Books I Read in March 2024

A Tomb With a View by Peter Ross is a fascinating book about graveyards in Britain and Ireland and the stories of some well-known and forgotten residents as well as the work of those who care for them. The famous Victorian cemeteries in London such as Highgate and Kensal Rise face issues with limited space and expensive upkeep. Ross writes sensitively about a variety of subjects such as Muslim funerals in east London, the infant burial grounds known as cillini in Ireland, graveyards in Northern Ireland in the context of the Troubles and the work of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission who recover the remains of soldiers found in northern France and trace the living relatives. Ross is a true taphophile – a lover of cemeteries – and a compassionate guide rather than an overly nostalgic one. ‘A Tomb With a View’ is an excellent book about reckoning with death in a life-affirming rather than morbid way.

Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer explores the moral question of appreciating or enjoying art made by people who have done terrible things. The book feels deliberately unfocused in order to go a bit further beyond cancel culture and the #MeToo movement which was the subject of Dederer’s original essay on the subject which went viral in 2017. After dealing with the predatory behaviour of male artists such as Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby and Pablo Picasso, Dederer also looks at female artists who have been judged as unmaternal, explores why artistic genius is elevated and vaguely alludes to her own “monstrousness” of being a functioning alcoholic for several years and not feeling guilt about leaving her kids for long periods of time to take up residential fellowships. There is no shortage of books and commentary and discourse about artists and the problematic things they have done, whereas ‘Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma’ is a provocative book which always turns back to the audience, and properly challenges the reader about separating the art from the artist and examining their own accountability.

Penance by Eliza Clark is a novel framed as a non-fiction account, and cleverly turns the true crime format on its head. Sixteen-year-old Joan Wilson was tortured and murdered by three of her female classmates, Violet, Angelica and Dolly, in the fictional North Yorkshire coastal town of Crow-on-Sea in 2016 on the night of the Brexit referendum result. A few years later, disgraced former tabloid journalist Alec Carelli is looking to cash in on the increasing popularity of the true crime genre by writing a book about the case, the entirety of which is presented here interspersed with podcast transcripts and news articles. Clark is very good at depicting the ridiculousness of a middle-aged man writing about how Joan and her friends lived their lives online mostly via social media sites such as Tumblr with no real clue about how obsessive online fandoms work in practice – or teenage girls in general for that matter. The manipulation involved is very subtle and the consequences of Carelli’s project are only truly laid bare in the final chapter.

Christ on a Bike by Orla Owen is another excellent novel from Bluemoose Books – the independent publisher based in West Yorkshire with a canny eye for quality quirky fiction. It tells the story of Cerys, who unexpectedly receives a life-changing inheritance as a result of a spontaneous act of unselfishness on her part. However, there are very specific conditions attached to Cerys’ good fortune which quickly turn out to be rather more sinister than they first appear, and this has serious consequences for her relationship with her older sister Seren. It’s a simple “what if” premise that lots of people will have daydreamed about, and Owen executes the twisty plot very effectively, depicting various moral dilemmas related to privacy, fairness and different personal priorities. The result is a very memorable and enjoyably dark tale.