Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor

I have very conflicted feelings about “Reservoir 13” by Jon McGregor because I admired so much about its technique and ingenuity, but I often wasn't engaged by the story in that satisfying way I hope a novel will make me feel. The novel centres around 13 year old Rebecca Shaw who goes missing and the effect her disappearance has on the local village. It traces the reverberations of this occurrence for over a decade recording small slices of the villagers' lives and the changing seasons as well as speculation about what happened to Rebecca or “Becky” or “Bex.” In this way, the novel accurately reflects what it's like to be vaguely aware of a missing girl and periodically see references to her in the media over time. It's poignant how a missing child never ages, but remains a peripheral presence in our consciousness while we continue to grow and change. Despite computer generated sketches that speculate how Rebecca might look if she aged, the villagers mentally see the girl preserved in her youthful form and she exists fundamentally as a haunting unanswered question.

McGregor depicts a large cast of characters in a glancing way where we receive intimations about life developments, but never delve into any one character's psyche very deeply. Over a long period of time we see friends make plans for the future, follow different paths in life and reunite for awkward catch-ups. Marriages break up, optimistically come back together and fizzle out again. In this way, the novel gives the most extraordinarily accurate sense of village life where we have a vague awareness of major life changes for a certain group of people, but never truly get to know them. A novel which produces a similar effect (but has a very different style and nature) is Joanna Cannon's “The Trouble with Goats and Sheep” which also concerns a community's reaction to a missing person. It makes a poignant commentary about the natural way we socialize, make assumptions about others and never get the chance to truly engage with them on a meaningful level. It’s also really beautifully written but there are lots of mundane details about the multitude of characters’ lives alongside details that clue you into larger issues those characters are dealing with. Because I didn’t feel like I really knew the characters in depth, I cared about those mundane details even less than I would in a novel where there are a few central characters I got to know really well. If that were the case, I’d be okay with treading water waiting for a more interesting plot development or psychological insight. But, in “Reservoir 13” I felt like I didn't grasp who many of the characters were until page 200 or so – at which time there was so little of their story left in the novel it's like I barely ever knew them at all.

No doubt a rereading would yield a more fruitful understanding of the characters involved. The first time I read Virginia Woolf's “The Waves” I had difficulty distinguishing between the six central characters – partly because the oddball poetic language blurred them into one at first. It's only been through multiple re-readings that each character has crystallised into a distinct individual with many layers of psychological depth. In the long run, that made the novel feel so much more rewarding and also turned it into my absolute favourite novel. The comparison between these novels is apt because McGregor's novel also follows a small group of adolescents' lives as they grow up and in doing so poignantly captures the flow of time and paths in life. Woolf also traces how the sun rises and crosses the sky in her novel while McGregor gives equal weight to changes in nature. Frequently descriptions of characters' lives are interspersed in the same paragraph with an observation about developments in the lives of local animals like birds and foxes. So while we witness characters give birth, change jobs and suffer, we also witness over the years bats who breed, feed and hibernate. This gives an even more fully rounded portrait of what it's like to live in a community.

Each section begins with a new year and a description of fireworks in the village. 

Alongside descriptions of specific characters McGregor also refers to the lives of peripheral individuals in a striking way. A man moves to the village and people think of him as “the widower” even though no one knows the specifics of his situation. It turns out that his wife isn't dead at all; they are merely separated. Yet, the community still think of him as a widower and never get to know many more details of his life. The false impression about him has been cemented in the public's consciousness in a way which is both tragic and comic. A similar impression is given of the missing girl's parents who are viewed from a distance in a way that we can see hints of their painful conflict, but don't really fully understand or know them. A different but equally meaningful effect is created when we get a slight understanding of the domestic abuse a mother receives at the hands of her mentally/behaviourally-disabled child or the fear of a woman who escaped a painfully destructive marriage or a man's conflicted feelings about his son's homosexuality. Other characters are hesitant to intrude upon these characters personal lives making the reader feel the excruciating sting of isolation.

