Alexandra Morton-Hayward, a 35-year-old mortician turned molecular palaeontologist, had been behind the wheel of her rented Vauxhall for five hours, motoring across three countries, when a torrential storm broke loose on the plains of Belgium. Her wipers pulsed at full speed as the green fields of Flanders turned a blurry grey. Behind her sat a small, black picnic cooler. Within 24 hours, it would be full of human brains – not modern specimens, but brains that had contemplated this landscape as far back as the middle ages and had, miraculously, remained intact.
For centuries, archaeologists have been perplexed by discoveries of ancient skeletons devoid of all soft tissue, except what Morton-Hayward cheerfully described as “just a brain rattling around in a skull”. At Oxford, where she is a doctoral candidate, she has gathered the world’s largest collection of ancient brains, some as old as 8,000 years. Additionally, after poring over centuries of scientific literature, she has tallied a staggering catalogue of cases – more than 4,400 preserved brains as old as 12,000 years. Using advanced technologies such as mass spectrometry and particle accelerators, she is leading a new effort to reveal the molecular secrets that have enabled some human brains to survive longer than Stonehenge or the Great Pyramid of Giza.
It began with my dad’s 8mm projector. When I was ten my father would let me play projectionist for the movie nights my parents put on at our house. I was hooked right from the start. The projector was one of the first mechanical things I was allowed to play around with and I loved it: I loved threading the film, the feel of the metal teeth of the intermittent sprocket, the rapid-fire hum of the projector’s motor and the acetate smell of the film and how it bubbled on screen when a piece got caught in the gate.
And there are monsters here, too: a subterranean essence hiding at the heart of the structure. It’s with this image—dog, tail and all—that we get a hint of what Haddon is about. Both this cover and the tales that lie beneath gesture toward something savage and incomprehensible at the center of ourselves. We catch it in glimpses, illuminated by terror and ecstasy. Haddon finds these devastating moments in the ancient and the modern, across centuries and across continents, in moments when mythic themes—the alternation of creation and destruction, the devastating transformations that result—repeat endlessly, the heartbeat of the human condition.
Novels about queer identity are as common as road trips these days. What makes this one stand out is seeing the journey to self-acceptance from the point of view of a woman born in 1941, who began to practice psychiatry at a time when homosexuality was considered a disorder and electroshock therapy an appropriate treatment. Yet Montague is such a gifted, sensitive and big-hearted writer that she can extend her imaginative sympathy even to Magda’s parents, whose strict Protestant religion taught them to revile this essential aspect of their daughter.
It's a challenging time for social satire: For one thing, the country sometimes seems as divided by what it finds funny as it is by politics. But Blood Test, a new novel by Charles Baxter, perhaps spans divisions because it draws upon a tried-and-true comic predicament: namely, the little guy who's forced to punch above his weight with a larger entity.
Walter, who has played more than a score of Shakespearean roles from Viola to Brutus, admits “I worship Shakespeare”. She nevertheless wants to take him to task for the limitations on his insights into women and women’s lives. Her book provides a series of supplementary speeches, mostly in rhyming iambic pentameter, introduced with brief but revealing snippets of her own connection to the characters across her career.