Culture

This book begins strangely. Kathryn Paige Harden and her man Travis go off into the Texas desert to take some LSD in the hope that it will provide a ‘hard serotonergic reboot’. They have not so far had sex, but Travis has plans. ‘You’ll come back with your third eye,’ he says, ‘and then we’ll fuck. You’ll be glad we waited.’ At this point you may be tempted to hurl the book across the room. The self-centredness is oppressive. But persist. It rapidly becomes a very powerful read. Harden is a psychologist and behavioural geneticist, and the primary theme of Original Sin is the way in which science raises questions about morality and the law. For example, is a psychotic man who murders his wife less guilty than a sane man who does so with a clear head?

Removed from banknotes, his statue sprayed with graffiti, blamed for Gaza, the Bengal famine, the deaths of millions, Churchill no longer sits comfortably aloft his ‘pinnacle of deathless glory’, as he wrote of Alfred the Great. In the parlance of the late Martin Amis, it’s as if our national hero’s trusted barber at Truefitt & Hill has given him a brutal rug-redo. A further clipping to his reputation is Simon Matthews’s study of his ‘poor record’ at the Admiralty between September 1939 and May 1940 – i.e. just before he becomes ‘Peak Churchill’. Viscount Stuart famously overheard Churchill reply to a questioner pressing for awkward details ‘Only history can relate the full story’, adding after the right pause: ‘And I shall write the history.

Just before writing this piece, I saw Gary Oldman in a London production of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. For those unfamiliar, the play revolves around an old man listening to a series of tapes recorded by himself when he was younger, musing pompously on his hopes and dreams for the future. In his present, desiccated state, he can only scoff at his middle-aged self, before being overcome by the pathetic realisation that it is all up for him and that he is doomed to a miserable, unhappy future. I suspect that much the same has been going on in Joe Biden’s household of late. If, of course he still knows what day of the week it is, or what his name is.

David Keenan’s seventh novel is quite the ride, but its plot is not always easy to disentangle. The author has said that its title is his favourite word, and the book’s clearest narrative thread concerns the abduction of a young boy outside a Glasgow football ground in 1979. The boy’s older brother, Aaron, is subsequently guided by an angel called the Precious Gift. Aaron meets the guardian angel during a run for charity in 1986, on the last day of his boyhood, or so he thought, because he could never imagine doing a sponsored run again after that, because he got into literature and smoking pot straight afterwards.

The dogs, horses, diamonds, furs, full-length evening gowns of lace and pearls; private jets and limousines; the ever-present jostling retinue; the push and shove of photographers and the clamour of crowds – Elizabeth Taylor and Elizabeth II had a lot in common, each taking themselves very seriously and needing to be seen to be believed. Whereas the Hollywood actress was majestic mainly in her vulgarity and brashness, however, the late Queen, as is evident in this pair of biographies, did her level best to be reticent, even non-existent. The best known of her few recorded utterances are ‘Oh really?’ and ‘Are you sure?’. She had a tendency to stare at a person with ‘absolutely no expression’, or at best ‘an expression of controlled irritation’.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover was written in a villa outside Florence during the winter of 1927-28, two years after D.H. Lawrence was diagnosed with TB. Described by him as ‘a phallic novel, but good and sun-wards, truly sun-wards’, the tale is set in his native Nottinghamshire, which he left in 1912 when he eloped with his aristocratic wife Frieda von Richthofen, who was then married to his tutor. Frieda, who valued her freedom, was enjoying an affair with the Italian officer Angelo Ravagli, who became her third husband after Lawrence’s death in 1930. It is believed that Lawrence was impotent for the last years of his life. In the evenings he would read aloud his finished pages, in which the Lawrentian philosophy is expressed by Oliver Mellors, gamekeeper to Sir Clifford Chatterley.