All this means that I've been really moved thinking about what Jon McGregor did in the structure and style of this novel. It's a revelatory depiction of what it means to live in a community and society. But, at the same time, when I was actually reading it I found my mind so often drifting to other things and I found it difficult to concentrate on. McGregor's successful stylistic choices effectively convey powerful meaning, but at the expense of a wholly immersive story. So it depends what kind of reading experience you're after. If you want a book you can meditate on and get more out of by reading it a second time around, “Reservoir 13” is a great book. But it's not the kind of novel that pulls you into the text so that you entirely forget that the world exists around you – at least, it didn't do that for me reading it for the first time.

An Unrestored Woman by Shobha Rao

Any dramatic or violent shift in society will mean that the lives of ordinary people are drastically affected. When country borders are redrawn people must also redraw their sense of identity. Some will survive this shift and some won’t. Shobha Rao writes about a large group of loosely connected individuals whose lives have been changed or residually affected by the Indian subcontinent being partitioned into the countries of India and Pakistan in 1947. These are short stories which can definitely be read independently, but this book exists in that murky realm between the novel and a collection of short stories. Part of the book’s power comes from seeing how certain characters appear differently in stories which don’t focus on them. But each story brings to the forefront the concrete life-altering changes caused by Partition in a fascinating variety of forms.

Rao’s characters embody a wide spectrum of individuals from men to women, from the wealthy/powerful to the poor/helpless, from gay to straight or somewhere on the spectrum in between, from Hindu to Muslim to agnostic and from young to old. It’s certainly not necessary to read them in order, but since I did so I could detect the way some themes or ideas would recur in different forms throughout the book. Where in the story ‘The Merchant’s Mistress’ a female servant triumphs over the lord and memsahib of the manor, the story ‘The Mehsahib’ shows a similar situation but the servant’s triumph feels much more morally complicated. A woman’s grief over the death of her baby in ‘The Lost Ribbon’ resonates much differently from the grief felt by a woman taken on holiday by her husband to try to save their marriage in the story ‘Curfew.’ These show a vibrant array of personalities and how common experiences will have different repercussions depending on each character’s individual responses to them.

One of the most engaging things I found throughout the book was how Rao shows a variety of sexual identities. The first two stories ‘An Unrestored Woman’ and ‘The Merchant’s Mistress’ include female characters Neela and Renu who are housed together in a camp for women that have been outcast or left without means because of the loss of their husbands. The physical connection they find together isn’t explicitly sexual but involves complicated feelings of romance, desire and love. Another story ‘The Imperial Police’ is from the perspective of Jenkins, a British officer stationed in (what is today) a city in Pakistan. He falls for one of his subordinates named Abheet Singh who is a Sikh, but isn’t able to fully articulate this desire to him and discovers a very different perspective on Abheet’s life after he’s killed in a violent community skirmish. I always find it fascinating to read about sexuality presented in complex ways within stories, but this collection also includes different perspectives on heterosexual marriage and the problematic challenges these couples face.

I was particularly interested in reading this alongside Arundhati Roy’s “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness” as both authors sought to explicitly depict the repercussions of Partition for a wide variety of individuals. While Roy’s novel is more an overarching look at society and explicitly political, Shobha Rao’s stories focus much more on the preoccupations and individual conflicts within particular moments in her character’s lives. Some are directly involved in Partition and some are not. The story ‘Such a Mighty River’ explores the life of an old man suffering from a form of dementia where he wanders the streets searching for his long-deceased wife. He’s been removed from time and circumstance in a curious way, yet he’s drawn back into it when a former prostitute he once visited and her cohorts decide to hold him hostage. However, the story ‘The Opposite of Sex’ is about a character named Mohan, one of the surveyors responsible for literally drawing the borders between India and Pakistan. He decides to use this power for his own selfish means with tragic results. Then there is the story 'Unleashed' which is far removed from India and involves a woman named Anju who lives in America in a drunken, depressed state which is reminiscent of a Jean Rhys novel.

Watch Shobha Rao discuss her collection and read from the story 'Kavitha and Mustafa'

One of the most memorable stories for me was ‘Blindfold’ where Bandra is a woman stripped of any prospects or livelihood, but she decides to muster what funds she can to found a brothel. This is a woman whose course in life was severely disrupted because of the repercussions of Partition, but who chose to survive and earn money to better the lives of her children through the exploitation of girls and women she buys from impoverished farmers. While her decision brings her temporary security and prosperity, it ultimately destroys her in both her estrangement from her children and a particular girl she purchases who cunningly asserts her independence. It’s fascinating how the issue of selling sex is represented here when compared to how it’s played out in the story ‘The Road to Mirpur Khas’ where a wife named Arya decides to sell her body when she and her husband face starvation.

