Mothers of America let your kids go to the movies! get them out of the house so they won’t know what you’re up to it’s true that fresh air is good for the body but what about the soul that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images... So wrote Frank O’Hara in ‘Ave Maria’, in 1964.
‘Summer was the season of strangeness,’ muses Temperance, the barmaid at Little Nettlebed’s only alehouse. ‘People behaved peculiarly then.’ Temperance’s aside anchors the dramatic irony at the heart of Xenobe Purvis’s debut novel The Hounding, set in an 18th-century Oxfordshire village in the grip of a drought. In the villagers’ eyes, through which much of the story is told, this strangeness starts with the Mansfield sisters, five orphaned girls leading a reclusive life on a farm across the river, in the sole care of their blind grandfather, John. The girls’ free manners, in flippant disregard of the era’s orthodoxies, fill onlookers with mistrust.
We think of the Raj as controlling only India and Pakistan, and its infamous breakup happening in August 1947. It’s a story told and filmed so often, and whose echoes reverberate today with such nuclear sabre-rattling that surely there is little left to add. And please nobody mention Edwina Mountbatten’s possible affair with Jawaharlal Nehru ever again. How could the British be so capable of running an empire but so hopeless when it came to dividing it? But there is a wider, and fascinating, history which has itself been partitioned off and ignored.
On 19 December 2011, at around 3.30 a.m., a young wolf in the mountains of southern Slovenia trots away from his pack and never looks back. For the next 90 days or so, Slavc (after Slavnik, the mountain of his home) lopes onwards, hardly stopping, fording fast rivers and traversing high passes, until at last, having cut a horseshoe loop through Austria, he crosses into Italy and stops in the picturesque Alpine plateau of Lessinia. More than a decade later, Adam Weymouth follows in the same wolf’s padded footsteps. For Slavc, this is a journey into a landscape of confusing novelties, full of motorways and noise and anti-wolf country folk. Head down, a passing shadow in the night, he moves forwards, like ‘a ship sailing off the world’s edge’.
Private Eye asked last week: Which of Michael Gove’s luckless staff at The Spectator will be assigned to review this grisly account of their editor’s marital woes? Reader, it’s me! I’m happy to do this, though, because I have an interest in how to be a political wife (I am married to Alex Burghart MP), and perhaps have something to learn here, though I’m struggling to understand, eek, ‘lesson seven’: Realise... that when you step over the salt circle into the five-pointed star coven of politics, you have ceased to become a person. You are now a c**t. There’s a feeling that the author still has a touch of PTSD. Readers with expectations of schadenfreude will not be disappointed. Sarah Vine shoots thunderbolts.
The 1990s and the following decade were, it is widely agreed, a bad time to be a girl. Which is strange, because a girl seemed like the best thing you could be then. Certainly better than being a woman. Not as good as being a boy or a man, of course, but since those were out of the question (gender fluidity was still a nascent proposition), you might as well lean into girlhood. For millennial girls like me and Sophie Gilbert (a Pulitzer-nominated staff writer on the Atlantic), this was a confusing period. On the one hand, girls were everywhere. We became teenagers to chants of ‘girl power!’, and later we got our vision of young adulthood from the Lena Dunham series Girls. ‘Girl’ was an identity with potential.
On 3 June 1960, a letter appeared in The Spectator which began: Sir, We are homosexuals and we are writing because we feel strongly that insufficient is being done to enlighten public opinion on a topic which has for too long been shunned. The letter was prompted by the government’s failure to act upon the recommendation of the 1957 Wolfenden Report that homosexual acts between consenting adults in private should no longer be a criminal offence. This had led to the founding of the Homosexual Law Reform Society (HLRS) in 1958, and it was for this organisation that the letter’s three signatories worked as volunteers.
There is no such thing as a bad friend. The societal expectations and collective imagination of what friendship should look like have, over the past century, set unrealistic expectations, meaning we are all doomed at some point to fail as friends. At least this is what the cultural historian Tiffany Watt Smith argues in her new book. Bad Friend is elegantly written as part memoir, part history, citing multifarious sources, from 12th-century Paris to the American sitcom Friends. The author weaves in her own experiences of female friendships, candid that her research for the book made her reassess the formative and transformative relationships she has cultivated in her life. Reading the book forced my own recollection and reconsideration of friendships.
Alice Mah didn’t enjoy finding her roots. Even though ‘ancestor tourism’ is increasingly popular among westernised descendants of Chinese émigrés like her, she felt a nameless sort of dread when visiting the village in the Cantonese county of Taishan where her great-grandfather came from. It didn’t help that she’d just attended the morbid Qingming festival, when the Chinese remember their dead by sweeping their tombs. Mah’s memoir opens here, and we nervously anticipate the tragedy or horror that will surely strike – and are left waiting. Other than the pushiness of Taishanese cousins, who demand ‘red pockets’ (a traditional way of gifting money in small red envelopes) and donations for the village from their richer compatriots, the trip seems uneventful.
War – huh – what is it good for? According to Duncan Weldon, throughout most of history it’s been fantastic for economic growth and development and has perhaps fuelled technological innovation and more. Blood and Treasure is a delightfully quirky approach to military history. Colonial Spain was thought to be cursed by the gold brought home from its colonies in the New World, since the crown somehow bankrupted itself multiple times during this period, despite the riches. Weldon contends that since the gold meant that Spain’s monarchs did not need to approach parliament for money, it left them untethered from their economies and constraints.
