The essay

Savage spends the entire collection telling us she’s playing at being an intellectual – that it’s a ruse, yet another trick – and all the while the book provides an object lesson in the many ways that’s simply not true. The un-small line of her vision, the intricacy of her argumentation, the richness of her sources, the cultivation of her contradictory style, pitched between brashness and eloquence, and the pleasures of her experimentation: Blueberries testifies against its author.

In certain respects, Davis is as quirky an essayist as she is a short-story writer. The greatest practitioners of the form – Hazlitt, Woolf, Orwell (choose your own) – tend to write in ways that seek to draw the reader into the movement of their thoughts. There is a sense of ideas and arguments being pursued on the page. Davis’ essays are interestingly unlike this. She does enliven them with the occasional autobiographical reminiscence; some of them even have the bones of a narrative structure. In an essay on the now little-read American writer Edward Dahlberg, for example, she undertakes an informal survey, asking every bookish person she meets their opinion of him. But her approach tends to be plainspoken and paratactic. There is often a sense that the thinking is already done and Davis is simply reporting her results, leaving readers to make of them what they will.

We might, for the sake of simplicity, call a human body a result of the things it has eaten and the things it has excreted; the things it has said and done and had said and done to it. The things it has read and pretended to read. The things which I have recently read, such as these books by Ellena Savage and Emma Marie Jones.

These books suggest that all writing can be read in the manner that one reads a poem, that is, with an acute sensitivity to the processes through which meaning is configured in a particular textual event.

This is a book about the complexities of home, about being unhomed, about the body as home, and about the spaces we work to make home, our dwellings and our neighbourhoods. When life is marred by unbelonging and grief, it is the habits and routines of being homed that bring comfort and even joy.

When I say that Broadsword is dedicated to describing Where Eagles Dare, I mean it. The book details each scene’s mechanics, its organising principle is plot exposition. It’s as if an electro-magnetic pulse, fine-tuned to wipe out all cinema, had shimmered across the globe, erasing the hard drives and reels. All that remains, in this post-movie world, are Dyer’s memories and his loquacity. The first question that occurs on picking up this book, however, is not ‘What is it for?’ but ‘Who is it for?’

What is Essayism? Its writer admits to us that he has ‘no clue how to write about the essay as a stable entity or established class, how to trace its history diligently from uncertain origins through successive phases of literary dominance’ – and praise be for that. The book is instead a series of attempts, of essays, of course, at delineating or describing the form.

What are essays for? They are for thinking about things that need to be thought about yet don’t get thought about much, or at all, or interestingly, or for long enough. They are for picking up ideas, feelings, forces in the air, still unnamed and amorphous, and giving them a foothold in language. Whatever is in the air and whatever is disappearing – unnoticed, unmourned. They are for resisting choices offered to us that are not true, yet made to seem inescapable.