Religion

In historical writing the Restoration era has been the poor relation of the Puritan one before it. It is true that we all have graphic images, many of them supplied by Samuel Pepys, of the years from the return of the monarchy in 1660: of the rakish court and the mistresses of the merry monarch; of the Restoration playhouses and the newly-founded Royal Society; of the disasters of the great plague and the fire of London and the Anglo-Dutch naval war. Yet until very recently there has been no equivalent to the scholarly foundations which were laid by Victorian narratives of the civil wars and the republic, and on which the successive controversies about the Puritan revolt, from the ‘gentry controversy’ of the 1950s onwards, have been erected.

Freemasons have been getting steadily less glamorous since their apotheosis in The Magic Flute. Nowadays, one thinks of them in connection with short-sleeved, polyester shirt-and-tie sets, pens in the top pocket, sock-suspenders and the expression ‘My lady wife’. I honestly can’t see them guarding the secrets of the universe. Dan Brown’s new conspiracy theory cosmic thriller, portraying freemasonry as a wise secret sect, starts at a considerable disadvantage. Ends there, too. Robert Langdon — was there ever a dimmer name for an action hero? — is lured away from his cryptological studies by an invitation from a wise old acquaintance, Peter Solomon, in Washington.

Set in the future, The Year of the Flood tells the story of the build-up to and aftermath of a pandemic known as the Waterless Flood, which all but eradicates the human race. The environment the survivors are left with is extremely inhospitable: Earth’s natural resources are long depleted, and the flora and fauna that remain are made up of genetically spliced, hybrid organisms such as rakunks (rats crossed with skunks), pigoons (hybrid pigs resembling balloons because they’re stuffed with duplicate human transplant organs), and liobams (lions forced not just to lie down with lambs but to integrate with them biologically) — not to mention soydines, chickeanpeas and beananas.

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.

Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands, by Aatish Taseer The publication of Stranger to History is likely to be turned into a fiery political event in Pakistan. The author is the half-Indian son of Salman Taseer, the glamorous and controversial Governor of the Punjab and one of Pakistan’s most important newspaper proprietors.The work is a heartfelt cry for attention from the old mogul, and with its talk of alcohol and of illicit liaisons it provides plenty of fuel for the Governor’s enemies. But it will be a pity if Aatish’s first book — part family memoir, part an account of his journey through the heart of the radical Islamic world — is exploited by his father’s foes.

On this book’s title page its publishers enlarge on Peter Ackroyd’s ‘retelling’: his book, they declare, is at once a translation and — wait for it — an ‘adaptation’ of Chaucer, and from the beginning, you are made aware of what form this adaptation will take. This is how Chaucer introduces his Prioress in the General Prologue, and it is a moment of quiet, if sly, humour as he sketches the prissy little ladylike ways of this Merle Oberon in a wimple: And Frenssh she spak ful faire and fetisly, After the scole of Stratford atte Bowe, For Frenssh of Parys was to hire unknowe.

Khomeini’s Ghost, by Con Coughlin The Life and Death of the Shah, by Gholam Reza Afkhami The fall of the Shah of Iran at the beginning of 1979 took the world by surprise. A self-confident autocrat, supported by a large, American trained and equipped army and a ubiquitous and powerful security service, he was driven from power in less than six months by a motley alliance of middle-class liberals, clerical fanatics and student demonstrators, without a blow being struck in his defence. The impression of sudden cataclysm was accentuated by the character of the Shah’s successor: a bearded Islamic ideologue, who flew in from Paris after 15 years in exile. All the signs are that the diplomatic and intelligence services of the West were as unprepared as every one else.

A Book of Silence, by Sara Maitland The BBC sound archive has a range of different silences: ‘night silence in an urban street’; ‘morning silence, dawn, the South Downs’; ‘morning silence, winter moor’; ‘silence, sitting room’; ‘silence, garage’; ‘silence, cement bunker;’ ‘silence, beach’. You only have to read those phrases to know, viscerally, that their differences are true and real, and that you could add any number of others. Silence, kitchen, with fridge; silence, theatre; silence, restaurant, across the table; silence, restaurant, rural, general; silence, car, after argument; silence, bath; silence, bed, 3am; silence, at the Cenotaph; silence, friendly and silence, not.

If anyone should wince at a hint of aggression in the title of this book — and some Catholics might — let him or her remember or read Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho! (1855), in which every Spaniard is a sallow coward, every priest a slinking prevaricator and every Protestant Englishman an apple-cheeked exemplar of straightforwardness and truth. At least, that is how I remember it, with astonishment; a high point in 300 years of anti-Catholic propaganda. Tit for tat is never a good idea, but balance is, and this collection of 16 portrait-biographies by different hands can be thought of as a contribution towards fairness.