How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue

We should have known the end was near. How could we not have known? When the sky began to pour acid and rivers began to turn green, we should have known our land would soon be dead. Then again, how could we have known when they didn't want us to know? When we began to wobble and stagger, tumbling and snapping the feeble little branches, they told us it would soon be over, that we would all be well in no time. They asked us to come to village meetings, to talk about it. They told us we had to trust them.

In the small village of Kosawa, in an unnamed African nation that presumably resembles author Imbolo Mbue's native Cameroon, the water and soil have been poisoned by an oil company called Pexton. The children of the village are becoming gravely ill, and often dying; pleas to the company to clean up the land fall on deaf ears, and the village chief is in the pocket of the oil barons. It's the town madman who pushes the village to finally take matters into his own hands: during a visit from Pexton's ambassadors, he nicks the key to their truck, knowing that for ritual reasons no one will dare touch him. Suddenly the town leaders find themselves having kidnapped three of the company's employees, a situation which presents both great opportunity and great danger.

This scenario, which I really liked, makes up the first third of the novel, and turns out to be rather inconclusive, as all kinds of real-world activism really are. The immediacy and intensity of the hostage scenario gives way to what I thought was a much weaker novel about the education of Thula, a young girl when the hostages are taken, who goes to America and comes back to Africa as a firebrand intent on bringing political change to her country. The bulk of How Beautiful We Were was, I thought, marred by bad literary choices, beginning with the novel's structure, which is composed of several first-person sections written by villagers. Their own stories can be detailed and engaging, but they felt to me ultimately a distraction from what's clearly meant to the main narrative, which happens at a bird's-eye view that robs it of specificity and detail.

Several of these sections are written from the perspective of "The Children," a collective of Thula's "age-mates." I really loved this at first, but over the course of the novel it forces Mbue into authorial positions that just don't work: she uses a series of ham-fisted letters from Thula to the Children in order to inform us of the progress of her education, for example. Later, when the Children splinter, having argued about the morality and efficacy of the violent methods the employ to supplement Thula's political activism, the internal logic of these sections breaks down almost completely.

I didn't think this book worked, honestly. But when it's at its best, it presents complex and interesting questions about how oppressed peoples in the Third World can and should fight back. During the hostage scenario, a team of envoys travels to the nation's capital to convince an American journalist to write about them; the outrage in the U.S. over the village's plight leads to an arrangement with the oil company and an NGO called the "Restoration Movement" that brings a measure of progress. But Thula returns understanding that only political change will make a difference; her non-violent campaigns are contrasted with the gun-happy "Children," in a way that seemed a little jejune to me but not without knowledge or understanding.

I have an ongoing project to read a book from every country. How Beautiful We Were falls in sort of a gray area: though born in Cameroon, Mbue lives in and wrote the book in America. But perhaps this is offset by the African setting of the novel, so I'm counting this for Cameroon, which puts me at 50 countries.

The Rebel Angels by Robertson Davies

It's not that I wanted to know a great deal, in order to acquire what is now called expertise, and which enables one to become an expert-tease to people who don't know as much as you do about the tiny corner you have made your own. I hoped for a bigger fish; I wanted nothing less than Wisdom. In a modern university if you ask for knowledge they will provide it in almost any form--though if you ask for out-of-fashion things they may say, like the people in shops, 'Sorry, there's no call for it.' But if you ask for Wisdom--God save us all! What a show of modesty, what disclaimers from men and women from whose eyes intelligence shines forth like a lighthouse. Intelligence, yes, but of Wisdom not so much as the gleam of a single candle.

Maria Magdalena Theotoky is a grad student at the Toronto college of St. John and the Holy Ghost, affectionately called Spook. She's been made the research assistant of Prof. Clement Hollier, with whom she is madly in love, after a previous tryst on the professor's office couch, but her hopes to pursue their relationship further prove difficult: Hollier is taken up with the task of executing the will of another professor who left an enormous collection of manuscripts and artwork, along with two others: the insipid Urquhart McVarish (a Davies name if there ever was one) and the genial priest Simon Darcourt. While Hollier is away, Maria's new office is invaded by an old friend of Hollier's, a cruel and hideous genius of a defrocked monk named John Parlabane.

These characters make up The Rebel Angels, Davies' crack at the classic campus novel. Davies, who was the founding and longtime dean of the University of Toronto's Massey College, knew a thing or two about campus life, and The Rebel Angels beams with affection for the Life of the Mind that it provides. Maria's first-person chapters alternate with those of Darcourt, who tells us that he left a life of priestly service for the kind of mental and spiritual contemplation available to a university professor--a transition that both Darcourt and Davies admit is out of fashion, but indicative of the novel's ardor for what it sees as unfashionable and discarded Wisdom, capital W.

