For his part, Joyce has an uncannily well-tuned ear for the speech of working-class Dubliners, and Ulysses, which is awash with pub talk, gossip, political polemic and satirical invective, is one of the first novels in English to portray what we might now call mass culture. It includes tabloid journalism, scientific jargon, a pastiche of women’s romantic fiction, a mini-Expressionist jargon, the language of the unconscious and a good deal more. There is really no answer to the question “What is Joyce’s style?” even though he could spend days on end sculpting a sentence.
The novelist Cai Emmons, who has intimately explored the rough contours traced by rage, grief and happiness onto ordinary lives for 20 years, has two novels out in September, “Unleashed” and “Livid.” The reason for the near-simultaneous release — and the extraordinary productivity and urgency behind it — was the shattering news she received on Feb. 4, 2021.
“It’s like: ‘How many nice meals have you prepared?’ You know, for your family or friends. You take some time to make a nice meal, but you don’t necessarily remember. Maybe it sounds ridiculous, but I’m totally immersed in the work I’m doing today. Every time I write, it’s like the first time,” she says.
The approach has yielded so many books that the epithet routinely attached to Oates is “prolific”. Unfortunately, this suggests that the salient feature of her output is its quantity. Does she mind? “I guess it’s just true. It’s just a fact,” she says. “I never thought that I would even publish one book. If you publish your first when you’re quite young, you feel: wow, maybe there will never be another one. And it was sort of one book at a time. Or one project at a time. ‘If I can just get this finished …’ I guess I just kept on with that.”
“I walked six miles this morning” messaged BordersCrone a couple of weeks before our proposed hike, “and am absolutely knackered”. “My foot doctor said I should keep off it for five weeks,” replied BucksCrone, “but it’ll be OK in a boot.” DevonCrone’s hip hurts (that’s me) but she decided not to say anything. After all, the die was cast with the three Old Crones committed to walk the 97-mile St Oswald’s Way in Northumberland.
As a group of friends – two octogenarians plus one youngster of 78 – we keep each other motivated for our weekly Saturday parkruns, but this would be much more challenging. We hadn’t meant to get so old before tackling it: 2019 was the plan but then came lockdown. We enlisted the help of Mickledore Holidays to produce for us a not-too-strenuous itinerary and sort the accommodation. The longest day was supposed to be 11 miles, which we reckoned we’d manage. Just.
But then we come to Miss Marple, Christie’s other enduring character. This lady has inspired several theatrical incarnations, from the hearty Margaret Rutherford to the perfectly understated Joan Hickson. And now she has claimed the attention of a group of best-selling authors, each trying her hand at a Miss Marple story in an anthology simply called “Marple”. The illustrious group includes Kate Mosse, Val McDermid, Elly Griffith, Lucy Foley and Ruth Ware. Each author captures Christie — and Marple — perfectly, while also displaying just a bit of her own unique touch. Feminist author Naomi Alderman, for instance, describes one pompous male character as having a voice that “boomed from the bottom of his beard.” Later he’s found face down in his plate of roast venison, dead of an overdose.
So, what does Marple have that Poirot hasn’t? First, she is relatable. One would like to entertain Miss Marple to tea. She is maybe one of Christie’s few real and fleshed-out characters: the consummate English spinster, living in the typical English village, with its gossip and intrigues. Marple actually represents a whole generation of women whose hopes of marriage were dashed by the loss of over a million young men on the battlefields of World War I. As a young woman of good family at that time, she was raised to make a good match, and not equipped for much else. She clearly has an excellent brain. In other times she might have gone on to university and had a lucrative profession. Instead, she has to content herself with her garden and good works around the parish. It’s no wonder that she turns that excellent brain and sharp powers of observation to solving crimes.
So “Fairy Tale” is a multiverse-traversing, genre-hopping intertextual mash-up, with plenty of Easter eggs for regular King devotees. Thankfully, it’s also a solid episodic adventure, a page-turner driven by memorably strange encounters and well-rendered, often thrilling action.