Culture

Here are 90 furious little spats about our extraordinary and inadequate attitudes to God. Alice Thomas Ellis has subtitled them her ‘assembled thoughts’ on her Roman Catholic faith and what she sees as its suicidal attempts at liberalisation. She is impassioned, funny, fearless and has been in hot water a number of times with the Church and the periodicals she writes for. The Universe sacked her. There is an affectionate introduction by Richard Ingrams, who says that he loves misfits and drop-outs and likes to provide them with soapboxes (e.g. in The Oldie, he describes her as a woman who has suffered in her time but keeps at the heart of the fight). She is no recluse.

In his History of the Conquest of Mexico, Prescott described the bafflement of the Spanish arriving in a country where savagery and sweetness, blood sacrifice and delicate manners co-existed unsettlingly. In Mexico nothing was straightforward. Anita Desai is known, and acclaimed, for her novels about India. The sub- continent is her birthplace and literary territory. Setting her latest novel in Mexico, she writes with a visitor’s eye about a visitor, Eric, a nice, unmotivated post-graduate student at a loose end, who stumbles into a quest for his roots. For the quiet Bostonian, the shock of Mexico is visceral, overwhelming.

In this enthusiastic study of the bohemian Garman family, Cressida Connolly has chosen a hard task. Group biographies are tricky to write and risk being muddling to read: there are 21 Garmans in her index. But her greatest problem has been to make her subjects, in particular Mary, Kathleen and Lorna, the three sisters at the centre of the book, signify in their own right rather than as wives, lovers and muses to a series of more talented men. They were indeed, as she writes, ‘strikingly beautiful, artistic and wild’; but that was about it. As Connolly is too honest to conceal, they were also frequently a pain in the neck.

‘His name is protean. He begets doubles at every corner … On the wet morning of 27 November 1582, he is Shaxpere and [his prospective wife] is a Wately of Temple Grafton. A couple of days later he is Shagsper and she is a Hathaway of Stratford-on-Avon. Who is he? William X, cunningly composed of two left arms and a mask. Who else? The person who said (not for the first time) that the glory of God is to hide a thing, and the glory of man is to find it.’ Thus Nabokov on the mystery of Shakespeare. The mystery is not that we don’t know much about the man from Stratford, although the facts are barely enough to fill two or three typed pages. The mystery is that, from mediaeval times onwards, there is not any other author about whom such doubts of attribution cling.

The sixth in the ‘No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency’ series of novels is as delightful as any of its predecessors. Mma Ramotswe and her able assistant, Mma Makutsi (‘the most distinguished graduate of her year from the Botswana Secretarial College’ with a 97 per cent pass mark), continue to dispense true justice in a corrupt world while experiencing to the full the moral and emotional stresses of life. Cheerful ladies though they may be — and their virtues and foibles certainly cheer the reader — their triumphs over adversity do not come without a cost. Their vulnerability, as well as their humanity, is what makes them so attractive.

Two of a good thing is usually better than one — unless, of course, the good thing in question is you. Nobel Prize-winner José Saramago’s new novel, The Double, is built around just such a premise.