Caroline Moore

Over the years, I too have regularly been meeting with moths. So far, I have encountered 891 species just in my own garden in Sussex. But most of these moths came to me: I have an ancient metal Robinson trap, inherited from my grandfather, which lures them to a mercury vapour bulb. Katty Baird, how-ever, despises ‘all-too-easy light traps’. (‘One of my most rewarding experiences with a moth trap was at an old people’s home...’) She is proactive, even hyperactive, in seeking out her quarry across East Lothian, ranging from moorland cliffs and caves to the ‘car park toilet block near my children’s primary school’. Meetings with Moths, by an ‘extreme moth-er’, makes me feel like a decadent southerner, bloated on the relatively huge hauls in my part of the world.

At one time, Penelope Lively was routinely shortchanged by critics. Her protagonists are often middle-class professionals — historians, archeologists, scriptwriters and the like — and her Booker-prizewinning Moon Tiger was notoriously dismissed as the ‘housewife’s choice’. Now, gods, stand up for housewives! Lively is not a cosy read. The word which keeps coming to mind to describe these stories is ‘beady’ — though I may be influenced by ‘The Purple Swamp Hen’, in which the narrator is a wise old bird in the garden of a household in Pompeii (AD 79). A bird’s gaze is bright, speculative and disconcertingly dispassionate.

I was first sent a version of Undreamed Shores: The Hidden Heroines of British Anthropology in June last year. I started my review; but publication was delayed. So I tore up my opening paragraphs, which began with the remark that only armchair travel was possible at present. By 2021, I imagined, that would be out of date. How wrong I was. Ten months later, and the book engages even more urgently. We can all sympathise even more sharply with those female would-be explorers who longed to escape from the restrictions of their lives — though an Edwardian tea party now seems to us like unimaginable freedom. The past is a foreign country; so there are two layers of escape here.

Wendy Williams is an enthusiast, and enthusiasm is infectious. Lepidoptery is for her a new fascination, and it shows. On the plus side, her excitement shimmers as freshly as a newly-hatched Adonis Blue. She marvels, and makes us marvel, at the miracles she discovers. She wonders at the strangeness of a butterfly’s proboscis, which is not, as it appears, a drinking straw (even butterflies cannot suck through a straw longer than their own bodies), but works by capillary action, blotting up fluids and sending saliva down to dissolve sticky or solid secretions.

Tessa Hadley is not the sort of writer to land the Booker Prize, which tends to reward writers from ‘anywhere’ rather than ‘somewhere’. Hadley labours under perceived limitations: she is distinctively British, writes about the middle classes, and turns out, as the puff on the back rightly says, ‘the quintessential domestic novel’. Those who are put off by this description — probably mostly men — miss out on a vast range of female authors, from Jane Austen to Anne Tyler.

Boyd Tonkin is superbly qualified to compile this volume. As literary editor of the Independent, he revived that newspaper’s foreign fiction prize, first won by Orhan Pamuk and his translator Victoria Holbrook. Translators are routinely undervalued. As with stage-lighting technicians, one is apt consciously to notice only glaring blunders; so it is good to know that the Independent’s prize is shared between author and translator. I nevertheless approached this book with some scepticism. I couldn’t quite see the point of it. If one has read a novel already, what would one gain from a three-page essay?

The Red-haired Woman is shorter than Orhan Pamuk’s best-known novels, and is, in comparison, pared down, written with deliberate simplicity — ostensibly by a narrator who knows that he is not a writer, but only a building contractor. Polyphonic narratives are replaced by a powerful, engaging clarity. This simplicity is the novel’s greatest strength, yet at certain points seems as if it might become a weakness. Part one, which takes up the first half of the book, is superbly concentrated. It describes one summer in 1986 in the life of Cem, a middle-class 16-year-old boy who takes on a summer job 30 miles outside Istanbul to earn money before cramming for university entrance exams.

Arundhati Roy has published only one previous novel, but that one, The God of Small Things, won the Booker Prize. That was 20 years ago. Early success did not, however, block Roy into neurotic silence: instead, it offered her a platform for verbally intemperate political activism. She is an impassioned campaigner against globalisation, industrialisation and all forms of the arch-enemy capitalism, and a critic of US foreign policy, Israel and the government of Sri Lanka. Her Booker prize money was donated to the campaign against the Narmada Dam project. To Indian critics who condemn her hyperbole as ‘hysterical’ she retorted: ‘I am hysterical, I’m screaming from the bloody roof tops.

