Winner of the Whitbread Children’s Book Award (now the Costa Book Awards) in 1996, Anne Fine’s The Tulip Touch forms part of the oeuvre of her work for older children and teens. This is due in no small part to the more dark and challenging subject matter of this book, which explores childhood abuse and neglect, and at heart is a story about how we ignore the suffering of others for the sake of our own convenience.

The story’s narrator is the young Natalie Barnes, a girl of ten or eleven who is quiet, relatively studious and unimposing. Her family run hotels, and after moving into the Palace Hotel and moving schools once more, Natalie encounters Tulip Pierce, a strange, dishevelled and aggressive girl who lives nearby. In Tulip, Natalie senses excitement and danger; while  in Natalie, Tulip senses a willing playmate for her cruel games. The two girls become best  friends, and Natalie is drawn into Tulip’s increasingly bitter and mocking world. The novel turns on half-truths, glimpses and hearsay: we learn that Mr Pierce, Tulip’s father, is mean to her, that he makes her drown kittens and occasionally thrashes her. None of this is witnessed directly by the reader but is told through gossip and overheard conversations between people who heard it from other people. Tulip remains an enigma to us. While the adults around Natalie and Tulip (parents, teachers, guests at the Palace) seem to “understand” that Tulip “has had a difficult upbringing”, none of them are willing to truly take her on, preferring to get on with their own lives. Tulip becomes increasingly spiteful and cruel; and after a literally inflammatory evening, Natalie decides that she too has to start looking after herself and decides to “dump” Tulip as a friend. Thus the betrayal is set in motion and the scene is set for Tulip’s final revenge…

She tugged so hard at me, I had to go. But as I stumbled after her, still looking back, I knew I was bewitched. The Tulip Touch had really got me this time. I knew I’d dream of fires forever, and wake in the middle of my dull, dark nights to see the flames she might have lit in me still shooting up to scorch the sky. I’d see whole streets, entire cities, burning. I’d switch on my bedside light and, for a while, the old familiar pictures on the walls and clothes on the chair might blot out the smouldering visions. But I’d be sure Tulip was lying in wait in some bleak bedroom. And I’d know the minute my room was dark again, she’d pick up where she left off, and send more of her own imaginings into my boring dreams, to set them ablaze with her own growing frenzies.

The Tulip Touch is a smart and sad novel, bristling with danger and excitement. Aimed at children in their mid-teens, it deals with the cliques and (dis)loyalties of high school kids, with the carelessness of parents and the limits of our empathy for one another. It raises uncomfortable questions about all of us, about our apathy or complicity in social injustice, and – as the dark text on the novel’s sleeve reads – reminds us that no-one is born evil.

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), or North Korea, was established in its current form not long after WW2, when competing US/Soviet interests split the peninsula into two halves. Within the space of a few short years, a former anti-Japanese guerilla fighter who styled himself Kim Il-sung had risen to take control over the fledgling nation. American journalist Bradley K. Martin, armed with decades of experience reporting on East Asian affairs, as well as several trips into DPRK himself, explores how the country has become one of the most fascinating, cruel, tyrannical and stubborn regimes the world has ever known. Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader (2004) hopes to pull back the screen from behind North Korea and to illuminate this vile, enigmatic regime. The popular narrative about North Korea is well established in the popular mindset by now: the brainwashed, uniformed masses, indoctrinated from birth to deify and revere their “Dear Leader” Kim Il-sung and his successor, son Kim Jong-il. Statues of the leader adorn squares across the nation’s capital, Pyongyang; children learn to repeat by rote his name and wisdom in school; Christmas is not celebrated but the Dear Leader’s birthday is a national holiday; citizens must wear a badge of the Dear Leader’s face on their clothing; and all media is state-provided, such that all films, all television, and all books are about the Dear Leader and his achievements in North Korea. Outside influences are strictly frowned upon. There is much truth to all of this, and what Martin also reveals in his illuminating book is what lies behind the bizarre facade: prison camps, gulags, forced labour, torture, disappearances and widespread state brutality. It is distinctly possible that the modern state of North Korea represents the most perfect and hermetic totalitarianism that the imagination of man has yet conceived.

