12 ★ FT Weekend 9 November/10 November 2019T
his has been a year of
reading sequels, from
Margaret Atwood’sThe
Testaments o Elizabetht
Strout’sOlive, Again.
Nothing tests a reader’s fidelity more
than returning to a book, and a world,
that you once fully inhabited. A sequel
that doesn’t deliver is as disappointing
as meeting an old friend and reckoning
with the fact that a once-cherished
relationship has faded; a writer who
gets the sequel right gives you the
immeasurable pleasure of revisiting
a character you thought you’d never
get to hear from again.
But the most surprising and
delightful set of sequels I have read
this year came from the Indian writer
Perumal Murugan, whose huge
following among Tamil readers has
spilled over to others as more of his
novels are translated. Instead of a
single sequel, he has taken the unusual
step of writing a “double sequel”: two
books,A Lonely Harvest nda Trial By
Silence, written as independent novels
that offer strikingly different endings
to the same story.
In 2010, Perumal wrote one of his
most loved, popular and controversial
works.Madhorubhagan ntroducedi
Ponna and Kali, a couple bound
together by the rigours of the farming
life — and more deliciously bonded by
Kali’s desire for his wife, a love so open
and so possessive that it borders on
scandalous in 1940s Tamil Nadu.
By the novel’s end, their story had
darkened, and Perumal left the ending
ambiguous, with a hint that Kali might
be pushed to an act of suicide.
In 2013,Madhorubhagan asw
translated from Tamil into English by
Aniruddh Vasudevan asOne Part
Woman. Two years later, in 2015,
Perumal was viciously hounded by
rightwing groups. Ponna and Kali’s
childlessness is at the heart ofOne Part
Woman. Taunted for being barren,
Ponna, at her mother-in-law’s
suggestion, takes part in a religious
festival that allows a childless woman
to sleep with any man she chooses
because for one night that man is
taking on the role of the gods and,
if she conceives, her child will be
accepted as the gift of the gods.
In a series of orchestrated protests,
declaring that these passages had
offended religious sentiments,
rightwing parties and groupsforced
Perumal to quit his teaching job, fleeBooks
T
o enter into a world created
by Sarah Hall is to step into
a landscape that is feral and
alive. Nature — including
human nature — is not
always benign.
The stories inSudden Traveller, as with
Hall’s previous two collections,prod the
polarities between civility and animal
instinct. Danger stalks the hinterland,
and yet there is freedom to be found in
re-wilding. In “Orton”, a woman returns
to the site of the most memorable sexual
encounter of her youth to switch off the
heart implant that is keeping her alive
on “borrowed days”.
The opening sentence of the titular
story, shortlisted for the BBC National
Short Story Award 2018, takes no pris-
oners: “You breastfeed the baby in the
car, while your father and brother work
in the cemetery. They are clearing the
drains of leaves and silt, so your mother
can be buried.” Here we have it: life,
death, debris.
Hall, who herself had a child and lost
her mother in short succession, exter-
nalises the interior landscape of grief,pitting her protagonist against diluvial
downpours: “November storms have
brought more rain than the valley has
ever seen... The river has become a
lake; it has breached the banks, spanned
the valley’s sides. And still the uplands
weep.”
Reminiscent of her award-winning
story “Mrs Fox”, this collection’s open-
ing tale, “M”, features a modern meta-
morphosis. In “the hour between
prayers” a lawyer defending a women’s
shelter by day unzips “as if sutures are
being unstrung” to reveal a hybrid
winged creature within, “so evolved
and lethal it might free the earth’s hold
on the moon”. A superheroine for our
times, M circles the city offering
reprieve to women who have suffered
abuse by “resetting, if not restoring”
their bodies, gradually progressing to
taking vengeance on perpetrators.
“Who Pays?” also concerns women
who take action to protect themselves,
this time in the form of a fairy tale set in
a Turkish forest.
As the geographic settings vary, Hall
also explores internal terrain. In “The
Woman The Book Read”, a man con-
fronts is past when the daughter of ah
former girlfriend returns to his seaside
town in Turkey as a tourist. “After Ara
had left, everything had felt lesser, or
greater. The rain. The politics. Regret.
Abandonment seemed like a doorway
that became a corridor of doorways,
easy to pass through.” “The Grotesques”
follows the thoughts of a woman who
struggles with social conventions as she
prepares for a party and has an awk-
ward encounter with the town vagrant,
with dramatic after-effects.
The collection ends with “Live That
You May Live”, a nested narrativeSudden Traveller
by Sarah Hall
Faber £12.99, 144 pageschallenging the tales traditionally told
to girls. In a Guardian article describing
her writing day, Hall wrote that the
morning ritual with her young daugh-
ter includes a “pre-dawn literary anal-
ysis” involving “the alarming dearth of
female protagonists who solve their
own problems in children’s fiction”.
