Katherine Arden's debut is a perfect Russian fairytale

The Bear and the Nightingale is Katherine Arden’s debut novel and, by the time you’ve turned the final page, you’re left with a deep hope that there will be more and that they will be every bit as good.

Texan Arden spent a year in school in France and, before beginning her degree in French and Russian literature at Middlebury College, Vermont, a year living and studying in Moscow. Since then, she’s spent further time working in France.

And all that experience is important because her book is essentially a Russian fairytale.

Set in a past where Russians still pay homage to the Khan; where Moscow is built of wood and where the new religion of Christianity still overlaps with the old – at least in the far reaches of the countryside – Arden’s tale begins with a family gathering around a vast oven for the telling of a story on a bitter winter’s night.

It is a story of winter; a story of the season anthropomorphised; a story of greed and fear and courage and love.

When the family sits back at its end, we begin to learn about them.

There is Marina – a strange woman and daughter of an equally strange and unknown bride of an Ivan in Moscow, who was married to minor noble Pyotr at her father’s behest.

They have had healthy children during a happy marriage, but then she becomes pregnant once more and, even though she’s weakened by a particularly hard winter, insists she that will give birth and that the child will be a daughter who will, in effect, continue her own philosophy.

Dying in childbirth, Pyotr is left to care for the new-born Yasya – helped by the rest of the family and Dunya, the elderly nursemaid.

But some years later, when he travels to Moscow with his sons to look for a new wife, an incident occurs that sees him travel home with a special pendant for Marina’s daughter and fear in his heart for the safety of the child.

Traditional fairy tales have little character development.

One of the things that Arden achieves here is to develop character far more than is traditional, yet to simultaneously give us something that never ceases to have the real and discernible sense of a fairy tale.

She gives the characters enough depth to satisfy contemporary readers – and to make us care – while at the same time never taking us too far from the recognisable types. Equally, this delves into philosophical realms that you can choose to pick up on or not (the nature of religion, for instance).

Arden knows her Russian folklore and it’s a knowledge that radiates throughout this book, yet never feels false or forced.

A tale of deep, deep winter, the landscape is conjured sublimely. And perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of the novel is actually the language. Somehow, Arden gives her tale a linguistic feeling of age – yet without ever a false note to make you squirm and feel that it is artificial or somehow wrong.

At least one review I’ve seen suggests that this is, in part, magic realism. I disagree. And that’s because it’s important to stress that what this certainly is IS fantasy/fairy tale – and on those terms, it is a work of literature and wonder and needs no such literary terms to ‘justify’ it.

I will say no more than that Arden has written a wonderful, magical book, and that I can only hope that she will not be a one-hit wonder.

Books for the beach: the great annual dilemma

Loki with, err, her gospel

And so it begins: the great annual kerfuffle about What Books am I Taking on Holiday.

It brings with it the annual question of: ‘why don’t you get a Kindle?’ Well, I have a tablet, and I read news and features on it, but don’t particularly like reading anything longer.

I love the feel, the heft, the smell, the sense of a real book.

And however good the backlighting is on a device, glass does not take well to being buffeted by sand (oddly enough) and other elements, while computer technology does not, generally speaking, make good bedfellows with water.

I don’t an electronic device into the bath – so why would I risk dropping one into the sea or similar?

Books it is – and this ritual is one that, even in its apparent indecisiveness, I enjoy.

Of course, it adds weight to the baggage, but I’m not travelling by air.

The Other Half is being seriously serious this time around, with an intention of taking Piketty for the beach – only a doubting Thomas would not concede that Capital in the Twenty-First Century has already caused enough of a stir to render the first name of its author as superfluous.

And Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life, a massive new biography by Stephen Parker, is also sitting ready to find a corner in the case.

My own reading list is somewhat different – although the Brecht will be available if the mood takes me.

First up is The Colours of Catalonia: In the Footsteps of Twentieth-Century Artists by Virginie Raguenaud, which I bought in Collioure in the first place – and will now take back to provide artistic background for this trip.

It does, of course, include a section on Collioure and Matisse and the Fauves. And Raguenaud talks of Ceret and Elne, of Picasso and Survage.

Museums Without Walls, by Jonathan Meades, is also penciled in for provision of pithy pointers to looking at and reading the built environment around us.

And then I have Five Quarters of the Orange, Holy Fools and Coastliners – three novels, all set in France, by Joanne Harris, together with The Gospel of Loki, her reworking of Norse myth from earlier this year.

Harris is one of those writers I haven’t read as much of as I have meant to – but that’s largely out of fear. For ages, I dreaded any of her other titles being a let-down after the glories of Chocolat, which is a rare beast, in that it’s a book I’ve read rather more than once.

Back in 2005, I reviewed Gentlemen and Players for a magazine – and thoroughly enjoyed that too – but subsequent re-reads of Chocolat and a first reading of its sequel, The Lollipop Shoes, were as far as I dipped my foot into Harris’s oeuvre until dipping into Blackberry Wine a week or so ago.

I’d always intended to get a copy of The Gospel of Loki, but this has not been a big reading year, so hadn’t got around to it until The Other Half suggested it for the holiday list.

One Amazon reviewer suggested that Loki won’t appeal to anyone who liked Chocolat, but that seems a remarkably limiting idea with no logic.

I love Chocolat – and I love the Norse myths. I can’t be unique – well, not on that score, at least.

As Terry Pratchett’s dust jacket biog points out, he is “sometimes accused of literature”.

Harris is, first and foremost, a wonderful storyteller, with a great ability to weave modern fairytales – on occasion, very darkly – and to employ magic realism, but she’s also a writer of the sort of subtlety that the same can be said of her: indeed, she makes me think of Angela Carter.

Take Chocolat: it’s a wonderful story, but it’s also ‘about’ so much: about life, living, pleasure and guilt, and it leaves you with plenty of food for thought.

My mother didn’t like it, but then it was only some time after I’d given her a copy that it dawned on me that Harris’s approach to both the sensual pleasures of life and to religion might not entirely have appealed to her.

C’est la vie, as those damnable Frenchies might say.

Blackberry Wine is a great read, and as I turned the final page and brushed away a tear – yes, you really do care that much about the characters Harris creates – thus was born the feeling that Proust can wait.