Self-adhesive suns they glow fluorescent on grey monitors wanting for a world ess misremembered. Oh, how biddable! Our paper geisha girls, dancing in an open window breeze, only to die the deaths of petals curling, ips unpeeling from a disappearing love.
This is a slight book containing short stories about minor characters. And it is about to receive some fairly faint praise. A Possible Life, Sebastian Faulks’ 12th novel, does little to confirm exactly where he sits in the modern British canon. It probably does not matter greatly; on this showing, he is a competent creator of unmemorable prose, but there is little more to conclude than that. His resolutely low-key approach is certainly deliberate. A Possible Life tells five separate life stories of individuals (two from the 19th century, two from the 20th, and one from the 21st), who struggle in their attempts to establish a meaningful existence.
Fifty years on since the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, this is indeed an excellent time to assess its cumulative historical impact. After all, it is still cited as one of the most important environmental books of the 20th century, and seen by many as the publishing phenomenon that launched the modern environment movement. Many of today’s environmental leaders have enthusiastically acknowledged Carson’s attack on the indiscriminate use of man-made chemicals to control pests as a critical influence on their own intellectual development. All of which makes it an irresistible target for one of the most virulently anti-environmental ‘think tanks’ in the USA today — the Cato Institute, the publisher of Silent Spring at 50.
I had never come across commonplace books until I met up with my school friend Paul Foot in Oxford in 1958. The idea, he explained, was that you kept a notebook in which you transcribed anything interesting you came across in the course of your reading. I started doing it the following year. The first two of the following quotes are from D. H. Lawrence, then my favourite writer: Horace is already a bit of a mellow varsity man who never quite forgot Oxford. No old world tumbles except when a young one shoves it over. And why should one howl when one’s grandfather is pushed over a cliff? Goodbye, grandfather, now it’s my turn. Justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be believed. (Beachcomber) Wherewould we be without a sense of humour? (Very slight pause) Germany!
What a pleasure it was to be reminded in a ‘Life and Letters’ column by Allan Massie (28 July) of Desmond MacCarthy. He was an old friend of my parents’ and, in the immediate postwar years, a fairly frequent visitor to their house in Chantilly, outside Paris. One Friday afternoon — it must I think have been 1950 or 1951 — we were sitting opposite each other as the train rattled through Normandy. I was at that time reading Russian at Oxford and was struggling through War and Peace in the original. Not surprisingly, the book caught Desmond’s eye. ‘Did I ever tell you,’ he murmured in that wonderful velvety voice of his, ‘did I ever tell you that I knew the Tolstoys?
Charles Dickens remains in his bicentennial year as much a national treasure as Shakespeare, and just as deeply embedded in the English psyche as the Bard, declares Michael Slater, an Emeritus Professor of Victorian Literature at the University of London. Among the innumerable Victorians who sanctified domesticity, sentimentalised hearth and home and idealised family love, Dickens is especially conspicuous. Few people nowadays know Coventry Patmore’s Angel in the House, but many have seen depictions of Bob Cratchit’s humble Christmas dinner in A Christmas Carol.
By any measure the small town of Lalibela, hidden away amongst the gorges and plateaux of Ethiopia’s central highlands, is one of the most remarkable religious sites on earth. A dozen or so churches have been carved out of the rock and connected by a labyrinth of trenches, tunnels, culverts and crypts. The churches are substantial, elaborate and in their overall effect unlike anything else in the Christian world. Interiors disappear into chiselled-out arcades and apses; the light falls through intricate cruciform windows. The columns are so evenly spaced, the vaults so regular that it is easy to forget that every inch of these ‘buildings’ had to be designed and executed using negative space, a stone-carver’s technique that allows for no margin of error.
Tough job being a disused prime minister. John Major has resisted the temptation to flounce off in a sulk, or to play the international peacemaker, or (as Harold Macmillan was said to do during the 1970s) to fantasise about a glorious comeback urged on him by a despairing populace eager to rediscover its lost greatness. Instead, Major has become a social historian. After a book on cricket he now offers us a personal history of the music hall. His father, Tom Major (b. 1879), made a living as a comic artiste for over 30 years, and his recollections are the starting-point for Major’s investigations. Music hall grew out of the glee clubs and saloon theatres of the 18th century where ‘catches’ (hummable melodies) were played to boozing crowds by impromptu artistes.
Authors seem to be more unhealthy than most people. Sometimes the sick room simply offers time to read and a sense of grievance or detachment; but the relationship between health and writing may be more complex. John Ross, a practising physician and assistant professor of medicine at Harvard, has happily violated every rule of patient confidentiality in this gossipy, highly conjectural and entertaining piece of medical bookchat. Some of it is a bit far-fetched. Did Shakespeare have syphilis, and if so did a mercury cure cause tremors and personality changes? Ross thinks Shakespeare may have had an STD, that mercurial rage may have surfaced later, that he may have struggled to complete his last plays and that perhaps a syphilitic chancre increased his sympathy for others.
I suppose I may be one of the few people still alive to have known Krystyna Skarbek (aka Christine Granville), though, perhaps regrettably, not as well as many others in her brilliant, stormy but eventually tragic life. Today she would have been over 100. Of all the women agents who risked their lives in Nazi-occupied Europe in the second world war, Polish-born Krystyna must surely rate as one of the bravest of the brave. As they used to say in army vernacular, the George Medal (which was about as close to a VC as a foreign national could get), the OBE and the Croix de Guerre did not exactly ‘come up with the rations’. Churchill is alleged to have rated Skarbek his ‘favourite spy’. The reason?
