The Uncommon Reader – Alan Bennett

 Bennett makes what he can from the curious premiss of the Queen stumbling over the travelling library van in the grounds of Buckingham Palace and, out of politeness, borrowing a random book. Out of good manners she returns it a week later having read very little of it.

The queen is not a big reader, but again feels obliged to pick up a new title. This one is more to her taste, and she borrows another the next week, and a couple more the week after. So it develops. And it seems that the Queen’s new-found love of reading has consequences for those around her. Books are foisted on relatives, flunkeys, advisors, even the Prime Minister and visiting dignitaries.

It allows Bennett to have great fun airing (presumably) his opinions on books and writers while disparaging the great and the good for their literary shortcomings.

Using such an exalted lead character is an interesting departure from his usual viewpoint that delights in normality and the significance of the everyday experience. Or maybe not, even the Queen has a routine of sorts, a private life of sorts, and like everyone else, a desire once in a while to lose herself in a book.

Oryx and Crake – Margaret Atwood

Snowman, the last human alive on the planet (as far as he knows), spends most of his time contemplating Oryx and Crake. One was a lover, the other a friend. The genesis of their endangered species pseudonyms is the ‘Extictathon’ computer game monitored by MaddAddam, a shady on-line community populated by a brilliant elite.

Crake, in real life, is, or was, a gene-manipulating genius, responsible for both the pandemic that killed off the world population and the super-vaccine that enabled Snowman’s survival. The pandemic was unintentional; saving Snowman was an act of both friendship and necessity – Crake needed someone he could trust to look after his experimental project that produced a new species of human with undesirable qualities removed from their genetic make-up. They are known as the crakers.

While the crakers revere Crake as the creator, they love Oryx, who was their minder, mentor, and mother figure until she was wiped out by Crake’s pandemic. Now only Snowman remains for them, a poor sort of holy ghost of the trinity, channelling made up messages. He whiles away his time overseeing the crakers, his charges; cursing Crake, his friend; and missing Oryx, his lover.

The narrative slowly unfolds the history of Snowman, Crake, and Oryx in parallel with Snowman’s trials and tribulation in the post-apocalyptic world. Told at the individual rather than the global level, the decline and fall of western-led civilisation convinces. Incidental detail on life and death in a pandemic is all too familiar in Covid-19 times.

It is an engaging, if bleak, story where the main hook is ‘how did it get to here?’. The answer comes in trademark Atwood style with dry wit and caustic swipes at current societal trends.

There are two more books in the MaddAddam trilogy; watch this space.

The Quarry – Iain Banks

Kit, eighteen years old and at the high functioning end of the Asperger’s spectrum, lives with his dad, Guy, in an old and deteriorating house on the edge of a northern moor. The large garden backs onto a quarry. A palpable sense of ending haunts the place. Guy is dying, and the house is under sentence too, going through compulsory purchase, destined to be consumed by the expanding quarry.

Arriving for a long weekend are Guy’s old college friends. They all studied at the local university, film and media undergraduates, and shared accommodation at this same house. They are here to say goodbye, relive old times, and incidentally to track down an old video they made twenty years ago that is at least embarrassing and at worst career threatening.

Current careers in law, media, computing, and care reflect journeys taken and movements in political outlook. But some things never change, the drugs and drink are back on the table. Under their influence, old rivalries and recriminations are aired.

Kit, the narrator, looks on with interest as aspects of his father’s life, before fatherhood, are revealed. He would like one thing in particular to be revealed – the identity of his mother. One of the visitors may know something; it could even be one of the three women.

From the chequered past with its secret film, the bitterness of the present situation of Guy’s illness, and the uncertainty of Kit’s parentless future, Banks weaves a well-crafted portrait of changing relationships full of sharp dialogue and touching emotion.