Miraculously, we have actually had some decent weather so far this summer (touch wood!). So here are some novels to read in the sun.
- Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier. One of the fascinating things about Rebecca is that it’s set in the 1930s, on the very brink of World War 2. Du Maurier couldn’t have known that when she wrote it, but nevertheless this tale of a single summer on a glorious English country estate, shadowed by intangible menace, is highly suggestive of that enchanted, always-fleeting time between the wars: the last summer of the English aristocracy.
- Perdido Street Station – China Mieville. Another Gothicky masterpiece, set in the stifling, sleepless heat of a city summer. It’s a book that’s full of nightmares, in a place whose inhabitants are just too close together for comfort; a book that will drag you in, if you let it.
- The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon. This is a brilliant postmodern confection of paranoia, pastiche and the postal service. It’s no accident that it’s set in the summer: holidays, after all, traditionally were and still are a time when the natural order is upturned, when things are in flux.
- The Mysteries of Udolpho – Ann Radcliffe. Actually, it’s quite astonishing how many Gothic texts are set in the summer. Udolpho, an 18th-century doorstopper, is also set in Europe; its descriptions of Venetian summers and tours of the Alps are hypnotic and beguiling. They seem to pause time, stretch it out, in the way that the hottest summer days do, languid and breathless.
- Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen. Of course, Northanger Abbey begins with Catherine Tilney being sent away to Bath for the summer: her first summer away from home. It’s a time when the rules of her life are set topsy-turvy, and anything seems possible – including implausible Gothic plots about wife-murdering landowners.
- The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant – Stephen Donaldson. Admittedly the summer of the Land in the Second Chronicles is a desert pestilence brought about by Lord Foul, the ultimate evil. There isn’t really a “but” to this one: it’s not a light read – but you could do worse than this for a summer holiday project read.
- The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien. I love that Bilbo keeps thinking to himself of the haymaking and the blackberrying and the picnics that are going on in the Shire while he is tramping across the Wild. Technically the action of the book encompasses an entire year, but most of the journey is in summer: it really does feel like an extreme summer holiday, a sabbatical from the Shire, a moment of change for its hero.
- Lagoon – Nnedi Okorafor. Lagoon is set in Lagos, Nigeria; the beaches of Lagos are central to its plot, and though there is violence and terror, on the whole this polyphonic tapestry of aliens and humans and gods and sentient fish has a carnivalesque feel to it; again, a reversal of the natural order, an upsetting that heralds the start of a new phase of being.
- Lyra’s Oxford – Philip Pullman. I’m not entirely sure this is set in summer, but it certainly feels like it is, and perhaps that’s good enough. It’s a powerful story about belonging, a story about home; and surely the season of nostalgia is summer, an impossible, elusive golden light suffusing a place that really only exists in our memory.
- Moving Pictures – Terry Pratchett. I read this a couple of months ago, which is probably the reason why I’m thinking of it here. The unnatural summer of Holy Wood makes the people of Ankh-Morpork do strange things; normal rules of reality are suspended in favour of a shared fantasy that becomes horribly real. (It’s also quite funny.)
(The prompt for this post was suggested by the Broke and the Bookish’s weekly meme Top Ten Tuesday.)
The English Student 