page. Ewan Lawrie is a better version of myself on ABCtales. I read Bronte’s Inferno in one go. I couldn’t decide whether Bronte’s Inferno with a veiled reference to the Bronte sisters and the mystical worlds they created with their brother was also a satirical play on the great English novel. Or a pastiche of the great Russian and Soviet writer, who was actually from Ukraine, Mikhail Bulgakov and his satirical take on 1930s Stalinism, with a bit of help from the devil. Certainly the devil is here, Editor-in-Chief, offering the narrator a contract many of us writers would sign, sight unseen, promising fifteen seconds of fame (it used to be 15 minutes, but post Andy Warhol has since been scaled back). We also have the overly familiar black cat with an unwholesome liking for hard booze. Charon, ferryman of the underworld, provides a Rolls Royce and later a more inauspicious car to take our narrator to sign the contract which will end his life as he knows it. Charon is a woman, a mishmash of Hella the witch and Suzi Quatro who can pick up a knucklehead with one hand and show him ‘devil great drive’, especially in a shitty London pub.  

Ewan Lawrie’s Gibbous House trilogies are perhaps his best-known works, despite largely falling off the end of the world of publishing and ignored. A feeling many of us know too well. The plotting of the Master and Margarita injects a bit of whimsy, a bit of magic into Bronte’s Inferno. Not the Harry Potter kind, but perhaps more E. L. Doctorow’s dictum: ‘Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go’.  

The parallels are legion. Master (as in Margarita) is an unknown Ukrainian writer. His novel about another writer, Pontius Pilate. His mea culpa about his limited understanding and meetings with Jesus Christ isn’t panned, directly. Worse, his manuscript is rejected, largely sight unseen. He is locked up in the loony bin. The best place for any writers that has a messianic complex and believes they can make a living from writing.

The world-weary narrator of Bronte’s Inferno feeds on the same reality and displacement. Locked in a life, before his house burns down of a familiar routine of nothingness. To paraphrase, Victor Hugo, ‘Worlds trapped in a person’ who is of no interest to others. He finds enough energy to castigate his readers for failing to have noticed Moffatt’s triple murders and identity theft on the wrong side of the Atlantic in a place I once visited. Pay attention, the narrator of Bronte’s Inferno reminds readers, like a sharp-beaked teacher.  

  Devils remain who they are, no matter the dishonourific titles of Editor-in-Chief, or the appearance of an uncertain humanity. Woland magics a grand ball in Moscow in which the living meet with the dead. Writing confronts questions of identity, especially when ghost-writing celebrity non-fiction. The Editor-in-Chief has the final say. What way would you go? Read on. Write on.

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Sebastian Barry (2009) The Secret Scripture.

You should never step into the book you’ve read before (or something like that). Sebastian Barry is a terrific writer. This book won the Costa Book of the Year 2008. The Secret Scripture is in many ways the story of Ireland after the Famine, with a centurion Roseanne McNulty providing the handwritten shape of her life played out against the Civil War years in Ireland and the world wars that also came to Sligo.

Beginnings: Roseanne’s Testimony of Herself (Patient, Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital 1957—)

Roseanne’s testimony of herself is a narrative story of her girlhood and young adult life before she was incarcerated in Sligo’s Lunatic Asylum. The question of why she is there is implicit in her writing. But there is another narrative interbody with it. This comes from the psychiatrist who oversees her care, Dr Grene. The old hospital is closing. He is nearing retirement. In trying to decide about where Rosanne should go, the rights and wrongs of what has been done to her, he also has to map out the shape of his faltering marriage and what to do with his own life. One lies on and relies on the other. Judgement is dependent on knowing what you know and what you don’t know.

‘…it wasn’t so much whether she’d written the truth about herself or told the truth, or believed what she wrote or said was true, or even whether they were true things in themselves. The important thing seemed to me that the person who wrote and spoke was admirable, living and complete…from a psychiatric point of view I had totally failed to ‘help’ her to, to prise open the locked lids of the past…I preferred Roseann’s untruth to Fr Gaunt’s truth, because the former radiated health.’

