Culture

Our immiseration came swiftly and stealthily. At the start of the 21st century, Britain was a prosperous country. Ambitious people fought to come here. We trusted that, over time, we would become wealthier – an expectation that had been accurate for most of the previous two centuries. Since the millennium, Britain and western Europe have pretty much stopped growing – especially if we ignore the impact of immigration and calculate GDP per head. Reversing this slowdown should be the top issue at every election, but it is surprisingly under-discussed. In theory, almost all our politicians want growth. Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves keep describing it, nasally and tautologically, as their ‘number one priority’.

Beartooth, the second novel by the Montana-based writer Callan Wink, opens with two brothers elbow-deep in the viscera of the third black bear they have just shot out of season. Hazan’s hands are ‘moving around the hot insides of the animal as if he were rummaging through a junk drawer’. He wants the gallbladder, which will fetch around $1,500 – far more than the brothers get for chopping firewood. The skull, claws and skin will swell their illegal bounty by another $500. Thad and Hazan, aged 27 and 26 respectively, are in serious debt after their father’s recent death, and their roof is leaking. Logging in the Montana backcountry is hard work and poaching pays much better, even if their father would have disapproved.

There is something wonderful about a novel being rescued from obscurity. Robert Plunket’s My Search for Warren Harding was first published in 1983, given a few decent reviews and then disappeared. Occasionally admirers – including rather influential ones like Amy Sedaris and Larry David – would lend a weathered copy to friends, insisting they read it. And so here we are. Elliot Weiner, a third-rate academic (in fact the word ‘academic’ barely seems to apply), hears that Rebekah Kinney, a former mistress of Warren G. Harding, president of the United States from 1921 to 1923, is living in a decrepit mansion in Los Angeles.

At the turn of the century, the ineluctable march of democracy seemed assured. The Cold War extinguished and eastern Europe freed, a Whiggish history of the world continued to be written. A quarter of a century on, the great wave has broken and rolled back. Democracy is not what it was in Chile, Peru, Venezuela, Brazil, Hungary, Egypt, Turkey, Russia and Afghanistan. It has not emerged in China. The future looks less democratic than the past. Such concerns bother the big brain of the former Supreme Court judge and medieval historian Jonathan Sumption in his latest brilliant collection of essays.

This is a remarkable book by a remarkable man. Based on the Coromandel coast at Chennai in south-eastern India, Yuvan Aves is an active naturalist and an ardent activist. Still in his twenties, he teaches outdoor classes, he campaigns and he notes down the movements and habits of invertebrates, birds and fauna in his local wetlands and littoral. All his observations and the wider thoughts on ecology that make up Intertidal are given added heft and poignancy by the searing account of his childhood which begins the book. His father was a philandering no-hoper whom his mother left for another man. That man was even worse. He took against the young Aves and subjected him to regular beatings, forcing him to scrape the blood from the walls when visitors were coming.

Edward Wilson-Lee writes rather chin-strokey, erudite books for the half-educated general reader with a strong taste for big ideas and the ever-so-slightly weird –which is to say people exactly like me and very possibly like you. The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Young Columbus and the Quest for a Universal Library (2018); A History of Water: Being an Account of a Murder, an Epic and Two Visions of Global History (2022): autodidact catnip. He’s a gifted chronicler of the odd, the interesting and the esoteric. Think non-fiction Umberto Eco.

I probably won’t be the only one to say this of Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection: it made me feel seen, and not in a good way. The novel takes aim at aspects of modern life, from social media to remote working and interior design trends, that aren’t obvious subjects for serious literary attention. Latronico, a philosopher who writes in Italian (this is his first novel to appear in English), suggests that our online profiles and material possessions have taken the place of integrity and community in society. He makes you question whether there can still be such a thing as an authentic personality. The narrative follows a couple whose existence is, to all appearances, very pleasant.

One of the pleasures of reading, often looked down on in literary circles, is when one warms to an author’s characters. Among the many delights of Mrs Calder and the Hyena, Marjorie Ann Watts’s second collection of short stories, was my feeling that here were people with whom I would get along. Ostensibly, they are undistinguished – from the hinterlands of society, whether by virtue of status, wealth or age; yet they reveal some irrepressible glint of antinomianism, a rejection of conventional judgments and standards, a certain anarchic glee. In the title story, elderly Mrs Calder insists she is being accompanied by a hyena – ‘always a little on the edge of my vision, but definitely getting closer’.

In the early 20th century, the world went ‘raving mad on the subject of radium’, according to George Bernard Shaw. The newly discovered element was considered a miracle cure, used to treat about 150 medical complaints. And it was fashionable: society ladies drank afternoon tea in rooms filled with radium vapours, and cosmetic companies developed hair tonics, face lotions and anti-wrinkle creams, all claiming to contain the element. Doramad toothpaste even boasted: ‘Your teeth will shine with radioactive brilliance.’ Of course, the discovery had its down sides. One American tycoon drank so much of the tonic Radithor that his bones began to disintegrate.