One of the central motifs of The Rebel Angels is poop. It is feces, for example, that animates the work of Spook's science superstar Ozy Froats, who insists that there is much to be learned about the nature of the human body by studying its waste. There is a prudish pushback to Froats' work, though this detail seems a little strange to me, given that stool samples have been an important part of medical testing for a long time. But Davies' point seems to be that the things we think are worthless are often anything but: Maria's mother, a Romany woman she calls "Mamusia," is a celebrated violin repairer whose secret trick is to pack old instruments carefully in goat manure. The Rebel Angels is a novel about the synthesis of dualities: mind and spirit, past and present, ego and id. Parlabane tells Maria that everyone has, like a tree, both a crown and root, and it is the root that provides sustenance to the crown; the former must be nurtured for the latter to grow. Our poop--the things we wish to bury or ignore--is what fertilizes us.

The Rebel Angels might be the most Davies-like of any of the Davies novels I've ever read. Though the characters are well-drawn and vivid enough, they are all wits, and they all talk like each other, which is to say they talk a lot, and they're always doing things like quoting Rabelais and Paracelsus, or finishing each other's quotes by Rabelais or Paracelsus, or telling each other they haven't quite understood what it was Rabelais and Paracelsus were talking about. As a novel, it tends toward fustiness, but it really shines when it focuses on Maria's Romany heritage and family, which is something she has yearned to hide from her more sophisticated university associates. Mamusia--secretive, superstitious, sly, larger-than-life--is also a font of wisdom, the kind of which is typically ignored by the university, and its the scenes with her and Maria's uncle Yerko where the novel really comes to life. I have no idea whether it's an honest or accurate depiction of Romany life, but it's certainly an affectionate one, and in its way it proves the central idea of the novel: Wisdom is often to be found in the places one least expects.

The Old Man and Me by Elaine Dundy

There is a time for asterisks and a time for speaking out. I don't know--will all this morbid introspection into my terrible itch for that randy old man reveal itself merely as an exercise in self-indulgence, a senseless waste of time? Or will it be that, having put down clearly and to my own satisfaction once and for all what it was like sleeping with foxy grampa, I may finally come to understand what was going on in me? Maybe not. We must hope for the best. But it's so hard. I write three words and at the fourth memory seizes me. I waste hours mooning over a situation that play it as I may could only have been resolved by disaster.

A young American turns up in one of London's seediest and hippest Soho bars. She is waiting for a man of minor renown named C.D. McKee, once a poet, then an academic, then a Brigadier General during World War II, and now one of those people who is mostly famous for being famous, and of course, independently wealthy. She tells people her name is Honey Flood, but this is a lie--we know because she's the narrator, and she tells us that she's nicked it off her old roommate back in the States, a roommate whose mental breakdown of which she may have been the cause. We get the sense that we are in the presence of a psychopath, or at least a determined young woman with ulterior motives, but it's not until well into the book that we learn the truth: McKee's money is inherited from his dead wife, who inherited it from her husband, who was "Honey Flood's" father. Believing McKee's money to be rightfully hers, she plans to extract it from via seduction, and possibly murder.

What The Old Man and Me has in common with Dundy's equally terrific novel The Dud Avocado is a riotous voice: though the narrator here is cunning and manipulative where Avocado was naive, they share a blazing verbal wit and the powerful fanfare of common speech. C.D.--she calls him Seedy--praises not-Honey for her mockingbird-like reproduction of the mannerisms of the stuffy English manor house set to which he subjects her, and the praise could just as well be directed at Dundy herself. The Old Man and Me is, among other things, a culture clash novel: the priggish Brit vs. the faddish American. It explores dense layers of snobbery, lying along axes of nationality, age, wealth and class, and all this is reflected in the freewheeling precision of language.

What happens is, well, what you might expect to happen: Despite her intentions, not-Honey begins to fall for the old man. She begins to feel parallel emotions, love and anger, attachment and revulsion, tenderness and spite. She wheels unpredictably between wanting to murder him in various extremely literal ways and desiring him intensely, and the instability of her feelings forces her to confront the instability of her identity:

I really love him, I thought. I really love this bad old man, though of course, I checked myself, remembering the money, I wish him dead as well. For there it was: C.D. stood in the way of my getting my money but--and here was the catch--my money stood eternally in the way of my getting C.D. For sooner or later he must find out who I was and then--And then what?

