More from Books

People who’ve read Justin Cartwright’s previous novels possibly won’t be too startled at what they find in his new one. The main character is a clever, well-read media man of about Cartwright’s age, who lives in London but ends up feeling the tug of a more primal culture — in this case by clearing off to the Kalahari for six months. His thoughts are conveyed in a quietly glittering, often aphoristic prose. The book ponders the big questions of love, religion and the nature of the self, while also scrutinising such less abstract social phenomena as rap videos and lobster sandwiches. When the novel opens, David Cross, a former TV anchor and foreign correspondent in his early sixties, is adjusting to life as a widower.

Some writers spend their careers happily producing variations on the same book. Others seem to rethink the sort of book they would like to write with each new work. Only a very few, however, have a career which looks like a planned trajectory into something completely new; you would not predict Tolstoy’s late fables from his first autobiographical sketches, or the opaque fantasy of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake from the dogged realism of Dubliners. And yet all the steps in between are carefully considered, and the career makes perfect sense. Italo Calvino was very much one of those writers.

‘I think there would be something wrong with a middle-aged man who could take pleasure in Firbank’. That, more or less, was Evelyn Waugh’s judgement in the interview he accorded the Paris Review in the mid-Fifties. (I say ‘more or less’ because I can’t lay my hands on that volume of the interviews, but if the words are not exact, the sense is). Yet Firbank had, as he admitted , influenced him when young, along with Hemingway, who had also, as Waugh observed, developed ‘the technical discoveries upon which Ronald Firbank so negligently stumbled’. That quotation, unlike perhaps my first one, is accurate, for it is taken from an  admiring essay on Firbank’s work which Waugh wrote in 1929.

Ox-Tales: Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Oxfam, £5 each Buy short stories and help the wretched of the earth! I don’t mean short-story writers, on this occasion, though that injunction usually holds too. No: I mean, if you buy one or, preferably, all four of these pretty, pocket-sized paperbacks you’ll be donating to Oxfam. Cooked up between the Hay Festival’s impresario Peter Florence and Mark Ellingham of Profile Books, Ox-Tales is a sort of literary equivalent of the War Child album: a gallimaufry of short fiction donated by various authors — about two thirds original stories, about a third novel-extracts.

Surviving, by Allan Massie The Death of a Pope, by Piers Paul Read Coward at the Bridge, by James Delingpole Alcoholism, with its lonely inner conflict between escapism and conscience, is an inexhaustible subject for literature. The emotional agony of addiction is fascinating, as long as it is other people’s. Allan Massie, the illustrious Scottish littérateur, has written an empathetic novel about the loneliness of the long-distance boozer, always isolated, even in the company of fellow alcoholics who try to help. Some alcoholics in desperation submit to Alcoholics Anonymous, in the hope that mutual support may ease the daily fear of lapsing. Massie once spent several years in Rome and evidently knows the city street by street. It is the perfect venue for his novel.

David Crane’s latest book is much more interesting than its title would lead you to believe. If you buy it hoping for a collection of stories of derring-do and British pluck, you won’t be wholly disappointed: you will indeed learn how Frank Abney Hastings, having got himself sacked from the Royal Navy for behaving like a petulant teenager when given his first command, went on almost single-handed to invent naval steam-powered gunboats, and used the first one he built to sink a ridiculous number of Turkish ships in the Greek War of Independence.