Francis King

In the course of a lifetime of fiction reviewing, I have come to the conclusion that, though my colleagues are prepared doggedly to persevere with the reading of a novel from its muddled opening to its inconsequential end, they will read no more than four or five stories in a collection. What always guides them in this lazy choice is that one of the favoured stories will be the title one and another the most substantial. Since the title story is also the most substantial — in effect a novella — in Allan Massie’s Klaus, one can be absolutely certain that it will be the one on which every reviewer, including myself, chiefly concentrates.

In a remarkable way the trajectory of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s reputation after her death in 1967 parallels that of George Meredith’s in 1909. In a remarkable way the trajectory of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s reputation after her death in 1967 parallels that of George Meredith’s in 1909. A recipient of the OM and held in awe by such younger novelists as Henry James, Hardy and Stevenson, Meredith was generally regarded as one of the greatest writers of his time. But now, apart from his poetry — which he himself rightly thought superior to his prose — he is little read, even though every history of English Literature contains a lengthy entry for him.

The subtitle, ‘The Anglo-American Gardens of Florence’, of this engaging and elegantly produced book, is misleading. The reclusive and narcissistic chatelaine of the Villa Gamberai in the days of its glory, Princess Catherine Jeanne Keshko Ghika, was not an Anglo-American but a Romanian. Similarly, Lady Paget, indefatigable not merely as a custodian of her superb garden at Torre di Bellosguardo but also as a lady scribbler, was born a Saxon princess, Walburga (‘Wally’ to her friends) Helena de Hohenthal. Katie Campbell also from time to time strays beyond her geographical parameters.

Eleven years after Jean Rhys’s death in 1979, Carole Angier published a monumental biography, a model of its kind, with 70 pages of notes and seven of bibliography. Lilian Pizzichini’s ‘portrait’ of Rhys is a book of a wholly different kind. The best way to describe it is that it bears the same relationship to Angier’s work as Beryl Bainbridge’s novel According to Queeney to Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson. Both Pizzichini’s and Bainbridge’s books rely for their potent fascination not on extensive research but, to a remarkable degree, on empathy and imagination.

Chicago, by Alaa al-Aswani Because I spend part of each winter in Egypt, friends from time to time ask me to recommend, not a guide, but a book that will give them the ‘feel’ of that country. Invariably my choice has been The Cairo Trilogy of Naguib Mahfouz, the only Arab writer to have won the Nobel Prize. But since the English publication of Alaa al-Aswani’s The Yakoubian Building in 2007, it too has become, for me, an instant recommendation. This is a remarkable work, in which the goings-on in a venerable residential block, still in actual existence, is brilliantly presented as a microcosm of Cairo life.

There are writers so prolific that one wants to shout, ‘Oh, do give it a rest!’ There are others so costive that one wants to shout, ‘Oh, do get a move on!’ It is into the second of these categories that Francis Wyndham falls. This 403-page volume contains all the fiction, three books in total, that he has produced in more than half a century. It is sad that there has not been far more. The first book is a collection, Out of the War, published in 1974, but originally written during the second world war, when the still teenage author had been invalided out of the army with TB. It is amazing that he should have produced stories so accomplished at so early an age. ‘They seemed to have been written by someone else’, he remarked on their exhumation.

Like Angus Wilson, Julian Maclaren-Ross immediately grabbed the attention of Forties reviewers and readers with a series of short stories at once ruthlessly observant and irresistibly entertaining. However, unlike Wilson, admirably self-disciplined in the organisation of a career that eventually carried him to the centre of the literary establishment, Maclaren-Ross, alcoholic and wasteful of his gifts, soon drifted to its periphery. It is only recently that he has come once more to be recognised as a writer of the stature of Saki or Firbank, minor certainly but no less certainly a cherishable joy. It is clear from this selection that the people who kept his letters were rarely those who, their lives as itinerant as his, were closest to him.

In 1926, Tessa Codrington’s maternal grandfather, Jack Sinclair, once British Resident in Zanzibar, decided to buy for his wife a house on the ‘New Mountain’ in Tangier. One of Muriel Sinclair’s many eccentricities was that she had no wish to see her grandchildren. In consequence it was not until the old woman’s death that Tessa Codrington, then nine, first visited the house. Subsequently her mother was to give her a smaller house, built by Jack Sinclair, originally an architect, in the spacious grounds of the main one. An eager amateur photographer from her earliest years, Codrington is now a professionally accomplished one. As one turns the pages of this photograph album, one is repeatedly arrested by some striking image.

A few nights ago I was at a dinner party at which all those present knew each other far better than I knew them. For what seemed an interminable time their sole topic of conversation was the tempestuous relationship of a couple of whom I had never even heard. The story, in as far as I could piece it together, was fascinating; but with its oblique references to long-past events and to people merely indicated by their first names, it also exasperated me. I had the same experience during my reading of this novel. When we meet one of the two main characters, Lewis, he is looking down on a lake from his high perch on a builder’s ladder. All at once he suffers a hallucination of an arm raised out of the lake, a forefinger pointing. Subsequently there are references to a Manny and a Carl.

This book takes up the story, told so memorably in his Clouds of Glory, of Bryan Magee’s early years in working-class Hoxton. In the first chapter, the now nine-year-old Magee, always precocious in his search for knowledge, is learning about the facts of life from one of his chums. Soon after, separated from his family as a wartime evacuee, he is learning the facts of provincial life first in a remote Sussex village where only two people own cars, and then in Market Harborough where a high percentage of the inhabitants have never travelled farther than to Leicester. At the age of 11, the already intellectually robust, ambitious youth wins a scholarship to Christ’s Hospital, an ancient foundation far wealthier than Eton, where he enters a totally different world.

Prematurely, John McGahern published his Collected Stories 14 years before his death early this year. To prepare this Selected Stories he obsessively polished and ruthlessly cut stories that, even as they then stood, for the most part seemed already perfect. He also added two stories, one of which, ‘The Country Funeral’, strikes me not merely as the best that he ever wrote but also as the one that most accurately epitomises the sort of subject that he chose and his unsparing way of dealing with it. Three brothers, though long since transplanted to metropolitan settings, are still emotionally connected to the seaside hamlet in which, as fatherless children, an uncle invited them, as an act of grudging charity, to spend their summer holidays on his estate.