Notes on a Reader

Baileys Fiction Prize Long List Challenge. Books 1-4

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Baileys Women's Fiction Prize Long List Reading Challenge

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My top reads of 2015 so far...

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SYP bookclub – Afternoon tea with Emily St. John Mandel

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Originally published over on the SYP blog, Press Forward

A review by Emily Finn, Book Club attendee and SYP Inprint Editor

On 14 March, the SYP book club had the opportunity to meet and chat with Emily St. John Mandel to discuss her latest novel Station Eleven. In a lovely hotel in Bloomsbury we sat down to a wonderful afternoon tea courtesy of Picador and once the tea had been poured we spent a great afternoon asking our many questions on plot, characters, influences and dystopian worlds.

The first thing we wanted to know was ‘how do you go about writing a novel at the end of the world?’

Emily revealed that she had not read a lot of dystopian novels before starting writing Station Eleven but she knew that with this book she wanted to end the world. To do so she felt she had two main options:

A holocaust – the concern being that this would quickly become politicised and that wasn’t what she wanted from her book;
A pandemic – the basics of the flu are already there in the world so it is easy to do anything with it. A winner!

She went on to say that ‘once you imagine a world without electricity the rest kind of gets taken away’. She makes it sound easy.

Emily then admitted to spending an unsettling amount of time researching the genetic structures of the flu and how it can mutate into other, more deadly conditions. She found this both horrific and oddly reassuring as although there have been many fatalistic flus and diseases out there that can wipe out sheer numbers of the population, at the end of the day we are still here, living day-to-day life.

An interesting part of the book is that although it is set in a world where 99% of the population has died, the fatalities and survivors’ instincts are not graphic and gruesome. Emily shared with us that setting the plot 20 years after the event was partially influenced by the fact that she didn’t want to write a horror book. The reader must assume the probable terror and tragedy in the direct aftermath of the pandemic, a time Emily specifically writes very little about to keep the nature of the book intact – the focus is on moving forwards and finding the future in the new, changed world. By doing this, Station Eleven is set apart from other post-apocalyptic books where destruction and chaos play a much larger role.

Emily intentionally wanted to focus on the everyday materialism that would be lost following a pandemic such as this, utilising the loss of electricity and running water, rather than just smart phones and social media. She doesn’t want to be preachy and her interest was more set in how we could function without the essentials that we take for granted every day and building characters that would see all of these functions as science fiction.

We moved on to discuss the continuous and prominent Shakespearean theme in the novel asking Emily why she decided upon Shakespeare plays, both for the opening scene to the novel with the performance of King Lear and for the performances of the travelling symphony throughout. Her answer was founded in personal interest and a love for the plays of Shakespeare she has read so far and plays that she has seen at the theatre in New York. Emily felt that King Lear was the perfect play to symbolise the first scene with central character, Arthur, as in both the play in the novel and the original Shakespearian plot no one knows that they’re about to lose everything – in Station Eleven it is after all the beginning of the end for all of these people.

Emily goes on to describe how Station Eleven started out initially as a book about a general traveling theatre performing literary plays but that she liked the connection between Shakespearean plays and the time before electricity, representing in a way how things have come round in a loop. Within the novel she also references parallels between the survival of the plague in Shakespeare’s time and survival following the apocalyptic pandemic – Survival is possible and many of the theatre companies in Shakespearean time were smaller groups who would travel round and put on performances with whatever they had, so it seemed fitting that the Travelling Symphony were doing the same.

Finally, we were very interested in discussing the variety of characters in the novel. *Spoiler alert*

Our focus was on the controversial character of the prophet in the novel, Tyler. Our group was quite divided on our opinions of Tyler and also the plot reveal near the end of the narrative where the prophet’s identity is exposed. Emily admitted to us that she always had a prophet in the story, but actually it wasn’t always intended to be Tyler. In fact through the writing process it frequently changed to a third person in the story before the final storyline and character choice was settled upon. Additionally, Emily revealed that she has originally planned to kill Jeevan off after his appearance as acting paramedic in the opening scene. It is through Jeevan’s character that the reader is first informed about the danger of Georgia Flu and after much editorial discussion she decided to write him back into the story near the end.

Quick-fire questions:

Who was your favourite character to write?

Miranda – I felt a real connection with her when I was writing…I tried to give her a nice, quiet death

What three things would you miss most in a post-apocalyptic world?

Electricity, running water and air travel

Who would you pick as your survival companion from Station Eleven?

Kirsten – she could then teach me to throw knives and things

Who would be your ideal actors/actresses to play the characters in a film adaptation?

For Clark I could imagine Patrick Stewart and for Kirsten maybe Carey Mulligan.

What would be the one thing that you would insist be kept in the film from the book?

I think it would be important to keep it multi-racial and gendered.

Final Words…

We had such a lovely time and many thanks go out to Emily for meeting with us and answering our many questions and also to Picador and publicist Sam Eades for arranging everything and putting on afternoon tea for us.

Want more like Station Eleven? Here’s some suggested reading that came up during our discussions:

The Dog Stars by Peter Heller – this was the all-important novel that taught Emily that gas goes stale after a few years!

The Country of Ice Cream Star by Sandra Newman – this has just made it on to the Bailey’s fiction prize long list and is centred around an apocalypse that wipes out 80% of the American population leaving behind a generation of children who die before their 20th birthdays. This is another new take on the post-apocalyptic world but with a YA, racial twist.

