1. The God of Small Things (1997) by Arundhati Roy 

2nd year text

*This book features child sexual abuse, domestic violence and other kinds of violence, graphically depicted.

“At Papachi’s funeral, Mammachi cried and her contact lenses slid around in her eyes. Ammu told the twins that Mammachi was crying more because she was used to him than because she loved him. She was used to having him slouch around the pickle factory, and was used to being beaten from time to time. Ammu said that humans were creatures of habit, and it was amazing the kinds of things they could get used to. You only had to look around you, Ammu said, to see that beatings with brass vases were the least of them.”

Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (4th Estate, 2017), p. 50.

I studied this book as part of a module on the representation of nature in literature so the focus of my study of this book was eco-critical in nature. The natural world has a significant presence in the book and Roy writes nature beautifully but I ended it loving the novel more for what is suggested about the impact of trauma and the often socially transgressive ways people may seek to relieve themselves of the weight of it. The novel begins (in a non-linear way) in 1960s Kerala where the relatively comfortable lives of twin siblings Rahel and Estha Ipe are made increasingly less so by the sexual abuse of one of the twins by a cinema employee, and the tragic death of their cousin Sophie shortly after this. It follows all that takes place in the lives of the individual family members and their community following these events, all under the backdrop of religious and political conflict within the nation. 

The novel deals with issues of gender, class, and caste-based oppression as the Kerala represented in the book is one where Christian and lighter-skinned Indians are regarded as superior to Hindu and darker-skinned Indians who are frequently described as ‘Untouchables’ (“Mammachi told Estha that she could remember a time, in her girlhood, when Paravans were expected to crawl backwards with a broom, sweeping away their footprints so that Brahmins or Syrian Christians would not defile themselves by accidentally stepping into a Paravan’s footprint.”). The novel also represents a culture where intermarriage between castes is a cause of social and familial ostracisation, particularly for women of higher castes marrying “down”. I found this book heartbreaking for so many reasons outside of Rahel and Estha’s story, which is painful in itself, and it left me feeling stunned by the human capacity for evil and the perversion of justice for self-preservation. 

2. The Wolf Border (2015) by Sarah Hall

2nd year text

The Wolf Border was required reading for the same nature-based module that The God of Small Things was on, which is fitting because the book is centred on the attempt of a wealthy earl to reintroduce wolves to the Lake District. His reasons for wanting to do this are dubious at best, and the politics around his desire was one of the aspects of the novel I found most fascinating. 

The novel follows an English zoologist called Rachel Caine who is employed by Thomas Pennington, the new Earl of Annerdale (a fictional place in the Lake District) to lead a rewilding project. It is set largely in the English countryside, with some parts set in Nez Perce, the Native American reservation that Rachel lives on and works in before returning to England. Before the project, Rachel prefers the company of non-human animals to the company of her human peers, a preference that, along with her choice of career, is largely informed by her fraught relationship with her mother Binny. As the project progresses, Rachel grows to appreciate the joys of being in relationship with other people, and moves away from her “natural” inclination for short-term, intentionally emotionally-barren sexual relationships to an enjoyment of the emotional intimacy offered by a long-term relationship. 

The book is an interesting study on the fluctuating nature of human desire, which Hall ultimately depicts as ever-shaped by our environment and circumstances. Hall also represents the nuances of maternal feeling (or lack thereof) in Rachel and Binny, who each have a complicated relationship with motherhood. The book also explores the boundary between human and non-human, and our conceptions of wilderness and civilisation, which themselves are not separate from the animal/non-human animal question. Amidst all of this are issues of land ownership (and human dominion over the natural world more generally), the peerage, and the privileges and exemptions that being titled affords a person, all of which are caricatured through the character of Thomas Pennington who will not be stopped in his use of the Cumbrian landscape for his purposes. 

The novel’s pace is slow in a good way and Hall’s descriptions of wolves, trees, birds, lakes, fells, and valleys, not to mention the changes in the weather from the project’s inception to its completion, often stopped me in my tracks. Like Roy, Hall also writes nature stunningly, but where Roy’s descriptions derive their power from their figurative quality, Hall’s descriptions are more Realist in nature and powerful because of their temperedness, not in spite of it. Rachel also spends a lot of time indoors, and with this came equally arresting passages describing the sights, smells and sounds of her cabin in Nez Perce, the vast rooms of Pennington Hall, and the modest cottage just outside of the Annerdale estate that Thomas arranges for her to stay in, aptly named Seldom Seen. Despite its largely outdoor setting, its focus on the development of the wolves themselves in this nature conservation project, The Wolf Border is an unexpectedly domestic novel about much more than wolves being ferried across nations for “a rich man’s whimsy”, as Rachel describes it. 

