Little Fires Everywhere

Little Fires Everywhere – Celeste Ng

I really enjoyed this novel. It was easy to read, compelling and had more layers to it than first expected but did not feel contrived. Little Fires Everywhere begins with the ending; the Richardsons stand outside their house in the aftermath of a fire which could not have been an accident. There is evidence of “multiple points of origin”, that ‘little fires’ were started all over the house. Fires crop up throughout the novel in a metaphorical sense too in the form of problems and secrets that stay hidden only for so long, that get out of control. Yet, fire is also a symbol of renewal, “Sometimes you need to scorch everything to the ground and start over. After the burning the soil is richer, and new things can grow. People are like that, too. They start over. They find a way.”

It is also a novel of moral dilemmas. Abortion, race, motherhood are all themes and the omniscient narrator allows us to see both points of view. When neighbours of the Richardsons try to adopt a Chinese baby, abandoned at a fire station, and the mother decided she wants her baby back, they enter into a court case which splits opinion, even within the same family, and raises questions: who has the right to motherhood? What about the baby’s cultural upbringing?

Little Fires Everywhere focuses on the Richardson family, whose life in a large house in Shaker Heights has a flawless exterior, and their tenants, Mia and her daughter, Pearl, who travel from place to place, something of a mystery and a draw to this settled suburbia. The Richardson family has problems beneath the surface, however, and their lives are all disrupted in some way throughout the course of the novel.

I found the characters mostly sympathetic and they seemed real – flawed and at times frustrating but essentially good. We empathise with Lexie and her decision to have an abortion, with Pearl and her longing to fit in, with Moody and his unnoticed affections, with Elena and her wish to uncover Mia’s past, with Bebe and her desire to keep her child. The novel seems to be advocating Mia’s view when she says, “Most of the time, everyone deserves more than one chance. We all do things we regret now and then.”

Celeste Ng also writes beautifully. She makes the everyday seem magical. For example, when describing a parent’s feelings for their child: “your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all at the same time.” She exposes human emotions that are often kept hidden, reaching, as all good literature does, beneath the surface.

I would definitely recommend Little Fires Everywhere and found it a better, more developed story than Celeste Ng’s first, Everything I never told you (though that is also worth a read).

The Wasp Factory

The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks

Now I’ve read some strange books, but this is possibly one of the strangest! Even the reviews quoted at the front of the book send mixed messages: “you may hate it” (Cosmopolitan), “perhaps it is all a joke, meant to fool literary London into respect for rubbish” (The Times), “one can only admire a truly remarkable novel” (Daily Telegraph).

It is certainly a unique creation and I am still not quite sure what to make of it. A horror story and a mystery too, the novel’s plot follows the central character, Frank, who lives on an island with his father. He is in touch regularly with his ‘crazy’ brother Eric, with whom he has secret phone calls. He is brutal, a murderer (though he is still only a teenager), which he admits in a very matter of fact way: “that’s my score to date. Three. I haven’t killed anybody for years, and I don’t intend to ever again. It was just a stage I was going through.” He doesn’t even feel remorse. The narrator is unlikeable to say the least, though I felt some empathy for him after the reveal at the end – he is certainly a product of his upbringing. He also is not without empathy for others; he keeps in touch with his brother and looks out for his friend Jamie. Perhaps this is what makes it so chilling.

Women are strangely absent from the novel – his mother has left when he was very young – and hence his views are shaped by popular culture and media: “women, I know from watching hundred – maybe thousands – of films and television programmes, cannot withstand really major things happening to them”. His misogyny seems almost farcical. The narrator says he hates women “because they are weak and stupid and live in the shadow of men”. This is heavily ironic given the outcome of the novel.

It is graphic in its unpleasant descriptions; from the specifics of the place where he tortures wasps, to the details of him using the toilet. It is definitely an uncomfortable read but also strangely gripping and cleverly written. It is evident that a reveal is coming, but I did not guess the twist.

Frank is trying to make his own way, his own power, through torturing animals, “I have the factory, and it’s about now and the future; not the past” but he has been shaped by a past of which he is not aware – he has been misinformed. Later, he considers that his “father’s truth has murdered what [he] was”. In a weirdly self-reflective and haunting ending he issues a warning: “Each of us, in our own personal Factory, may believe we have stumbled down one corridor […] but a word, a glance, a slip – anything can change that, alter it entirely, and our marble hall becomes a gutter, or our rat-maze a golden path”. The narrator may seem to be a monster, but he is also presented as a fragile human too, searching for identity.