Dundy plays this really well; the problem is convincing because the character is so convincing. We even feel, as she feels, a growing empathy toward C.D., an irascible and essentially unhappy man whose better qualities have languished simply because they have not been lately requested. The pair are terrible for each other, needy and mendacious and injurious to the other's health, but it's not hard to see how they are perfect for each other, too. I have no doubt a male writer could never have pulled it off so well: distracted by the banal kind of attraction the C.D.s of the world have for the "Honeys," they could not have understood the attraction the "Honeys" have for the C.D.s. The novel, as the narrator says it must, hurtles toward a crisis that will put things to a kind of rights, but somehow it manages to wrest a sweet and happy conclusion, of a kind, from the wreckage.

The Game-Players of Titan by Philip K. Dick

The board was so enormous that it petrified him. Its sides, its two ends, faded, disappeared into the understructure of reality in which he sat. And yet, directly before him, he made out cards, clear-cut and separable. The vugs waited; he was supposed to draw a card.

It was his turn.

Pete Garden, after having a little too much to drink, makes too large a bet around the gambling table. By the time the game is over, he's lost Berkeley, California, a region he controls as its "Bindman." He's also lost his wife; his marriage dissolved. Bad luck. In the future of The Game-Players of Titan, the human race is radically reduced after an intense war with a race of aliens from Titan they dismissively call "vugs." The vugs make the remaining Terrans play a board game in which huge regions of the Earth are swapped for one another and marriages swapped and recombined to search for what every one calls luck: the ability to get pregnant, a rare feat in the aftermath of immense weapons that failed to defeat the vugs but which rendered much of humanity infertile. Pete, determined to win back Berkeley, finds it's already been sold to the world's greatest and luckiest player of the game; to defeat him Pete will end up mixed up with the secret machinations of the vugs on earth.

At the heart of The Game-Players of Titan is a crude sort of social satire: power and wealth are determined through a set of obscure rules unavailable to ordinary people, and though the game itself requires luck, you can't really say that advancement is available to all. It reminded me of Old Spencer from The Catcher in the Rye telling Holden that "Life is a game one plays according to the rules," to which Holden wisely observes that this is only true for the "hot-shots" who find themselves winning. Life for the Bindmen is still fluid and precarious; livelihoods and marriages are always on the chopping block, but Dick notes wryly that this is not so different from the way things have always been:

But marriage had always been primarily an economic entity, Schilling reflected as he steered his auto-auto up into the early-morning New Mexico sky. The vugs hadn't invented that; they had merely intensified an already existing condition. Marriage had to do with the transmission of property, of lines of inheritance. And of cooperation in career-lines as well. All this emerged explicitly in The Game and dominated conditions; The Game merely dealt openly with what had been there implicitly before.

In fact, you might even say The Game is fairer than life on the old free Earth we live in; the rules of the Game are at least laid out ahead of time and clear to all. Pete's quest to get back his Berkeley bind leads him to another playing group whose members, after a few feints and false reveals, turn out to be vugs in disguise, a radical group of warmongers who work outside of the game to undermine humanity: essentially, cheaters. Through this group Pete learns to play the game as the vugs play it, with their psionic powers, which makes bluffing a very different thing. Instead of pretending to read an eleven as a twelve, for instance, your vug opponents might infiltrate your mind and make you see your twelve as an eleven.

Through this door come Dick's old familiar tropes: pre-cogs who can preview the future, telekinetics, real things that look fake and fake things that look real, and of course psychotropic drugs, which dampen the abilities of vugs and psionics and make the playing level fair, if such a thing is even possible. The final "game," which pits Pete and his playing group against the vugs with the whole Earth staked, is Dick at his very pulpiest, though his ability to describe states of irreality and transformation makes The Game-Players of Titan more interesting and more sophisticated than its antecedents. It's one of the least memorable of Dick's novels that I've read; but even the least memorable of them are stupendously rich with ideas, and supremely strange.

Harrow by Joy Williams

Hope no longer found a place to dwell. Even the insects felt it gone. The colt, the cub, the calf, the stones that would be precious jewels deep within the earth. The flowers who, as Wordsworth knew, enjoyed the air they breathed, were aware of nothing but hope's absence. Something definitely had gone wrong. Even the dead were dismayed.