In these stories, Shobha Rao powerfully represents a variety of experience all the way from the formation of the borders between India and Pakistan in 1947 to the present day where a woman of Indian descent contemplates what was lost along the way. They are at turns harrowing and heart-warming, but all utterly absorbing. 

My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent

One of the most horrific of human betrayals must be the abuse of a child by a parent. Not only does this warp a young person's development, but normalizes cruelty to the degree where a child might then inflict it upon others and themselves. Debut novel “My Absolute Darling” by Gabriel Tallent gives a startlingly new and heart-wrenching look at the way a child is made to feel dependent upon her father's abuse. Fourteen year old Julia is raised by her single father Martin in a rundown house on the California coast. The only other familial contact she has is with her decrepit but kindly grandfather, Daniel. She goes by the nickname 'Turtle' but Martin more often affectionately calls her 'Kibble' or 'My Absolute Darling.' Martin is very scholarly and often reads philosophy, but he’s prone to paranoia as he has extreme survivalist beliefs. Their shack is filled with an arsenal of weapons which he frequently trains Turtle in using. She’s a very adept student who can load, clean and accurately fire a range of guns. As Turtle prepares to go to high school and grows older, their isolated home life becomes more strained and intolerable. This is a mesmerizing story full of courage, dramatic scenes and insight into the formation of a severely damaged young individual’s identity.  

Tallent has a curious writing style which treads somewhere between a hyper-realized reality and an elevated intellectual drama. The story is highly attuned to the natural world. Frequently scenes are filled with rich descriptions of the plants and animals that surround their rural house. This reminded me of the kind of detail found in recent novel “The Sport of Kings” by C.E. Morgan or the pastoral scenes found in books by Émile Zola. Turtle’s psychology is presented in a complex way to show her skewed perspective of the world that’s been tainted by Martin’s oppositional personality and overbearing ideology filled with hate towards women. For instance, when she sees a well-meaning girl at her school she thinks: "I will grow up to be forthright and hard and dangerous, not a subtle, smiling, trick-playing cunt like you." The blunt unmediated reality of her inner and outer life are so forcefully presented, yet the trajectory of her story and interactions with others feel more akin a highly stylized drama. The closest comparison I can make is to the film ‘The Night of the Hunter’ which pays close attention to the details of nature and children’s loss of innocence under an insidious masculine figure. It’s both concretely realistic and saturated by an elegiac filter that makes it feel mythic.

The most fascinating way the novel deviates from being truly naturalistic is in the social interactions Turtle has with a couple of boys she meets on a hike. Brett and Jacob are just a little older than her, yet they are so learned that they frequently drop literary allusions into their discussions and reference classic literature. This is a consistent trope throughout the novel with Martin who often applies philosophical stances to their situations or even how he names a hated spider that inhabits their house Virginia Woolf. It’s through the friendship that Turtle strikes up with Brett and Jacob that the reader is keyed into a whole level of society surrounding her which Turtle is excluded from. The landscape which felt totally wild, untamed and impoverished through Turtle’s eyes reveals itself as an ordered and privileged place filled with affluent houses and valuable property. This realization forcefully smacks the girl: "Turtle has always known that other people grew up differently than she did. But she had, she thinks, no idea how differently." It’s tremendously powerful how the author presents this shift, yet it also felt slightly jarring. Brett and Jacob’s characters are so idiosyncratic that it’s difficult to believe the bond they hurriedly form with the aloof and combative figure of Turtle.

The greatest power of this novel is in its evocation of Turtle’s development and conflicted psychology. Her father insults her horrifically leading her to hate her personality, her intellect and her body. At one point she thinks "the slit is illiterate - that word undresses her of all that she has knotted and buckled up about herself; she feels collapsed – every bitter, sluttish part of her collapsed and made identical to that horrible clam." Yet she thinks his behaviour is justified and she mentally defends him: "she thinks, you are hard on me, but you are good for me, too, and I need that hardness in you.” Martin alternates physical, mental and sexual abuse with declarations of how much he values her and how they stand as a pair in opposition to the world. This makes Turtle feel that she has no purpose or value outside of this enclosed severely dysfunctional relationship. The author shows how this inner conflict plays out through torturously tense scenes and how painful it is for Turtle to imagine a life without her father’s dominant presence: "She thinks, I don't even know what all right would look like. I don't even know what that would mean."