In the year when East and West Germany were being reunited Günter Grass felt he must start keeping a diary. He was sure what was taking place was a dreadful mistake: At night I often toss and turn, haunted by images of a Germany that can no longer be mine. This Kohlian abomination: egomaniacal, bombastic, jovial, tough, condescending, domineering, feigning harmlessness. Chancellor Helmut Kohl was a power politician of genius. Although taken by surprise by the fall of the Berlin wall in November 1989, he soon saw how to make himself the architect of reunification. Grass was dismayed to see how easily the Germans were led by this philistine.
The Impressionists adored clothes. They delighted in strapontins, polonaises and paletots; fans, hats and umbrellas were an extra treat. They were keen on couture, but they didn’t restrict themselves to painting grand ladies; it was the golden age of flânerie, and Paris had been transformed from a higgledy-piggledy labyrinth into an elegant public space of boulevards and parks. The artists got out of their studios and started studying the people in action. Debra Mancoff looks at their paintings with a dressmaker’s eye. She can tell you not only what the outfits are made of, but also what’s under them, who made them and how they have held their shape despite the heat of an Impressionist picnic.
The Grimm brothers’ fairy tales are gruesome. Heads are cut off and sometimes stuck back on again. Children are maimed, or chopped up, cooked and eaten. Broken promises are punished horribly, though a magic bird or a talking animal can sometimes make everything come right. Yet those tender-minded parents are misguided who keep their children away from Grimms’ tales for fear of instilling terrors. Little children know about terror already because they are afraid of being abandoned, and of big strangers. With no prompting from anyone, they play games involving much noisy bashing and killing of imaginary monsters.
Here’s the paradox. By any standards, Arthur Conan Doyle was an extraordinary man; a doctor, a politician, a keen sportsman (he once took the wicket of W.G. Grace and he was skiing almost before the word was invented), a social campaigner, a spiritualist and of course a very great writer, not just of detective stories but history, horror and even poetry. And yet the slate of his life was wiped almost entirely clean by his single, greatest creation, Sherlock Holmes. Doyle himself was aware of it. ‘I am in the middle of the last Holmes story,’ he wrote to his mother in 1892. ‘After which the gentleman vanishes, never, never to reappear. I am weary of his name.’ It didn’t work, of course.
A century ago, Antarctica was a seriously tough place in which to be a scientist. In February 1912, a German expedition established its research station on an ice-shelf in the Weddell Sea, only for that section of shelf to break loose ‘with an explosive boom’, and drift away — pursued by the German ship. When Apsley Cherry Garrard journeyed to the emperor penguin rookery at Cape Crozier in July 1911, to investigate the embryology of the birds, he and his companions carried reindeer-fur-lined sleeping bags which froze solid during the days, weighed 21 kg at their heaviest, and could take up to 45 minutes of melting and wriggling to enter each night.
for Antony and David Impossible to picture a time without it there beneath the living room window, afloat in the shadows of our father’s desk. Its flattened tassels were the rays of sun in a child’s drawing; it was where we must gather, three breathless children, our coats on for school, or to show who was first to be ready for bed, and if we’d a score to settle this was where we must do it. When was the last time we stood there, myself and my two, fly brothers, in the days before their bodies hardened and wives and children hovered round them? It is late, perhaps – a splash of moon at the window. Outside, a row of curtained houses looks blindly away from two small boys and their sister, who have not even thought to arrange the order of their going.
These two, DOROTHY AND CLARICE DENCH — A pair of local spinster sisters, as I guess — Both died, two years apart, aged ninety-five. Yet ‘We are only here a little while’ Is carved, with names and dates, into this bench: A saying of theirs, perhaps, that raised a smile When each new birthday found them still alive, That friends recalled with wry tenderness? Did they walk their dogs here every day Then stop at ‘their’ bench and sit gratefully, Half-hearing distant cries (Howzat? or Play!), Half-watching men in whites move on the green As ‘Flush’ and ‘Bingo’ barked at long leg-drives That rolled, to dry applause, towards the screen?
If Britain is serious about this Olympic legacy thing, we should get ‘talking about the weather’ added to the list of official sports. We’d clean up at Rio. Strange, mind you, that we don’t actually know very much about the subject which consumes so much of our conversation. How rainclouds form, why lightning happens, where Britain’s first windmill was — that sort of thing. One man determined to put this right is Charlie Connelly. Bring Me Sunshine (Little, Brown, £12.99) is his anecdotal, layman-friendly exploration of the elements and what they do to us.
‘He walked straight past the wolf and picked up the dead garter snake.’ This is the exemplary sentence that young teacher Connie writes out for a good-looking, baseball-loving pupil three grades behind in his studies. ‘Fifteen years old, and thick as a plank,’ the school Principal, Parley Burns considers him. Connie chooses her words to meet what this boy really cares about. The school is in Jewel, a small town in south-west Saskatchewan, and Michael, always happier out-of-doors, really did bring in a snake, to display its beauty. Finding it, Parley killed it with his blackboard-pointer. Unfortunately the best Michael can do with the sentence is: ‘He wakt past the fol and pickt up the ded grtre snake.
Fiona Sampson has produced a vigorous and valuable guide to ‘the diversity and eclecticism’ of present-day British poetry. It isn’t a book for beginners but for those broadly acquainted, at the very least, with the work and influence of important poets of the last century — W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin — and perhaps rather confused and unclear about what is happening now. Sampson herself is a notable poet, critic and editor who enjoys and admires a wide range of contemporary poetry, and Beyond the Lyric should assist any intelligent readers infected by her enthusiasms and wanting to update their knowledge.