Father Gaunt haunts Roseanne’s life as priests haunted Ireland. Roseanne was immediately suspect for being female. For priests such as Father Gaunt, even the Virgin Mary would have been suspect unless the Lord Jesus vouched for her. Roseanne was also suspect because she was extraordinarily beautiful. The kind of beauty that led men to temptation. Father Gaunt’s solution to marry a sixteen-year-old girl to a widower three times her age, had the merit of taking her out of circulation. And since she was Protestant destined for Hell, making her a follower not only of her husband, but the one true church and saving her soul.

Roseanne proved to be not as pliable material as Father Gaunt hoped. Her extraordinary story is not of failure, but of high spirits. A different kind of beauty. I can never remember what I wrote the last time, so I’ll reiterate it here, the ending was too chocolate-book for my liking. But this is a great story. Well worth the reading or re-reading. Read on.

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Beastie and The Psychic Fairy Queen.

I’d an online meeting yesterday with The Psychic Fairy Queen, Jan Murphy. We share the same publishers. I suppose in a world in which there are synchronicities, Spellbound would publish The Psychic Fairy Queen. I’m just the smelly mate that tagged alone by coincidence, even though there is no such thing as coincidences. If by coincidence you’re reading this then you’ve probably read my book Beastie.

That’s a gently nudge. Yes, I’ve read a little about nudge theory too. I’d read The Psychic Fairy Queen when it was first published on 19th December 2024. My book Beastie hit the shelves almost a month later (and if you’ve forgotten to leave a review, I won’t mention nudging anymore and will show up at your doorstep).

Jan and I or Jack and Jan, which has a nice ring to it, were talking about marketing. Before we got down to book business, I did what everybody else does—and I apologised, because I just had to do it, like a kid asking for a sweetie—I asked her to read me. Tell me something fabulous. Enlighten me with something that I didn’t even know. Tell me something that would have Jesus turning to God the Father and saying, ‘I didnae know that either. Where’s the Holy Ghost when we need him and I’ll ask him?’

She did tell me something fabulous. Something that will change your life. But I can only share it if you offer up—in my writer friend Sooz’s language, proof of purchase and an a Amazon review.

Jan had the same symbol, sacred geometry that is on the cover of her book, hanging on her wall behind her head. I could describe it, but it would be easier if you haven’t already bought her book to do so.

We both faced the same problem. A common problem for booksellers, worldwide. The Weathergirls got it.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5aZJBLAu1E

For the Weathergirls the street was the place to go. Instead of men, it’s raining books. Every five seconds a book is published by Amazon. In Scandinavian countries such as Norway, every second person has published at least one book. Those unpublished are regarded as illiterate or worse, English or American. This was before COVID, when they had more time and even more books were published, and just after the election of the moron’s moron Trump, for the first and last time, so Scandinavian attitudes may have hardened since then.

Jan did chastise me a bit for not fully believing that my book would get taken up into the ether and land the coveted Number one, New York Times’ Bestseller List. In her world, if you don’t believe, you don’t get. In my world, our parallel worlds, you don’t get, and you get kicked for not getting. But I’m always happy to split the difference. I’ll kick anybody to sell another book.

What Jan has done is pay for advertising on Amazon for her book. Algorithms rule the world. That is one way in which she can get bounce on her local sales (which have been good). What it means is paying homage, economic rent, to the handful of richest men in the world.

I, of course, would do the same. It would allow me to tell the story of how Jeff Bezos once followed me on Twitter. How I’d both Hillary and Bill Clinton in my feed. Before I was found out as a charlatan and not even a billionaire. Of course, I was unTwittered (that was before it was the mighty falling and failing into X).

Jan had tens of thousands of likes and hits on her book in India. India is the most populous region in the world. A Hindu culture. She might well be onto something here. But neither of us were sure how that translated into sales.

I’m pretty unfussed about the graph on my Amazon page when it jerks up and down like the Dow Jones Index, which, in general terms, means I’ve sold a book, or perhaps two. I’m looking for trends. When it starts plummeting usually, it’s the death star.

I know also that TikTok (which is for those much younger than Jan or me) can still nudge book sales in the way Twitter used to. I joined TikTok yesterday and watched all the videos and listened to the bumf, so I know how #BookTok works. I’ll start posting and mess about and see if it influences sales.

