Yahoo News Book review: Funny Weather by Olivia Laing
When Olivia Laing began her collection of essays, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, she had no idea just how relevant it would be. She came up with the phrase “funny weather” long before Covid-19, in November 2015 for a series of columns in Frieze magazine — it felt like the best way to describe the news cycle.
Over the next four years her column responded to Donald Trump’s election, Brexit and the Grenfell Tower fire, which all happened in quick succession, leaving Laing feeling anxious that she had no time to process them. Art provided not just an escape, but another way of thinking; a mental space away from Twitter and rolling news, with more perspective, breathing space and conclusions.
This collection brings together those Frieze articles, along with other essays from the past decade. There are profiles of artists’ lives, which read more like satisfying short stories; love letters to artists Laing admires; literary criticism of 21st-century books by women; and interviews with authors Hilary Mantel and Ali Smith, and artists Chantal Joffe and Sarah Lucas.
Laing writes through the prism of “paranoid reading”, an idea developed by the critic and queer-studies pioneer Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick at the height of the Aids epidemic. The paranoid reader is concerned with gathering information, but rarely with solutions (the internet is a breeding ground for this). Sedgwick’s antidote is reparative reading, less concerned with fact-finding.
Much of the ground covered will be familiar to anyone who has read Laing’s other books — loneliness, alcoholism, gender relations and technology all loom large. She weaves in her own experiences and expands on ideas from To the River (2011), which traces the course of the Ouse, the river that Virginia Woolf drowned in, as well as themes from The Trip to Echo Spring (2013), exploring the relationship between creativity and alcoholism, and The Lonely City (2016), which considered how being alone affects artists. There are also thoughts on frenetic Twitter culture, which resulted in her first novel, Crudo (2018), the winner of the James Tait Black memorial prize.
Laing is at her best when you feel her connection to her subjects — the section on Derek Jarman is outstanding. Laing’s older sister introduced her to his work when they were children growing up with a gay mother and prying, homophobic teachers. Jarman’s “buoyant and fizzing” mind (and his garden) have inspired her ever since.
Every essay is rich with forensic research, but never feels weighed down by it. There’s too much heart in Laing’s writing for that. She creates an atmosphere through detailed descriptions of particular moments and everyday actions, remembering the exact way that she took her earrings out before having sex for the first time, and including moments that make you empathise with the famous, omni-talented figures she talks about — from Hilary Mantel recounting her Catholic parents’ unconventional break-up to David Bowie at Andy Warhol’s Factory.
Laing is no naive bluestocking — she is well aware that art isn’t a magic bullet. If only it was as simple as reading Charles Dickens giving you an urge to volunteer at food banks. It’s not even about art providing cosy reassurance. She wants art to be unsettling, and it is a demanding read at times; it’s dense, but tempered by humour. As a result, this is also a thought-provoking, inspiring collection that you can go back to whenever the weather takes a funny turn.
Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency by Olivia Laing (Picador, £20), buy it here.
