More from Books

Tuesday

Helen Carr

Snapshots of the Middle Ages in the Canterbury pilgrims

What does the term ‘medieval’ mean to you? Most of us have some idea of the Dark Ages, the centuries roughly spanning the departure of the Romans and the early, or indeed late, Middle Ages (which Ian Mortimer extends to the Renaissance). For those brought up on school history, or who revere the nous of the Romans, it was a time when civilisation declined. But the ‘Dark Age’ moniker is increasingly accepted as unfair, with historians arguing hotly and convincingly that the period was anything but dark. Seb Falk’s recent The Light Ages showed that major scientific exploration was under way in the late Middle Ages. Following on from this, Mortimer now explains why the period matters, and why it was once overlooked.

Christopher Shrimpton

Shared secrets: The New Life, by Tom Crewe, reviewed

‘It is shocking to read about. But once you are used to it, it is a little like reading about Ireland, or socialism.’ This is the accepting, if unfeeling, response of John Addington’s undergraduate daughter after reading his recently completed book on homosexuality. ‘It is a very rational argument, Papa.’ The New Life, Tom Crewe’s superb debut novel, is set in fin-de-siècle London and follows Addington and his co-author Henry Ellis (based on John Addington Symonds and Havelock Ellis) as they try to make a rational argument for ‘the impossible subject’. They are respected writers and family men, but each is burdened by an unacceptable private life: Addington has brought a young man to live in his home; Ellis’s wife has moved away to be with another woman.

Stuart Kelly

The idealist vs the entrepreneur: Birnam Wood, by Eleanor Catton, reviewed

I always feel an element of trepidation when approaching a new book by an author whose previous work I have admired. When the novelist in question won the Booker prize in 2013, and I was on the judging panel, the static crackle of anxiety is even more intense. And so the fearful question: is Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood a stinker? No, it isn’t. But will it ‘pull a Mantel’ and win the Booker again? I doubt it, though I would not rule out its appearance on other prize shortlists. It is a subtle, sometimes acerbically comic and ultimately tragic novel of great sensitivity.

Alexandra Coghlan

Why are women composers still disregarded?

Did you know that throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th it was considered a ‘biological impossibility’ for women to sustain the kind of abstract thought required for serious musical composition? Or that in the 1910s women in London could be compelled to sit separately from men in concert halls, sometimes even denied entry if not in academic dress? How about the fact that the Halle Orchestra summarily dismissed all its female members in 1920? Or that from 1952 to 1962 only eight works by women were performed at the Proms? For a bonus point, can you name the year – the decade, the century, even – in which the first opera by a woman was staged at the Vienna State Opera? (The answer is 2019.

Suzi Feay

From man of words to man of action: Hotel Milano, by Tim Parks, reviewed

The global disruption of 2020-21 posed a special challenge to novelists. As a subject it seems irresistible; but how to find order and pattern in a series of seemingly blank, eventless days? Stuck in the pandemic doldrums, Tim Parks’s elderly narrator at least has memories of the past and a richly stocked mind to call upon when lockdown bites. Frank Marriot embarks on an ill-advised trip to Italy at the very start of the pandemic, when he is begged to attend the funeral of an old friend, Dan Sandow. Oddly, Frank has heard nothing about a virus spreading from China. A former cultural commentator and magazine feature writer, he has long undertaken a print and TV detox, so is unaware that he is being flung into the rapidly heating cauldron of Covid. ‘Ben, I don’t do news.

Leaf Arbuthnot

‘It felt like a piece of bad news I should pass on to someone else’ – Robert Douglas-Fairhurst on his MS diagnosis

In October 2017 the academic Robert Douglas-Fairhurst went to see a neurologist in Oxford. A couple of months earlier a weird thing had happened: he’d gone on a long walk and ended it shuffling along, like an old man in slippers. He wasn’t yet 50. Having had a scan, he was looking forward to hearing there was nothing to worry about. ‘I’m going to come right out with it,’ the neurologist said, fixing him in the eye. ‘I think you have multiple sclerosis.’ Contemplating a trip to Dignitas, he wonders if people generally buy a two-way ticket or just the single All of us, Douglas-Fairhurst writes in Metamorphosis, his heartening and unexpectedly gripping memoir, find at one point or other that we are standing on a trap-door.

