Can you navigate the moral maze?

Copies of June’s book of the month More Everything Forever have arrived with some subscribers, but haven’t got to everyone yet. So before diving deep into its spiky, argumentative, eye-popping text, I thought I’d take a moment to talk about some other reads you might appreciate.

A big chunk of the reading I’m doing at the moment is looking for books to share with you all, but I’m also working on a book myself (more soon) which involves a ton of wide-ranging reading. So my recent explorations have included Georgian-era artist travelogs, weighty tomes on Victorian agricultural rebellions, and a look at some Nazi hunting after the Second World War. 

These titles will all emerge in the fullness of time, however, so I wanted to highlight a few other books I’ve enjoyed in the last few months.

One of the bright spots was Christopher Mathias’s To Catch a Fascist: The Fight to Expose the Radical Right. Written by a longtime journalist who covers underground rightwing political movements, it’s a fast, urgent, and fascinating look at the rise of the right—and the work done by anti-fascists to expose them. At its best, this includes moles going inside radical cells to expose them, with all manner of cheek-clenching moments as undercover operatives dance on the edge of danger. It came out in February and if the subject matter appeals, I think it’s definitely worth looking at.

I am also trying to work my way through some classic non-fiction storytelling, and so picked up Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam War book The Things They Carried. OK, so this one is not entirely non-fiction, but the semi-autobiographical stories here definitely draw from real life—and make it an incredibly interesting to look back on now, both as a series of beautifully-drawn prose vignettes and as a historical document. Although it covers Vietnam at the end of the 1960s, it was released in 1990, not long before the first Gulf War. That’s like somebody today writing about their role in the invasion of Iraq—O’Brien is insightful, present, and has the benefit of perspective.

But without a doubt the best thing I’ve read this year is a short piece of fiction, Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. It’s an Irish novella, but very Russian in its approach—that kind of carefully-weighed short story full of moral ambiguity, things unsaid, that you might see in Chekhov or Turgenev. I was genuinely gasping at the end and felt changed by reading it, it just seemed so perfectly constructed that I was a mixture of moved, impressed and jealous by the time I turned the final page. 

I didn’t know Keegan’s writing before, except maybe a brief glimpse here and there, but this slim book was an astonishing introduction and I am ready to greedily devour everything she’s ever penned.

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Is there a common thread to these books? At first I didn’t think so. But they are all, in some way, about complex, compromised people put in morally difficult circumstances. And they are often about men wrestling with their conscience.

I wonder what that says about me.

Read anything you would suggest for other members of the Club? Just email me back and let me know—if you include a line or two about what you liked, perhaps we can expand our recommendation circle even further.

Onwards

Bobbie