When Anna Burns, author of last year’s Booker prize-winning account of the Troubles, Milkman, was asked whether writing was a political act, she was taken aback. “Honestly? This is the sort of question I don’t know what to do with. It’s not how my brain works.” Eventually she allowed that if politics was about power then yes, OK, her work was political. Such qualms did not deter the judges of the inaugural Orwell prize for political fiction from awarding Burns another trophy. Chair of judges Tom Sutcliffe praised Milkman’s “account of how political allegiances crush and deform our instinctive human loyalties”.
Like the rest of the Orwell prize shortlist, Milkman has a theme rather than an agenda. Always capacious, the genre of political fiction can now accommodate authors such as Ali Smith, Rachel Kushner, Paul Beatty and Jonathan Coe. As George Orwell wrote: “No book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.” Much harder to find, however, is an example of what one might call the campaigning novel: that subset that includes classics by the likes of Charles Dickens and Émile Zola alongside fiction-cloaked manifestos, memoirs and works of reportage. What unites them is a passionate desire to use character and narrative to draw the reader’s attention to some social ill and to galvanise efforts to remedy it. As Sam Leith, Orwell prize judge, describes the approach: “Look at this, isn’t it awful?”
Like the town’s general store from 1919 and schoolhouse from 1850, the Oakhurst Diner in Millerton, N.Y., is a living time capsule.
Housed in the original 1950s Silk City dining car, it screams classic diner: crimped stainless-steel facade, Formica counter with stools, pink-and-blue neon sign, specials scrawled on chalkboards. But the nods to midcentury nostalgia mostly end there.
Sure, you can get two eggs and a cup of Joe here. But you could also order a bahn mi sandwich, Bulletproof coffee, CBD-infused Kombucha, artisanal hot sauce, a macrobiotic bowl with seaweed and brown rice, kimchi and a $16 burger made from “grass-fed and grass-finished” beef sourced from Herondale Farm, about 14 miles up the road.
The Memory Police is a masterpiece: a deep pool that can be experienced as fable or allegory, warning and illumination. It is a novel that makes us see differently, opening up its ideas in inconspicuous ways, knowing that all moments of understanding and grace are fleeting. It is political and human, it makes no promises. It is a rare work of patient and courageous vision.
But dear reader, if you are one of those people who has hungered for something else, for an elaborate feast for the senses, you should give this a try. Haikasoru produced good books, but more than that, it gave us a view into a seldom-glimpsed literary field — Japanese speculative fiction — and Automatic Eve is a great example of the brilliant books they produced. I hope there is a Haikasoru 2.0 in the near future and that like Mothra it emerges from its cocoon once more, ready to astonish us.
One day he overhears two women walking past his shop, saying: “There’s no point going in there, it’s just books.” A lesser man might give up. But despite the gloomy picture he paints of bookselling, this is a delightfully heart-warming love letter to bookshops, one that celebrates their serendipity: the unexpected joy of coming across books you didn’t know existed. And even as a locus of chance encounters: “Often customers – not locals – will bump into people they know from a totally different walk of life in the shop.” As Flo – a student who occasionally helps in the shop (“the very embodiment of petulance”) – writes on the blackboard outside: “Money can’t buy happiness, but it can buy books (which is basically the same thing).”
For most of the 20th century J Lyons & Co Ltd lodged at the heart of Britain’s social imagination. From the 1920s you could pop into a Lyons tea shop to be served by a “nippy”, a light-footed waitress got up like a parlourmaid. If you were a working girl of the newest and nicest variety – a secretary, teacher or shop assistant – you could eat an express lunch on your own in a Lyons without risking your respectability. If you were feeling particularly smart, you could go up to “town” and stay in the art deco-ish Strand Palace or Regent’s Palace hotels, vernacular versions of elite institutions such as Claridge’s or The Savoy. In the evening you might venture out to the “Troc”, or Trocadero, in your best togs, where you could enjoy a fancy dinner and dance to a jazz band. Back home, the stream of comforts continued as you sat down with a cup of Lyons tea while your children might get a Mivvi, a sumptuous ice-cream-lolly hybrid.