Culture

The idea to ask for poems about HS2 came to me as I was listening on YouTube to W.H. Auden’s poem ‘Night Mail’, which he wrote to accompany a section of the terrific 1936 documentary about the London to Glasgow Postal Special directed by Basil Wright and Harry Watt (who described Auden as looking like a ‘half-witted Swedish deckhand’). Not altogether surprisingly, the tone of the entry was less celebratory than Auden’s, with the notable exception of Carolyn Thomas-Coxhead’s prize-winning submission, written in the finest MacGonagallese. Her fellow victors are rewarded with £30 apiece and George Simmers snaffles the extra fiver.

Now that I’ve given up drugs, I find myself addicted to psychological thrillers written by women, featuring no gore and a great deal of malice aforethought. My favourites this year were (in order of preference) Disclaimer by Renée Knight (Doubleday, £12.99), You by Caroline Kepnes (Simon & Schuster, £7.99) and I Let You Go by Clare Mackintosh (Sphere, £7.99). And Nick Cohen’s brilliant What’s Left: How the Left Lost its Way (Harper Perennial, £9.99) was reissued just in time to provide an explanation for the Labour party’s current ecstatic self-immolation. I have bought and given away a dozen copies of this book, and I plan to buy and give away a dozen more.

Though artfully plotted and well written, some of Rachel Billington’s early novels, starting with All Things Nice in 1969, had a tinge of Mills & Boon. Reviewing one of them, Auberon Waugh wrote: ‘The hero is described as “smooth and pink”. Good: I hate green, prickly heroes.’ By the time she wrote A Woman’s Age (1979) — a novel covering roughly the same lifespan as that of her mother, Elizabeth Longford — Billington had matured into about the same standing as Elizabeth Jane Howard. Though Howard’s Cazalet chronicles are pleasurable to read and laced with intellect and wit, she is not in the same class of acclaimed ‘literary novelist’ as, say, Colette or Iris Murdoch.

Since retiring from coping with new books I have found it a pleasure not to have to glance at any of them. One, however, Anne Tyler’s 20th novel A Spool of Blue Thread (Vintage, £7.99), was pure pleasure. A quiet family drama over four generations, set in Baltimore as usual, it was never obvious which way it was going. but patterns emerged in the end. My interest in India is matched only by my ignorance, so almost everything in Ferdinand Mount’s Tears of the Rajas (Simon & Schuster, £25) came as a surprise to me. Through the careers of various enterprising relations, he tells the story of the British in the years leading up to the mutiny — or first war of independence as I now know it should be called.

Laurence Scott’s The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World (Heinemann, £20) is the year’s most surprising book. I expected a dour, lumbering tract about the dehumanising influence of new technologies, social media and information overload. Instead, I found a real flirt of a book. It’s full of impish gaiety, elegant and lithe in its language, providing intellectual ambushes and startling connections. It examines our evolving notions of publicity, privacy, time-wasting, frivolity, friendship, allegiances, denial, escapism and squalor in the internet age. The teasing, wary optimism is bewitching as well as informative. The little volumes of the ‘Penguin Monarchs’ series (£10.99 each) will be a matchless collection when completed.

My top title of the year is Satin Island by Tom McCarthy (Cape, £16.99), convincing proof that the best writers of our time are anthropologists, and that James Joyce, were he alive today, would be working for Google. I also enjoyed Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (Granta, £14.99), a self-deconstructing novel whose metafictional plot speaks of the nature of time and of things being endlessly interconnected. My non-fiction pick is Iain Sinclair’s London Overground: A Day’s Walk Around the Ginger Line (Hamish Hamilton, £16.99), the psychogeographer’s passionate take on 21st-century London, a place of perpetual change and chronological resonances.

The Whitechapel Fiend is a psychic conduit for the vilest aspects of Victorian sex and class, and a creature mainly of the imagination. In 1888, the year of the murders, John Francis Brewer published The Curse Upon Mitre Square, and novels have followed from such writers as Edgar Lustgarten, Colin Wilson and Iain Sinclair. Many are Ripper mash-ups in the style of Robert Louis Stevenson or Arthur Conan Doyle, as in the Holmes capers of Ellery Queen and Michael Dibdin. Marie Belloc Lowndes’s The Lodger was made into a film by Alfred Hitchcock, A Story of the London Fog (1927), starring Ivor Novello as a sympathetic Ripper; and he features in many other films — in This is Spinal Tap (1984), for example, as the subject of Saucy Jack, a projected rock opera.