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves - Karen Joy Fowler

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We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is such a remarkable book. It's been on my radar for a long time, largely because I think the title is fab and the hardback cover (right image) is gorgeous, but I patiently waited for the paperback version before giving in and buying it. And I have to say, it was worth the wait - I was blown away by this book, it took me to places I didn't expect it to, and I would honestly say it's probably one of my books of the year.

The best and only way to read this book is to just pick it up without reading anymore than what is given on the blurb. The purpose of the book is based around the big reveal on Page 77 and I challenge anyone to see that coming - it plays along the same way that books like Room and Never Let Me Go do; lulls you in a false sense of comfort before turning things on its head. I read it having to contain every little bit of my excitement (and there was alot of it), desperate to talk about what just happened but not wanting to give away the fundamentals to people who I will no doubt force this book upon.

Blissful ignorance is one of my favourite ways to start reading a book - Room by Emma Donoghue is another definite book that needs to be read in ignorance - it can either work in your favour and blow you away or it can throw you off what you expected and potentially disappoint, but isn't that the fun of not knowing?
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is too good to ruin prior to reading it, but it's far too good not to read at all.

This book is so beautiful and compassionate, it has just about something that everyone can relate to; family politics, sibling love and rivalry, but also an even further depth that noone could understand unless they were living it. It will make you re-evaluate your own philosophical and moral values. It's eye opening as well as entertaining. You won't want to stop reading this.

Once finished, if you can, read the author's note about writing the book too - it gives a great account of why she wrote it and how close to her heart this story was from her own experiences.

That is all I can say. I don't want to discuss it further and destroy the magic of this book, but it is too good not to give mention at all.
Just trust me and read it: you won't regret it!

You can read an extract here from Serpent's Tail. #WAACBO

I will also add in that this book has just been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2014 which is so exciting as it really deserves it and I think it has potential to go far!

Who is Pilgrim?

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I Am Pilgrim - Terry Hayes

I will start out by holding my hands up and admitting that I didn't give this book quite the attention I should have. My excuses being that it is a 700 page hardback that puts a brick to shame. It was not a commuter-friendly choice, but I was far too keen to wait the extra few months for the paperback to come out (I think I've now learnt my lesson about patience). Therefore, my perfect excuse to read it was a cottage holiday with the family for a week in Cornwall. I had high ambitions to finish it in the week, but *insert excuses here* I got about half way through before I had to return to handbag-compatable reads in London. That was about 3 months ago and shamefully I rarely found opportunity to pick it up again until last week when I decided it was time. The mistake I made was stopping at the point where the story dipped slightly and so I didn't have much compulsion to keep at it. The first 400 pages took me a week months ago, the latter 300 pages took me an evening. It turned out that good.

Do not be fooled by the length it took me to read this - all you need to do is read all of the reviews on Goodreads (of which majority are 5*s) to see that I am definitely in the minority, most people couldn't put it down and I genuinely believe if I'd been reading it on my commutes, I too would have read it solidly from cover to cover in a week or 2.

Plot:
Pilgrim is the codename for a man who doesn't exist. The adopted son of a wealthy American family, he once headed up a secret espionage unit for US intelligence. Before he disappeared into anonymous retirement, he wrote the definitive book on forensic criminal investigation.

But that book will come back to haunt him. It will help NYPD detective Ben Bradley track him down. And it will take him to a rundown New York hotel room where the body of a woman is found facedown in a bath of acid, her features erased, her teeth missing, her fingerprints gone. It is a textbook murder - and Pilgrim wrote the book.

What begins as an unusual and challenging investigation will become a terrifying race-against-time to save America from oblivion. Pilgrim will have to make a journey from a public beheading in Mecca to a deserted ruins on the Turkish coast via a Nazi death camp in Alsace and the barren wilderness of the Hindu Kush in search of the faceless man who would commit an appalling act of mass murder in the name of his God.
(Goodreads)

It is a great book. It is extremely clever, it is one thing to mention one of the most exceptional, infallible detectives/secret agents, but to actually create this character and plot line with every detail as to why he is the best is something else.
The book starts off pacey - there's been a murder, it has been considered and planned down to the last detail to make it near impossible to solve. We're intrigued. It then skips off to a whole other plot line, which is the main, dominating purpose of the book, following an extremist trying to destroy the human race for the sake of his religion. This is when it gets clever. Again the details are so precise that it's a wonder a reader couldn't recreate it themselves in real life (fingers crossed they won't) - not many books go in to the detail of terrorism, not only from the action side of things but into the person's past and present mind. This makes it exceptional to read and really intriguing. However, it goes into so much detail and back story that it becomes quite long. This was the point where my holiday ended and I put down the book for a while - I couldn't yet piece together the connection between the beginning sequences and the middle back story and so it became easy to stop reading.

I recently read S J Bolton's review on this book and she sums up exactly how I felt: "It was interesting enough, well-written enough to hold my attention, but not the epic, race against time, most thrilling thriller ever written I’d been hoping for.
It gets there – Oh, my, but it get’s there – it just doesn’t do it fast."
She says it - it gets there, it just takes its time about it, and having read it now, why shouldn't it? About 50 pages further from where I stopped (if only I had preserved a little more), there is suddenly revelations that blow things out of the water; the pace suddenly accelerates into overdrive, pieces start to fall into place and the timer starts ticking down very fast.The ending pulls it together perfectly, it leaves no burning question unanswered and does so in a way that you won't want to stop thinking about it.

As I said, I wish I had given this book more attention initially that I know it definitely deserved and I am pleased to hear that the film rights have been bought too. It is made for the big screen - they may have to condense it down some, but it will make a block buster!
Plus it means I can force the story upon my friends who would not be interested in reading such a hefty book!