Martin relies on many interviews with state defectors during his book, building up a picture of what life is like inside the deeply stratified society. Only the elite are permitted to live in Pyongyang, which is perhaps best thought of as a showcase for foreign eyes. Most of what little money North Korea has is poured into elaborate building projects in Pyongyang: the world’s tallest hotel, for example. Or another statue dedicated to Kim Jong-il and the “socialist paradise” he and his father have created. Or the five-lane highways (cars are notoriously expensive and scarce in DPRK) in which the middle lane is reserved especially for use of the Dear Leader. The old, the crippled and those from “bad” family backgrounds (read: those with anything less than perfect loyalty to the regime) live in the rural, remote parts of the country, where state-distributed food rations are often scarce and families often resort to living of berries and sometimes tree bark for survival. Any criticism of the regime is punished strictly – the prisoner herself and, until recently, her entire family would be carted off to some gulag in the mountains for anything up to ten years (Kim certainly seems to have picked up a thing or two from those early days with Stalin), and Martin recounts interviews with former prisoners who talk of near-stavation, of being forced to sit, straight-backed and fists held out, for over ten hours a day. While in recent years it seems that public executions have halted, and the families of political prisoners and defectors are no longer punished (ascertaining accurate information about the most secretive state in the world is never easy), the country remains both cruel and unusual. Meanwhile, of course, the Dear Leader lives in the most resplendent luxury: owns more than a dozen palaces, has concubines to spare (picked up from the street to audition – their parents merely informed that their daughter has gone to “serve the state”), and there is even an anecdote that each grain of rice eaten by Kim Il-sung was individually chosen and washed.

Of course, North Korea is now over fifty years old, and things have changed. Martin talks the reader through the economic, political and social evolution of the state; from its initial status as little more than Stalinist lap-dog, through its 1950-53 war with South Korea (Kim Il-sung invaded, although that was not the message given to DPRK citizens, who have always been taught that South Korea and its ally, the USA, represent an aggressive imperialist threat), the thorny nuclear issue (which in the 1990s seemed to halt promising talks with South Korea), and the stuttering “reforms” begun in recent years by Kim Jong-il, who was historically reluctant to follow the path of China and embrace market forces, having witnessed the collapse of Communism both in Russia and in Eastern Europe. It seems, in recent times, that private black markets have begun to organically emerge in some parts of the country; the last resort of a people with no alternative. It may be these black markets which save  the people of North Korea. Rice rations have been historically extremely unreliable; DPRK is a country rife with malnutrition and pellagra. Reunification with the South remains the great obsession of the Kim regime and its states ultimate goal, although, as Martin points out on more than one occasion, the South itself is currently less than keen on the idea; facing the prospect of absorbing a failed state with an emerging economy would not be in the best interests of South Korea at this point.

While Martin briefly touches upon some of the ideological and philosophical traditions that have helped form the modern DPRK, I would have liked to see more of this. North Korea cannot be understood without grasping the concept of juche, a specifically Korean form of nationalist self-reliance propounded by Kim Il-sung which has been largely responsible for the country’s isolationism and inward-looking nature. This idea of juche, combined with a feverish dedication to Communist ideals, and – as Martin suggests all too tantalisingly – combined with the Confucianism which permits dynastic succession, is the mindset which helps form North Korea. There are many hard-won details in this book which will inform and educate anyone who wishes to learn about DPRK; the role it has played, and continues to play in the world, as part of George W. Bush’s famous “axis of evil” (along with Iran and Iraq). It is a superb achievement, and will no doubt lead to further reading on my part on the subject of North Korea.

