A.S.H. Smyth

From a young age – ten perhaps – the author Dan Richards has had a strained relationship with night-time. Grappling with insomnia, he would take ‘the homeopathic approach to [his] waking nightmares’, rereading Moominland Midwinter despite its existential terrors. Even now, he writes, he finds it easier to sleep when he is not at home. This has, for better or worse, given him time to think – and lots to think about – while not much else was going on.

‘Is it because we see our world only darkly that we surround ourselves with lies we call time, history, reality, memory, detail, facts?’ Richard Flanagan’s memoir opens at the Ohama coal mine in Japan, once home to his father and a host of other POW slave labourers. It then spirals outwards via his childhood (in a remote Tasmanian settlement), his much-put-upon mother (who hoped Richard would become a plumber), his semi-present, kindly, traumatised father Archie (enshrined in The Narrow Road to the Deep North) and on through all the now-familiar Flanagan themes.

In my drafts folder there languishes an email to The Spectator pitching a letter from a then-forthcoming trip to Georgia. That was, alas, the spring of 2020. So when I saw Leo Vardiashvili’s debut novel billed as ‘a winding pursuit through the magic and mystery of returning to a lost Caucasian homeland’, I leapt at the vicarious travel opportunity. Fleeing the disintegrating post-Soviet republic in the early 1990s, Irakli Donauri and his sons (though not his wife) arrive in London – Tottenham, specifically – where they are surprised to find ‘no top hats, no smog and no afternoon tea’. The boys grow up; two decades pass; their mother never joins them. Then one day, overwhelmed by homesickness, Irakli returns to Georgia – and promptly disappears.

New books by, articles about or Sasquatch-like sightings of J.M. Coetzee routinely send me back to that infamous YouTube clip of Geoff Dyer face-planting while being introduced by Coetzee at the Adelaide Book Festival – an episode often cited as evidence that the Nobel Laureate has no sense of humour. The garlanded ex-South African’s work is famously as dry as the Karoo, and Coetzee himself has been accused of having only ever laughed once. But a smile is visible in ‘The Pole’, the longest story in this collection. Beatriz, in her late forties, is an educated Spanish woman, ‘a good person’ in a ‘civilised’ (read dormant) marriage, involved in organising things like highbrow concerts but otherwise not taken seriously.

Because I once made the mistake of dabbling in Egyptology, some ‘friend’ will schwack me every other week with a meme, cartoon or article about people who still believe the pyramids were built by aliens. I have longed for a handy single volume to present to these loons, full of unarguable evidence putting this business past dispute – and Pierre Tallet and Mark Lehner have provided it. In 2013 excavators in Egypt’s Eastern Desert on the Gulf of Suez uncovered the world’s most ancient harbour installation at Wadi el-Jarf. Here they unearthed a cache containing the oldest extant inscribed papyri (c.2607-5 BCE).

In 1928, a modest young lecturer from Wilwaukee, Mildred Harnack, née Fish, arrived in Berlin to begin her PhD in American Literature. In the febrile, polyglot atmosphere in the city at the ‘crossroads of Europe’, the media was still mocking Adolf Hitler and few took him seriously. Mildred saw, close up, the brokenness of American and German capitalism and, distantly, the apparently level playing fields of communist Russia. As the Nazis gained increasing control over the body politic, she taught an overtly socialist syllabus — Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiseret al. When, halfway through her dissertation, the university fired her, she promptly started teaching at a night school for working-class students. ‘Should Hitler be chancellor?’ she asked her pupils.

In 1835 the first two Egyptian antiquities were registered in the British Museum: a pair of red granite lions from Nubia. Each bore the name of Tutankhamun — not that anyone had ever heard of him. All serious understanding of the millennia-spanning Nilotic civilisation had disappeared before the last hieroglyph was carved in 394 AD. In the mid-18th century the most advanced ‘scholarship’ on the subject consisted of ‘pinpricks of insight in an enveloping fog of misapprehension’, and by the early 19th century the Egypt of the pharaohs was still largely buried in the sand. The word ‘Egyptology’ did not exist.

In 1935 the troops of Benito Mussolini’s sinister-clownish Roman Empire II invaded Ethiopia, in large part out of spite for Italy’s embarrassing defeat there 40 years earlier. Initially largely uncontested — thanks both to Emperor Haile Selassie’s desperate faith in international brotherhood and to a hearty dose of Quislingism from his leading nobles — when ‘war’ eventually did break out it was so one-sided that Ethiopian women were gathering spent bullet casings for reuse while Italian planes (the older Ethiopians believing these were dragons) dropped poison gas on them. Selassie, meanwhile, fled to England.

Only Helen DeWitt would start a book with an epigraph of her own pop-culture mash-up poetry and end with an appeal to buy the writer coffee. The author of just two previous published novels (about a multilingual child prodigy, and an encyclopaedia salesman turned sex-peddler, respectively), DeWitt keeps a pure flame, and doesn’t want to hear why others won’t. She and her characters inhabit an intellectual, emotional and physical triangle between New York, Berlin and Gloucester Green bus station, Oxford. ‘It would mean a lot to me to work with [an editor] who admired Bertrand Russell,’ one of her narrators remarks... about her children’s book. Another one has ‘views on the Kaddish of Mr Leon Wieseltier’.

In 1945, on a Putney side street, in a city full of darkness and half in rubble from the Blitz, the 14-year-old Nathaniel and his sister are abandoned by their parents into the care of men they think may well be criminals. Their father is still troubled as a result of the war; their mother close to stories from the present. Left to his own devices, Nathaniel sees the world in terms of shipping routes, and learns London’s geography (or an earlier form of it) by barging on the Thames with smuggled greyhounds. In a house full of odd comings and goings, and ‘dangerous with secrets’, his new confrères include an Aramaicist ethnographer, a lusty St Lucian pot-washer and a girl whom Nathaniel names, out of necessity, after the street on which they first met.

Today is National Indexing Day (#indexday) – at least according to the UK's Society of Indexers. 'Celebrating book indexes, indexers, and the profession of indexing.' As I write, they're wrapping up their annual jamboree, at London's Foundling Museum. A few months back, I was out walking the dog and listening to Dracula on my phone when I could've sworn I heard a character described as 'indexy'. Now, audio recordings are not always perfect, and glitches – digital or human – do creep in (I recently heard one narrator trip over a word, say 'sorry', then repeat the word and carry on – all of which remaining in the finished version). But I thought I'd give Greg Wise, narrating, the benefit of the doubt. I rewound the tape. Nope: 'indexy', for certain.

Many and various are the things one finds in Kentish pubs (I’m told); but few could top the sepoy’s skull discovered at The Lord Clyde, Walmer, complete with brief biography: Skull of havildar ‘Alum Bheg’, 46th Regt. Bengal N. Infantry... blown away from a gun. From this grisly starting point, Kim Wagner, lecturer in British imperial history at Queen Mary University of London, narrates how, in the swelter of mid-1857, following outbreaks throughout British India, native Bengal Army units at Sialkot mutinied, killing officers and civilians and looting the cantonment, and then set out for Delhi to join Bahadur Shah, the briefly-minted ‘Emperor of India’. They didn’t make it.