One of the few positives of two lockdowns this year is the time they’ve afforded us to read. By that I mean, properly read. Not just Sunday supplements, but books that require we’re not red-eyed with tiredness when we pick them up at night. These are books that provoke ideas and evoke emotions; books that challenge and excite, inspire and stimulate. Here are three favourite reads of mine this year. Although there have been many brilliant releases in 2020, none of these are new as it turns out. A mix of literary, popular and non-fiction, they each made an impression on me and will maintain their places on my bookshelves for the foreseeable.

Wide Sargasso Sea
by Jean Rhys

If like me, you read and loved Charlotte Bronté’s Jane Eyre, then you’ll be intrigued by Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea. They are nothing alike, mind you. The former is set in the bleak north of England, where the personalities whom Jane Eyre encounters on her journey from orphan at Lowood boarding school to governess at Mr Rochester’s Thornfield Hall are more often than not as biting and inhospitable as the weather and landscape that surround them. Wide Sargasso Sea, however, is set in the unfamiliar and oppressively hot surroundings of a Jamaican sugar plantation, again in the late 18th/early 19th century. This novel gives voice to the infamous “madwoman in the attic” who terrorises the inhabitants of Thornfield Hall in Bronté’s 1847 novel. In fact, it takes Bronté’s caricature and creates a living, breathing, thinking, feeling woman with a past and hopes for the future.

I re-read Wide Sargasso Sea this year after first encountering it in university more than 20 years ago. It provides a fascinating and plausible background for the character of “Bertha” Mason, Mr Rochester’s first wife, who is depicted in Bronté’s novel as nothing more than a dangerous animal locked away in a windowless attic in Thornfield Hall for her own safety and everybody else’s. When reading Jane Eyre as a teenager, I saw Bertha as merely a frustrating foil to the romantic happy ending I was hoping for, not as an individual who had lived and suffered. But Rhys gives Bertha a human voice in Wide Sargasso Sea, while challenging Bronte’s narrative and offering a counter characterisation of this poor unfortunate young woman, who shipped against her will from her native Creole to the unfamiliar and austere north of England. The novel also questions Mr Rochester and his motives. In Bronté’s novel, he is portrayed sympathetically as a husband who has been misled and mistreated by his wife. Indeed, Mr Rochester had always been seen as a Victorian literary hero, albeit a dark and brooding one, but Wide Sargasso Sea undermines this portrait by putting forward a fresh perspective on his early relationship with Bertha Mason.

This prelude to Jane Eyre offers a brilliant and disturbing depiction of how powerless women were in the 19th century, how easy and convenient it was for men to have them declared insane and how they so often found themselves unable to control their own narrative.

Buy it here

A Ladder To The Sky
by John Boyne

Creating a convincing and compelling antihero is a difficult thing to do, although not for author John Boyne who is a master of characterisation. His novels are almost always a reliable read (I did find A History Of Loneliness a bit disappointing though), delivering believable protagonists and intriguing plot lines. A Ladder To The Sky, which charts the fortunes of aspiring writer Maurice Swift, is no different. Swift, an ambitious, duplicitous, charismatic young man with no moral compass whatsoever, wants literary success and the fame that comes with it at any cost. Throughout the novel, which spans three decades, he attaches himself to brilliant writers with the aim of stealing their stories and making them his own.

The book casts a fascinating light on what constitutes plagiarism. We’re told that Swift has an elegant writing style, but he has no head for ideas or plots. However, once furnished with these, he has the linguistic ability to produce a well-written piece of work. A Ladder To The Sky also questions how far one man will go to achieve fame. While one of Swift’s “victims” is his wife, most are elderly gay authors who become enthralled by the attentions of Boyne’s magnetic villain. By manipulating his relationships with these men, Swift achieves the success he dreamed of but leaves a legacy of emotional destruction in his wake.

Despite being thoroughly villainess and unlikeable, Swift is a compelling character, and his dreadful deeds equally gripping. Boyne brings an intoxicating glamour to the novel as Swift relocates from cosmopolitan Berlin to the beautiful Amalfi Coast and on to the heart of New York in Manhattan. We watch him climb that ladder to the sky by brutally kicking others off each rung, and we turn each engrossing page in the hope that this marvellous sociopath will eventually meet his comeuppance. The wonderful thing about John Boyne is that we know he doesn’t always provide the ending his characters expect or deserve. There’s nothing predictable about Ladder To The Sky except its author’s brilliance.

Buy it here

Catch and Kill
by Ronan Farrow

I heard Ronan Farrow (Mia’s son with Woody Allen) being interviewed by Pat Kenny about Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators late last year and I bought the book to read during our first lockdown in March. Never has the phrase, “Truth is stranger than fiction” ever felt so apt. The New Yorker reporter’s account of his efforts to unearth the truth about the persistent rape and sexual assault allegations against movie mogul Harvey Weinstein reads like the script of a Hollywood blockbuster – complete with spies, espionage and corporate cover-ups – and is the kind of story Weinstein would have relished translating onto the big screen, I’m sure, were he not, in fact, the villain of the piece.

Exposed in the book is the extent to which Weinstein’s power and influence protected him for decades, as well as the fear and paranoia endured by his victims. The degree to which Farrow was hindered in his efforts to gather evidence and expose Weinstein, both by those employed by the former film producer as well as reputable media organisations, is staggering. The latter, Farrow discovered, were either protecting their own predators or intimidated into silence by Weinstein’s wealth and influence. The book frames the outwardly glossy world of Hollywood as a dirty old men’s club.

Farrow’s dogged determination to stick with the story and reveal the truth is remarkable. To put it in cinematic terms, he’s the James Bond of investigative reporting, going to incredible lengths to complete his mission, even fearing for his life at one point. Catch and Kill is an old-fashioned tale of good versus evil played out in our modern-day reality. And although Farrow succeeds in telling his story, there is no happy ending in this book. The reader is left in no doubt that Weinstein is just one of many offenders, and that the guardians of these predators are not just powerful individuals but entire institutions. A brilliant read.