THIS WEEK’S NEW BOOKS REVIEWED | FEATURE
BETWEEN WORLDS: A QUEER BOY FROM THE VALLEYS
Jeffrey Weeks (Parthian)
Jeffrey Weeks is a well-known gay activist, historian and author of numerous books, articles and papers, who has been described as “the most significant British intellectual working on sexuality to emerge from the radical sexual movements of the 1970s”. Between Worlds serves not only as his autobiography, but as a first-hand account of one of the most culturally significant times in gay history.
Growing up in a Rhondda mining village during the 1950s and 60s, Weeks recounts his feelings of isolation: a loving, yet suffocatingly conservative family and community, and the shame he felt on realising his sexuality during adolescence. He found solace first in education, and ultimately as a scholar in queer London. Documentation of his personal journey goes in tandem with the social and cultural transformation that led from the decriminalisation of homosexuality: the erupting gay movement, the AIDS crisis and the Thatcher years. He tells tales of turbulent times, battles, movements and tragedies – and the brave people who paved the way for increasing acceptance of queer life.
Interweaving gender, class politics and sexuality, Weeks gives an intimate, humorous and insightful account of the juxtaposing worlds and communities which shaped him and his fascinating, inspirational life. Between Worlds will especially touch a nerve for those who came of age in the late 60s/70s – or those who have ever had to flee the suffocating small-town life to explore and become themselves.
Price: £20. Info: here
words DENIECE CUSACK
I FEEL LOVE
Julian Hanshaw & Krent Able [eds.] (SelfMadeHero)
This collection of six graphic stories, a follow up to I Feel Machine, was conceived one inebriated London night in September 2018. Nights like this currently feel like a distant memory, so a comic based on love and human (or otherwise) connections serves as a shot in the arm.
First up is Teen Swamp Monster Love by Benjamin Marra, who made a name for himself with O.M.W.O.T and Night Business and offers a suitably visceral take on love here. An awkward teen, away on a weekend-long French immersion course, finds his raging hormones leading him into a ritual resulting in body horror and violence; Marra’s simple style and direct storytelling lead this into territory more humorous than terrifying.
Anya Davidson’s Hurt/Comfort revolves around a daughter recently released from a psychiatric hospital into the care of her lonely mother. With an alluded backdrop of an extinction-level event in the media, characters find solace in erotic fan fiction and concepts of mutual care. Economic line work and a small colour palette put focus on the characters and their needs.
Co-editor Julian Hanshaw’s I Want To Watch is beautiful to look at, with an art style reminiscent of Rob Guillory’s work, but bleak in tone. A couple escape London to travel to a seemingly Spanish resort; the male of the couple has cuckolding fantasies of watching his wife with another man, but things don’t quite work out as he had hoped. They return with a new experience under their belt and a further distance between them than before.
Black Balloon, by Krent Able, is I Feel Love’s most OTT and ridiculous offering. A divorced killer for hire has an organic weapon, a la Existenz, and goes on a spree – cue a crescendo of gore, and an interspecies romance that comes out of leftfield. The artwork is a delight to look at, toeing the line between stomach churning and hilarious.
The Anchor is buzzing with frenetic energy and jumps off the page. Hard to summarise what it’s about, but there’s big themes of religion, being, philosophy, sin and sacrifice crammed into a small package. Writer Kelsey Wroten raises a multitude of existential questions that have left me wondering what the point of anything is.
Cat Sims’ take on the impact of pregnancy and the environment’s effect on us bookends the collection, bringing to light the consequences it can have when combined with ill mental health and visual and auditory hallucinations, and with an art style reminiscent of both Charles Burns and Josh Simmons.
Though I was previously unfamiliar with most of the artists involved in this collection, this comes highly recommended as a jump-off point to explore their back catalogue. I feel happy, exhausted, depressed, horny and sick – don’t know if I feel love, though.
Price: £14.99. Info: here
words GARETH MOULE
LA MADRE
Grazia Deledda [trans M.G. Steegman] (Dedalus)
Originally published over a century ago, La Madre charts a consecrated priest’s struggle to avoid temptation as he questions his vow of celibacy. Set in a rural parish in Grazia Deledda’s native Sardinia, Paul’s mother has ensured that he’s lived a life devoted to his priesthood, but when he falls for Agnes she is left conflicted between her maternal desire for his happiness, and an instinctive obedience to tradition.
Is his piety worth suppressing true love? Deeply nuanced characters compensate for the straightforward premise, with even those who make brief appearances seeming complex and well explored, and it never feels that the author is impressing her own opinion upon the reader – there is no ‘correct’ choice for Paul to make.
It’s a timeless story that has been well trodden since, with films like Black Narcissus and Chocolat building narratives that are similar both in content and in their parable-lite nature. However, Deledda’s talent for capturing the internal torment of her characters, and the inspired use of the dual perspective of Paul and his titular mother, saw her win the 1926 Nobel Literature Prize, and ensures the novella remains a compelling and refreshing read today.
Price: £8.99. Info: here
words ALEX PAYNE
PERMAFROST
Eva Baltasar [trans. Julia Sanches] (And Other Stories)
Can you achieve literary hero status without a name for people to use when singing your praises? How about antihero status? The narrator of Permafrost seems to possess most of the other qualities which get characters canonised thus: a ceaselessly sassy and waspish Barcelona lesbian, seemingly near-irresistible to women but with a pervasive yen for suicidal ideation (providing it’s somewhat glamorous or iconic) and, with no end of brutal one-liners about her dull family thrown in, a quest for rootless independence.
Despite her cynicism over her sister’s pregnancy, it doesn’t quite turn out that way for our anonymous protagonist, but beforehand there is much navigation in the waters of the postgraduate life-slump. Each chapter functions as a self-contained unit, while still allowing for plot and character development, and while there isn’t a great deal of local colour – the narrator pines to leave Barcelona, and does so twice, for Brussels and the Scottish Borders – Permagel, the original title, was a bestseller in Catalan.
Prior to this debut novel, Eva Baltasar’s favoured medium was poetry, and this rings through in much of her phrasing and linguistic tics. No doubt a number of these will have been subject to Julia Sanches’ translation (pleasingly, Sanches is afforded an afterword to outline the challenges this text offered), but consider, too, Baltasar’s eye for simile, like comparing Gillette razors to “old letterpress T’s”, or the rollercoaster list of things the narrator thinks about when not thinking about sex.
Price: £10. Info: here
words NOEL GARDNER
WATCH HER FALL
Erin Kelly (Hodder & Stoughton)
In a saturated market, a new psychological thriller by Erin Kelly [pictured, top – credit John Godwin] is always cause for celebration. And thankfully her trademarks – murky domestic setups, morally ambiguous protagonists on the verge of cracking, and a strong sense of place – are all present and correct in Watch Her Fall, set in the impenetrable world of professional ballet.
Prima ballerina Ava Kirilova is about to take on the role of her career, the fabled dual part of Odette and Odile in Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, under the instruction of the tyrannical Mr K, founder of the London Russian Ballet – who also happens to be her father. Someone else wants what Ava has, however, and is watching her every move: a war of attrition that will eventually prove fatal.
While Watch Her Fall is never anything less than compelling – and the cutthroat world of ballet deliciously drawn – the obligatory twist is too heavily foreshadowed for it to be a genuine jolt, and falls a little flat when it comes. Long-time Kelly fans may find themselves hankering after the more deftly-plotted The Burning Air and He Said/She Said, but any limitations in the story itself are more than offset by the author’s skilful mastery of characterisation.
Price: £14.99. Info: here
words ALICE HUGHES
