10 ★ FT Weekend 19 October/20 October 2019W
e can only imagine
Cynan Jones’s delight on
discovering the word
“stillicide”. With its evo-
cation of stagnancy and
death, it’s a perfect title for the poet lau-
reate of taciturn men battling nature
and themselves. In fact its meaning is
more mundane: stillicide is simply the
dripping of water, but it’s apt for a novel
where water is both central and absent.
The setting is a future Britain: water is
scarce, and as such is a focal point for
conflict. Pipelines have been bombed by
terrorists, so water is supplied to a major
city — presumably London — by train
(“ten million gallons... at two hundred
miles an hour”), protected bymarks-
men onboard and along the tracks.
Another relief plan is under way, to
supply fresh water from an iceberg
towed into the city. “They’re breaking
from the ice cap anyway. Why let them
melt into the sea?” But the creation of
this “Ice Dock” will need “a gash cut
through the city to steer the iceberg
through” and the displacement of thou-
sands of families into repurposed ship-
ping containers — a policy that is, to put
it one way, politically difficult.
These are the plates Jones sets spin-
ning, telling the storyfrom different
viewpoints. Among them are a sniper onthe Water Train, his dying partner, a
worker building the Ice Dock, a govern-
ment official defending its plans to the
press, a journalist covering the story,
and his wife on the brink of an affair.
The variety of voices means that read-
ing this novel is a less intense experience
than Jones’s last two books,The Dig nda
Cove, butStillicidewill never be mistaken
for a comedy. The tone is set by the
opening line where Branner, the Water
Train marksman, shoots asuspect.
“The boy’s hand opened and closed as if
he reached for a glass of water but it was
just the nerves dying through his body.”
So the setting is sombre, the world is
suffering, but the stuff of life — desires,
rivalries, plans made and set aside —
goes on. “Dystopia,” says one character,
“is as ridiculous a concept as utopia.
Ultimately, we’re animals. And animals
find ways.” This is as close to a manifesto
for Jones’s fiction as you will find. In his
books, higher consciousness is sidelined
and people take their place in nature,
motives and thinking pared back. The
language is correspondingly stark, the
sentences cut close. “The rain hit Bran-
ner’s hood. Hit. Hood. Made a shelter for
his mind. A building he hadn’t stepped
out of yet. It closed him off.”
This simplicity of language means
that when emotion is portrayed directly,
such as Branner’s dying wife dictating a
letter to him, the effect is devastating.
How big this small book is, givingthe
barest detailsof its future world — water
tokens, alittlements, soilmen — so the
reader has space for their own interpre-
tations. A lesser writer would have
made an epic, with hundreds of pages of
world-building, and it would have been
immensely boring.Stillicide, like Jones’s
earlier books, is never boring, but excit-
ing, upsetting and essential.Books
I
n the epigraph toAkin, Emma Dono-
ghue’s intelligent new novel, the
author informs us of the two main
meanings of the title: “related by
blood” and “similar in character”.
She introduces us to Noah, a retired
academic scientist based in New York.
He is preparing to travel to his birth-
place, Nice, when he receives a phone
call from a social worker asking if he’s
willing to offer a home to his 11-year-old
great-nephew, Michael. Noah has never
met Michael, whose father died of a
drug overdose and mother is in prison
for possession of a controlled substance.
Michael has been living on the wrong
side of Brooklyn with his grandmother,
who has just died; he is glued to the
games on his phone and consumes only
junk food. When the social worker
brings him to Noah’s apartment for a
home visit, Donoghue makes the cul-
ture clash obvious, and funny. Noah
frets over what to offer them — stuffed
olives or “Marcona almonds dusted with
rosemary”? He’s touched when Michael
asks him about his late wife, but he just
misheard, evident when Michael
repeats: “So what’s your Wi-Fi?” Noah
and Michael are “akin” in the first sense
of the word, and yet seemingly worlds
apart in character. As the novel devel-
ops, Donoghue excels in revealing how
their immediate differences in fact
mask a touching similarity. Thedead-
pan repartee between Noah and
Michael keeps her portrait of their rela-
tionship from edging into schmaltz.
Noah, loath to forfeit his trip to redis-
cover his roots in France, decides to take
Michael along. There is something of the
claustrophobia of Donoghue’s 2010
novelRoomin the portrait of the pair of
them in Nice, cooped up in a shared
hotel room, and drifting around a city
that’s especially crowded thanks to half
a million carnival tourists.
The pair soon bond over photogra-
phy. Michael displays a flair for Insta-Stillicide
by Cynan Jones
Granta £12, 192 pageschildren by hiding them around Nice
during the war?
