Digby Durrant

In Sybille Bedford’s book, Jigsaw, a woman who is suffering from insomnia asks for books. ‘Oh, not real books, I couldn’t look at those. Detective stories only.’ So Sayers’ Wimseyland and Christie’s Poirot are required. How would she get on today? Ruth Rendell and P. D James would do excellently but none of these books would do at all: they are all thrillers, packed with blood, murder and mayhem, a nightmare diet. No time for quiet little grey cells to be working away here. Charles Maclean’s Home Before Dark is a particularly disturbing example of the genre.

I was astonished by the huge success of Louis de Bernières’ Captain Correlli’s Mandolin which I staggered through back in 1994. Many separate passages were colourfully and beguilingly written, but the book as a whole was confusing and over- written, as if the author couldn’t bear to stop. I haven’t read any others since, and didn’t relish reading his latest, though I was encouraged to find it a mere slip of a volume compared to Captain Correlli’s’ adventures — and Christian a very different kind of hero. A medical salesman, he believes that marriage turns wives into sisters and sex soon dies out, a painless castration.

We know the pressures the steady flow of immigrants has caused in our society though we hear less about the benefits of having them here; nor do we have much idea what they think about us. Lev, the Polish migrant in Rose Tremain’s new book, expected to find men who looked like Alec Guinness in The Bridge on the River Kwai but found they were slovenly geezers with shaven heads and garish tattoos and not so different from those he worked alongside in the sawmills back home before losing his job. The early death of his wife, his responsibility for his adored small daughter and his ageing mother, the need of money in a decaying village persuade Lev to leave for London.

This is a book about the failure of two marriages. One is destroyed by a past that refuses to slacken its grip, though the marriage itself has to limp on; the other is wrecked by a future impossible to avoid. They are seen through the eyes of four different people, two from one family, two from the other. Ruth, a precocious 15-year-old, has by far the most entries, hence the book’s title. The result of all this is a very crowded and colourful canvas, a patchwork quilt of a book. The two families live within walking distance of each other in a sparsely populated part of Northumberland and they are in each other’s pockets whether they like or not.

Even as a boy Charles knew there was something false about his father Adrian Mainguard. Why? Nobody else did. An internationally famed pianist and composer, blessed with Dionysian looks and a forehead Virginia Woolf described as ‘like a bow window revealing his soul … there was something god-like about him’. Benjamin Britten, Auden, Sackville-Wests and Bloomsburys, all chanted praises. He was married to Edie, the daughter of the chairman of Vickers-Armstrong, and had performed for the royal family at Windsor. But still Charles sensed a flaw in the crystal. At least in his own eyes time was to prove him right. ‘Discovery of the truth about him set the compass for my life.

It’s understandable that a man fails to kill himself with a puncture repair outfit or drown himself in a bucket but rather miraculous if he can’t throw himself under a bus successfully. Yet this is the melancholy achievement of ex-Sub-Inspector Swaminathan, Swami, from Mullaipuram in the state of Tamil Nadu in southern India. A good man unjustly struck down by fate after cracking the rib of a Very Guilty Suspect during a routine inquiry, he suffers a cerebral haemorrhage leaving him barely able to walk or speak. Even when a white man throws himself out of a hotel window and lands in front of his wheelchair he’s silent and only feels a strange peacefulness as he shares the dying man’s last moments.

I wonder how much my enthusiasm for Alexander McCall Smith’s stories about Precious Ramotswe, the founder of The Ladies No. 1 Detective Agency, came from reading them while in a French hospital recovering from an emergency operation?  Grateful to be transported from my hospital bed to Botswana and find myself in her company I wouldn’t have heard a word against her. And when his first Edinburgh book came out called 44 Scotland Street, where years ago I once had digs, did I allow a nostalgic bias to creep in? But here’s Love Over Scotland, and I have no excuse for any bias, nostalgic or otherwise. Many of the original cast reappear.

Listing page content here Andrew Taylor has written on a wide range of subjects, but it is for his crime thrillers that he has become famous and won so many awards. By my estimate he’s written 26, which is just under half of the 59 books he’s credited with by Amazon. Until now I have only read one of these and it was excellent. The American Boy is a long, gripping mystery novel of the kind that Wilkie Collins invented to delight the Victorians, and so I looked forward to Taylor’s new one, A Stain on the Silence. When James’s phone rings and he hears a tiny voice say ‘Jamie’ he would have been wise to have rung off immediately. Only Lily Murthington has ever called him that and she had almost ruined his life. Now she’s dying and wants to see him.

You don’t read Nadine Gordimer without knowing it will be about Africa and its manifold problems of which you will know too little and even if you did know more could do little about. Her new book is no exception, though I think it will trouble our conscience less than usual. Paul Bannerman is a 35-year-old ecologist faced with the probability that a huge dam and a nuclear reactor are going to be built, causing immense damage to the land around them and disruption for those who live there. He and his colleagues are out to stop both ventures. Their activities stall when Paul is operated on for thyroid cancer.

