Culture

The story that John Barth has to tell is that he had planned a book, to be entitled Ten Nights and a Night, in which he would reprint ten already published stories, interweaving them with a new story about his relations with his Muse. The purpose would have been to put these tales into a narrative frame, ‘connecting their dots to make a whole somewhat larger (and perhaps a bit friskier) than the mere sum of its parts’, on the model of The Thousand and One Nights and the Decameron. But before the book was completed there came the events of 9/11, which seemed to make story-telling hopelessly irrelevant. Still, the story-telling in the Decameron took place under the threat of the Black Death and hence was a studied gesture of irrelevance.

This book stands in an ancient intellectual tradition. Its theme dates back to the year 1798, in which the English economist Thomas Malthus published his famous theory of demography. Human population, Malthus reasoned, grows exponentially, as each extra couple multiplies itself in turn; whereas food production can increase only arithmetically, and beyond a point not at all. Return to equilibrium is possible only through starvation or disease, provoked either by natural catastrophe or by wars over the scarce remaining resources. The resources of the earth have proved to be more elastic than Malthus foresaw. The mechanisms by which they may be exhausted are infinitely more complicated than he realised.

The time is the late 1990s; the setting a boarding school called Hailsham. This being a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, the narrator, Kathy H., who attended the school, is looking back after some years and trying to make sense of her story. The school, it is quickly made clear, is not quite like other schools, the pupils not quite like people we know, and the 1990s slightly different from the decade we might remember. There is talk of ‘carers’, of the ‘fourth donation’, of ‘completing’, of someone called Madame. There don’t seem to be any holidays, and, anyway, the kids don’t have parents; nor are they orphans. In the outside world, they just have what are called ‘possibles’; people who bear a strange resemblance to them.

Geoffrey Hill publishes books in verse rather than collections of poems. This is admirable but presents a reviewer with problems. You want to recommend him more or less unconditionally as England’s best hope for the Nobel Prize. At the same time, there is the risk that new readers, acquainted with the easy-going chattiness of Betjeman, say, or Larkin, may find this writer too dense and allusive. Scenes from Comus is a case in point. Read it once, by itself, and you may struggle. Read it as the envoi it really is to Hill’s previous books, the last four in particular, and you will discover clarity as well as density, as if observing a city from the air. Hill is 73 now. He has been an admired and productive poet for more than 50 years.

Among the unexpected pieces of information in this enjoyable ramble among the picturesque ruins of the Latin language is the name of a good restaurant if you should find yourself at Larroque in Tarn. The advice comes under B, for Bonum vinum laetificat cor hominis, ‘good wine cheers the heart of man’, an adage written calligraphically on the wall of the Restaurant Le Roucanel. (The thought comes from Psalm 104, though Mr Gray doesn’t mention that.) No great Latinist myself, I was glad to find Long Live Latin to be the welcoming Hampton Court Flower Show of Latin; Chelsea gold medallists might no longer care to walk among such (to them) familiar blooms. But Long Live Latin is no bare seedsman’s catalogue.

At the centre of Michael Chabon’s earlier novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, was a comic book hero known as the Escapist. That book weighed in at a portly 656 pages. The Final Solution revolves around Sherlock Holmes and is a mere stripling by comparison, scarcely more than a novella illustrated with stiff little line drawings. It is a slim novel with a fat one trying in vain to get in. In July 1944, the war is nearing its end and Holmes is teetering on the edge of dotage, a prospect that scares him far more than the Reichenbach Falls. Still keeping bees and smoking foul-smelling shag, he is tempted from retirement by a murder outside the vicarage of a nearby village on the South Downs.

Welshmen will know what Le Goff’s name means. To mediaevalists it conveys not only Smith, but all that is gracious, gilt-edged, and grandfatherly among French historians. Or, as one of the blurbs puts it, rather unkindly, ‘He is among France’s “great” historians.’ That means great in the special sense of an institutionally sanctified professor doomed in old age to confer imprimaturs on the work of others, to employ a ‘team’ of research assistants for his own, and to compose ponderous pensées such as ‘Today comes from yesterday and tomorrow emerges out of the past.’ Don’t laugh.

‘I am beginning to see that brain counts for little but that character counts for everything,’ wrote Harold Nicolson, in one of those flashes of self-perception which from time to time brilliantly illuminated his life. ‘It is not a pleasant thought as my character is weak and easily influenced.’ He was only just 17 when he articulated that particular piece of self-deprecation; he would have said exactly the same 60 years later and been right on both occasions. His ability to diagnose his weaknesses, coupled with a total inability to do anything to rectify them, was one of his most endearing characteristics; it also explained why his various careers, in terms of what his talents entitled him to expect, were signal failures.

About Grace is about David Winkler, a man crippled and made fearful by the accuracy of his dreamed premonitions — a man who foresees future events and who is then constrained to watch them unfold. He dreams of a man killed in an accident and then witnesses that accident. He dreams of meeting his future wife and then encounters her exactly as foretold. And then he dreams of the death by drowning of their one-year-old daughter, Grace — a death in which David Winkler himself plays a large part. In an effort to forestall this, Winkler decides to leave the only two people he loves, escape to the Caribbean, and live alone there for the next 25 years.