Culture

A.N. Wilson has never been afraid of big subjects. His previous books have tackled the Victorians, Charles Dickens, Dante, Jesus and Hitler, to name just a few. So it’s hardly a surprise that he’s now decided to have a crack at Goethe’s Faust. How do all the intellectual fireworks fit together? What, in short, does it all mean? As literary whales go, they don’t get much bigger. In fact, apart from the Bible and the Divine Comedy, there aren’t many works which have had such a decisive impact on western literature. It has so deeply marked the popular imagination that most of us probably know the story, even if we haven’t read it. It is, nevertheless, something of a puzzle.

In September 1940 the Dutch abstract artist Piet Mondrian arrived in New York, a refugee from war and the London Blitz. He was 68, a well known figure in modern art circles in Europe but as yet little appreciated on the other side of the Atlantic. His visas, his travel and his accommodation had been sorted out for him by well-wishers in Britain and he was welcomed in America by Harry Holtzman, an artist some 40 years his junior. On the evening of his arrival, Holtzman entertained the stiff, fastidious, well-dressed Mondrian to dinner in his apartment and introduced him, via the phonograph, to boogie-woogie. He recalled: Mondrian’s response was immediate, he clapped his hands together with obvious pleasure. He sat in complete absorption to the music, saying, ‘Enormous! Enormous!

One of my favourite cartoons is of the owl and the pussycat going to sea in their pea-green boat. The caption is the owl’s guilty admission: ‘I’m afraid there have been… other cats.’ Caleb Carr, in this memoir of his own love affair with a pussycat, is straightfaced: ‘I should own up to the fact that I’d had similar relationships with other cats – even (and in some cases especially) cats who were not mine.’ I have a high tolerance for cat books, but after this one I turned in relief to a ‘Simon’s Cat’ animation on YouTube. There’s one in which a hapless man opens the door for a kitten who has spent hours scrabbling hysterically at the glass like a prisoner longing for escape. The animal then decides that, on reflection, outdoors is overrated.

If you are someone who revels in the deliciousness of oil paintings, who looks at them and wants to eat them ‘as if they were ice cream or something’, in Damien Hirst’s phrase, then Martin Gayford’s latest book will be a banquet. In part, this is thanks to the illustrations – luscious close-ups of Van Gogh’s brushstrokes like buttercream icing, and a double-page spread of a golden Rothko large enough to tumble into. But mainly it’s due to his intention to understand the medium of painting from the inside out: from the artists’ viewpoint rather than the art historian’s. He is well placed to do this, having interviewed almost every well-known artist (many of them for this magazine) during his past 30 years as a critic.

‘She was dead even before I became aware of her existence.’ The menacing opening line of this gripping novel is not about the title’s Mary Rose but about another six-year-old girl, Margaret Sutton, who has been abducted, raped and murdered in the Kent woods. The story is told from the perspective of Mary Rose’s father, Rowan Anderson, who spends most of his time in London, writing a biography of the scientist Hertha Ayrton and feuding with his possessive girlfriend, Gloria. He periodically visits his daughter and his wife, Cressida, in their country cottage.

Since the 1990s there has been a spate of post-colonial memoirs written by white Africans. The best was Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart, a poetic, guilt-stricken Afrikaner confessional published on the eve of Nelson Mandela’s release from prison. Two others of note were by Rhodesian/Zimbabwean writers: Douglas Rogers’s The Last Resort and Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight. Both were beautifully written, funny and full of original insights. Peter Godwin, another Rhodesian/Zimbabwean, is the most prolific of all, and Exit Wounds is now his third memoir. These writers, all beneficiaries of an excellent British-supervised education system, can really tell a tale.