Here a mother crafts an alternative
bedtime story, in which a girl is also a
sudden traveller, escaping the confines
of the inherited canon — “she knew
that she was made of roads; she knew
that moving was her spirit”. The
mother comes to the realisation, how-
ever, that her daughter’s story is ulti-
mately her own to write: “She is not
mine. She is of what I cannot know.
Unmade. Ready.”
At a slim 144 pages, the seven stories
inSudden Traveller merit savouring
slowly: several of them reward reread-
ing. Hall’s prose is briny and sensual —
unsurprising, perhaps, from an author
who describes the process of writing as“physical, tactile almost”. Her lyricism
— “the sea is black, bladed, strung with
small lights” — reveals the influence of
James Salter, but it’s a voice, fierce and
unapologetic, uniquely her own.
Despite the accoladesfor her five
novels, including two Booker prize
nominations, Hall has said that she is
most proud of her short stories — “art
reduced into something more pure”.
Teetering on a precipice of menace,
the stories in this collection don’t seek
to offer easy answers, only some solace
in a shared human condition: “We are,
all of us, sudden travellers in the world,
blind, passing each other, reaching
out, missing, sometimes taking hold,”
Hall writes in “Sudden Traveller”.
“But... after the darkness, the loss,
the loneliness, someone is going to take
your hand and tell a story... The
story will feel so familiar to you. You
will begin to understand that those
who suffer, suffer the same. In this con-
dition, we are never alone.”Natural selection
Sarah Hall’s third story collection teeters on the precipice of menace as
it explores the gulf between civility and animal instinct. ByMia Levitin
Steve MorrisHall’s prose is briny
and sensual... her voice,
fierce and unapologetic,uniquely her own
The pleasure of
the double sequel
Nilanjana Roy
Reading the world
by Ruth Padel‘A new manner of part-writing, and, thank God, less lack of imagination than before.’
Beethoven, 1825Does being deaf break the chains?
Could he have written this otherwise?
Blue placard in a leafy street.
The ordinary trance of morning light
on flickering poplars windblown jade.
Bentwood chairs with metal legs. Pine desks.
Bound manuscripts and marbled covers.
I never believed I’d meet him here. Still less
that my fingers could touch his touch on the page.From ‘Beethoven Variations’ (published in January 2020 by Chatto & Windus, £12)The Poem
On Opening the Manuscript of a Late Quartet
in the Music Archive, Krakowhis hometown and renounce writing
itself for a few years. He found it hard
to return to fiction, and at first wrote
only poems, finally returning to writing
with the publication of another novel,
and these two sequels, in 2018.
If there’s one thing that Indian
writers in English envy those who write
in more rooted regional languages such
as Tamil, Bengali, Hindi or Gujarati, it
is the relationship these writers have
with their readers — often strong,
direct and very close.
AfterOne Part Womancame out in
2010, Perumal found that he was asked
the same question over and over by his
readers — was Kali alive or dead? He
had no intention of writing a sequel. As
he said in a recent interview with the
cultural commentator TM Krishna, “I
myself was not sure whether he [Kali]
was alive or not. Even I started to ask
myself the same questions.”
Trial By Silence eturns to Ponna andr
Kali’s relationship in one of these two
branched paths. Kali turns away from
suicide, but has to contend with his
own jealousy and possessiveness.A
Lonely Harvest hould be the sadder ofs
the two, taking the path where Kali
kills himself, but it might be the more
surprising. It becomes the entwined
story of three women: Ponna’s
mother-in-law Seerayi, Ponna herself,
and her mother Vallayi, trying to
rebuild their lives and withstand the
scrutiny of the village.
For India’s small, growing cosmos
of literary prizes, Perumal’s double
sequels presented an unusual problem
— how were they to be judged? The
jury for the recently established JCB
Prize for Literature clubbed both
novels together on their shortlist. The
jury for the slightly older DSC Prize for
South Asian Literature chose only one
novel of the two,A Lonely Harvest, for
their longlist.
But the pleasure of reading these
sequels lies in reading them together,
like twins with their own distinct
characters. It is so rare to be gifted this
experience by any author. A sequel is
inevitably an ending, and we are used
to the idea of only one ending. Perumal
suggests that our choices can shift in a
moment; a man can step towards his
doom, or be distracted and let the
thought fade, turn back to the world,
just as in life. Maybe more books
should have two endings, the one you
expect, and the one that jolts you in
another, more surprising direction.Back to the future on a strange planet
C
ontroversy surrounded this
year’s John W Campbell
Award for Best New Writer
when its recipient Jeannette
Ng, laurelled for her novel
Under the Pendulum Sun, gave an
acceptance speech branding the man
after whom the award was named a
“fascist”. She also blamed him “for set-
ting a tone of science fiction that
haunts this genre to this very day.
Stale. Sterile. Male. White.”
Campbell, who died in 1971, was for
many years the editor of the classic
pulp sci-fi magazine Astounding, and is
regarded as one of the genre’s god-
fathers. There is no doubt, however,
that he held racist, sexist and eugeni-
cist views that today are quite rightly
regarded as abhorrent. At any rate,
Ng’s blistering critique has resulted in
the award being renamed the Astound-
ing Award.
