Culture

Readers of Mark Bowles’s All My Precious Madness (2024) will find much that is familiar in How Do People Stay the Same. Both are about a Bradford-born writer with a love of travel, philosophy and espresso. Both eschew conventional narrative for their protagonist’s meandering reflections on his past and spleen-ventings about the modern world. And both are characterised by long, clause-rich sentences that never lose their way. The differences are of tone and form. All My Precious Madness was, to be reductive, a funny novel with sad moments, a formless rant that did suffer by its formlessness. How Do People Stay the Same is a sad novel with funny moments, a fascinating formal experiment that tells its story via a series of reverse- ordered journal entries.

Two spies meet in a white-tiled bathroom in Tehran. One large chap is perched on a creaking laundry basket, while his host, seated on the toilet, pours good-quality vodka into a pair of glasses. Water gushing from the taps and the radio playing prevents any officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard who might have bugged the place from overhearing their conversation. It is 1981, two years after the Iranian revolution, when ‘the world’s oldest empire folded and plummeted like a kite in a hurricane’, Macintyre tells us in true Bond-baddie style. Then comes an astounding confession, words that Bond has never uttered, and ‘by the time it took to run a bath, the KGB spy had become a double agent’.

Matthew Sweet’s jaw-dropping life of Barbara Cartland opens with the grande dame reclining on her chaise longue in the library of Camfield Place, her home for 50 years. Here she could be found daily between 1.15 p.m. and 4 p.m., a ghoulish masquerade of femininity in a hot-pink taffeta cocktail gown with a snappy Pekinese nestling by her side. Her face, beneath the halo of Elnett-stiffened yellow hair, is an inch of white powder. There are two clownish circles of rouge on her cheeks and sticking plasters on her temples to tighten the skin. Gazing into the middle distance through tarantula-sized false eyelashes lathered in black boot polish, she is ‘talking, talking, talking’. (Boot polish applied with a toothbrush is preferable to mascara because it stays put when you cry.

Sometimes I like to imagine who I’d be without the internet. A better person, for sure. A person who has read more novels, possibly written one, and spent considerably less time bickering with strangers. But what if there are other, more profound, ways in which going online has changed me? That’s the question addressed by both Benji Wilson and Kathryn Jezer-Morton in these books, which look at how the commodifying grammar of the internet has insinuated itself deep into our personalities. One explores the way we behave as consumers, and the other examines the way we shape ourselves for consumption: together, they offer a depressing insight into the way we live now.

If you remember the 1970s you might also remember Carlos the Jackal, an international terrorist notorious for taking the Opec oil ministers hostage in Vienna in 1975. He also murdered two French policemen in Paris, later claiming to have personally murdered 83 people, plus another thousand killed on his orders during his terrorist career. But that may be wishful thinking. His name is not Carlos and he didn’t award himself the ‘Jackal’ sobriquet. That came about through the discovery of an arms cache he had hidden in a girlfriend’s flat in London. The Guardian reporter who broke the story noted that a briefcase full of weapons was placed next to a bookshelf displaying Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 thriller, The Day of the Jackal.

Any readers of Robert Harris’s new novel who aren’t ancient historians might be surprised to discover what an important figure Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa was: Caesar Augustus’s right-hand man since they were at school together; the builder of some of Rome’s most significant buildings; the winning commander in several battles that changed history; even, as Harris puts it in an afterword, ‘the effective co-ruler of the Roman world for many years’. Happily, that same afterword also suggests that such ignorance of Agrippa’s achievements isn’t necessarily our fault – because Augustus ‘all but effaced his closest comrade from the official record’. This, of course, leaves a handy gap for the novelist to fill. But how to fill it?