I’ll get back to Jan and ask her how Amazon is working for her book. If it works for her, I’ll jump in and start giving one of the richest men in the world economic rent. Nothing comes from nothing, Shakespeare, King Lear and all those crazy Trumpian right-wingers keep reminding us.

If #BookTok works for me, I’ll show her how to do it. Invite her to jump right in. We’re collaborators on a small planet that keeps spinning and will continue doing so, even when we step off it. I’ve got another couple of novel-sized stories I should be working on. One I should be starting. Marketing is such a joyless trudge. We’re not looking for recognition, just movement in the right direction. We’ve split the world in half. She gets Amazon. I get the Chinese whispers of TikTok. We’ve brought two worlds together. Game on. Read on.

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Joan Didion (2005) The Year of Magical Thinking.

The Year of Magical Thinking has been an international bestseller, been reprinted over twenty times and is perhaps the best-known of her books. The subject she specialises in is death, which we’re all familiar with, but nobody seems to want to talk or write about it.

In Duncan Williamson’s short story Death in a Nut, Jack (no relation) lived with his mother in a cottage by the shoreside (Williamson was born in a tent on the shores of Loch Fyne). His mother won’t drink her morning tea. She tells her son that Death will come for her that day. Sure enough, Death appears as an old man with a shining scythe on his back. He asks Jack for directions to the cottage they live in. You can guess what happens next.

‘Go to the literature,’ Joan Didion tells us. ‘I’ve been a writer all my life.’

Screenplays, in particular, like The Panic in Needle Park, start with the status-quo. That’s the set-up.

Quintana, the beautiful child Joan Didion and her husband, John Murray, adopted when she was three-days old admitted to the sixth-floor ICU at Beth Israel Hospital, New York, 25th December 2003. We know from Didion’s subsequent memoir, Blue Nights, Quintana doesn’t make it. Which is a nice way of saying she dies.  

John, her husband, also dies on the 30th December 2003 (Death in a Nut, book 1). He has a heart-attack. The kind doctor friends of the family called ‘widow makers’. When the paramedics came, they performed a theatre of dance. Shocking him back to life and cutting his chest open. He was already dead. It was just a matter of putting him on the gurney. Wheeling him away and pronouncing his dead body, dead on arrival. Didion recognises this sad truth later, when she’s more herself.

Just because her husband of 40 years was dead didn’t mean that they’d stopped bickering. She called it the void. ‘There is no real sense of the meaning of the word “dead” when applied to someone who was alive just days ago.’

‘Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant.’

This is Didion’s refrain from Magical Thinking. Limbo was for the living. She was reminded of how, before John died, he had complained about wasting time (writing time is precious) on writing a piece about Natalie Wood. Yet she can’t seem to think or do. Her failure is not just that of a widow but also a writer.

A writer’s job is to remember. When she sits down and begins her outline of what happened to her on 4th October 2004, she was doing her job. Making sense of the world. Her habit of mind had changed from grief to mourning. Greif puts death in the nut. Mourning lets death washes back to shore and unfold oneself, stand upright with his (or her) sickle. Grief is passive and past tense. Mourning is always present.

‘Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.’ Read on.

Notes.

1. The Ordinary

2 The Nature of Grief

3. Mourning Ourselves (plural)

4. Letting Go

“I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.” But eventually, we must release them. Letting go doesn’t diminish our love; it allows us to move forward while honoring their memory.

5. The Power of Shared Knowledge

“Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information is control.”

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Paul Lynch (2023) Prophet Song

Paul Lynch (2023) Prophet Song.

Writers are told, never start with the weather. Paul Lynch starts with the weather in his debut novel, Red Sky in the Morning. Prophet Song, Lynch’s latest award-winning novel, starts with the night weather and a knocking on the door.

‘The night has come and she has not heard the knocking, standing at the window, looking out at the garden. How the dark gathers without sound the cherry trees. It gathers the last of the leaves and the leaves do not resist the dark but accept the dark in whispers.’

Long convoluted sentences that don’t make sense yet they do. A writer’s job is make things worse for his or her characters.