Donoghue uses the novel as a vehicle to
tell us about the Marcel Network and the
French Resistance, but she doesn’t shy
away from some uncomfortable histori-
cal truths about France’s time under
occupation. “Funny how the wordcollab-
oratormeant something so benign in
Noah’s academic world”, comments the
narrator, compared with the malignity of
“close to a million” French civilians who
werecollabos— informers — to the Nazis.
A character wryly comments: “So many
did claim they’d been in the Resistance,
afterward, didn’t they? Lined up for
praise and thanks, medals, even money
from de Gaulle’s new government. And
maybe they even half-believed it. Mem-
ory was deceptive,n’est-ce pas?”
It becomes clear that Donoghue is not
just examining kinship with respect to
Noah and Michael, but is looking at
“akin” in a broader sense: in terms of
time and place, as she points to unex-
pected similarities between Nazi-occu-
pied Nice and Michael’s present-day
Brooklyn. When Michael asks Noah
about his mother possibly “snitching to
the Nazis”, he is echoing a previous con-
versation in which he told Noah why he
didn’t tell the police the names of the
boys who stole his skateboard:
“Snitches get stitches.” With respect to
his mother’s wartime actions, Noah,“troubled by the parallel”, says: “I
don’t know if snitch is quite the right
word for it.”
He struggles to explain to Michael
why it’s important to inform the police
about a crime, yet it was terrible for his
mother to “betray her own people to the
invaders”. He adds: “Cops are not the
same as Nazis.” Michael raises an eye-
brow: “Tell that to the black kids at my
school.” The concept of the wartime cur-
few also resonates with Michael, who
had been made to “come straight home
from school... and stay inside, live to
be a man”. When Noah shows him pho-
tographs of French anti-Nazi graffiti:
“Michael curled his lip. ‘We’ve got bet-
ter graffiti in Brooklyn.’
‘Well, these folks were working in a
hurry so they wouldn’t get shot.’
‘Same with taggers. This one guy, they
found him dead a couple blocks from
my school.’
Noah had no response at all to that.”
Donoghue looks at the puzzles left to
us by the dead: did Noah’s mother col-
laborate during the war or didn’t she? At
the time of his overdose, was Michael’s
father snitching to the police, or wasn’t
he? And how do we, their living kin,
piece these puzzles together? By the
novel’s close, with many nuances of
“akin” so thoughtfully explored, the
opening gloss feels more like a tease
than a definition.Worlds apart
A retired academic and his streetwise nephew go on the trail of family secrets
and discover much about true kinship in this subtle novel. ByEmily Rhodes
Grace RussellOn the water front
A catastrophic water shortage triggers conflict in a gripping,
upsetting picture of a future Britain, writesJohn SelfF
ollowing Cressida Cowell’s
appointment as the UK’s new
Children’s Laureate, Eloise
Williams has been announced
as the first ever Children’s
Laureate Wales. The stated aim of the
new post is “to engage and inspire the
children of Wales through literature”,
and Pembrokeshire-based Williams will
hold it until 2021.
She says: “I feel passionately that
there is a connection between children’s
books and the hope I feel every time I
walk into a classroom. I truly believe
that young readers will make our
futures bright and I’m honoured to be a
part of that.”
Williams’s novelsElen’s Island nda
Seaglass both feature children on
coastal holidays, and the natural magic
of the setting gives rise to events
involving magic of the supernatural
kind. So it is with Eduard Shyfrin’sTrav-
els With Sushi in the Land of the Mind
(White Raven, £12.99), in which sib-
lings Aaron and Stella are spending the
summer with their grandparents by
the seaside.
After eating mysterious golden sushi
at a restaurant, brother and sister are
transported to the Land of the Mind, a
fantasy kingdom based on the princi-
ples of maths and quantum physics.
They venture through various realms,
trying to thwart the evil Black Queen’s
plans for domination, and learning
lessons about science and morality
along the way. It’s likeFlatlandcrossed
withThe Pilgrim’s Progress. All of this is
beautifully illustrated by the roatianC
artist Tomislav Tomic.
There’s no faulting Ukrainian author
Shyfrin’s ambition. His novel encom-
passes wormholes, suicide bombers, the
Jewish diaspora, wave-particle duality,
the nature of God and a whole lot else
besides. Whether it is successful in
unifying these big ideas is another
matter. The book’s tone of allegoricalmysticism may enthral some butleave
others bemused.
Just as philosophical — if somewhat
more digestible — isPatience, Miyuki
(Princeton Architectural Press, £12.99).