In 1797, following a written plea for troops to counter an incursion by an American Revolutionary War veteran into Louisiana, Manuel Godoy, minister to the Spanish crown, made a note in the margin: No es posible poner puertas al campo (‘It is not possible to put up doors in a field’). Both literally and metaphorically, Spain could no longer defend the indefensible. In 2017, the 45th president of the United States signed an executive order to build a wall along the country’s Mexican border. Its construction, for which he perversely wanted Mexico to pay, was a practical and symbolic one. The United States was turning its back on Latin America.
One of the earliest leper hospitals in Britain was built in London near the beginning of the 12th century by Queen Matilda, the wife of Henry I. It was a benign combination of housing, hospital and chapel, with patients free to come and go as they wished. Matilda started a fashion among the wealthy, so that by 1350 there were more than 300 such hospitals across the kingdom. Far from lepers being shunned and feared as outcasts, therefore, their treatment for much of the medieval period was enlightened. ‘The mythology of the “medieval leper” seems no more real than that of the vampire or ghoul,’ writes Oliver Basciano. The author is a journalist who has worked for the Financial Times and the BBC.
Two shibboleths are treated in Thomas Peermohamed Lambert’s audacious debut novel. The first is the University of Oxford; the second is the Israeli-Palestinian controversy. ‘It is the great issue, isn’t it? The great shibboleth.’ Edward, the protagonist, is a state-educated undergraduate whose connection to Islam is a Muslim grandfather from Zanzibar. He finds himself in a world of wealthy public school boys with ‘a social calendar, rugby fixtures and sexual assault hearings’, and girls from sister schools, ‘fully recovered from eating disorders’. This fictitious world is outdated, but Lambert’s satirical touch still hits the mark about ‘the creatures of the written word [the university] specialised in churning out, as if the country needed more of them’.
Claire Adam’s compelling first novel Golden Child won the 2009 Desmond Elliot Prize and was also picked as one of the BBC’s ‘100 Novels that Shaped Our World’. It told the story of contrasting twins in Trinidad – one an academic high-flyer, the other a misfit. When the latter is kidnapped, the father must act to rescue the son he has never quite understood. Adam has followed this with an ostensibly quieter novel about a Trinidadian woman called Dawn, divorced with two adult sons, who lives in south London and works for an estate agent, after abandoning her medical career. She decides to search for the baby girl she gave up for adoption more than 40 years earlier, having got pregnant by a tourist at Carnival, aged 16.
A prospective reader who chanced upon Recommended! without its subtitle might be forgiven for thinking that the six grim-looking portraits on the cover depict the Watch Committee of an exceptionally puritanical interwar-era seaside town. This would be a misjudgment, as, rather than being charged with censoring films or evicting courting couples from cinema back rows, Nicola Wilson’s galère – Hugh Walpole, Clemence Dane, George Gordon, Edmund Blunden, Sylvia Lynd and J.B. Priestley – turn out to have made up the selection panel of the early 1930s Book Society. The subtitle is, of course, a wild exaggeration. Even at its high-water mark, the Society’s membership was in the low five figures.
The first time I heard a piece of music by Erik Satie it was on the B-side of a Gary Numan single. Played on a synth that sounds like a theremin sucking on a dummy, ‘Gymnopédie #1’ is so saccharine sweet it actually makes the music seem sorry for itself. And yet. It got me hooked on Satie’s catchy yet sombre ironies. Par for the course, says Ian Penman in this dazzling study. People who know nothing about music beyond the top tens of their teens can be so ‘instantly beguiled, captivated and transported’ by Satie that his ‘pop single length’ works are ‘now part of some collective audio memory’. Those who know nothing much about music can be instantly beguiled, captivated and transported by Satie For all that, there is no mention of Numan here.
How did the UK become a place where young people think it’s permissible to record a relative at home and make that recording public? Why has privacy been so easily discarded, and why have people welcomed its demise so they can control the behaviour of others? A few years ago, when I taught at university, a student who lived with their parents told me they had argued with their mother about what they described as ‘queer identity’. The student had secretly recorded the argument and wondered what I thought about them using it for a piece of writing. I think their assumption was that because I’m a journalist I would embrace the idea. I did not.
For several centuries, the word ‘celebrity’ meant fame. A couple of hundred years ago, it acquired a secondary meaning of a person overendowed with that quality, and this has now largely driven out the previous usage. In parallel, the same journey has been travelled by ‘genius’. Once an essence that attached to works or deeds, it now also refers to people – celebrities of accomplishment, no field too trivial. Helen Lewis teases out the consequences of this shift and makes a modest plea for its reversal.
Be under no illusions: this is not a food memoir. Chopping Onions on My Heart is a linguistic exploration of belonging; a history of the Jewish community in Iraq; and an urgent endeavour to save an endangered language. Above all, it is a reckoning with generational trauma. The subjects of Samantha Ellis’s previous books include the life of Anne Brontë, heroines of classic literature, feminism and romantic comedy. She is the daughter of Iraqi Jewish refugees, and the language she grew up around, the language of her people and culture, is dying. Judeo-Iraqi Arabic ‘came out of the collisions of Hebrew-speaking Jews and Aramaic-speaking Babylonians, and then absorbed linguistic influences from all the other people who conquered Iraq’.
‘Everyone has a mother, but we don’t all smash up our lives for her sake,’ we hear in the first few pages of Lili is Crying. It’s a sensible message, but one which seems suited to an entirely different book. Hélène Bessette’s 1953 debut novel – translated into English for the first time – is a tale of bust-ups, mistakes and life-ruining decisions in a fiery, fickle relationship between a mother and daughter. Charlotte and her daughter Lili live in Provence, and the novel jumps between the 1930s and 1940s, from Lili’s ‘ribbons and Sunday dresses’ to her first freighted dalliances with boys.