The black death

A gorgeous blonde crosses the threshold of a softly furnished Parisian hotel room, hand in hand with a man. It is, we are told, the same room in which she was conceived 30 years earlier. The scene opened ‘Do It For Denmark’, a 2014 ad campaign by a Danish travel company, attempting to turn Paris into a sales pitch for parenthood after the country’s birth rate had plummeted to a 27-year low. Tongue in cheek, the advert claimed that 10 per cent of children are conceived on holiday.   More than a decade on, the same story is unfolding worldwide. In Generation Maybe, Camilla Cavendish, the former head of the Downing Street Policy Unit under David Cameron, charts an ‘extraordinary wave’ of childlessness sweeping the world.

In the early 1370s, Louis I of Anjou, the second son of the French king, commissioned a vast series of tapestries, now on display at the Château d’Angers, representing the Book of Revelation. In the middle of the narrative is a group of men on horseback wearing distinctively English armour; one wears pheasant feathers in his helmet – another mark of English soldiery. As for the Apocalpyse itself, its horsemen were led by Edward III. Edward’s 50-year reign dominated 14th-century England. But, as we see in Sceptred Isle, Helen Carr’s gripping narrative account of the period, Edward himself was dominated by the dream of taking the French crown. It led him to launch two great invasions, one in 1346 and the other in 1359.

In an essay for Prospect a few years back the writer Leo Benedictus noticed how many contemporary novels used what he called a ‘hindered’ narrator: that is, a protagonist (often a child) whose partial understanding of their world forces us to read between the lines. Unreliable narrators set out to deceive. By contrast, hindered narrators — such as the trapped five-year-old in Emma Donoghue’s Room — genuinely believe what they tell you: it’s all they know. As in Room, a hindered narrator can supply drama and pathos, but it’s handy for farce, too, as Christopher Wilson knows well.