Culture

The subtitle of Walter Reid’s biography of James Ramsay MacDonald refers to ‘the extraordinary rise and tragic fall’ of Labour’s first prime minister. The rise was not especially extraordinary. In the first decades of the 20th century several people from relatively humble backgrounds – David Lloyd George and John Burns from outside MacDonald’s party, and Philip Snowden and Arthur Henderson (to give just two examples) from within it – reached the top or very near the top of British politics. But did MacDonald have a tragic fall? He was prime minister for six of the last eight years of his life; a cabinet minister to within six months of his death; and only left then because he was in his 71st year and in poor health. He turned down a peerage and the Thistle.

Whether you went with the two big rugby goalposts, those opposing H’s of Heaney and Hughes, or with Blake Morrison’s quondam super league of world English (or sometimes airport) poets, Brodsky, Walcott, Murray and Heaney, Heaney loomed amiably in the poetry landscape of the late 20th century. I knew him a little and liked him a lot. Enough now to appreciate that there was something endlessly consoling about being alive at the same time as an incontestably – or only rarely, foolishly contested – great, canonical poet, someone you might occasionally meet or, more regularly, see new poems or new books by; and something correspondingly harrowing and disorientating about this same poet no longer being alive. A geographical feature has been taken away, a hill, a forest, a river.

What biographer would pass up a time-travelling opportunity to meet their subject face to face? This novel’s protagonist, Gavin Mulvany, an academic specialising in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is somehow able to slip back in time to 1777, a year before the fractious French writer died. He turns from irritating fan to close companion, accompanying Jean-Jacques on long philosophical rambles and coach journeys around Paris. They attend the premiere of Voltaire’s last play (as does Marie Antoinette), call on Benjamin Franklin and visit the Marquis de Sade in a lunatic asylum. Gavin’s long-delayed book about Rousseau is concerned to solve the puzzle of why a passionate theorist on children’s education could dispatch his own five newborns to a foundling hospital, never to see them again.

Ian McGuire’s previous historical novels, The North Water (2010) and The Abstainer (2020), tightly plotted literary thrillers with Shakespearean bodycounts, embodied the Schopenhauerian creed that to be human is to suffer. His latest, White River Crossing, is no different. Canada, 1766. A pedlar appears at Prince of Wales Fort, a Hudson Bay Company trading post on the Churchill River, bearing a fistful of gold ore. The chief factor, Magnus Norton, dispatches his deputy, John Shaw, his nephew, Abel Walker, and Tom Hearn, first mate of the fort’s whaling sloop, on a 500-mile expedition to the Barren Grounds, deep in the subarctic tundra, to locate the source of the treasure. They’re guided by a native Indian chieftain, Datsanthi, and his family.

From skylarks and bumblebees to the changing seasons and the sea, composers have long drawn inspiration from the natural world. In Discord, Jeremy Cooper’s eighth novel, Rebekah Rosen goes a step further, seeking inspiration not in nature itself but in a wartime diary chronicling the annual crops on a Peckham allotment. She intends to use this natural code as the basis of a piece for saxophone and orchestra commissioned for the 2022 BBC Proms.  Her chosen soloist is Evie Bennett, a rising star on the international stage. Cooper’s narrative traces their complex – indeed, discordant – collaboration, through alternating points of view. Though both trained at the Royal College of Music, in other respects they are polar opposites.

A familiar defence of Anglicanism holds that flowers of principle bloomed in the mucky soil of compromise. Yes, this idea runs, the Church of England that evolved from Henry VIII’s marital strife was indeed a theological hotchpotch; but there is nevertheless much to be said for a tolerant strand of Christianity forming a middle way between Roman Catholic and hardline Protestant alternatives.   The perceived breadth of Anglicanism has long remained its selling point. Like the proverbial Australian farm, it is (or was) a Church with few fences but many wells. Elasticity over matters of secondary importance used to apply at a structural level.

Our appetite for true crime is nothing new. The Victorians devoured it and, as Lottie Moggach’s fourth novel shows, they were as gawking and prone to erroneous judgments as any crowd on social media. Mrs Pearcey is about two women in 1890s London: sparky young Hannah Teale, engaged to a rising journalist on the Star and living with her widowed mother in Camden Square; and impoverished Mary Pearcey, who lodges in a Hampstead boarding house and is accused of the grotesque murder of a woman and her baby. It was a celebrated case in its day, coming soon after the Ripper murders, and it is now revived in Moggach’s vivid, immersive imagination. Part of the novel’s attraction lies in its setting in and around Camden Town.

The Marquis de Morès (1858-96) was a man of many abilities, but balancing a chequebook was not one of them. Bested (savaged, frankly) by the Chicago meat-packing lobby and frustrated in his attempt to build a railroad across Indochina, the soldier, duelist and self-styled ‘economist’ returned to his native France in 1886, caused havoc and invented fascism (if we allow the Italian historian Sergio Luzzatto to have his way) – only to meet his nemesis much closer to home.

The courage of women dropped into Nazi-occupied Europe in order to work for Special Operations Executive (SOE), was immense. Trained as spies in Britain, they were tasked with sabotage and subversion of Nazi military rule and operated covertly with Resistance fighters and other British agents. It was a hugely risky job. Thirty-nine entered occupied France in this way, mostly by parachute. Imagining their experiences seems to be a rite of passage for many esteemed novelists – off the top of my head I can think of William Boyd, Sebastian Faulks, Simon Mawer and Kate Quinn. I have read and enjoyed their books, but there is often a sense of the protagonists being superhumanly lucky: beautiful, outspoken, brave, and able to glide through the espionage.