In this Japanese-inflected fable by
French writer and poet Roxane Marie
Galliez, a follow-up to last year’sTime for
Bed, Miyuki, a little girl longs for a flower
in her grandfather’s garden to open. As
spring arrives and the flower remains
stubbornly closed, Miyuki heads off in
search of water to sprinkle over it. One
after another, her increasingly frantic
efforts fail. Not even her own tears can
help. Eventually her wise grandfather
achieves the desired effect with a few
dewdrops. The flower blooms.
The lesson is that all things happen in
their own time and trying to hurry them
up is futile. Galliez tells her Zen tale
simply and evocatively, and Laos-born
Seng Soun Ratanavanh’s exquisitely
lovely illustrations make it sing.
Singing is, of course, something for
which Paul McCartney (pictured) is
fairly well known. Now the songwriter
has turned his creative powers in a liter-
ary direction. His picture bookHey
Grandude! Puffin £12.99) is about a(cool, guitar-playing grandfather, much
like McCartney, who is known by his
grandchildren as “Grandude”, also
much like McCartney.
Grandude uses a magical compass to
take the four kids, whom he calls “Chill-
ers”, on adventures to faraway places. At
each location — a desert island, the Wild
West, the Alps — they have a narrow
scrape, but by the end the Chillers are all
tucked up safely in bed, washed,
brushed and ready for sleep. ey Gran-H
dude! s a perfectly acceptable, jaunty lit-i
tle affair, fetchingly illustrated by Kath-
ryn Durst, but it’s not exactly ground-
breaking. In musical terms, you could
say it’s more Wings than Beatles.
Beatrix Potter’s books continue to sell
in their millions. Her retelling of the tale
of Red Riding Hood first appeared inAFrom offbeat to Beatle to Beatrix Potter
History of the Writings of Beatrix Potter, a
1971 academic work edited by Leslie
Linder, and exists as three handwritten
drafts held at London’s Victoria and
Albert Museum. Now for the first time it
is being published as a standalone book,
Red Riding Hood Warne, £12.99), with(
Helen Oxenbury providing illustrations
in her usual delicately brilliant style.
Potter’s storytelling often has a dark,
macabre streak, and this is true of her
version of Charles Perrault’s classic fairy
tale. The wolf here is seductive and
suave, more than a little reminiscent of
that charming gentleman with “black
prick ears and sandy-coloured whisk-
ers”, the fox inThe Tale of Jemima Puddle-
Duck. He is also ruthless and, in the text
at least, does not receive his due come-
uppance, although Oxenbury strikes a
slightly more moralistic note by show-
ing a group of axe-wielding woodcutters
chasing after him in the final picture.
Finally, a couple of notable reissues.
Those of a certain vintage may remem-
ber the World of the Unknown books
published by Usborne in the 1970s. The
non-fiction series covered paranormal
phenomena, grouping them by themes
such as monsters and UFOs. Perhaps
most memorable of all was the one on
ghosts, which has just been republished
asAll About Ghosts Usborne £7.99).(
Although elements of it are dated —
ghost hunters armed with tape record-
ers and flash-cube cameras — this sur-
vey of hauntings, poltergeists and so on
is conducted with straight-faced, scien-
tific solemnity and is all the scarier for it.
Another welcome reissue is of Mar-
gery Williams’sThe Velveteen Rabbit
(Folio Society, £34.95). This sumptuous
slipcased edition showcases the gor-
geous artwork of William Nicholson,
whose illustrations — with their
restrained use of colour and deceptively
simple brushstrokes — bring to vivid life
Williams’s classic Edwardian tale of a
toy rabbit who yearns to become “Real”.By James Lovegrove
GENRE ROUND-UP
CHILDREN’S
FICTIONAgent
Running in
the Field
by John
le Carré
Viking £20/
$29, 288 pagesT
he engine of every
decent novel, and
certainly every spy
thriller, is conflict.
“The cat sat on the
mat is not story,” as John le Carréa
has opined, “but ‘the cat sat on the
dog’s mat’ is.” A neater summary
of the writer’s craft would be hard
to find — but for too much of his
latest novel, le Carré ignores his
own advice. This cat sits too long
on its own mat.
Nat, the protagonist ofAgent
Running in the Field, is a 47-year-
old officer of the Secret Intelli-
gence Service, recently returned to
London after long years abroad
running agents. Like many
middle-aged men working for a
large institution, he lives in fear of
the HR department, awaiting the
summons that will see him sacked
and replaced by an eager millen-
nial on half his salary.