We are first introduced to Pavel Nicolayevich Rusanov, a snivelling Party man who wears thin-rimmed spectacles and has swallowed the callous collectivized propaganda of the state. He sits in pompous judgement over his fellow cancer sufferers, most notably Oleg Kostoglotov (seemingly based to some extent on Solzhenitsyn himself), an embittered yet intellectually lively critic of the regime, who attempts to form relationships with two of the female nurses on the ward, Vera Gangart and the young nurse Zoya. Through these characters and others, Solzhenitsyn explores the impact of Stalinist rule, both on the individual and on society as a whole. The idea of the “cancerous” Soviet state with its “tumours” of labour camps is central to the novel’s themes; just as Kostoglotov, discharged from the ward towards the end of the book, realises that his life cannot ever be quite the same; so, in the zoo, gazing at the caged animals, he comes to understand that Russian life, too, cannot go “back to normal” following the horrors they have witnessed. Through the character of Rusanov Solzhenitsyn explores the human and intellectual fallacies of ideology; subsuming all thought, all feeling and all reason under the cold metal sheet of official state policy, a trick of despots and totalitarians everywhere, which allows human life to become cheap, which ultimately permits the most horrific crimes and destroys empathy. It is a sense of individual liberty which Solzhenitsyn seems to champion; whilst not any kind of cheerleader for Western liberal capitalism, he uses a barbed wire to scar the face of Stalinist propaganda, revealing the wounds beneath.

Also, of course, the book functions as an examination of the state of post-Stalinist healthcare and the suffering of those with cancer, both male and female (although the novel focuses mainly on the men’s ward, one touching scene in particular involving a vibrant young woman about to have her breast removed will stay with me). Solzhenitsyn depicts the realities of the patients: their fears, paranoia, obsessions and denials, as well as the doctors and nurses: the paucity of resources they have to work with, the overstretched system, and even a discourse on the relative merits of public and private healthcare through the private doctor whom Vera goes to see. Cancer Ward is sometimes a difficult book; easy to admire, for sure, but not easy to love. Discussing the artistry of prose in translation is always a tricky business, but Solzhenitsyn has a clear, plain and somehow sneakily profound manner of writing which gets under the skin; despite this, the book, clocking in at 570 pages in my edition, often feels longer than it is and can become turgid in places. There is little amusement here, and although there is a curious sense of life-affirming freedom embodied in Kostoglotov, it remains – as Solzhenitsyn’s legacy bequeaths its own Soviet X-ray to us – bristlingly ambivalent.

This autumn I learned from experience that a man can cross the threshold of death even when his body is still not dead. Your blood still circulates and your stomach digests, while you yourself have gone through the whole psychological preparation for death – and lived through death itself. Everything around you, you see as if from the grave. And although you’ve never counted yourself a Christian, indeed the very opposite sometimes, all of a sudden you find you’ve forgiven all those who trespassed against you and bear no ill-will towards those who persecuted you. You’re simply indifferent to everyone and everything. There’s nothing you’d put yourself out to change, you regret nothing. I’d even say it was a state of equilibrium, as natural as that of the trees and the stones. Now I have been taken out of it, but I’m not sure whether I should be pleased or not. It means the return of all my passions, the bad as well as the good.

Green’s novel is eminently readable – I brushed through Paper Towns in just a few days – and extremely funny. I caught myself chuckling out loud on many occasions. “Getting you a date to prom is so hard that the American government believes diplomacy alone will not be sufficient and that force will be required.” The wit is one of the three things that make this novel so enjoyable: the others are a fast-paced and well-plotted narrative; and a genuine sense of profundity and thoughtfulness, as the motif of the “paper towns” is developed by first Margo and then, later, Q. (A “paper town” is a fictional place surreptitiously added to maps by cartographers in an attempt to “copyright” their maps; any other map they see which also contains this fictional place, they will know it’s a rip-off of their product). Green uses the idea to talk about the banality of suburban life and the feelings of helplessness and lack of self-understanding that these teenagers are feeling. The situation of these kids – about to leave high school, fretting over dates for prom and starting to realise that they will soon be leaving the school and one another for the final time, along with the maelstrom of emotions that leaving entails – will be familiar to everyone. It is a frequently genuinely touching novel interspersed with moments of hilarity and excitement, as well as John Green using the narrative to plug his favourite bands, which frankly I have no problem with at all when he has such good taste (the Mountain Goats, Billy Bragg & Wilco’s Mermaid Avenue, the Violent Femmes, all get a mention). Anyone who enjoys YA fiction, or really, anyone who enjoys exciting and intelligent writing, should read this book. I adored it.