Dystopian fiction is having a moment. Where once it was the story of state power run amok--the old anxieties of the Cold War imagined at an accelerated pitch--today's dystopias are all ecological disasters, climate fiction: cli-fi. As the possibility of mitigating the advent of climate change grows dimmer, these books ask us to imagine a world that is both unimaginable and certain. In Lydia Millet's A Children's Bible, for example, storm and disease separate children from their irresponsible parents, sundering a reckless past from a burdened future.

But Millet's book feels underwhelming because as the future becomes depleted old modes of narrative feel false. If you can't write poetry after Auschwitz, can you write a novel before the death of the Earth? As Joy Williams puts it in her new novel Harrow--the only book I've read that really captures the bewildering horror of climatological crisis--"The old dear stories of possibility. No one wanted them anymore, but nothing had replaced them."

Harrow's heroine is Khristen, who, her mother tells her, died briefly as a baby before returning to life. Khristen's father doubts this belief, as does Khristen and everyone else, but the belief clings to her and shapes her life. She holds the key to living through the age of apocalypse, maybe, having ultimately recovered from death. As the ten-year old judge Jeffrey describes her: "As an interesting case she could anticipate no present moment, she possessed only the future, which she was still powerless to change."  In contrast to Khristen are the small band of elderly eco-terrorists--with whom Khristen resides after her school closes and her mother disappears--living in a ruined motel at the edge of a black lake. These elderly folks are all past and no futurity, and they dither about not making good on their plans to blow up factories and murder pharma profiteers because on some level they understand that the gestures are futile and empty. Alice, the budding eco-terrorist from Williams' The Quick and the Dead might age into such a person.

These elderlies are anomalous, of a past world; though we might expect the exacerbation of ecological collapse to radicalize most people, Williams unnervingly suggests the opposite might occur: people decide that nature has betrayed them and hasten its demise, treasuring plastic, cutting down the last few trees for committing the offense of simply being alive so long. The elderlies are essentially, symbolically, literally too late; strategy does not matter because apocalypse cannot be converted:

The owls lay fuddled and miserably starving in their hollows--their home, darkness had been taken from them. The very earth had been pressed to chalk, to clay, as through a mangle. The wolves, the bears, the great fish (which he had never seen) gone, even the harmless snakes and frogs of his childhood. If someone claimed he'd seen an eagle, he would not be taken seriously. The possibility of seeing an angel or a witch on a broomstick would be treated with more polite agnosticism. The fouling of the nest was all but complete, the birthright smashed.

Harrow is recognizably a Joy Williams novel: no one else is as capable at making every line glitter, or as incapable of writing a sentence that is boring. ("The spider brings the web out of herself and then lives in it. Remarkable.") But Harrow is not like The Quick and the Dead, which at the very least takes place in the swimming pools and arroyos of something resembling a very real Arizona. Scenes and images in Harrow are completely disconnected from each other and realism has been abolished. It seems like an attempt to discover a narratological mode that matches the nature of the crisis. Whether it is successful seems almost beside the point: strategy doesn't matter, etc., etc.

The middle of it sags a little bit when the focus pulls away from Kristen and onto the elderlies, but the ending is wonderfully cryptic and intense: a little boy named Jeffrey Khristen meets at the hotel becomes, as he has always wanted, a judge in a nearby courthouse. The cases that come in front of him have nothing to answer for but their entire lives, and though Jeffrey denies the simplicity of the accusation, he feels a little like an image of God. Should we be comforted or terrified that the "judgment" part of the End of Days has not been forgotten? When Khristen comes before him, he becomes fascinated with her, the "interesting case." He senses that there is something different in her, that maybe there is a way of being in this new world, of dying, and then living on.

A Question of Upbringing by Anthony Powell

The image of Time brought thoughts of mortality: of human beings, facing outward like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure: stepping slowly, methodically, sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognisable shape: or breaking into seemingly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance. Classical associations made me think, too, of days at school, where so many forces, hitherto unfamiliar, had become in due course uncompromisingly clear.

When A Question of Upbringing, the first book in Anthony Powell's monumental series A Dance to the Music of Time, begins, the narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, is a green young student at a tony secondary school in England. Like a lot of people at sixteen or so, his life takes the form of a preoccupation with other people, whose habits and values he yearns to know better so that he might fashion himself after them. There's his roommate, Stringham, wealthy and mercurial, and Templer, a brash womanizer. Rounding out this group is Widmerpool, an aloof, buffoonish student whom nobody likes. Widmerpool's ambition is comic, and the more popular students either rag on him or do their best to ignore him; on the other hand, even if you didn't know a little about Widmerpool's rise to power and fortune over the course of the series, you might recognize it as something more formidable than the young students are able to.

