This is by Gwendoline Riley; it was published just this year.

Now this book was absolutely not on my reading list AT ALL. But the name came up. Somewhere. I can't even remember where. Which is frustrating. I have tried in vain to find the triggering reference.

And when I read the name, I thought: Oh, I think Petya Grady has mentioned her from time to time. Approvingly. And then I looked back, and saw she'd mentioned Riley and this book, quite recently, in some puzzlement.

And then I thought: Interesting. I wonder if Libby has anything by Riley. (Because I've just about tamed Libby now. Although it is definitely better to finish your book within the allotted time, because renewing is a bit of a pain...) Libby had The Palm House. And then I realized it had been longlisted for the Booker Prize this year.

OK, so let's just read it.

So there we are... A chaotic chain that leads to the inclusion of an unplanned book, despite the fact that other books have been patiently waiting for ages to get a look in.

Is this good? I can't decide. There always has to be room for spontaneity. But I can't help feeling my reading is awfully disorganized somehow...


I hate this cover...

***

Anyway. I read The Palm House. I cantered through it, because it really is a delightfully smooth read, with brilliant dialogue and a relatable situation: Literary people aged 40-something, in London, in one of the years when there was Saharan sand in the air, and everything -- apparently -- looked murkily different.

Edmund Putnam (49) has resigned from Sequence (a highbrow-ish publication) after 25 years. His colleagues and friends are shocked: "It's like the ravens leaving the Tower," says one. The problem is the new editor. Simon Halfpenny. Shove for short... He wants to turn Sequence into the London version of The New Yorker, and he's a pain. Never stops bellowing; never stops moving -- "In fact he would literally travel around the room on his chair, propelling himself from desk to desk, as if the room were a screen and he himself a restive cursor." (I've read a couple of reviews, eg this one, that say Shove is modelled on an editor who moved from The Sun to the Times Literary Supplement in the 2000-teens.)

Putnam feels menaced by him: "Thick-skinned philistine like him; he could thrive anywhere. Yet we're being asked to accommodate him. Sequence, of all places." He is profoundly cynical about the workplace he's just decided to quit. There's no longer any respect, he feels, for knowledge, or understanding, or rigour, or taste.

None of this is a million miles from things I have experienced... So I found it compellingly readable.

Putnam's father has just died, which doesn't help. The death does mean he inherits a house, the sale of which will bring in some handy money. But still, he's hit hard, especially as he thinks back over the disappointments of his father's life.

Our narrator, Laura, is a little younger than Putnam. About 40. Bit by bit, and utterly undramatically, we hear about various incidents in her life -- her truly awful father who hasn't been part of the family for a long time; her early years on the Wirral living with her grandmother and her self-sufficient, unapproachable, bitingly sarcastic mother; her early experience of sexual abuse at the hands of stand-up comedian Chris Patrick; her loneliness as a student (whether this is related to the Patrick incident we're left to decide for ourselves); her brief relationship with an actor ("so actorly, he seemed at times to be acting the part of an actor"); her progress from freelance gigs to "a proper job"; the death of her father (which means she, too, will have some money from a house sale, and can get a mortgage for a studio flat, which scenario is the inspiration for the cover that I don't like); her brief stay with TV producer Mitch Seiler, from whose rather strange clutches we're relieved to see her escape unscathed; and her loyal support for Putnam, who eventually goes back to Sequence when the ghastly Shove is a thing of the past.


The Wirral, 2026. Laura's erstwhile home

***

So you skitter to the end, and you think: What was that I just read, and what do I make of it? It's very enjoyable, but in terms of story, there's really very little. It's a series of episodes. Lives clicking together and apart like billiard balls.

And then you start to think about it, and read what other people think about it, and you realize how clever it is, and how much it simultaneously exposes and conceals.

The verdict of the Booker judges is opaque in the extreme, by the way, and I almost wondered if I'd read the same book... But their concluding sentence rings true: "The Palm House is minimalist, precise, and indelible."

My take-aways:

1.

I really sympathized with Putnam and his frustration with his wrecking-ball new chief. We've all been there. Something's working well; everyone's doing a good job; and some talentless blight feels the need to change it for the worse.

In general, the world of work is portrayed in a way that feels very real. When Shove is ousted, you suspect the reason is much more that he was cooking the books than that he was a useless editor. And there's fallout from the upheaval. Three job losses. People who will be impacted much more than he will.

I also loved this little riff: "Welcome to mid-career... where everyone cares just that LITTLE BIT LESS about everything you SAY or DO."



2.

Putnam's way of coping is to be a drama queen. As I said, I'm not unsympathetic, but he definitely plays to the gallery. When he's in his bleak moods, says Laura, Putnam is "unappeasable", embracing "an exhilarated nihilism". Colleague and former girlfriend Katherine agrees: "He's hard to help. That's him. That's him since he was twelve, I suspect. Him against the world." There's a very funny passage along these lines, which I'll quote (because the book, despite its grim storylines, IS very funny):

"Never mind carrying a cross, it felt at times as if Putnam had decided to wear a coffin when he came out for a drink... I imagined a coffin propped up near our table and Putnam occasionally bashing open the lid to shout,
"'Don't mind me!'
"'Don't mind me IN MY COFFIN, will you?'"

