Anyone who works in a library, in particular an academic library, knows that knowledge is not neutral. The own-the-snowflakes cry of “facts don’t care about your feelings” is not merely rude: it is untrue. A library is not just a repository of knowledge: it is a repository of certain kinds of knowledge, presented in particular ways, and constantly rejigged to be aimed at particular audiences. Over the twenty-odd years since I first started working in libraries I have been regularly surprised by the speed with which academic trends and interests change, and the ways in which a good library is reactive, almost alive, in how it can respond to shifts in the kaleidoscope of opinion or academic fashion.
My two collections of short fiction, Lost Objects and Out of the Window, Into the Dark, both recently published by Calque Press, collect most of the stories I have written over the past decade. With no prior planning, it turns out that a number of my protagonists are librarians and archivists, repository and museum curators, work on planet-sized libraries and in academic settings. Apart from the planet-sized libraries (one can always dream…) these characters reflect what I have worked at since entering the job market. It’s no wonder that my experience as an institutional librarian and library assistant informs the topics I am interested in exploring as a writer.
This isn’t just a roundabout way of saying that I can pull together a kickass display for Black History Month, or that I can support academics who suddenly get a yearning to look at trade routes in medieval Central Asia. It is more that the disconnect between what a library looks like to its users (shelves, order, classmarks, Spanish to the left, German to the right) and what a library looks like to the people it is entrusted to (the materials shifting like the walls in the movie Labyrinth, huge deposits of just-in-case ephemera, the constant fight against entropy and mission collapse) is something I find artistically and intellectually productive. Some of my favorite books—as the following list of genre-leaning fiction reflects—engage with what I see as a library’s yin-yang nature: order shored against chaos, chaos containing the seeds of its own regulation.
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, translated by Lucia Graves
Twenty years after its publication in English in Lucia Graves’s delectable translation, The Shadow of the Wind hasn’t lost any of its charm, and remains a classic of the “secret library” sub-genre of books (such as Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s El Club Dumas and Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith) which imagine the library as the physical shape of occult or mystical desires. Its young protagonist, a bookseller’s son, becomes obsessed with Julian Carax, an obscure, cursed author, and starts investigating what could have happened to him along with his vanished bibliography. When the young bookseller’s life becomes intertwined with the truths he starts to discover about Carax, reality and fiction are shown to be different sides of the same coin. At its heart, this engrossing novel is an ode to the transformative power of books and storytelling, masterfully articulating that wondrous moment of discovery we’ve all experienced when finding the book that turned us into readers. But The Shadow of the Wind is not simply about books—the library at its centre, the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, serves as a heart-wrenching metaphor for all that was lost under the long shadow of Franco’s dictatorship in Spain, and in particular for the shameful “pact of forgetting” that the democratic transition imposed on Spanish citizens, removing the possibility of restorative justice around the horrors of Franco’s regime. This is a novel that became a modern classic for all the right reasons.
The Murder Room by PD James
A body is found in a London museum dedicated to the interwar years. Adam Dalgliesh, a senior police officer and respected poet, is sent to investigate along with his team. Then another murder occurs. The two crimes don’t quite emulate, but seem reminiscent of certain murders exhibited in the museum’s own “Murder Room,” where artifacts relating to famous crimes are presented to the public in their historical context. If a museum functions as a dark mirror to society, then this chamber of horrors and its curated psychoses develop into a horrid mise-en-abyme where Dalgliesh can trace the woes of all those connected to the crime. For a writer of P. D. James’s talent, this set-up brims with possibility: under the guise of a cozy murder-mystery, she passes a lens over UK society at large, dissecting class, domestic arrangements, loneliness and aging, the changing nature of the London landscape, and even the sorry state of the National Health Service and care system. All this furthers the question at the novel’s core: what is a museum actually for?
Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett
Many of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books poke serious fun at the academic life: the wizards who run Unseen University are venal, petty, aggressive rung-climbers, gathering power for themselves over the bodies (living or dead) of their rivals. Unseen Academicals is in many ways more of the same, and should be treasured for its queasily recognizable portrayal of the power struggles and rivalries over unimportant matters that infect so many institutions. But, as always, Pratchett looks at different sides of the issue with compassion and empathy. The plot of the novel involves the university faculty having to play a football match in order to keep hold of a large endowment—enough to cover eighty-seven point four per cent of their food budget (“Three cheeses isn’t a choice, it’s a penance!”). Of course, this offers scope for parody and broad satire, but, underneath the impotent babbling of the academics, Pratchett gives us a portrait of life below stairs in a large institution, and makes his key point—that everybody deserves a chance, not for who they are but for what they can be—with economy and heart.