Watch Gabriel Tallent discuss his inspiration for writing My Absolute Darling.

Other recent novels such as Hanya Yanagihara’s “A Little Life” and Eimear McBride’s “The Lesser Bohemians” have shown the long-term effects of abuse for difficult individuals. But I think “My Absolute Darling” gets a fascinating new angle on this harrowing issue capturing the powerful emotion of a damaged individual’s trajectory. Tallent shows the way a person’s instinct can help guide her towards realizing what’s right for her life. Even though this is an intensely dramatic and sensational story that’s definitely nothing like my own life, I found myself connecting with and relating to Turtle’s shifting internal logic. It’s challenging to reconcile the way you perceive and value yourself in relation to how others’ react to you. Learning to take on and process what others make you feel without letting it distort your sense of being is monumentally difficult. “My Absolute Darling” inhabits this struggle so powerfully.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy

Oh how I fretted starting this novel so weighted with expectation! It took Arundhati Roy twenty years to write this second novel after the phenomenal success of her first Booker Prize-winning novel “The God of Small Things.” Add to that the fact that the author is an astute political campaigner and activist who writes extensively about Indian politics and society – which I know little about. Add to that the murmurings I’d heard about the novel’s complexity and someone who told me she had to put this novel down because, despite the beauty of the writing, the sheer extent of references was overwhelming. So I frequently picked up this book and ran my hand over the cover, read the back and put it back on my shelf. But two things prompted me to finally start reading “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness”: it’s long listed for this year’s Man Booker Prize and a lovely booktuber named Annie at ‘Am I Write?’ offered to buddy read it with me. I’m so glad I was finally pushed to read it two months after its publication. While this novel is definitely a challenging read, it is also an intricately layered, surprising and wondrous depiction of a society in transition. And how glorious to find growing out of the story of this great civilization in turmoil a tender shoot of hope!

What surprised me the most since I’d avoided reading any reviews of this novel is that one of the central characters we’re introduced to at the beginning was born intersex. Anjum has both male and female genitals, but was raised as a boy. In her adolescence she leaves her family to live as a woman and joins a haveli filled with other intersex and trans people. They are a collective and family and become even more so when Anjum adopts an abandoned child named Zainab. When she takes this three-year old girl in: “Her body felt like a generous host instead of a battlefield.” It’s so beautiful and moving the way this individual whose family feel disgraced by her and who is scorned by the majority of society finds a way to pour her love into caring for someone instead of allowing herself to be crippled by being branded as a hijra outcast. However, we quickly learn that in her later years Anjum leaves her haveli called Khwabgah (the House of Dreams) to live in a graveyard where she gradually establishes a home for herself and eventually forms a community of individuals displaced by social conflict. She has a wonderfully unprejudiced view when taking people in stating: “I don’t care what you are… Muslim, Hindu, man, woman, this caste, that caste, or a camel’s arsehole.”

Rather than continuing to primarily focus on Anjum’s story (as I wished it did), the novel branches out to encompass a multiplicity of characters from many different parts of society. Roy introduces a dizzying array of people all connected with particular political movements, social clashes or devastating disasters. These centre largely around a location of vast protest called Jantar Mantar. In the centre of this vast amount of voices of dissent, a baby is abandoned and kidnapped. Who this baby is, where she came from, why she was left and what happened to her is gradually explained over a few hundred pages. But built around her story are the tales of people still caught within the repercussions of Partition, national/religious battles and especially the conflicts within Kashmir, the northernmost part of the Indian subcontinent. The novel mostly focuses on a group of people who knew each other in childhood and worked together in a theatrical production in their youth, but have gone on to take different sides in the political struggles. It charts their various romances, quests for revenge and how they’re helplessly drawn into conflicts that seem to have no end.

Roy describes how amidst war: "Still the Amaltas bloomed, a brilliant, defiant yellow. Each blazing summer it reached up and whispered to the hot brown sky, Fuck You."

