Culture

Do we need another wrist-breaking book about Adolf Hitler, the Third Reich and the second world war? Since Ian Kershaw published his two-volume biography of the Führer 20 years ago, there have been at least a dozen similarly weighty tomes on the war by historians including Max Hastings, Andrew Roberts, Antony Beevor and Kershaw himself; not to mention more recent massive lives of the Nazi dictator by Brendan Simms and the German historians Peter Longerich and Volker Ullrich. So what is there left to say that we do not already know? To gain attention, any new study has to have a thesis: some fresh angle that previous writers have overlooked or played down.

There is nothing in world sport, ‘nothing in the history of the human race’, Ramachandra Guha modestly reckons, that can remotely match the passions that surround Indian cricket. I have no idea how many listeners or viewers hung on every ball of Ben Stokes’s Headingley heroics last year, but it is a safe bet that had it been Sachin Tendulkar or Sunil Gavaskar batting, and an India victory over Pakistan at stake, then you could add as many noughts to that figure as will accommodate a cricket-mad population edging its way towards the one and a half billion mark. The Commonwealth of Cricket is part celebration, part elegy, but before all else unashamedly the book of one of those tens of millions of India’s cricket fans.

At some point in his twilit, enigmatic novels of vanished lives and buried memories, Patrick Modiano likes to jolt his reader with a glimpse of the all-too-real horrors that underpin his work. In Invisible Ink such a moment comes when the narrator recalls images from a postwar trial, where ‘behind the accused were about 30 suitcases — the only remaining traces of persons who had gone missing’. You might say that Modiano has spent a literary lifetime opening those suitcases to find out whose lives they contained. Born in Paris in 1945 to a Belgian actress mother and a Jewish father who had survived the Occupation by weaving through an underworld of shady deals, he grew up in a family microclimate of evasion and oblivion.

’Tis the season of complacency, when we sit in warmth and shiver vicariously with Mary and Joseph out in the snowy wastes, A Christmas Carol or The Snowman. A handsome exploration of Antarctica seems equally appropriate festive fare. Peter Fretwell brings us chillingly close to a continent that has always inspired awe, evidenced by christenings such as Mount Erebus and Fenriskjeften — the Wolf’s Jaw mountains, named after Fenris, the Norse equivalent of the Beast, which will arise at the end of time to eat the world. The coldest, driest, remotest and windiest place on the planet, surrounded by the roughest ocean, has always seemed like somewhere primordial deities might live and secrets subsist — entrances to underworlds, hidden civilisations, UFO bases.

History used to be so much easier. There were the Wars of the Roses, then the Reformation, the Civil War, the Enlightenment and finally the Victorians. Each one had its own century and its distinctive tag. Throw in Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, garnish with a few zealots and adventurers, some glorious triumphs and some grisly deaths. It was all part of our Island Story. You knew where you were. Take the Enlightenment, for example. Everyone knew that this was the Age of Reason: the moment when science finally started to impose order and banish religion. The French rationalists had their heyday, Voltaire, the philosophes and all that, before they were vanquished by the Scottish empiricists David Hume and Adam Smith and the great commercial acceleration of the late 18th century.

This is an Exquisite Corpse of a novel — or if you prefer another name for that particular game, Heads, Bodies and Legs, or Combination Man, or perhaps most appositely Consequences. The parlour game involves creating something and then passing along the hidden creation to which another then adds, and The Arrest reads like Jonathan Lethem playing the game against himself. He is a novelist whose work has always experimented with, and evaded, genres. In this one, he is juggling dystopia, Thoreau-like idealism, science fiction, folk horror, sentimentality, revenge plot and quite a lot more. It is also very funny. I did want to say that it is like Cormac McCarthy animated by Hanna-Barbera, but Lethem gets there first, since one scene is a — loving?