Interconnect

In 2003, Robert Harris published Pompeii: A Novel, which for vitality and entertainment and the atmosphere of the decadent Roman world around the Bay of Naples in the first century AD can hardly be beaten. The great eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 and the destruction of the playground city of Pompeii is made even more cataclysmic by Harris’s angle on it. Not until nearly the end of the book does he describe the mushroom cloud, the blood-red lightning, the choking ash four feet deep, the terrifying withdrawal of the sea, the darkness and the final silence.

When the poems of Philip Larkin came to the fore in the late Fifties, I admired his graceful colloquialism but was dismayed by his almost proselytising gloom; life wasn’t given much of a chance. So I decided that he was a great Comic poet — stretching the idea of Comedy to almost Renaissance widths and depths — that he was the Les Dawson of the anthologies. This wasn’t good enough as a formula, it left too much out; but it was a way of admiring while keeping at a distance.

What is the point of William Cobbett? Richard Ingrams claims that Cobbett was one of the greatest Englishmen who ever lived, yet his life is largely forgotten. He is remembered, if he is known at all, as the author of Rural Rides, a classic account of his travels around the English countryside in the 1820s. Previous biographers have celebrated Cobbett as a Radical politician and man of the people. Ingrams presents him in this admirably concise biography as a great journalist, who fearlessly exposed corruption in high places and championed the freedom of the press. In fact Cobbett in many ways resembles his biographer — the two men even look a bit alike. Cobbett was self-educated and self-made. His father was a small farmer near Farnham with a violent temper.

Lord Rosebery was the great lost leader of Victorian politics. Today he is a forgotten figure, but in his time he was the most famous man in Britain. Precociously talented and a star orator, he could draw vast crowds and keep them spellbound. He was the heir apparent to Gladstone as leader of the Liberal party, but as prime minister he was a failure. He held office for little more than a year, and by the time he resigned the Liberal party was in a state of shambles from which it never fully recovered. His life is an extraordinary story of squandered talent and wasted opportunity. Until now, Rosebery has remained an enigma. There has never been a full biography. Historians have dissected his speeches, but no one has got close to the man.

To be successful, biographers must possess some degree of empathy with their subject. They need not convince themselves that they would always have acted similarly, still less play the part of counsel for the defence, but they will have failed if the reader does not understand why the subject of the biography behaved as he did and what the forces were that drove him onwards. Some degree of sympathy is essential, and the less appealing the subject, the more difficult the task will be. The difficulty is compounded if the biographer has been previously required to approach the material from a different angle: the facts are the same but the point of view sometimes means that they can seem startlingly different.

It was always on the cards, to use a rather obvious metaphor, that Hilary Mantel would write a novel about spiritualism. Her earlier books were awash with hints of the numinous. Giving up the Ghost (2003), her recent memoir, duly connected these fragments of otherworldliness up to the circumstances of her own life. Now comes Beyond Black, a long, dense and complicated work which combines almost forensic accounts of the modern medium in action with some rapt reportage from in and around the M25 corridor, while leaving the reader in no doubt that these two kinds of banality are somehow connected.

Following his previous three novels — the work upon which much of Winton’s international acclaim rests — the 17 interconnected stories of The Turning come as something of a revelation. Those previous works, to this reviewer’s mind, have tended towards being overwritten and over-embellished (give-away epithets such as ‘lyrical’, ‘exuberant’, ‘inventive’ and ‘gutsy’ commonly recur). In The Turning, however, Winton has spectacularly reinvented himself and reined in his writing to create a world of pared-down, stunning and entirely believable completeness and complexity; a world at once exotically alien and instantly knowable.

The initial reaction to this solid little book must be ‘Oh no, not another!’ As Claire Tomalin says on the jacket, ‘A new approach seemed impossible.’ But ‘Susannah Fuller- ton, the President of the Jane Austen Society of Australia, has brilliantly hit on one.’ Her theme is crime and punishment and it has yielded up a parallel world to the novels that Jane Austen was very much aware of, lurking around the margins of ‘the two inches of ivory and fine brush’ she used for the tiny events of Georgian family life. Fullerton early became interested in the connections of the Austen family to Australia, as others have done: there is even the novel imagining Jane Austen living there.