Review

There might be a million stories in the naked city, but the early childhood of Stanley Kubrick was one of the more typical: born in 1928, in the Bronx, to upwardly mobile, artistically sophisticated Jewish parents, one generation out of the Pale. ‘I’m not Jewish but my parents were,’ he liked to joke.

If Louis-Ferdinand Céline were around today, he would almost certainly be cancelled. So why publish a previously unknown fragment of his? Unlike some writers, whose views are inferred from their work, Céline’s anti-Semitism was beyond doubt, if at times a little confused. He wrote two anti-Semitic novels and a pamphlet, and associated with collaborators and Nazis. He was, however, not a card-carrying member of any political partyand did not subscribe to fascist ideology, beyond the notion of the expulsion of the Jews from France. He certainly didn’t believe in the possibility of some master race. Humans are vile, was his central belief. As the character Ferdinand says in War: ‘Your instinct is never wrong when it faces the ghastliness of man [sic].’

In the opening pages of Michelle See-Tho’s début novel, Jade and Emerald, an unnamed narrator is avoiding someone’s gaze. That someone is ‘pristine, poised like a goddess’ to the narrator’s vision of herself: haircut ‘like an eight-year-old boy’s’, smudged make-up, dress the wrong colour. There is a secret between these two young women, blown open by the prologue’s end.

When we first meet Max in Evie Wyld’s The Echoes, he is dead. He does not believe in ghosts, he tells us, yet that it precisely what he is: ‘a transparent central nervous system floating about like a jellyfish’. Max lingers in the house he shared with his partner, Hannah. He tries to make his presence felt, to signal to Hannah that he is still there, but he lacks any supernatural ability. Hannah moves on with her life, and all Max can do is ‘watch as the flat becomes the home of others – the moths, the spiders, the silverfish, the dust motes and … the leftovers of the dead’.

Stories about women from disparate times and places leading parallel lives are almost a genre unto themselves. In Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, a well-known literary example, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, connects the lives of three twentieth- century women (one of them Woolf herself) in an intergenerational portrait of queerness and mental illness. In Evie Wyld’s The Bass Rock, a trio on the Scottish coast are linked over several centuries through themes of violence against women. In Tracey Chevalier’s The Virgin Blue, an American woman living in France noses out the story of a persecuted ancestor.

Dominated by tropes of repetition, inversion, and doubling, Parade feels like a hall of mirrors that reflects and re-imagines pieces of reality while also refracting elements of Rachel Cusk’s own body of work. This is not recognisably a novel or a collection of short fiction, but a new iteration of the style initiated by Cusk’s lauded Outline trilogy (2014), a patchwork of vignettes unfolded by an enigmatic narrator. Cusk continues to push the boundaries of fiction, exploring oscillating paradoxes of connection and disconnection, passion and dispassion, attachment and hatred, creation and destruction. At the heart of all of these is the generative primal conflict of gender; together these form the bleak coordinates of the Cusk cosmos.

Given the global resurgence of interest in compounds such as psilocybin, LSD, and ayahuasca, it is a wonder more contemporary novelists have not turned to psychedelic experience for inspiration. It is, after all, hard to think of the golden age of psychedelics – roughly the mid-1960s to mid-1970s – without recalling the trippy, Zeitgeist-capturing literature it produced, including Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971) and Tom Wolfe’s (highly fictionalised) Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968).

In 1906 and 1908, on the island of Bali, thousands of people dressed in ceremonial Hindu attire walked towards Dutch gunfire in acts of mass suicide known as puputan. These were not the first events of mass violence by the Dutch against the indigenous people of what we now call Indonesia – nor the last. In 1621, the native inhabitants of the Banda Islands were slaughtered en masse to secure Dutch access to nutmeg; it was the starting point for Amitav Ghosh’s brilliant non-fiction work The Nutmeg’s Curse (2021). The only Bandanese who survived were enslaved. During the so-called Dutch Golden Age of the 1600s, Batavia (now Jakarta) was home to 27,000 people – half of whom were enslaved. In 1740, the Dutch massacred almost all ethnic Chinese residents of Batavia, establishing what would become a dark history of anti-Chinese violence in the archipelago.

Increasingly, public understanding of issues vital to humanity’s well-being and future – climate change, health policy, international relations – is informed by debate that pits specious prejudice, masquerading as opinion, against expertise. Communicating with a lay audience, experts on complex yet politically charged subjects confront twin challenges: they must present evidence that is multifaceted and can provide no perfect or certain solution, while simultaneously dismantling arguments, founded in denialism, that endorse simple strategies and offer comforting but false hope. Experts and those who wish to construct evidence-based policy are struggling to meet these challenges.

Vladimir Putin must be tried in an international court for ordering the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. He must be tried, not just indicted, and to do this a new international court explicitly intended to deal with leaders responsible for such territorial aggression must be created. Since the Russian president won’t appear before any international court, he will need to be tried in absentia. Nevertheless, such a trial is essential not only to uphold international law, but to deter other international leaders who are contemplating aggression.