Something that really carried me along while reading this complex novel is the beauty and disarming nature of Roy’s prose. This is something that Annie (my read-along buddy) noted as well. There are frequently bizarre metaphors and descriptions which really caught my attention. For instance, there is an owl which is compared to a Japanese businessman. There’s also a character that is compared to the voice of Billie Holiday: “Not the woman so much as her voice.” At other points she has a disarming way of drawing the reader into the character's particular experience: “She could hear her hair growing. It sounded like something crumbling. A burnt thing crumbling. Coal. Toast.” These odd descriptions have a way of reaching across national and cultural boundaries to draw you into the intense dissociation from reality the character has in a moment of crisis. Roy also has an acute sense of the tragic ironies which frequently exist in this society such as an air-conditioned mortuary: “The city’s paupers who lay there in air-conditioned splendour had never experienced anything of the kind while they were alive.” The narrative frequently also serves as social commentary making observations about how it's always women and children who are oppressed and abused the most in class, religious and political warfare.

It's true, the novel’s story isn’t straightforward and it will reference a lot of things most Western readers probably won’t be familiar with. Even though I occasionally would look up terms or events, I largely resisted this temptation because I preferred to immerse myself in the flow of the story and let certain things remain mysterious for the time being. Now, I can go read up more about them. But I got to a section of the novel where I think Roy really points out why she can’t write a straightforward story. This is from one character’s notebooks: “I would like to write one of those sophisticated stories in which even though nothing much happens there’s lots to write about. That can’t be done in Kashmir. It’s not sophisticated, what happens here. There’s too much blood for good literature.” I think Roy probably feels the same way. She is far too knowledgeable about everything that’s going on in India, its immense history and complicated politics to write a simple story. As such this novel probably isn’t what you’d classify as “good literature” in a traditional sense because the story goes all over the place. But at the same time, Roy revolutionizes the form of the book to fit all the multitude of things going on inside her head. And, after all, that’s what the novel is for – it keeps reinventing the form to suit the subject matter and the outlook of its author.

It takes dedication, patience and time to read this novel properly. But it encompasses a vast amount of heartfelt compassion for humanity so I'm immensely grateful for the journey it took me on.

When Light is Like Water by Molly McCloskey

Any tale that describes an American’s permanent move to the UK or Ireland will immediately grab my attention because of my connection to this experience. In Molly McCloskey’s novel “When Light is Like Water” Alice travels to Ireland to live and work there while she figures out what to do with her life. She ends up falling in love and setting there. It’s so difficult to resist the charms of Irish men! However, the majority of the novel relates an account of the dissolution of her marriage through an affair and her present life sorting through her emotionally-broken past. In doing so, McCloskey creates a powerful account of the complexities of Alice’s wayward love life and the difficult grief-laden process of moving forward when she’s lost the people who are closest to her.

The story of this novel is relatively simple, but the psychologically-insightful and evocative writing is what make this tale come vibrantly to life. McCloskey is highly attuned to relationships in communities, social groups and in romantic partnerships. She observes how "There is nothing like the presence of an outsider to heighten one's enjoyment of being an insider." This statement could readily be applied to a foreigner who enters a community or someone new that’s introduced to a circle of friends. It shows how our connections with others are reinforced by a kind of smug familiarity when an unknown entity enters the ring.

The primary focus is Alice’s affair with a man named Darragh and the emotional repercussions this causes on all sides. It’s presented as if this romantic betrayal was almost inevitable but the impact upon Alice and the way she processes it comes to her as a surprise: "I had always imagined adultery would feel shadowy and whispered, a world in black and white, all cobblestones and dripping eaves, but what it felt like was being always on the run, everything breathless and fractured and a little ridiculous." Rather than being caught up in the sensationalism of it, Alice is disarmed by how it’s exhausting and embarrassing having an affair. It tinges her retrospective account of her relationships with these two men with a special kind of melancholy as if this is an example of the inevitable solitary nature of life.

The author makes sharp observations about the way we are in some ways strangers within our own relationships. When describing her connection to her husband she states "there are currents that operate independently of us and of which we seem remarkably ignorant." When you’re part of a couple it so often feels like there is an energy to it which both participants are entirely unaware of as over time it moves between states of psychological/physical/sexual closeness and distance. Equally, the novel makes astute observations about the strangeness of encountering someone we once had a strong connection with: "Why is it that what we so often find on meeting someone we’ve loved seems not a residue or an after-image but a feeling more like foolishness?"