Mostly, A Question of Upbringing feels like an elliptical take on the familiar campus novel, something a step removed from Lucky Jim or the first part of Brideshead Revisited. The lynchpin scene of the friendship between Jenkins, Stringham, and Templer comes when Stringham sees a wanted poster that bears an uncanny resemblance to their overbearing house master Le Bas and calls the cops to report him. But the friendship quickly fades--Powell cannily reveals how brief the relationships we consider formative in our youth really can be--and the scene moves outward through slight variations: a finishing program in the French countryside, the first year of college. What Jenkins learns at these institutions is really the shifting and subtle nature of human beings: the subtle changes in Stringham and Templer, for instance, that makes their friendship no longer viable.

There's a curiously unfinished quality to A Question of Upbringing: characters are ushered onto the stage to make very light impressions, and then ushered off again, as if being earmarked for later use, which they probably are. Powell makes much of the way that people leave one's life and then suddenly appear again, revitalized and seen anew in new contexts; though the novel feels preoccupied with its preparatory motions, you have to admit this quality captures something of the anticipatory nature of youth. I sort of expect the first book in the series is like a TV pilot; something with rough edges you have to sit through to get to the good stuff. I will probably read one of these a year until I finish: it will take twelve years, at which point I'll be 46. That seems to me perhaps to be the right way to absorb a series with a scale like this one.

Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald

But there is something else. As it passes overhead, the rook tilts its head to regard me briefly before flying on. And with that glance I feel a prickling in my skin that runs down my spine, my sense of place shifts, and the world is enlarged. The rook and I have shared no purpose. For one brief moment we noticed each other, is all. When I looked at the rook and the rook looked at me, I became a feature of its world as much as it became a feature of mine. Our separate lives coincided, and all my self-absorbed anxiety vanished in one fugitive moment, when a bird in the sky on its way somewhere sent a glance across the divide and stitched me back into a world where both of us have equal billing.

Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk, a memoir of her experience training a falcon in the wake of her father's death, might be my favorite non-fiction book of the past several years. I don't read a lot of non-fiction, and part of its appeal was its literariness: Macdonald interweaves her own story with rich threads of fiction, like that of fellow falconer T. H. White, and history and myth. But it also resonated with me because, like several people have in the wake of the COVID-10 pandemic, I have become more interested in birding and birds. Though training a hawk and birdwatching are very different pursuits, they share an inexplicable sense of satisfaction that derives from the way human and animal life intersects.

One of my favorite essays from Macdonald's new collection Vesper Flights hits much closer to home: Macdonald describes watching fall migrants in New York City from the observation deck of the Empire State Building, whose bright lights both attract and confuse the birds. In her account they "resemble stars, embers, slow tracer fire" and "ghostly points of light." In this moment Macdonald captures a very specific sense of amazement that occurs when one realizes that New York City, the concrete jungle, is--and has always been--a place where birds have lived lives that precede and overwrite us. Birding in New York puts me in touch with the transitory nature of life, as if the earth wears the city lightly.

The experience of reading Vesper Flights can't compare to H is for Hawk. The strength of that memoir is not just in the incision of its insight but the power of its narrative: the tortuous twin processes of training the hawk and coming to terms with the death of a father. The essays in Vesper Flights can feel too brief and too numerous, and when there are so many the form begins to show. The epiphanies come, as they never do in life, with a little too much regularity. The strongest essays are often the ones that linger the longest, like a long profile of a researcher who uses Chile's Atacama Desert as a stand-in for the surface of Mars, or an account of the yearly ritual of "swan upping," in which the Queen's swans--she owns most of the swans in the country, I guess--are tracked and tagged.

A theme does eventually emerge: several of the essays address the way that our ideas of the natural world intersect with the burgeoning forces of nationalism. In more than one piece, Macdonald describes how, during World War II, species that were considered notably "British" became rallying cries for preservation, as if British identity were to hinge on the continued existence of these birds. She makes much of the fact that birds don't know borders, even as they are enlisted in our most parochial disputes about who belongs where. She talks about how immense murmurations of starlings helped develop wartime radar technology, and hapless migrators whose leg tags have been mistaken for spy technology by suspicious powers. This is such an interesting perspective that I found myself longing for a book that might have been--not a collection of brief essays, but a book that develops this theme as fully and insightfully as H is for Hawk.