Mother Courage, Ellish Stack has a Phd and a good job. Her dad, Simon, was a scientist too, but her mother is dead, and he’s paranoid, and in the early stages of dementia. Larry, her husband works for the teacher’s union. They’re respectfully upper-middle class and their eldest son is in line to become that icon of respectability—he has a university place to study medicine. His future is set. She has three other children, including baby, Ben. 

The knocking on the window is their Kristallnacht. They are not Jews. But Larry Stack as a trade-unionist is an enemy of the people. Two officers from the Irish Government’s newly formed GNSB have come to question him. Have come to warn his family. This will be your fate if you oppose us. In the name of freedom, they’re asking them to give up their freedom of thought and assembly, freedom of the press and mass media. It’s a Trumpian scenario we’re all familiar with.

‘The world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another, and the end of the world is always a local event. It comes to your country, visits your town, knocks on the door of your house, and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore.’

Prophecy comes from the prayer-book of it couldn’t happen to us. Inevitably it does. Germany, Chile, Spain and Ireland itself had their ‘Disappeared’. Ellish refuses to believe that Larry is gone. Disappeared.

The Irish Government dictatorship will somehow see sense. Suspend the Emergency Powers and the curfews and the rounding up of enemies of the people. Her son, Mark, the doctor-to-be will not be drafted into the militia and fascist army of the governing forces. The logic of inevitably and disbelief creates a toxic fatalism.

‘We were offered visas to Australia, but we turned them down. How could we have known what was going to happen? Leaving everything behind was impossible.’

The impossible is always impossible until it becomes possible. Prophet Song seems prescient. ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ An epigram attributed to the philosopher and essayist George Santayana. It is often paraphrased as ‘Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.’

Santayana first used this expression in his work ‘The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress,’ which was published in 1905. Mother Courage, the heroine in the novel 2023 by Ellish Stack, illustrates that not much progress has been made. We wait to bear witness to see if the moron’s moron Trump will be re-elected President. Prophet Song may well follow this playbook in American society. Hyperbole? I hope so.

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Rebecca F. Kuang (2023) Yellowface.

Yellowface wowed me and as a reader (and sometimes writer) I’m not easily wowed. It offers both an insider and outsider account of the publishing industry masquerading as satire. Everyone that had hoped to have something published by the big four publishing companies, get an agent, or somehow get something published online or in print, should read Yellowface.

The setup is simple. Imagine Jesus was hanging about Galilee. Judas comes visiting and notices a manuscript that looks very much like Aramaic notation in Jesus’s copperplate handwriting. He makes off with it, knowing they’ll crucify him for it when he brings it out as his own Biblical book and call it Apocryphal.

‘The night I watch Athena Liu die, we’re celebrating her deal with Netflix.’   

That’s a first line to die for. But there’s still another 319 pages to fill. I was discussing book theft or plagiarism with another writing buddy on ABCtales. Mark’s latest book, I told him, sounded remarkably similar to mine. I claimed ownership on the basis I was here first. Since neither of us are likely to sell over ten books in our lifetime, there’s lots of room for saving grace. But we both agreed if the devil came up behind us and told us we’d be an international number 1, New York Times Best Seller and not need to worry about cash again—if we stole our fellow scribbler’s manuscript—we’d jump at the chance. Of course we would. The only question would be if we could use smartphones to sign our contracts with the devil or would we need to use the old-fashioned cloak and dagger and signed in blood with an agreement date of when to collect out soul?

June Hayward knows what it’s like. ‘Every writer I know feels this way about someone else. Writing is such a solitary activity. You have no assurance that what you’re creating has any value, and any indication that you’re behind in the rat race sends you spiraling into the pits of despair. Keep your eyes on your own paper, they say. But that’s hard to do when everyone else’s papers are flapping constantly in your face.’

Narrator, June Hayward (Song) is an unknown writer. Her Yaley friend Athena Liu is on a different stratosphere when they move to New York. ‘It’s so hard for white writers to catch a break these days,’

June’s worldview comes right out of the Trump’s handbook of cultural malapropisms and cultural appropriation of grievances. The Great Replacement theory, also known as the white genocide conspiracy theory, posits that there is a deliberate plot (or conspiracy) to replace white populations in predominantly white countries with non-white immigrants, leading to the extinction of white culture and identity. The theory has its roots in far-right ideologies and has been propagated by various white supremacist groups and individuals.