When reading this book I was strongly reminded of Anne Enright’s masterful novel “The Forgotten Waltz” which recounts a woman’s romance with a married man. Not only does Enright also dissect the moment by moment swings of emotion which accompany acts of infidelity, but she also shows how the Irish nation transforms in the background of her story. McCloskey does something similar as Alice witnesses the country change over a few decades. She observes how “Ireland at the end of the eighties often resembled was a place celebrating, insistently, its own collapse, and there was a certain dignity in that, a triumph even." and carries on through the early 2010s when the country experienced its ill-fated property boom. But McCloskey also casts her gaze further afield as Alice’s journalism takes her to Africa and her observations of society there make a sharp contrast to her impressions of Ireland.

“When Light is Like Water” is a deftly told story of painful heartache told as if looking through soiled panes of glass.

Mirror, Shoulder, Signal by Dorthe Nors (translated by Misha Hoekstra)

The story of “Mirror, Shoulder, Signal” by Dorthe Nors is fairly simple on the surface. Sonja is in her 40s living in modern-day Copenhagen and working as a translator of sensational Scandinavian crime fiction by Gosta Svensson (who is compared to Steig Larsson). Her occupation as a translator allows the author to explore thoughts about the nature of writing: “Language is powerful, almost magic, and the smallest alteration can elevate a sentence or be its undoing.” Sonja is learning how to drive at an academy although she’s self-conscious that she’s older than most of the people in her class. The story follows her lessons on the road, her experiences receiving treatment from a New Age-type masseuse Ellen and reflecting on memories of her family/childhood. Sonja feels in some curious way cut off from both her past and future so struggles to navigate her way through a nebulous present. What begins as a light and comic tale gradually turns much darker and soul-searching.

The beginning of this book reminded me of the start of Evelyn Waugh’s novel “Scoop” which shows a socialite’s madcap car ride through the streets of London. Sonja isn’t a very good driver and from Nors’ descriptions you can almost feel the car careering through the streets of Copenhagen narrowly escaping multiple accidents. Her education is not helped by her instructor in the passenger seat Jytte who smokes, frequently seizes control of the car and makes xenophobic/racist comments. As she’s disturbed by this behaviour she switches instructors to the centre’s owner Folke and a romantic tension forms. As Sonja’s behaviour becomes increasingly erratic it becomes clear how lonely and troubled she really is although on the surface she appears completely calm.

Sonja finds it relaxing to visit Western Cemetery in Copenhagen.

It feels like Nors wrote this novel partly as a self conscious foil to the kind of Scandi crime that Sonja translates. Her character feels slightly contemptuous of the genre and the people who avidly read it. She remarks that politicians who like taking these books on holiday will happily “rub themselves in SPF 50 and wallow in evil like it’s a party.” In contrast to the tales of violence and intrigue that she translates, Sonja’s story is something much more considered and subtle. Nothing extraordinary happens to her, but the schism which exists between her and her family – especially her sister Kate is intensely felt: “If Sonja and Kate were apples, you’d say that they’d fallen on two different sides of the tree.” Rather than explosive action, it’s only in unsent letters she writes and a telephone call to Kate that you’re really given a sense of how unhinged Sonja really is.

Sonja obsessively mulls over details of her childhood. There is a feeling of nostalgia and sense of loss that I think a lot of people feel especially if in adulthood they’ve moved away from where they were raised: “the place you come from is a place you can never return to. It’s transmogrified, and you yourself are a stranger.” Some descriptive details come up multiple times (such as a sandwich made from brown sugar pressed into bread). In particular, she frequently recalls a past visit to a strange fortune teller in a curry tunic that somehow obstructed her moving forward in her life: “If you don’t believe in the occult, you can’t guard against it, Sonja realizes. And if you do believe, you’re in deep shit.” I couldn’t quite make out why this encounter was so significant to Sonja, but it’s disallowed her from maturing into a healthy adult. Instead she’s trapped in this slightly infantile state where she can’t emotionally relate to many people or, indeed, drive no matter how earnestly she tries to learn. As it progresses the story has a curiously melancholic and haunting effect. Although “Mirror, Shoulder, Signal” didn’t feel entirely satisfying, it was an intriguing and thoughtful novel.