Rhys Hughes' 3 favorite reads in 2024

• 2023
• 2024

This novel is marvellous.

It has a particular resonance for me because I studied in a Maritime College and I had relatives who spent their working lives at sea and probably they experienced much of what Lowry's protagonist here experiences. A tramp steamer in the 1920s/30s.

The novel spoke to me on a deeper level than most other novels have done. Curiously enough, I had this paperback when I was young and always planned to read it and never did. Four decades later I acquired the same edition and now I have read it. I wish I had explored the work of Lowry sooner!

His prose style is exquisite. Lyrical and strange but also muscular and true. There is no baroque decoration for its own sake here. The poetry is beautiful but brutal. There is a sturdy stream of consciousness backed up by an extraordinary set of dialogue exchanges and pure gutsy descriptions of the maiden voyage of a new sailor. It is psychologically tough, offbeat, stoical, exotic, and timeless, and it feels absolutely authentic in every line of every paragraph.

I have become an instant Malcolm Lowry admirer. I will now seek out all his other books.

Easily one of the best short-story collections I have ever read. Maybe even the best.

This doesn't mean that all the stories in the book are equally entertaining, but it does mean that the best stories are so good they impart a terrific momentum to the collection as a whole, carrying it forward beyond all negative criticism, at least in my view.

I bought the edition I own, a pleasingly designed paperback published by Anchor Books, in the early 1990s. Barth is a writer I regard as almost impossibly talented, and yet considerable effort is required from the reader to fully appreciate his works. This means that despite the author's genius he is never going to be truly popular. Criticially successful, yes, and perhaps even raised to the level of major cultural icon, but widely read? Maybe in the nineteen-sixties, but not now.

Patience, stamina and focus are needed and those can often be in short supply in the modern reading world. I understand this. The collection consists of fourteen stories of varying length. The first, 'Frame-Tale', is simultaneously the shortest (or one of the shortest) and the longest story ever written, but this is a trick. The story is constructed in the shape of a Möbius strip. It's a gimmick but one I happen to like." Once upon a time there was a story that began: Once upon a time there was a story that began..." and so on to infinity.

The second story, 'Night-Sea Journey', is, to my mind, one of the greatest philosophical short stories ever written. It is about existence, identity, chance, destiny and implausibility. It is existentially terrifying, a sort of horror story, and yet utterly realistic. It is about where we all come from and the extreme unlikelihood of us ever coming from anywhere at all.

Three stories in the collection, 'Ambrose His Mark'. 'Water-Message' and 'Lost in the Funhouse' are directly connected and form a suite about a family of mild eccentrics. The wonder and strangeness of childhood is explored in these linked pieces, fairly conventionally at first but with an increasing reliance on metafiction. These tricks are not shallow, done for their own sake or merely to show off the author's cleverness. They genuinely add to the poignancy of the narratives, in a way that I can't quite identify. They take the stories outside themselves, join them to our own lives on some enigmatic level.

And the prose is exquisite. 'Petition' is an extremely grim (but stoical) tale that is beautiful, bitter, desperate, resigned, horrid and magnificent all at once. It is more disturbing than anything written by Kafka, Beckett, Ligotti or any of those other specialists in psychological, spiritual and existential unease, and it also has the sadness to be found in those writers' most acute and sombre visions. Not only sadness but an offbeat, hideous humour too, a product of the stoicism of the doomed narrator. 'Autobiography' is a story that tells itself. It's not the autobiography of an author but of the words that appear as the story is being told. It is therefore utterly contemporary with itself, perhaps the only fiction written in the permanent present tense. 'Echo' is a story about Narcissus and Tiresias, but with an unexpected outcome that turns out to be the logical consequence of both characters' peculiar aspects.

There are some lesser experimental pieces here too, still intriguing if not as satisfying, namely 'Two Meditations', 'Title', 'Glossolalia' and 'Life-Story'. The final two pieces in the book are novelettes or perhaps novellas. They are both magnificent. I am still in awe of their brilliance. 'Menelaiad' is absolutely one of the most difficult pieces of fiction I have read, and one of the best, though it takes a lot of focus from the reader not to lose the thread of what's going on. I am amazed that anyone could construct such a structurally complex story and make it not only coherent but ingeniously amusing. I am still not entirely sure I understood every allusion and twist, every revelation of this multi-layered compressed epic.

'Anonymiad' is a masterpiece about the art of storytelling itself, worked out in the form of a castaway story, with prose that is muscular and cerebral but deeply poetic and never fussy, always to the point despite the complexity of the metaphors and phrasings. It is a perfect work, by which I mean I simply can't see how it could ever be improved by changing even a single word. I have read thousands of books in my lifetime so far, probably tens of thousands of short stories.

This book is one that I will always congratulate myself on having the good sense to read.

I regard this book as an almost perfect novel.

Having read Carr's A Month in the Country and How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the F.A. Cup and enjoyed both, I was expecting to also like A Season in Sinji but in fact I more than liked it. I loved it.

A Month in the Country is about the redemptive powers of art and features a protagonist who learns to be more accepting and progressive in his social politics: the mood is sombre, pastoral, muted. How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the F.A. Cup is about how the big dreams of small people can become big realities on what remains a relatively small scale. But A Season in Sinji isn't about one or two things. It's about life in its entirety during a time of acute crisis. And the way this crisis manifests itself is only partly through violent action.

There is also boredom, psychological games, the weirdness of the 'other', the proof of the extreme flexibility of the human psyche. A Season in Sinji at times is as exciting as a Hammond Innes adventure novel. At other times it's as ironically satirical as Catch 22, as subtly menacing as Rex Warner's The Aerodrome, as camp and absurd as It Ain't Half Hot Mum.

It was published in 1967, therefore the language of Flanders, the narrator, might strike the modern reader as frequently prejudiced (and yet realistic for the time and place) and yet one of the main characters, Wakerly, regularly puts forth arguments that resonate strongly with modern values (he decries racism, for example). Everything about this novel feels sincere, authentic, genuine.

Cricket plays a role in the plot, but I wouldn't say this is a 'cricket novel'. It's a war novel, a touching farce, a comedy of errors, a dramatic period piece, a tragedy, a bildungsroman, a mimetic slice of history from a fragment of the former century that was absurdist, surreal and perhaps insane.

Carr regarded this book as his best novel. I can understand why.