But then comes the diagnosis:

"His real decision, it seemed to me, was to suffer. Nobody understood. Everybody fell short... Having staked out this lonely position he seemed determined to defend it against all-comers...
"I used to feel, at those times, talking to him, as if I were trying to climb a steep sand dune, while he stood on the crest: exultant in his misery."

Putnam is such a mine of depressing things -- he's only good for the scrap heap now; he's yesterday's news; nobody's going to want to give him another job -- that you really do fear the worst for him.

But this is his way of coping. To a certain extent, I recognize it as mine...


Putnam has a cat, called Cat. Cat likes round shapes, ie bowls and plates moving above him, which he follows around. But Putnam is sweet with Cat, and presumably doesn't depress him too much

3.

Laura's way of coping is very, very different. For all sorts of reasons, she has built a shell around herself. Putnam constantly accuses her of being facetious. She is, she agrees, and she doesn't like this trait in herself. But also, there's this: "Putnam did think I was far too unconcerned generally. That was a frequent flashpoint between us." At one point, he tells Laura: "It's all right for you... You've never cared about anything in your life."

And it's as though the rest of the book is a refutation of this point... As we've seen, Laura has been forced to deal with a shit ton of things, and she has definitely cared about them. She just doesn't talk about them. She deflects. She displays a "relentless larkiness".

And yet she has compassion. She doesn't give up on Putnam; she is friends with Craig who, she suspects, was once close to committing suicide; she doesn't even turn her back on her mother, even though talking to her is a big effort.

Petya Grady has illustrated the dynamic between Laura and Putnam in a really neat little diagram. (There's a more detailed chart here.) She concludes: "The closer the novel gets to pain... the less its language appears willing to perform it. We may be dealing with HARD things but, by god, we are going to be chuckling about it all. At the same time, as we bemoan the end of an era as Putman resigns from his job… we feel an impending sense of dread and doom... only to realize that all the suffering is probably a tad exaggerated and the optionality for Putman much greater than it is for Laura."


Dubrovnik, 2023. Little Laura, her mother, and her grandmother holiday here, buy ugly shoes, and visit a fortune teller who sorts out Laura's warts...

4. Economics. Putnam and Laura are ultimately quite lucky financially. Their chance of security comes about largely through inheritance, as is often the case.

We've seen Laura in rented house shares and borrowed rooms, and the "normal" modern housing condition is expressed very well in this little dialogue:

"'It's terrific for me,' Putnam said. 'I feel as rich as Croesus. But one does wonder where ordinary people go these days...
"'They go to Hastings,' I said. 'Or they live in rooms until their parents die...
"'Respectable people,' said Putnam, 'with good jobs, TWO respectable people making an actual contribution... they couldn't get NEAR that house.'"

By managing to move away from freelancing, Laura becomes financially independent even before that windfall came along: "Some money arrived every month. That strain of worry was gone. I could pay bills and make choices." And the studio apartment spells freedom: "Living in a flat-share was not something I'd have to worry about again unless I messed up very badly. I was free. I was lifted-up." The book concludes with a conversation with the plumber, who has just fixed the boiler. It's a very old model, he tells her, but it should last until spring. She suggests, hopefully, that it may be good for a few years. "'There's every chance,' he said."

Every chance. That's the best we can hope for. Every chance of stringing things out a big longer. Oh, and friendship. The novel begins and ends in the pub, with drinks and packets of crisps and companionship.



***

As always, others' insights helped me build up a more rounded picture.

-- I missed the significance of the title, and had to have it pointed out to me. Laura resolves to get to know London a bit better, which is the context for this: "Putnam and I kept meaning to go to the Cabinet War Rooms. He often said, too, that I should go with him and his father one weekend to visit the ancient cycad in the Kew Gardens palm house." Of course, they never did... So the palm house stands for all the things we never get round to doing, never have the opportunity to do... John-Baptiste Oduor also suggests that "the refined, insular world of literary magazines in which beautiful things can grow because they are cut off from the outside is its own kind of conservatory". The hothouse of publishing... That makes sense, too.

-- Clare Clark rightly points out that the lack of linear plot in Riley's pages in no way equates to dullness: Rather, her "disquieting acuity and her spare and unsparing prose makes them shimmer with tension... She is the laureate of disconnection, her bone-dry humour edged with the vertiginous lurch of despair."

-- This blogger cites a couple of elements where the book "stumbles". I'm not sure that's the right word. I feel both these things are absolutely deliberate. Firstly, Laura stays behind glass: "She is a superb noticer and an almost total withholder. That is the design, but readers who want interiority from a first-person narrator will spend the book locked out." Which is totally the point: Laura has walled herself in. Not in a way that makes us fear a massive blow-out in the future, just in a way that makes us feel half-sorry for her isolation, half-envious at her self-containment. That post's second criticism is that threads are picked up and then dropped: "A lodging arrangement in the last third builds a real, low hum of menace, then simply ends. Deliberate, I am sure. Still frustrating." Again, the fact that nothing "happened" in that encounter doesn't detract from the tension, or from our awareness of the economically driven precariousness of the situation.

***

So, I wish Riley well in the Booker. She's an author to whom I will definitely return.