The Library of the Dead by T.L. Huchu
Ropa Moyo has a gift: she can see the dead. We’ve all read stories with this premise, but don’t be dissuaded: this novel, the first in a series, offers a refreshing take on the trope. This is a world where ghost talkers and the supernatural are part of society and the bureaucratic world, while the Edinburgh depicted feels realistic, gritty, and recognizable. Add to that a setting on the verge of apocalypse, where an “incident” of some magnitude has already taken place, yet normal life is still more or less intact—a delicate balance that I find far more interesting than a full-blown post-apocalyptic world—and you find yourself with a rare thing, a novel that is as subtle in its approach to worldbuilding as it is kick-ass in its plot. This fast-paced supernatural mystery contains many entertaining subplots: vanishings, family dynamics, a terrifying haunted house, and more. But leaving the action and the protagonist’s unquestionable charm to one side, Huchu’s writing shines when interrogating major questions that are brought to the reader’s attention almost via sleight of hand: servitude, gatekeeping, or even which magic (a.k.a. knowledge) is more “proper.” This is an atmospheric story that asks the right questions and packs the right punches.
Nova by Samuel R. Delany
The Alkane Institute doesn’t make an appearance until mid-way through Samuel R. Delany’s science fiction classic, Nova, and yet its presence is ubiquitous in the book’s plot and worldbuilding. When Captain Lorq van Ray decides to challenge physics and enter a nova, he is less interested in gaining the tons of Illyrion that he expects the adventure will provide him than in settling a long-standing score with his childhood frenemies, Prince Red and his beautiful sister, Ruby Red. Delany’s vibrant imagination brings science-fiction topics about the struggle for resources, mass migration, and humanity’s relationship to technology and places them alongside Tarot readings and other occult mysteries. The central library, the all-powerful Alkane, is a massive, dome-like institution, whose influence is felt over the galaxy—it’s a larger-than-life centre of learning that encompasses all the knowledge of Delany’s multi-system universe Today, Delany’s SF classic feels more prescient than ever (“Oh, for the rebirth of an educational system where understanding was an essential part of knowledge”), and acts as a window for imagining what the heritage politics of the future may look like centuries from now.
The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami, translated by Ted Goossen
There’s always room for one out-and-out fairytale, and Murakami’s brief, beautiful book joins the list on those grounds. Like all the best fairytales, it reads as though it is being made up on the hoof, and yet follows an internal logic to which we cannot but consent. Our unnamed narrator goes to the library to return some books and take out some new ones, only to find himself imprisoned by a vicious old man and tasked with studying a number of thick books about taxation in the Ottoman Empire so that the old man can eat his newly-educated brains, “because brains packed with knowledge are yummy.” How he escapes—of course he escapes—is a story that fits neatly into traditional narrative structures: loyal animal-ish sidekicks, shapeshifting girls, a touch of Robert Louis Stevenson, a pinch of Borges. But the final few pages offer us a twist that recontextualizes everything that has come before, and the story about being kidnapped turns into a narrative of grief observed: a sideways punch that you should see coming but which will floor you nonetheless. The book is illustrated throughout with collages and found images, which adds to the impression that we are reading not just a text found in some archive somewhere, but a text which is itself that archive: a beautiful object as well as a moving story.
To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis
One of the reasons jokes work is said to be that they offer us sidelong ways into things that, if contemplated seriously, would drive us mad…or to tears. I put Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog very firmly into this category—it’s one of the funniest novels one could ever read, yet the air of melancholy, of climate grief, that stands behind its best scenes gets me every time. We begin in the ashes of Coventry Cathedral, destroyed in a bombing raid in November 1940, with a group of time-travellers sent back to find various McGuffins that their patron, the impossible Lady Schrapnell, needs to fulfil her unnecessary plan to rebuild the cathedral as it was before the Blitz. But what sets the novel’s plot in motion is a sharp dig at the perpetual state of academia—the projects that can only get underway because of external support (for Schrapnell read Sackler), and the way in which use-value is prioritized above everything else when money is concerned. The main body of the novel, a reworking of Jerome K. Jerome’s perfect comedy, Three Men in a Boat, takes place with this disastrous future always lapping at its edges: a bittersweet reading experience.
The Legends of River Song by Jenny T. Colgan, Jacqueline Rayner, Steve Lyons, Guy Adams, Andrew Lane
Professor River Song is, arguably, one of the most beloved characters in the Doctor Who universe. The wit with which she comments on clothes and lipstick, while rejoicing in intellectual matters and her own research, are among the sides of her charm that any bookish girl can rejoice in. She comes into this list as a triple threat: the character first appeared in the now-classic episode, Silence in the Library; at least one of the stories in this book takes place at a museum, Madame Tussaud’s in London, and of course Song also happens to be a scholar, a Professor of Archaeology, and “the acknowledged expert on the long-extinct precursor races to have evolved in the galaxy.” River Song has been gifted with more than one book of adventures, audio-plays, etc—used to great effect within the larger Doctor Who universe to fill in the gaps of her multi-layered narrative—but this little volume of five tales is one of my favorite outings. The pocket-sized adventures it contains read like little jewels, even miniature episodes; and, even if they are written by different people, the stories are not jarring: each one of the authors has managed to convey River Song’s voice, the pizzazz and deadpan retorts that are the character’s trademark. Expect the usual adventures—heartbreaking time-loops that last an eternity and realities that warps in on themselves. The stories here also give us a glimpse into Professor Song’s life in prison, instances in which she makes use of her scholarly knowledge to save the day, or moving musings on topics such as possible parenthood with The Doctor, or the trials and tribulations of having the time lord as a boyfriend/husband. This is an enjoyable read for Doctor Who fans anywhere.