Instead he is shunted sideways,
to the Haven, a London station
where service misfits are put out to
grass. Or as Nat puts it: “a dumping
ground for resettled defectors of
nil value and fifth-rate informants
on the skids.” There are loud ech-
oes here of Mick Herron’s Slough
House series, where spies who
have messed up are dumped in a
ramshackle London station.
But while Nat’s career may be
flatlining, his sporting prowess is
soaring. He is a dedicated badmin-
ton player, so highly acclaimed
that Ed, a new arrival at his club,
waylays him in public, demanding
a match. The two men are soon
playing regularly. Ed, it later turns
out, was playing more games than
just badminton. But while Ed and
his secrets are the story catalyst,
he is thinly drawn and not espe-
cially sympathetic.
Before the book’s release, its
publisher promised that it would
“confront the division and rage at
the heart of our modern world”.
Instead the book exacerbates it.
Agent Running in the Field s in parti
an undisguised Remainer screed,
an anguished howl of Hampstead
(where le Carré has a house) angst
and fury. Le Carré uses Ed to
deliver chunks of clunky, didacticdialogue. “Britain’s departure
from the European Union in
the time of Donald Trump, and
Britain’s consequent unqualified
dependence on the United States
in an era when the US is heading
straight down the road to institu-
tional racism and neo-fascism,
is an unmitigated cluster f**k
bar none.”
Even Prue, Nat’s wife and a radi-
cal human rights lawyer, has a
placard declaring “TRUMP LIAR”.
And a colleague of Nat’s proclaims:
“Where are we now? Back of the
queue, behind the Huns and the
Frogs. With a bloody sight less to
offer. Total disaster.” There is a
long tradition of fiction exploring
hot-button issues, reaching back
to Dickens and Eric Ambler’s
thrillers set in 1930s Europe on the
cusp of war. But such open prose-
lytising soon wearies.
The pacing is slow at first. But
when the cat does eventually get
off its mat, after 100 pages or so, it
picks up rapidly. The tradecraft of
espionage, operations and surveil-
lance are finely drawn and pre-
cisely engineered. The scenes
when Nat is called in by his col-
leagues for questioning and the
slow car crash of his answers are
vivid and believable as he slowly
morphs from valued colleague
into a pariah.
No wonder that Richard Dear-
love, former head of the SIS, rec-
ently complained of le Carré that
“his books are exclusively about
betrayal... The feeling I get is
that he intensely dislikes the serv-
ice and what it represents.” When
he is on form, le Carré still delivers
cracking prose. There are few
more astute or acerbic observers of
the British class system. Florence,
another colleague, is “one of those
upper-class girls who’ve grown up
with ponies and you never quite
know what’s going on inside”.
Just when the story picks up,
Ed and Florence have galloped off
in another, somewhat unconvinc-
ing, direction, as though le Carré
was not quite sure what to do
with his cast of characters. The
ending, while heart-warming, is
almost whimsical.
Le Carré is rightly acclaimed as
one of our finest novelists. His cold
war series, featuring the spymas-
ter George Smiley, is also a subtle,
engrossing chronicle of postwar
Britain and its diminishing inter-
national role. But in the canon of a
great writer,Agent Running in the
Field s a minor work.iAdam LeBor is the author of ‘Kossuth
Square’ (Head of Zeus)Engine trouble
ohn le Carré seems to have forgotten his own writingJ
advice in an overly didactic thriller, saysAdam LeBorAkin
by Emma Donoghue
Picador £16.99/Little,
Brown $28 352 pagesBeatrix Potter’s storytelling
often has a macabre streak,
and this is true of herversion of Red Riding Hood
gram snaps that impresses Noah, whose
appreciation stems from his grandfa-
ther, a famous French photographer.
Noah tells Michael about his grandfa-
ther’s work, but they are more intrigued
by a troubling set of prints Noah
recently discovered among his dead sis-
ter’s effects. These nine mysterious pho-
tographs of wartime France seem to
have been taken by his mother, but
Noah is at a loss as to who they portray
and what they reveal.
With Michael’s help, Noah gradually
uncovers answers, which only point to
more disturbing questions: why did
Noah’s mother photograph the Excel-
sior Hotel, which the Nazis requisi-
tioned to hold more than 3,000 Jews
before sending them by train to Drancy
and then Auschwitz? Why did she take a
photo of Moussa Abadi and Odette
Rosenstock, masterminds of the Marcel
Network, which saved the lives of 527OCTOBER 19 2019 Section:Weekend Time: 10/201917/ - 18:13 User:andrew.higton Page Name:WKD10, Part,Page,Edition:WKD, 10, 1