The Crossed Keys Chronicle

Despite the ever-increasing prevalence of BookTok and algorithmic recommendations on Amazon and Goodreads, I am constantly surprised how often the best way to find a new, interesting-sounding book is just to visit a new-to-me bookstore. A few weeks ago, on a trip to NYC, I stopped in at McNally Jackson Books and found a few such books, one of which I picked up was The Greatest Possible Good by Ben Brooks.

The premise of the book sounded similar to my favorite show ever, Arrested Development, where a wealthy family has a catastrophe and they have to pick up the pieces of their lives. In this story, we encounter a very well-off British family named the Candlewicks, led by the patriarch Arthur. His teenage daughter, Evangeline, has a very activist streak to her, leading very small acts of rebellion at her private school, while reading lots of progressive literature. The family's lives are upended one day when Arthur goes missing for the span of 72 hours. While on a random evening walk, he falls some 20 feet into an abandoned mineshaft, breaking his leg, and is trapped there until his eventual rescue.

After his release from the hospital and during his recovery, Arthur has a complete change of personality and he becomes enamored with the idea of Effective Altruism. EA, as it's often known, was a concept popularized in the last decade or so by some British philosophers, which in the early 2020s enamored a certain set of the San Francisco tech elite and may have indirectly caused a minor cryptocurrency bankruptcy or two. The main principle of the idea boils down to the notion that if you have any money that is in excess of what you truly need to live comfortably, it's your moral imperative to donate the rest to causes that can do the most good on a per-dollar basis. Arthur becomes obsessed with this idea, and without consulting his wife or the rest of his family, he takes all the money from selling the family’s timber business and donates it to a bunch of EA causes. This obviously causes a bit of friction between himself and his wife, which leads to them getting a divorce.

Things do not get better for the family after that point either. I had a feeling that the story wouldn't be a laugh a minute given that one of the blurbs on the back compared the novel favorably to The Bee Sting, which is a book I truly love but is incredibly depressing. This book doesn't get to those levels of sadness, but towards the end I did eventually find it to be incredibly dour. I also didn't have positive feelings towards any of the family members, so I had a hard time rooting for any of them to break themselves out of their destructive loops.

In the end, I don't think I'd recommend The Greatest Possible Good unless someone really enjoyed fiction that mentioned EA in it. If you want a comedy about this kind of thing, I always suggest Arrested Development or Schitt's Creek, and if you want the actual depressing version, then definitely check out The Bee Sting by Paul Murray, who is an incredible author to check out regardless.

As we wait with bated breath for the announcement of the Booker Prize shortlist, happening on Sept 22nd if anyone happens to be in London then. And due to the fact that the only longlist nominees I'm still waiting to read aren't out in the US quite yet, I decided to take a look at this year's winner of the soon-to-be-renamed International Booker Prize, which is Taiwan Travelogue by Yang Shuang-zi and translated into English by Lin King.

The novel is presented as a novel within a novel, which with the English translation actually goes even one level deeper than that. The conceit in the book is that it's a rediscovered series of travel articles by a Japanese novelist in the late 1930s that had been translated into Mandarin Chinese in the modern day. We follow the visit of Japanese author Aoyama Chizuko to the island of Taiwan for a year-long visit to understand the culture of the island and to also occasionally present about her previous novel.

Her trip comes around the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War, and her visit is in fact sponsored by the colonial authorities with the tacit understanding that some of her articles would be suitable for propaganda purposes. Despite her Japanese heritage, Aoyama does refuse to participate in that kind of writing. Instead, once she arrives, she is paired with a local interpreter named O Chizuru, whom she eventually nicknames "Chi-chan," and she proceeds to try and satiate her never-ending appetite, which she often says is like a monster inside of her.