Tuesday

Hugh Thomson

Pico Iyer finds peace even in lost paradises

We all have our vision of a paradise travel destination. Mine was Tahiti, based on exotic remoteness and those pictures of glorious atolls with their cerulean blue lagoons – until I went there and discovered a severe underlying drugs problem among the island’s youth, and whispering discontent. Herman Melville once talked of how ‘the soul of man was an insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life’. It’s a phrase that gives Pico Iyer his title for this intriguing collage of such places which might, and should, be considered paradise, but that human intervention has spoiled. Like Satan surveying the Garden of Eden, the reader can take a certain mordant pleasure in the process.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

The triumphs and disasters of 1845

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times: not France in 1789, convulsed by revolution, but Britain in 1845, when the period Dickens referred to as ‘the moving age’ was in danger of spinning out of control. It was the year when the SS Great Britain, designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, left Liverpool docks on the first transatlantic crossing by an iron-built steamship; the Hungerford suspension bridge (another Brunel design) opened, and a Birmingham manufacturer obtained a patent ‘for Improvements in Springs to be applied to Girths, Belts and Bandages, and Improvements in the Manufacture of Elastic Bands’: the birth of the modern rubber band.

Sarah Watling

Fragments of a life: Janet Malcolm meditates on old family photographs

Janet Malcolm, who died in 2021, was one of her generation’s great practitioners – one might say agitators – of journalism and biography. She was a master of studies that are ostensibly about one thing, but are actually of a depth and range the reader is never entirely prepared for. Whatever topic she had in hand, you find her nudging at its limits, questioning its practices and accepted norms, turning what could, tediously, be described as a ‘gimlet eye’ on the irrational, emotional investment we have in those norms. A hallmark of her work is an extraordinary ability to (seem to) work her subjects out.

Dennis Duncan

Publisher, translator, novelist, critic and polyglot: the many lives of Italo Calvino

In retrospective mood, just months before the stroke that killed him, Italo Calvino mused on the character of his own writing. ‘The time has come for me to look for an overall definition for my work,’ he wrote. ‘I would suggest this: my working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight.’ Lightness – leggerezza – was the ideal he had striven for. If we think of his best known works in English – the dazzling high-wire acts of Invisible Cities or If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller – it would be hard to begrudge him the satisfaction of considering himself successful in his efforts. But let’s look at that formulation again: the subtraction of weight. Lightness here is not froth or naivety.

Guy Stagg

What’s to become of Wales?

In recent years, more and more nature writers have begun to engage with the climate crisis. On the one hand, they want to raise awareness of the scale of the problem; on the other, they try to make more tangible those apocalyptic visions of the future. In Sarn Helen, Tom Bullough asks how the crisis is affecting Wales, while walking the old Roman road that linked the country’s south coast with the north. As he writes in his prologue, Wales is not the front line of the emergency, but by focusing on the local, he hopes to give meaning to this vast, diffuse and complex threat. Sarn Helen is several books in one. At its simplest, it describes the long walk the author made in sections over several months between the various pandemic lockdowns.

Julie Burchill

The indomitable Pamela Anderson sees the best in everything

Pamela Anderson’s life story contains several showbiz-beauty clichés: an abusive childhood, accidental fame and many marriages. Unlike Marilyn Monroe, Lana Turner or Rita Hayworth, she didn’t grow up with the Hollywood studio system, so there were no brilliant writers and directors laid on to make her acting career memorable. But the absence of this structure – in which women were deemed past it at 35 – also meant that she could do much as she pleased at an age when those earlier sex symbols were distraught, depressed or dead. Ten years ago she was branded ‘delinquent’ for running up $493,000 in unpaid taxes and moving to a trailer park in Malibu.

Nick Duerden

A Trinidadian tragedy: Hungry Ghosts, by Kevin Jared Hosein, reviewed

In rural Trinidad in the early 1940s, in a village on a hill, the rich rise like bread to the very top. This is where Dalton Changoor and his much younger wife Marlee live, in a mansion on a large plot of land that requires plenty of upkeep. The poor dwell at the bottom, among them several Hindus who just about manage to stave off poverty by doing odd jobs for the Changoors. One of them is Hansraj Saroop, whose illicit attraction towards the lady of the house is not unreciprocated. One night, Dalton, who has ‘a face that looked like a wine bottle has been smashed into it’ and is increasingly losing his mental faculties, goes missing, and this proves a catalyst for an island drama whose shockwaves will reverberate down the years.