 ‘Reading lets us live in someone else’s shoes. Literature builds bridges; it makes our world larger, not smaller.’

No surprise that Trump claimed to not read books while claiming to have written one (The Art of the Deal).

This tongue-in-cheek references are more feelings than fact mapped by Rebecca F.Kuang’s narrator June and feed her belief that she—and not her literary work—is being discriminated again. She is not part of the quota system.

For this belief to be true, she has to suppress another belief, which she also knows to be true. White, middle-class writers have dominated the publishing industry. They have had and continue to have more opportunities to publish their work than writers of colour.

June Hayward changes her name to June Song (a middle name handed down by a then hippy mom). In ‘The Last Front’ she writes outside her cultural niche about an indentured Chinese Labour Battalion in the first world war she can straddle two belief systems. But the centre cannot hold being Song, but not truly Asian. Like Al Jolson blacking up and singing about ‘Alabammy’ and ‘Mammy’.   

‘This industry is built on silencing us, stomping us into the ground, and hurling money at white people to produce racist stereotypes of us’ she is told by her Asian nemesis, Candice.

She’s on the wrong side, because she’s no longer able to write, which, as any writer knows, is a different circle of hell. ‘Writing is the closest thing we have to real magic’ is what her life had been about.

Her persona appropriated and aligned with the perspectives of snowflakes or Asian backlash (choose your silo).

A whydunnit combined with old-fashioned morality tales which crawl up inside the publishing industry and readily show its Janus face. A satirical expose of class and racism in the publishing industry and online literary spaces. Read on.

  • 😈 “Unleash the Beastie! https://bit.ly/bannkie
  •  📚 Share the Magic, Share the Page! 🌟 #BeastieNovel #BookBuzz” 😈

📚 Beastie and Robert Burns: A Literary Journey 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

💬 #Beastie #Scotland #Novel #Literature #Bookworm #GrittyFiction

I’d a bit of a problem with my computer. So I apologise for not replying sooner to any queries or to thank you for buying my book. And sharing links. That is so important because it affects the algorithms. As we know they rule the world and we just do the sweeping up for Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and his ilk (but don’t tell them I said that).

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Robert Burns: Scotland’s Poetic Genius 🌹

I talked to Avä Whyte a journalist on the Clydebank Post about my book. Haggis and Burns supper day. You can let me know if read anything about the book in our local paper.

Beastie. The title of the book comes from To a Mouse, perhaps Burns’ best-known poem. Supposedly written, November 1785, after ploughing a field. And no, I wasn’t there. I’m not that  old.

‘Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie.’

💬 #LiteraryJourney #ScottishHeritage #BookLove #PoetryInspiration #CulturalLegacy

 The poet’s address is to a mouse. In my book, Beastie (link below), it’s a teenager, Chaz Sweeney’s victims.

Both To a Mouse and Beastie get up close and personal. Tell us about the unreliability of the world. A field in Ayrshire—around Dumfries—was Burns’ stomping ground. We find the cruel coulter of history, which ploughs and seeds, closer to home in a place we know well, Dalmuir.  

Madness and storm which blow across heath and fields in King Lear. Burns firmly planted his feet in Scottish soil, in what W. B. Yeats called the ‘desolation of reality’. Scotland’s bard employs not the language of dread, but the tenderness of common speech to invoke warmth and fellow feeling for our fellow animal. Indeed, envy and mourning of lost innocence in a way that reminds us of our own childhood, when a wee boy or lassies rips off Christmas paper.  

A shared joy: ‘The present only toucheth thee’.   

Do me a wee favour and share the joy—and share this post. It doesn’t matter if you’ve done it before. It helps me reach out in a way I’m not capable alone. In a way we’re not capable alone in blasted heath or Scottish field.

😈 “Unleash the Beastie! https://bit.ly/bannkie

 📚 Share the Magic, Share the Page! 🌟 #BeastieNovel #BookBuzz” 😈