Last year, I attempted to pass through security in an American airport carrying a small black box, containing eight batteries and a visible circuit board. If the switch was flipped, the display counted down in red flashing numbers. Unsuprisingly, the officer in Salt Lake City pulled it out of my hand baggage. ‘What’s this?’ ‘It’s to attract moths,’ I said; then, thinking this sounded feeble, added rather grandly, ‘I’m a lepidopterist.’ ‘Say that again.’ So I did, and a huge grin lit up the face of my interrogator. ‘Hey, y’all,’ he called out to his colleagues. ‘C’mon on over, listen to this… Say it again.

Looking for the Outsider is the biography of a novel, from conception through publication to critical reception. Alice Kaplan’s life-story of L’Étranger (The Outsider in English translations, The Stranger in American) is a lovely work, lucid and thought-provoking. It makes one feel afresh the sheer strangeness of Albert Camus’s imagination. All genius is, perhaps, freakish; but Camus’s sprang from peculiarly unpromising soil. He was born in a white working-class area of Algiers. His father was killed in the battle of the Marne before he was one. His mother was deaf and illiterate, with a vocabulary of about 400 words; she worked as a cleaner. His uncle was also deaf and nearly mute, and made barrels.

Anicet is, as its cover proclaims, a Dadaist novel, reissued on the centenary of its composition. Louis Aragon would doubtless have been delighted to learn that it is almost impossible to review. An art critic, with his ‘little gadgets… called criteria’, is satirised in these pages as a kind of ‘policeman’, whose mission is in fact to seek out artists whose theories and works might disturb the peace… At the slightest threat of disorder the critic must set things right by exposing fraud and anarchy. Here, in pre-emptive defiance, is a ‘novel’ which is nothing but ‘fraud and anarchy’: a work in which there is no coherent plot, no illusion of character, written in a style riddled with self-mockery.

My last review for The Spectator was of Julian Barnes’s biographical novel about Shostakovitch. A Girl in Exile also depicts the life of an artist favoured by a brutally oppressive regime, this time written by one who was there. Ismail Kadare survived the rule of that isolationist tyrant Enver Hoxha. In some quarters, Kadare has been criticised for surviving. Like Shostokovitch, indeed, he has been accused of collaborating with the regime within which he worked, joining the party and accepting public appointments. It is not the business of a book review to enter into such arguments; but some of the criticisms, made by armchair freedom fighters insisting that others should stand up for uncompromising heroism, are obviously, cruelly and merely naive.

When I look at the black-and-white photograph of Julian Barnes on the flap of his latest book, the voice of Kenneth Clark floats up from memories of the black-and-white television of my childhood: ‘He is smiling — the smile of reason.’ Supremely ‘civilised’, thin-lipped, faintly superior, temperamentally given to aphorism, it is no surprise to discover that Julian Barnes is a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Yet Barnes in his fiction is unlike the simplified Voltaire of Clark’s Civilisation. His novels never proclaim the triumph of reason: instead, they explore the dark and disruptive, uncivilised emotions on the edge of words — love, certainly, but also jealousy, paranoia, inconsolable grief and the fear of dying.

Amory Clay, photographer and photo-journalist, was born in 1908, only two years after Logan Mountstuart, writer, poseur and ‘scribivelard’. Amory died in 1983; Logan in 1991. Though shaped by the same era, their accounts of their lives are tonally worlds apart. Logan is flamboyant, self-regarding, lyrical, self-pitying; Amory plainer, braver, yet less self-revealing. Both, of course, are fictional, and both are protagonists woven by William Boyd into novels where they rub shoulders with historical characters. Amory, however, born into an era in which Vivians, Evelyns and Beverleys could be of either sex, is female. Boyd’s representation of a certain sort of female voice is pitch-perfect, chiefly because he is not trying too hard to signal Amory’s femininity.

T.H. White complained that the characters in Walter Scott’s historical novels talked ‘like imitation warming pans’: those in Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy, of which Flood of Fire is the final volume, talk like a whole Benares brass bazaar. As an avid reader of both Hobson-Jobson (the dictionary of Anglo-Indian slang) and Patrick O’Brian, I thought that the trilogy, set in the First Opium War, would combine the delights of both. And so it does; but one can have too much of a good thing. The linguistic pudding is often so over-egged that it clogs the arteries of the narrative.