Correcting past injustices for the sake
of a better present is likewise at the heart
ofThe Future of Another Timeline
(Orbit £8.99), the second novel from
Annalee Newitz, founding editor of
influential sci-fi website io9. A collective
of LGBTQ time travellers from a dysto-
pian 2022 make small changes in his-
tory, known as “edits”, that cumu-
latively will bring about a fairer, less
oppressive society. Calling themselves
the Daughters of Harriet after the aboli-
tionist Harriet Tubman, they wage war
with the rabidly misogynistic Comstock-
ers, named after another prominent
19th-century American figure, anti-vice
crusader Anthony Comstock.
Thisplot strand interweaves with
another following1990s teenager Beth,
who is part of the riot grrl music scene
and struggles with abusive males, her
father in particular. The time travel
involves magic rocks — not a wormhole
or DeLorean in sight — and is one of the
more engaging aspects of this intricate,
earnest piece of Gen X wish- fulfilment.The challenge of repairing a damaged
world also rears its head inAlways
North(Unsung Stories £9.99) by Vicki
Jarrett. In 2025, software engineer Iso-
bel joins a team surveying the Arctic
seabed for oil deposits. As their ship
travels ever further north, they draw the
attention of a malign polar bear which,
the captain believes, is the same bear
that mauled him as a child. The journey
ends in disaster, and 20 years later, after
environmental catastrophe wrought by
melting ice caps has brought civilisation
to its knees, Isobel revisits her memo-
ries of the expedition to discover what
exactly went wrong.
Powerful and timely, Jarrett’s debut
novel blends eco-horror, mysticism and
post-apocalyptic catastrophe in a very
satisfying mix, the doominess leavened
by Isobel’s cheerily vulgar first-person
narration.
Global cataclysm strikes again in
Cixin Liu’sThe Supernova Era(Head of
Zeus £18.99). First published in its
author’s native China in 2003, but
drafted some 15 years before, it is now
appearing in English in the wake of
his hugely successfulRemembrance of
Earth’s Pasttrilogy — in particular, theHugo-winning first volumeThe Three
Body Problem 2015) — which has(
impressed, among other notables,
Barack Obama.
A wave of lethal neutrino radiation
from a distant supernova delivers a
death sentence for everyone on Earth
over the age of thirteen; the youthful
physiologies of preteens render
them immune. Before they die, the
adults pass on as much knowledge as
they can to the children, who then must
muddle through as best they can. In
China, collective effort brings harmony
and prosperity.
The grasshopper to China’s ant is
America, where innate belligerence and
a love of violent video games reinforce
the worst aspects of adolescence. Inter-
national tensions culminate in live-fire
war games in Antarctica, resulting in
half a million deaths.
All of this is related as though by a dis-
passionate historian, the narrative
interspersed with “found” documents
and transcripts. A chauvinistic subtext,
a lack of fleshed-out female characters,and some painfully stilted dialogue —
although it’s unclear whether this last is
the fault of the original novel or the
translation — all add up to a rather
resistible reading experience.
Yet another apocalyptic scenario
crops up in Dave Hutchinson’sThe
Return of the Incredible Exploding Man
(Solaris £7.99). Unemployed Scottish
journalist Alex Dolan takes a job writing
a book for plutocrat Stan Clayton about
Clayton’s pet project, a supercollider
which, it is hoped, will enable scientists
to plumb the secret of gravity. There’s
definitely something odd going on at the
site, and when Dolan is forced to turn
spy on behalf of MI6, his feelings of sus-
picion and paranoia grow.
It’s only after a long, slow build-up of
tension that the novel, in its third act,
leans into the B-movie-ness of its title.
An accident at the supercollider
bestows Alex with extraordinary pow-
ers, and at the same time creates a vil-
lainous nemesis for him, with the fate
of the world at stake. Essentially, this is
a sophisticated superhero origin story,
and while it’s witty and enjoyable
for most of its length, in the closing
passages it kicks up a gear to become
thrilling fun.
For light relief from all this mayhem
and calamity, there’sStrange Planet
(Wildfire £12.99), a collection of
Nathan W Pyle’s Instagram comic strips,
which have accrued millions of follow-
ers. Here, indefatigably polite and
mostly upbeat aliens navigate life’s com-
plexities. Their bemusement amuses,
but what really delights is their elabo-
rate yet bathetic terminology. Balloons
are “elastic breath traps”, toast is “a
twice heatblasted doughslice”, a smoke
detector is a “hotdanger screamer”, and
so on. The book offers pastel-coloured
balm for anyone who feels like they’re
trapped in a world that’s gone mad and
is teetering on the brink — which, let’s
face it, is most of us.By James Lovegrove
GENRE ROUND -UP
S C I E N C E
F I C T I O NAward-winning author Jeannette NgNOVEMBER 9 2019 Section:Weekend Time: 11/20197/ - 17:27 User:paul.gould Page Name:WKD12, Part,Page,Edition:WKD, 12, 1