Perhaps the most emblematic story, though, is the longest in the collection: “The Blue Yonder”, a tale – inspired, like many here, by real life  - of a mentally disturbed and possibly schizophrenic man, who, in his night-time guise as “The Zombie”, stalks and brutally murders homeless people, stuffing their mouths with cleaning fluid before decapitating them and leaving their heads in dumpsters. As the “day-time” version of the killer, known as “The Other”, starts to become dimly aware of what his alter-ego is doing, their battle of wills takes place amongst a backdrop of the winos, junkies and alcoholics who populate the park benches and underpasses of San Francisco. These are, then, stories of the dispossessed – and here we mean the truly dispossessed, those whose dispossession makes us not uncomfortable but often glad. There are no easy answers, no quickly identifiable “victims” and “oppressors”, often those dispossessed here are bad people, violent, brutal and cruel. They are stories of those who seek to dominate and wield power over others, who themselves victimise and Otherize groups around them. He dares us to empathise with these scenes from nightmares, dares us not to look away (a five-page description of a tramp’s autopsy in “The Blue Yonder” will turn the stomach), challenges our own moral and societal assumptions. If there is a writer who immediately springs to mind reading Vollmann, it is William S. Burroughs, in his nightmarish depictions of violence, brutality and the very fringes of socially acceptable behaviour.

The writing here is frequently grandiloquent and poetic: sometimes to Vollmann’s credit, sometimes to the mere bafflement of the reader, and I’d be lying if I didn’t confess that there were times I wished the narrative onwards and was, well, confused and – at worst – bored by Vollmann’s Pynchonian flights of prosodic fancy. The stories here bear great potential, but next I think I’d like to read something more recent of his work; I hear that Europe Central is a fine novel. In the meantime, to read something original, dark and unsettling, one could do a lot worse than checking out The Rainbow Stories.

I want more life. I can’t help myself. I do.

I’ve lived through such terrible times, and there are people who live through much much worse, but… You see them living anyway. When they’re more spirit than body, more sores than skin, when they’re burned and in agony, when flies lay eggs in the corners of the eyes of their children, they live. Death usually has to take life away. I don’t know if that’s just the animal. I don’t know if it’s not braver to die. But I recognize the habit. The addiction to being alive. We live past hope. If I can find hope anywhere, that’s it, that’s the best I can do. It’s so much not enough, so inadequate but… Bless me anyway. I want more life.

So speaks Prior, during Perestroika, the second part of Kushner’s emotionally devastating masterpiece, which is subtitled “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes”. Set in New York during the Reaganite 1980s, it follows the fortunes of a varied group: a gay couple, one of whom contracts HIV; a vile, powerful right-wing lawyer; and a seemingly straight-laced Mormon couple. The ravages and horrors of AIDS are the catalyst and epicentre of this play, which swings with grace and a cracked beauty from the deep and intimate to Miltonic grandeur, never feeling forced or difficult as it does so. It’s a deeply human work, compassionate and empathetic, and at the same time – and no less – an angry, pissed-off condemnation of the cruelties of right-wing policies regarding homosexuality and AIDS in the Reagan years. The tedious, dogmatic ignorances of conservative religion are attacked, and the frailties and sensitivities of human relationships raised to a near-apocalyptic pitch. It’s a frequently harrowing work, but alleviated through several things, notably Kushner’s beautiful, poetic writing (what a gift and privilege for actors it must be to read some of these lines) and a playful sense of the sacrilegious and the profane (an angel making an AIDS-ridden gay man ejaculate in his hospital bed? Conservative Christianity this ain’t, comrades). I welled up on several occasions reading this play; and I’m thankful for it.