It's a common trope that a book is always better than any TV or movie adaptation of it, but I'm unsure if that would be the case with this book. The story is a true love letter to Taiwanese food and culture, with even all of the chapters being named after different dishes. Large swaths of the book are just voluminous descriptions of individual dishes, snacks and meals that the two main characters go through eating. Given my lack of familiarity with food from that part of the world, I would love to see a TV version just so I could understand what food they're so often talking about, most of which sounded pretty great, though, as is often the case, too many vegetables were mentioned for my liking.

The rest of the plot outside of the copious depictions of food is also interesting, but again my lack of familiarity with the geopolitics of the time means that some of the more subtle points of the story probably went over my head. There is an obvious tension from time to time due to the fact that Aoyama is there at the pleasure of the colonial government and, like it or not, she is an embodiment of the will of the Japanese government in a time of war. She does make every effort to learn as much as she can about the native people of the island, predominantly through the speciality dishes.

If I have more time before my next batch of reads, I might go back and try some of the other shortlisted International Booker Prize entries for this year. Even without reading the other translated works, I will say this compares more favorably than the majority of the non International longlist nominees I've read so far, so I would imagine this is a worthy winner. Just make sure you can schedule your reading time of this book to coincide with your next meal as closely as possible or you might regret it.

The long fallow patch of Booker Prize longlist novels ended last time with Black Bag, and we continue this time with another excellent choice by the judges in their selection of May We Feed The King by Rebecca Perry. Along with its selection to the longlist, the famous UK bookseller Waterstones had already declared it their winner of this year's prize for debut fiction. At the time of this posting, the book is still not even released in the US, but I heard such good things I simply was forced to get my hands on a UK copy.

The plot is told in three acts. As we open, we are introduced to a woman who designs historical room recreations. She has been commissioned to set up a number of rooms in a former palace, now turned historic home, in honor of its 750th anniversary. We follow her for a bit in act one as she begins her work at the location and does her best to figure out how to properly recreate the settings. She works with an archivist who gives her a large number of historical documents that help unlock how she wants to set up the displays.

Act two is the meat of the book: we follow the story of a noble who, through the death of his other two brothers, is forced to become King. It's a role he never expected he would have to fulfill, and very quickly he bristles at his lack of freedom. He spends a few years trying to settle into the position, but he often floats the idea of abdicating the throne and leaving the court to return to a more normal life. When he does bring up this idea in passing, it's quickly apparent that this would be a choice of action he wouldn't survive. In the end, he and his queen, and her lover, seemingly escape unharmed, though it's implied they are never seen alive again.

Act three is back to the opening of our main character's historic room recreations, where she gives a small talk in association with the archivist about what the nature of history is and how we are to interpret what we read.

The story as seen above is relatively straightforward, but the reason this novel has received so much critical praise is its prose and what it has to say about what history is and whose perspective we see things from. My interpretation of the second act is that we're meant to see what we're reading as what our protagonist is discovering about the historical King as she's doing her research using the documents provided by the archivist. Perry's descriptions, especially in act two, are often so evocative that they make the reader feel like a voyeur who is peering into one of the recreated historical rooms and seeing what was happening 750 years ago.

One anecdote at the end of act three was personally very affecting to me. Our protagonist tells a short story in the presentation about the importance of records. She mentions an Italian named Garnier Valletti, who is the reason we know about over 286 styles of historical apples. He created meticulously detailed wax sculptures of them that survived to the present day. Otherwise we'd have no idea that many of the varieties ever existed, and yet no one knows for sure why he decided to create them, and ironically enough, he made no records at all about how they tasted, something you'd think would be a key feature you'd want to record. But instead we are left with the uncomfortable fact that there are many things we simply will never know. During the exchange with the audience, the archivist gives his answer as to why Valletti recorded what he recorded, and it's a line that has stuck with me after finishing the book, "To make us confront, one day, what we have lost."

As it stands now, I'm basically halfway through the thirteen books of the longlist, and while I enjoyed the oddity and weirdness of Black Bag, I think May We Feed The King is going to be hard to top for me. I sincerely hope it makes it to the shortlist, and I would love it if it were the winner this year, but only time will tell for that. Until then, it will still remain one of my favorite books of the year.