Madeleine Feeny

Doctor in despair: Tell Her Everything, by Mirza Waheed, reviewed

‘No one dies without regrets,’ says Doctor Kaiser Shah in Mirza Waheed’s melancholy third novel, an exploration of guilt through the eyes of a doctor haunted by his past, which won the Hindu Prize for Fiction 2019 and was nominated for two further prizes in Asia. While both Waheed’s previous novels – The Collaborator, a Guardian First Book Award finalist, and The Book of Gold Leaves – deal with the turbulent recent history of his homeland, Kashmir, Tell Her Everything tackles the moral cost of a professional choice that compromises personal ethics. Set between India, London and an unnamed oil monarchy, it tells the story of the regretful doctor, now retired in London and living in a luxurious Thameside flat.

David Crane

Failing to denigrate Britain’s entire colonial record has become a heinous crime

This book has already had an interesting life, and most readers will by now know something of its history. For any who don’t, Nigel Biggar’s Colonialism was originally submitted for publication to Bloomsbury and was warmly received by them; but two months later it was indefinitely delayed, because (as the ‘email from the very top’ went) ‘public feeling’ was ‘not currently favourable’. Biggar writes in his introduction: I asked them to specify which ‘public feeling’ they were referring to, and what would have to change to make conditions favourable to publication, but they declined to give answers. Instead, they informed me that they were cancelling our contract. Happily, William Collins has rescued what Bloomsbury chose to jettison.

David Honigmann

The death of popular music in Cambodia

The musical revolution of the 1960s reverberated widely. In many countries it was given added impetus by decolonisation. Newly independent nations adopted rock and roll, usually infused with local traditions, as a signal of modernity. From Addis Ababa to Dakar to São Paulo, officials and businessmen jived and swung and caroused in nightclubs, serenaded by bands with some measure of official sponsorship, if not directly employed by the government itself. Some of these stories ended unhappily. The Brazilian junta dispatched Tropicália musicians into exile. When the Derg seized power in Ethiopia, Swinging Addis came to a sudden halt. The ligueurs in Benin forced Angélique Kidjo and others to flee the country. But the most horrific tale of all was Cambodia.

Tuesday

Mathew Lyons

Is human migration really a normal activity?

Halfway up the high street in Totnes, a small town on the river Dart in Devon, a modest stone is set into the edge of the road. It claims to mark the point at which Brutus, legendary founder of Britain, first set foot on this island. The grandson of the equally legendary Trojan hero Aeneas, Brutus was said to have been born in Rome; but, exiled from his birthplace, he travelled western Europe before finally settling here. Most of us carry with us a little Neanderthal DNA. We are all mongrels of a sort That the legend of Brutus was a ninth-century fantasy concocted by a Welsh monk named Nennius need not concern us.

Francesca Peacock

A small house in Dublin: The Springs of Affection, by Maeve Brennan, reviewed

A man ignores his wedding anniversary and is so sickened by the bowl of flowers his wife has placed by his bed that he drops them and breaks the precious cut glass. Another man is so enraged by seeing his wife close the kitchen door when he comes in from work that he enters a state of fevered reverie where he concludes ‘nothing in his life made sense’. In a different story, the mess and argument caused by an improperly laid fire makes Mrs Derdon leave the house, sure that she ‘was not coming back’. The stories in Maeve Brennan’s The Springs of Affection (first published in the New Yorker, and, after her death in 1993, as a collected edition in 1997) are not about dramatic flights of fancy or the memorable red-letter days of a life.

Ian Sansom

Don Paterson is frank, fearless and furious about everything

Memoirs by poets – the Top Ten? It’s an admittedly niche category, and since no one would ask this in normal conversation, or even in a pub quiz, here is the chart. It is based not on official sales or downloads but rather on my own tastes, prejudices and relatively recent reading: Last Night’s Fun, Ciaran Carson; It Goes With the Territory, Elaine Feinstein; A Fly in the Soup, Charles Simic; The U.S.A.

Mark Cocker

Healing herbs in abundance in an unspoilt corner of central Europe

The only thing I’m uncertain about in this uplifting and beautifully written book is its subtitle. Granted, the landscape Kapka Kassabova invokes does sound like ‘a place that struck you dumb with its majesty’, but we are not in some Shangri-La beyond the reach of mortals. The valley in question is a two-hour drive from a modern European capital. Elixir is set on the banks of the Mesta River (known as the Nestos in Greece), where its life-giving waters meet the forests and mountains of the western Rhodope range in Bulgaria. Mesta’s montane flora has provided wild crops and herbal medicines for centuries This is the author’s country of origin; but she left it 30 years ago and is unflinching in her judgment of its recent past, which she divides into three phases.