There is a TV mini-series adaptation of the play, which I haven’t yet seen, but will soon. It stars Al Pacino, Emma Thompson, Meryl Streep, Mary-Louise Parker (a particular favourite of mine… ahem), and Justin Kirk (who also acts with Parker in the show Weeds). As always though, I think it’s best to go to the original text first, and of course the problem with drama is that it is designed to be staged, designed to be seen on-stage (and Kushner gives lengthy suggestions and proposals for how the play should be staged, including suggesting that the wires and mechanisms of the Angel should be visible to the audience – how Brechtian). Angels in America is a set-piece, a jewel. It’s a large, long play dealing with big, big ideas (redemption? grace? forgiveness? hypocrisy? politics? you’ll find them all here, along with generous lashings of the biggest, best idea of them all: love) which never feels less than present, here, now, with you. It’s in the room with you, looking at you. It is at once near and distant, micro and macro. It will squash your heart into a little ball. Read it. See it.

Artemis Fowl

The eponymous Fowl is a twelve-year old, suit wearing and hyper-articulate criminal mastermind (well, nearly), living in a large Lara Croft-esque mansion just outside Dublin. With his trusty bodyguard Butler he seeks to restore the Fowl clan to their previous days of vast criminal wealth. In this first installment, Artemis discovers the Book – an ancient document containing the secrets of the fairies, who in Colfer’s world are not Tinkerbells flitting prettily around lampshades, but a whole society living deep underground, with a crack squad of agents ready to deal with any trouble. We are introduced to the plucky Captain Holly, the first female fairy on the force, her disgruntled boss Commander Root, and – in a stroke of characterization immediately reminiscent to anyone who’s seen any action movies – the nerdy, paranoid but good-natured techie, a centaur named Foaly (I kept picturing Topher from Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse in this role). When Artemis Fowl reads a copy of the fairies’ Book, he resolves to steal their gold, no matter what the cost, and for the first time in history, launches a “hostile act” between the human and fairy species – he kidnaps Holly and holds her to ransom. Soon, Holly, Root, Foaly and more are caught in an exciting hostage escape, involving trolls, magic, guns, laser technology, and other tricks perfectly designed to get young readers’ hearts racing.

What makes the story touching are the glimpses of Artemis’ humanity peeking through the surface: his concern over the whereabouts of his father (missing at sea, presumed dead), the occasional twinges of conscience he “suffers” as he puts his Machiavellian and (almost) perfectly conceived plan into action. I will be teaching this novel soon to a group of Year 8 pupils, and look forward to how excited I predict my pupils will be to read Artemis Fowl: it is well-paced, witty, referential enough to raise knowing smiles and exciting enough to generate all kinds of childhood wish fulfilment fantasies; I want to be a fairy-battling criminal mastermind too! Well, let’s face it – who wouldn’t?

If the novel has flaws, they are in its pacing; it isn’t until quite late on that the stakes are raised, and it does go through some doldrums half way through. But the reader should persevere: the explosive and revelatory events in the book’s final sections are a worthy pay-off, all the more so for the painstaking character development that Russo has delivered. Janine, Miles’ ex-wife, proud of her weight loss and first experiences of orgasm; the shy and troubled young John Voss, a school colleague of Miles’ daughter Tick (Christina); and Tick’s on-off jock boyfriend Zack, the son of rising police chief Jimmy Minty, one of Miles’ great life rivals. All of these characters and more are given life and personality, lightening up Empire Falls until it feels as realistic as, yes, the blue-collar worlds that Irving creates. A reader “immerses” themselves into this book, reads it by bedside lamp and locks out the outside world. I shall miss Miles and his vertigo as he stands in front of the church, paintbrush in hand; I shall miss the genuinely moving relationship he has with his daughter (finally the one true and genuine instance of love in the whole novel), and the sense of frantic excitement Russo created in me as John Voss returns, menacingly, to school. I shall even miss Max, Miles’ wheeling, dealing father, food in beard and glint in eye, sponging money for booze off another sucker.

