Culture

‘The House’ in the title of Richard Davenport-Hines’s engaging new book is Christ Church, by any reckoning the grandest of Oxford’s colleges. The place has always been, he notes, akin ‘to an autonomous duchy within a larger federated kingdom’, and thus ‘a separate realm of memory’. Notoriously, its teachers and researchers are referred to not (in the usual Oxford way) as Fellows but as Students. That fact may be thought as good an illustration of its eccentricity as of its charm. This book isn’t a history of the House, as such, but a more concentrated series of biographical essays about ‘a select and self-regulated group of men who taught modern history’ there in the 19th and 20th centuries.

On reaching the end of Hettie Judah’s Acts of Creation, I felt somewhat overwhelmed. At 272 pages, the book isn’t particularly large, but the time span it covers, from prehistoric goddess figures to Laure Prouvost’s 2021 cyborg-octopus installation ‘MOOTHERR’, is enormous. The trajectories, practices and obsessions of the artists discussed range far and wide. Written to coincide with a touring exhibition of the same name, this ambitious book is more of a survey – a highly illustrated, annotated and well-researched one – than a traditional narrative. Judah’s energetic text displays the hunger of someone after a fast who can’t decide where to start at the buffet.

In 2021, a financial newspaper estimated the American televangelist Kenneth Copeland’s wealth to be in the region of $750 million. This fortune has helped the preacher build a property empire and purchase a fleet of private jets – acquisitions, he says, ordained by God. Gillis, the principal character in Chris Kohler’s Phantom Limb, has not been quite so blessed. After suffering a knee injury in his twenties that derailed a promising athletics career in England, Gillis gave his life to the cloth. His decision to become a minister, however, came not from any love of God (in fact, Gillis isn’t even a believer), but because it promised to provide a life of relative comfort, complete with a place to live, a modest income and plenty of free time.

One of the first things I was taught in literary theory was to look for supposed rhetorical rather than logical opposites and unravel them. It works well with ‘the opposite of cat’. Cartoons show this can be either mouse or dog. The Book of Elsewhere, based on the comic BRZRKR, poses something similar with metaphysics. The protagonist, B., or Unute, has a narrative arc quickly summarised as ‘I kill, I die. I come back’. What is the opposite of B.? He is not alive in a way we understand, but he is not dead, or a zombie; he is not undying, and time alone will tell if he is immortal. He feels pain, suffers, ‘dies’ and respawns like a computer game character, bursting out of an egg-like chrysalis, sometime – hence the title – elsewhere B.

There are other reasons beyond shortage of time (the acclaimed Indian novelist Anita Desai has just turned 87) to write a novella; the genre is as attractive and prestigious as it is fashionable. The deceptively slender format can briskly encompass whole worlds and histories, or alternatively, like the short story, depend on strict excisions and limitations for its effects. Rosarita does both. A young woman, Bonita, addressed as ‘you’ throughout, is taking time out from her Spanish-language studies and relaxing on a park bench in the historic centre of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Education has been her means of escape from the domineering family structure back in India that crushed her mother.

‘Please don’t let this be a scolding!’ I thought as I moved past this book’s tempting title to read the author’s bio, noting that she is ‘the chair of the Writing Programme at Columbia University’. Sure enough, the very first line of the prologue – ‘The sound of a diva’s voice was how I knew we were Mexican’ – made me fear that this might be the case. Funnily enough, my mother was also fond of the diva in question, Vikki Carr – especially the sob-fest ‘It Must Be Him’ – and my family weren’t Mexican as far as I know.