Miles Kington, humourist-at-large from the moment he was born, which he remembers because a shadowy figure had snapped at him that he’s pressed for time, what does he want to be, girl or boy? He arrives to find himself surrounded by an unusually colourful family. Father, a very short man who is made all the shorter by the thinness of his wartime socks, had recently failed to get into midget submarines. Hasn’t he noticed there hasn’t been a pantomime production of Snow White since 1937? The navy has recruited all the dwarfs they needed. Instead he’d got a job pretending to be a spy to test the alertness of the British public.

Ever since Dixon’s pie-eyed lecture on Merrie England in Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim there’s been a hunger for more exposures of the pretentious absurdities and backbiting jealousies of academia. Here’s another from a distinguished professor of English at London University who’s presumably seen a great deal of it. Perhaps it’s because of this that David Nokes’s book is much closer to farce than to the reality you find, say, in C. P. Snow’s novels set in a Cambridge college or Malcolm Bradbury’s satires on life at the redbrick and new plate-glass universities.

A writer, John Dearborn, known as Bron, persuades a publisher to commission him to do a book about love at first sight. Bron is obsessed with Paul Marotte, a physician living in Amsterdam who one day in 1889 sees Kate Summer on a bridge and instantly falls in love, decides to paint professionally and they join Gauguin and others at Pont-Aven. And then one misty morning by a river down in deepest Devon Bron, too, sees a girl on a bridge and he knows exactly what Marotte felt. Flora is no unworldly Kate. Everyone’s enjoyed her, including Mick Jagger and David Bailey, and she has husband problems. Now she’s through with love. Yet when Bron suddenly quotes Lauren Bacall’s famous lines from To Have and to Have Not, ‘You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve?

There never was a ticket with the word ‘POSH’ stamped on it by the P&O shipping line, which meant a passenger to India went out on the port side and returned on the starboard and got the best of the cooling breezes. So, where did the word come from? Michael Quinion says humans fear the unfamiliar and will go to great lengths to discover how a word or phrase came into being and remove its mystery. The mixture of laboured logic and startling inventiveness that gave birth to the word ‘posh’, though, is not completely unfounded. ‘Posh’ was originally the Romany for halfpenny and though it would have taken sackfuls of the stuff to get to India and back it was money.

It was only by a hoax that Andre.

At first sight Gilbert Adair’s new book seems like shameless pornography of a particularly sad and depraved kind, but more charitably and more accurately we discover as we read on that it is the story of an unlikely martyr-hero who risks his life in the cause of militant homosexuality rather than suffer suicidal loneliness. As a youth Gideon occasionally has very mild spasms of lust for boys but is content enough to lie beside a girl, his clumsy fingers inching past the cups of her brassiere to toy with her nipples. Suddenly her record player sings out, ‘Mr Sandman, bring me a dream/ Make him the cutest I’ve ever seen /Give him two lips like rose and clover/Then tell him that his lonesome nights are over.’ The scales fall from Gideon’s eyes.

The Grandmothers consists of four novellas, very different from The Golden Notebook, that sprawling, seemingly unedited, over-talkative, rather wonderful book that made Doris Lessing famous and became as stirring a call to arms for the swelling ranks of the feminist movement as Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch. Lessing disliked being pigeon-holed like this, insisting it was the whole of the human condition not just a part that fired her imagination. In 1971 she wrote, ‘The whole world is being shaken into a new pattern by the cataclysms we are living through … if we do get through … the aims of Women’s Liberation will look very small and quaint.’ None of this bothers Lil and Roz in the title story.

As Schindler's Ark shows, Thomas Keneally is at his best bringing the past to life undaunted either by the importance of the events or by the famous names at the centre of them. Two of his other novels that lie to hand, A Family Madness and Gossip from the Forest, confirm that he wastes no time in throwing the reader in at the deep end and keeping him there. In the first one it's Belorussia scrabbling to preserve its identity as Germany, Russia and Poland fight over it during the last war; in the other we eavesdrop on the private conversations between the French, British and German delegates when they meet in two railway carriages in a forest to discuss the armistice of 1918.

This is the story of a strange and intense friendship between two orthodox Jews, one a violinist seen as the next Kreisler, the other a clever plodder who falls under his spell, almost wrecking his own life in the process. The two meet as boys just before the war. Dovdl Rapoport, called David, a refugee from Warsaw, is the musician, soon to be orphaned by the Nazis, and Martin Simmonds is the son of a concert organiser, a shrewd man who recognises David's genius by taking him into his home, paying for his education and grooming him for stardom. Things go smoothly until at Cambridge David thinks he'd prefer to be a scientist, but hearing of the death of two fellow Jews, both brilliant young violinists, he decides to honour their memory by returning to his art.