The Selected Works of TS Spivet by Reif Larsen (Harvill Secker)
If, like me and many others, you are a sucker for a book with maps, this novel is for you.
Narrated by 12-year-old TS Spivet, it is the story of his life so far on a farm out on the great continental divide, in Montana, United States. It is a delightful collection of oddities and asides, obsessively recorded and “mapped” by TS.
His father is an old-world cowboy farmer, his mother an entomologist. The main body of the text is heavily annotated in sidebars and illustrations that elaborate all sorts of things from the beetles his mother is searching for, the layout of his room and his walls of notebooks, his sister’s corn-shucking method and the gunshot that killed his brother when they were testing something in the barn.
It reads at first like a highly original, often beautifully written boy’s tale of where he comes from, celebrating the cowboy myths, the great railways across the US and other notions embedded in American identity.
But gradually one realises that it is a lament and that all is not well with the boy. His work is recognised by the Smithsonian and he makes a solitary journey to Washington to receive a prize. As the narrative becomes darker and more surreal it is no longer clear how factual TS’s account is, what his maps really show us.
The novel seems unnecessarily complicated by a second story about women in science and, sadly, after such a shining start, it resolves far too easily. But this first novel is nevertheless an impressive piece of work, a book to occupy a special place on one’s shelf.
The Selected Works of TS Spivet is one of the 2009 Boeke finalists