All of this mirrored, of course, in Russo’s social themes: the decay of post-Reagan America, the closing of the textile mills, the unemployment, the sense of being trapped, the decline and fall, the trash making its way down the river. In the end, how do people cope with these tragedies? These quiet, slow infestations of hopelessness and the death of a meaningful future? They deal with it, of course, in the way the human beings always have and always will: with each other. Empire Falls is marvellous, if not revolutionary: cuddle up to it.

And yet the book is not a mere (mere!) depiction of the awful treatment of women in Iran; it is also, finally, about the redemptive power of art and literature. As Nafisi and her all-female group of students gather in her flat, remove their veils and begin to learn to speak openly about themselves, their lives and their dreams, they read and study some of the great canonical works of Western literature: Nabokov, The Great Gatsby, Henry James and Saul Bellow; Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte. Reading these novels, they find ways of expressing and identifying what is happening in their own lives, both personally and politically: Nabokov’s great protagonist Humbert Humbert is read as a way of thinking about how the regime in Iran imposes an identity as “woman” on them, just as Humbert imposes a constructed identity upon his “nymphet”. The quiet subversion of Austen slots neatly into a discussion of the roles these women must play in their own relationships with men, whilst a reading of Fitzgerald forms the backbone of Nafisi’s recollections and thoughts on the ascendancy of the Islamic revolution and the attempt to recapture some kind of mystical past. Her students are a varied bunch; some extroverted, some introverted, some desperate to escape and others determined to change Iran for the better, or merely to reconcile their own faith with what they see around them; all of them struggling with the confines placed upon them. They are brought to life on the page with empathy and no small amount of grace in the straightforward (this is an eminently readable book) yet quietly poetic prose of Nafisi, whose only flaw is that of repetition over the course of the text.

For anyone interested in the roles and lives of women in Iran, or what life was (and is) like for the citizens under the theocracy; or for anyone who wished to be introduced to, or reminded of, the transformative power of literature and the necessity of that imaginative bridge between the personal and the political, Reading Lolita in Tehran is a thoughtful, unusual and, in its own personal and small way, a powerful work.

As I Lay Dying

The novel is short yet endlessly rich in theme and symbols; the image of the family carting Addie’s coffin across the Southern landscape has an almost Biblical feel to it, as the buzzards collect around the wagon, stinking more and more each day. Darl, the “intellectual” one, the thoughtful and intense one, juxtaposed throughout with the independent Jewel and the stoic Cash,  is suspicious of the whole enterprise from the beginning, becoming more and more disillusioned with the process of taking Addie to Jefferson, until eventually he sets fire to the barn where the family are staying overnight. Rather than face the law and any potential fines, Adse has Darl committed. Again, Faulkner makes us think about the gulf in communication and understanding between the family members. Is Darl a heroic figure here? Misguided? Or actively malevolent? And Adse, insisting that the family travel across rivers and fords for days on end with a stinking corpse in a coffin to honour his wife’s wishes to be buried with her people – is he a selfless, dedicated husband? Or is the whole episode merely an excuse for Adse to get some new false teeth from Jefferson? The ease with which he introduces the new “Mrs Bundren” in the novel’s final line suggests a less-than-noble motivation for him. There is no objective or even subjective narrator to tell us. Only a succession of individual voices, each given to us with their own foibles and illusions, all in Faulkner’s distinctive and effortlessly beautiful stream of consciousness prose. Of course, let’s make no bones about this: As I Lay Dying is frequently – especially at the beginning – a confusing novel, where the reader is often unsure as to who is related to who, or about whom various characters are speaking, or even what is actually happening on the page at various moments. It is a rewarding reading experience, and I am well aware that if I read this novel again in three months and then wrote about it, it would read differently to this. Such is the way with William Faulkner.