We are our stories. We tell them to stay alive or keep alive those who only live now in the telling. That's how it seems to me, being alive for a little while, the teller and the told.History of the Rain (Book 3959, Bloomsbury, New York) is a quirky kind of book with lyrical Irishness, circular storytelling, poetic narrative, a wise-cracking protagonist, and my God, the rain. It had me rereading sentences and paragraphs to savour the words (sometimes to decipher the meaning), and in two different places, had me bawling my eyes out. There is tension and mystery, beauty and truth and that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know (thanks Keats) and I could ask for nothing more from a reading experience.
The narrator introduces herself, I am plain Ruth Swain, bedbound, here, attic roof beneath the rain, in the margin, where the narrator should be, between this world and the next. Stacked in precarious piles to the ceiling are the 3958 books that belonged to her father, and although Ruth has a Terminal Something, she plans to read them all before she dies. I am going to read them all because that is where I will find him. Ruth proceeds to tell the history of her family, dipping back and forth between the generations, and making literary allusions from the stacks of books she has already read (and especially from her favourite author, Dickens). Most of the references were obscure to me (and even though I have read Great Expectations, the only referenced characters I remembered were Miss Havisham and Pip himself), but not getting the references isn't a problem -- they're only there to make a point about books and the readers who love them. The following is as good a case as any against ereaders:(T)here's that smell the fat orange-spine Penguins get when their pages have yellowed and the book bulges, basically the smell of complex humanity, sort of sweat and salt and endeavor. Like all the fat orange Penguins, it gets fatter with reading, which it should, because in a way the more you read it the bigger your own experience of the world gets, the fatter your soul. Try it, you'll see.There is a bit of something lost in imagining leaving someone your fully loaded kindle, no? No marginalia, no dog-ears or food stains, no life. I must confess that I felt an extra connection to this book because it is set in County Clare; a rain-soaked corner of Ireland in which I spent three entranced weeks as a fourteen-year-old (in a Shannon River-side village that the author refers to as "the saintly surrounds of Killaloe"). And I must confess that I took pleasure in the minor character of Nurse Dowling because my own grandmother happened to be a Nurse Dowling (although the young tots on the Children's Ward where she worked always called her Darling). And although there was something kind of timeless about the setting, I appreciated that this story was set in the present; after the Celtic Tiger had become, once again, Those Irish; after the Boom and the Bust and the Rationalisation. For many reasons, I may have made more of a connection to History of the Rain than another reader might, but for that I can't apologise; all reading is personal, although I reckon the pull of the following is universal:I know what the river is like at night. I know how it tongues the dark and swallows the rain and how it never sleeps. I know how it sings in its chains, how steadily it backstrokes into eternity, how if you stand beside it in the deeps of its throat it seems to be saying, saying, saying, only what you cannot tell.This is the second title I've read from this year's Man Booker Prize longlist and it's ahead by a long shot (by a high jump?). Well, wouldn't Ireland win the World Cup of Writing? At least eleven times?
Honestly, this is the book that The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry wants to be when it grows up. So pay attention girls: if you ever do come looking for me in the books I've read, know that one like this that made me cry (twice!) is a clearer window into my heart and soul than the stacks of mediocre novels I've read. You don't need to go through 3958 books like Ruth Swain: I'm doing the winnowing for you.
