Katy Hays (2023) The Cloisters.

I ripped through The Cloisters. Katy Hays’s Sunday Times bestseller is one of those poor-little-rich-girl books where you don’t really need to think. That’s a begrudged compliment. It’s one of those books I don’t really think I should like, which is a way of saying I’m better than that (when, in fact, I’m lying, which you would expect).

The heroine is Ann Stilwell. Her goal is to escape Walla Walla, which was the spiritual home of Walt Whitman. No wonder she wanted to escape to New York, or anywhere but Walla Walla. She also wants to escape her mum.

‘Yer jist like yer da,’ isn’t meant as a complement in Scotland. And certainly not in our family.

Ann’s mum is background. Her dad is part of the puzzle. He was a genius whose spoke five languages but worked as a janitor rooting through bins to read academics musings on discarded bit of paper from Renaissance Etze. A bit of Good Will Hunting (or whatever that film was called). He dies mysteriously, but not very. Conventionally, in fact, but it’s dressed up nice.

The Prologue sets the tone. ‘Death always visits me in August. A slow and delicious month, we turned into something swift and brutal. The change, quick as a card trick’.

I love the last sentence. It points towards (or foreshadows) the end of the book in which the author offers a conceit, which I liked, ‘Ann Stilwell’s Guide to Reading Tarot.’

    "April is the cruellest month" is from T.S. Eliot's poem "The Waste Land" (1922), specifically the opening of the first section titled The Burial of the Dead. A skilled reader (me) can reference the opening line. But, of course, Artificial Intelligence is just another way of saying this matches with that to the nth degree. Searching databases makes such drudge jobs of pattern recognition in academia, law and in most fields, including medicine and science largely redundant.

Ann Stilwell academic research in The Cloisters takes her deeper into the occult and the nature of belief. Protagonist and ally Rachel Mondray. Well, here we go. If Stilwell (still well) is a solidly middle-class plodder, but in academia takes off her cape to be super girl in a brave and beautified way, then Rachel (My Cousin Rachel) is born to money and elegance personified. We’re talking Gwyneth Paltrow before the Gloop. Fuck it. Fling in the Gloop as well. Rachel is the kind of person that might have murdered her mum and dad but that’s just part of growing up and being superrich and cool on her own terms. Nobody in this world can be fat in the fattest place on earth.

I’m drifting here. Fatal as in fatalism. Hugh MacDiarmid said ‘Edinburgh is a mad god’s dream’. The Cloisters is where they live when they stay in New York. Read on.

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