3. Northanger Abbey (1817) by Jane Austen 

1st year text

“…if adventures will not befall a young lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad”

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, Lady Susan, The Watsons and Sanditon  (Oxford University Press, 1971), p.5. 

Very reductively, Northanger Abbey is a comedy about the perils of an overactive imagination. It’s Atonement without the false accusations of rape and the untimely deaths. (Ian McEwan acknowledged Northanger Abbey as the forerunner of his novel with a nod to it at the end of Atonement, which is also a favourite of mine.) Catherine Morland is a seventeen year old girl desperate for adventure and she finds it (invents it, really) when she is invited to stay at Northanger Abbey, the home of the father of the man she becomes infatuated with on a trip to Bath. Being newly nineteen at the time I read it, I related a lot to Austen’s depiction of girlhood in Catherine’s intense passions, sometimes ill-formed judgements and her seeming to be ever-plagued by the paternalism of boys really not much older than herself.

Northanger Abbey is a satire of the Gothic genre, and as such, features a lot of melodramatic passages about imaginary evil-motivated men whose invisible presences pervade every room, and malevolent phantoms with sinister designs, which makes it fun to read for that alone. (I desperately wish the phrase “malevolent phantom” was mine, but alas, it is the genius of Harper Lee and is from To Kill A Mockingbird.) It’s also a novel about the practice of reading, and the status of the novel as the form of the literature that was at the time denigrated as the preference of feeble-minded women. (This was because of its associations with frivolity and it therefore not having the makings of the stuff of Serious Academic Study.) This is a yawn-worthy, vaguely misogynistic take that Austen also satirises within the novel through lines such as “the person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.” (p. 84). If that offends you, Jane Austen said it, not me. Like Austen’s other writings, Northanger Abbey is playful and witty, transporting its reader back to a time that the best period dramas of our world can only dream of recreating. 

4. Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley

1st year text

‘And that”, put in the Director sententiously, ‘that is the secret of happiness and virtue – liking what you’ve got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.‘

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (Vintage, 1994), p. 12. 

Brave New World is a book about a world where happiness and pleasure are the only acceptable expressions of humanness and the masses are coerced by the powers that be to remain in these states of artificial ecstasy through a social system that encourages drug use from childhood to maintain them. The main reason for this is, as it so often is in similar cautionary tales, is to ensure the survival of the established social order. That social order is one where people are born sexlessly (they are “decanted” into being via test tubes) and are immediately sorted into intelligence-based categories that will determine their social existence for the rest of their lives. These categories are for the most part fixed, so if you are an Epsilon, the lowest social class, you will probably remain so until you die. It’s really cheery stuff. Free thought is demonised, individuality is demonised, knowledge outside of what the World State wants you to know is severely restricted. Sadness is not allowed and things as pesky as emotional attachments—and God forbid, love of any kind (romantic, familial etc)—are not only not allowed, but taught to literally evoke disgust in the citizens through social conditioning. For this reason, families don’t exist and if you know what’s good for you, there is no such thing as “having feelings” for a person. Anybody who feels these abnormal feelings is encouraged by their peers to take a drug to not be such a freak of nature in public. When the citizens of this supposedly ‘Brave New World’ come face to face with the remnants of the old world order (where people were born to parents and have emotional attachments to these parents, where Shakespeare is allowed to be read, where drugs aren’t the solution to all of life’s problems, and where you can have romantic feelings for others) chaos ensues with tragic consequences. 

Probably because I was a literature student, and/ or because I knew at a young age that fiction writing has value just beyond the aesthetic, when I read Brave New World for the first time I was incredibly struck by the World State’s erasure of Shakespeare and other literature from the masses. It’s implied in the book that the reason for this censorship is because of how these works allow people access to the complexity of human emotions and to envision a world where they can be individuals rather than subjects. This immediately made me think of the widespread belittling of the study of such things in capitalist societies, whose leaders are primarily interested in reproducing a compliant labour force that has neither the time or the resources to think too deeply about the fact that life could be different for them.

