Culture

This is the most dazzling era in astronomy that human history has ever known, but for all the attention it commands it could be the dullest. It seems almost routine, a swiftly forgotten news item at best, to see images of Mars beamed back from the planet’s surface or to have a comet’s content analysed by fragmenting its surface with a rocket. The astonishing construction of a space station circling the earth is of such little interest, it is wholly obscured by anxieties about the Shuttle that serves it. The seven-year, 2.2-billion-mile, inch-perfect flight of the Cassini spacecraft to examine Saturn’s moons registers only slightly more than the discovery this summer of 30 million new stars in the Milky Way by the Spitzer infra-red space telescope.

In 2003, Robert Harris published Pompeii: A Novel, which for vitality and entertainment and the atmosphere of the decadent Roman world around the Bay of Naples in the first century AD can hardly be beaten. The great eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 and the destruction of the playground city of Pompeii is made even more cataclysmic by Harris’s angle on it. Not until nearly the end of the book does he describe the mushroom cloud, the blood-red lightning, the choking ash four feet deep, the terrifying withdrawal of the sea, the darkness and the final silence.

It is always interesting to see what happens when a literary novelist turns to genre fiction. Swan Song is the third novel of Robert Edric’s trilogy about Leo Rivers, a private investigator based in modern Hull. The format is instantly familiar because Rivers is a modernised and home-grown Philip Marlowe — detective, knight-errant and laconic narrator — though Rivers lacks both the literary panache and the glamorously self-destructive habits of his original. Three young women, two of whom dabbled in prostitution, have been murdered. The principal suspect for the most recent murder is the victim’s boyfriend, now in a coma following a drug overdose.

Only the short-lived excitement about the Moon missions has given our age a hint of the fervour that aviation inspired in the interwar years. The new access to a whole new element gave that generation a defining identity, a sense of being incontrovertibly different from every one that had gone before, ever. A wonderful delusion that was not lost on the Western imagination. Robert Wohl charts in fascinating detail the manifold reverberations of flight, literary, political, artistic, intellectual. Much more than a plane-spotter’s feast, this is a thoughtful, wide-ranging, meticulous (as befits a history professor) analysis of arguably the most salient new fact of the time. A brilliant idea, stimulating, packed with incident.

Many things lead to addiction and obsessiveness, even madness, but one of the most surprising, and lasting, is cricket. You don’t even have to be any good (I know); it can still take over too much of your life. Marcus Berkmann, a writer (how he finds time to write anything during the summer is a puzzle) is no great shakes at the game. His account of his annual batting-average varies, but he never claims even to approach double-figures. At university he and other cricket failures founded a necessarily doomed team called, with student gallows-humour, the Captain Scott Invitation XI. Berkmann wrote a book about this team’s misadventures called Rain Men. (‘A very funny book about some very sad men,’ Ian Hislop.

Consider this. Does lightning ever strike twice in the same place? Along the magnolia corridors of the most expensive prison ever built in England, in the sombre half-light of a locked-fast double cell, it struck fatally (if metaphorically) once and almost fatally another two times before an oblivious prison service woke up to what was occurring right under their noses — a bizarre sequence of events which they eventually exposed as the premeditated machinations of a serial killer. ‘The Strange Case of Glenn Wright’ (as David Wilson himself entitles this meandering tale of dastardly homicidal intent) constitutes the most sensational section of this trenchant polemic.

Like Groucho Marx I tend to be rather ambivalent about joining clubs, but last November — in fact, exactly 48 hours before Deborah Hutton, author of this brilliant book subtitled ‘75 Practical Ideas for Family and Friends from Cancer’s Frontline’ — I unexpectedly found myself a member of what Hutton calls the last club in the world anyone would ever choose to join: ‘The Cancer Club. The only club in the world I can think of that is both rigorously exclusive and has no waiting list.’ But hold your horses, don’t flip to another review; this isn’t going to be a ‘Me and My Cancer’ piece. (I remember a ghastly girl exclaiming when Bob Champion won the Grand National on Aldaniti, ‘Oh, no!