This giant of literary canon is an adequate read

A Tale of Two Cities is one of those classics perpetually haunting you for not having read it, so I finally did that, and have to report the dubious achievement of never having been spoiled about anything except for its opening line despite its fame. Yes, reader, I was not even aware the book was about the bloody French Revolution.

The book starts with a carriage rolling towards Paris, where a bank manager meets a young lady for the first time to tell her that her father did not in fact die before she was born, but was imprisoned for most of his life for an unnamed reason, and now requires her lifelong care. It was clearly a time of greater trust in strangers and belief in the sanctity of the blood bond, because she acquiesces and returns to England with a father.

We are then at a trial where a man, Darnay, is denounced for being a spy on the most circumstantial of evidence, leaving you in perplexity they even bothered to have trials. The penalty is death, but fortunately he gets acquitted after his lawyer points out to the witness that the man he saw could have been any other, eg the lawyer’s colleague, after which the jury gasps because they look absurdly alike and lets Darnay go due to confusion.

After that we find out that Darnay is actually the nephew of rich cruel French man who enjoys running over peasant babies with his carriage. Darnay rejects that background and his inheritance, and instead chooses to go to England and dirty his hands by working, horror of horrors.

Darnay marries the young lady and has a little baby, but decides to go back to Paris at the start of the French Revolution thinking he’d swoop in and save his family servant who cried help, the peasants want  my head for being your family’s rent collector. To no one’s surprise, he gets imprisoned without trial.

The later half of the book has the family trying their utmost to save Darnay, and along the way we find out how Darnay’s fate has actually intertwined with the young lady’s father as well as the revolution’s ringleader before he was even capable of choice. The revolution is a sombre blood fest, and the book ends with a heroic action of the most selfless nature, elegantly coming full circle.

Ngl, it was a slog for at least some of the way. It has a substantial cast of characters with similar names (Jerry and Lorry? Stryver and Sydney? Monseigneur meant to represent the anonymous filthy rich gentry?), the lines run on indulgently with a tendency to the descriptive, and in general I struggled with comprehension and to care for anyone. But there were some beautiful lines — “slight displacements of the raging sea, made by the falling wounded” — like a grand painting of war hinting at much with so few strokes, and the way the plot resolved all its loose ends can only be described as classic. The second half moved fast, and the ending, with the last beatific thoughts of a man about to die, looking to an imagined future of the living characters: chef’s kiss.

Rating: 3.5/5

— A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens, 1859)

I’ll have taboos for breakfast, please

Earthlings is written by Sayaka Murata, who also birthed Convenience Store Woman, and it feels like this book is the Hyde to CSW’s Jekyll. Both feature a protagonist who might as well be the same woman, but if CSW’s Keiko is merely bewildered by the humans she has to coexist with, Earthlings’s Natsuki casually eats a societal taboo or three for breakfast.

Natsuki grew up in a toxic family environment, with parental units who dote over her sister as much as they abuse her. A couple of things keep her sane: the belief that she is an alien, conveyed to her by her plush toy Piyyut, an emissary from the planet Popinpobopia (and this you’re never quite sure if it is a figment of her imagination or actual possibility in the book’s environment), and the annual gathering of relatives at her grandmother’s house in the Nagano mountains, where she is reunited with her boyfriend and cousin Yuu, who shares a similar sense of estrangement. Unfortunately, the latter looks to be taken away as well, driving her to desperate proposals to Yuu. The adults are shocked when they find out, and Natsuki loses any opportunity to see Yuu again.

Natsuki’s childhood is truly nightmare fuel, replete with adults who do worse than fail to protect her. It is a relief when we see her again as an adult, granted limited autonomy via an asexual marriage — the only way she could move out from under her tyrannical nuclear family’s immediate scrutiny. When that gets threatened again, Natsuki and her husband, Tomoya, flee to her now deceased grandmother’s vacated house… where they reunite with Yuu.

This could have turned into a romance novel, but it’s more like Jordan Peele’s Get Out. It was wholesome for a length, when the three find in each other kindred spirits and found a society based on philosophical tenets, but driven by the threat of intrusion, they soon find themselves pushing these tenets to an extreme, unguided by your usual morals. In CSW you might have cooed over Keiko’s benign gestures of protest in the form of becoming the perfect convenience store worker. No such response will be had here — and that might be how you know the book is true transgression, not content to fit into some liberal’s easy recommendation. If you require trigger warnings, this book needs all of them.

Rating: 4/5

— Earthlings (Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori, 2021)