“One of the students held up his hand… he could see quite well why you couldn’t have lower caste people wasting the Community’s time over books, and that there was always the risk of their reading something which could undesirably decondition one of their reflexes…”

Huxley, Brave New World, p. 18.

Along with being able to articulate ideas that may be unsafe to do so explicitly, fiction has the unique ability to express a multitude of thoughts indirectly and to influence us to think very differently about the things we often take for granted simply by recontextualising those things, both very powerful tools. Because it was the first time I’d been exposed to a dystopian novel where the majority of people are, on a shallow reading, happy, I found Brave New World very disturbing. It’s a sobering reminder that social control need not take the shape of the glum faces and Brutalist architecture of 1984 to be social control. It made me think a lot about the social functions of things such as pleasure, comfort, and the feeling of safety (in opposition to a person’s actually being safe) and how these things can be weaponised against civilians for nefarious purposes.  

My main takeaways from this book are the following: 

1) forced fun is the worst kind of fun, and it’s especially less fun when you are quite literally governmentally barred from experiencing anything else, 

2) there is a place for “negative” emotions in the human experience, 

3) a world where Shakespeare’s plays are intentionally kept from me is not one I would like to live in. (What do you mean I can’t find a new production of Hamlet to watch every year??)

5. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (2013) by Karen Joy Fowler 

3rd year text

*There is a graphic scene depicting animal cruelty towards the end of the book.

“Here are some things my mother worked with me on, prior to sending me off to school:
Standing up straight. 
Keeping my hands still when I talked. 
Not putting my fingers into anyone else’s mouth or hair. 
Not biting anyone, ever.  No matter how much the situation warranted it. 
Muting my excitement over tasty food, and not staring fixedly at someone else’s cupcake. 
Not jumping on the tables and desks when I was playing. 
I remembered these things, most of the time. But where you succeed will never matter so much as where you fail.”

Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (Serpent’s Tail: 2021), p. 102.

***THE BIGGEST SPOILER IMAGINABLE AHEAD***

– read only at the potential peril of your future enjoyment of this book –

Fern, Rosemary and Lowell Cooke are siblings. Everything is great and normal apart from the fact that Rosemary and Lowell are human and Fern is a chimpanzee. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, narrated by an adult Rosemary, tells the story of their early years raised as siblings in Illinois in the 70s and the aftermath of this experiment on the entire family. The situation that the Cookes find themselves in is the result of Rosemary’s father’s interest in animal experimentation, a by-product of his career in animal psychology, and the novel focuses particularly on Rosemary and Fern’s relationship as sisters. After behaving as chimpanzees are wont to do, which puts a violent end to the experiment five years in, Fern is eventually “rehoused” in a lab facility with other chimps, Rosemary grows up to be a troubled and adult, and Lowell dedicates the rest of his life to animal rights activism. 

What I found the most fascinating about We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves was that it showed how tenuously constructed the distinctions between human and non-human animals can be, which Fowler did in multiple very clever ways. The question of the “truth” of human and non-human animal nature permeates the novel, with Fowler showing that ideas around this seem to be both constantly evolving and fluctuating. Humans behave in “animal” ways throughout, and vice versa, with Rosemary’s father really coming out as just about the most monstrous person you could conjure up. (“Was my father kind to animals?” Rosemary asks on our behalf, drily answering with: “He would have never run over a cat if there was nothing to be learned by doing so.”) The themes of identity, contradictions, indistinction or ambiguity, and that age-old disconnect between humans’ perceptions of themselves and the realities of those selves are best illustrated by Rosemary’s insistence that “Fern was not the family dog. She was Lowell’s little sister, his shadow, his faithful sidekick”, which, of course, is exactly what pets are to most humans. 

Another significant aspect of the book is the impact of our parents’ choices on us. Part One of the novel is marked by a deeply affecting sense of loss as Rosemary recounts her younger self’s experience of Fern’s removal from their house, which she hauntingly refers to as Fern’s “disappearance”. Fern, once a beloved sibling, and who we are not told is not actually human until Part Two, becomes problematic in the eyes of Rosemary’s father and grandparents when she jeopardises Rosemary’s safety in an incident where she “fails” to behaves like a socialised human. How Fern is treated afterwards was an illuminating illustration of how easily we can dehumanise what we once saw or treated as human. By drawing our attention to the similarities between us and the animals we categorise as “wild”, Fowler invites us to question our callous attitudes towards different types of animals, sometimes expressed violently, and the possible flimsiness of our justifications for it.