Jane Gardam

Susan Hill knows exactly how to please. This small, smart, elegantly printed little notepad of a book is a delicious Victorian ghost story, nostalgically and expertly comforting. It opens as smoothly as an M. R. James or Conan Doyle short story, over a good fire in a shadowy room on a winter’s night: The story was told me by my old friend, Theo Parmitter, as we sat in his college rooms one bitterly cold January night. There were still real fires in those days, the coals brought up by a servant in huge brass scuttles. . . . We know this room and we know the professor’s story, too. It is the fine old chestnut to roast upon the coals: the story of the haunted painting. Oscar Wilde examined it in The Picture of Dorian Gray and M. R.

C. K. Stead was Professor of English literature in the University of Auckland and is a highly esteemed literary critic and author. He is not, to my knowledge, a theologian but was urged to write this novel about the life of Judas Iscariot by the professor of religious studies at Victoria University because, ‘These are our stories. They must be constantly retold.’ Stead has, I would guess, used his recent awards to visit the Holy Land, for the beauty of Galilee, its atmosphere and light, and the looming presence of Jerusalem are some of the best things in the book. The novel itself is oddly disappointing. It is based on the far from new idea that Judas did not commit suicide after the crucifixion by hanging himself on the fig tree once cursed by Christ.

This is the sketchy diary of a 60-year-old woman with an amusing, runaway pen, written over 19 months. She is scatty, impulsive, open-minded and living cheerfully in Shepherd’s Bush, which never ceases to intrigue her (‘Today I saw a man standing on his head in the middle of the pavement’). Wide-eyed and aware of men, it is easy to see her as Bridget Jones’s mother, but she is not silly. She is strong in adversity, loyal to sick friends whom she sees through to the end and she expresses her fearless if curmudgeonly opinions even at her own dinner parties, where, often, silence falls. She is a passionate atheist, though the last entry has her embracing a black evangelical priest.

Thrillers now come heavily disguised, and but for the blood-stained head-lamp on the jacket of this one and the warning across the corner, ‘Be careful who [sic] you trust. It might just be the death of you’, one would take the book to be a straight- forward, if lurid, portrait of a bright girl with an adrenalin problem. Holly Krauss, talented, good-looking and running her own successful business, is attracted to danger and bad company as well as to drink and sexual excess. After a long day in the office she courts sexual, financial and marital disaster of an evening. Bruised, beaten-up and minus items of her underwear, she always limps back to a (very unobservant) kindly husband who works from home as an illustrator. He is enigmatic but constant and sane.

This is a strange and wonderful novel that deserves the most serious attention. Whenever Ron- ald Blythe’s name comes up in conversation the next sentence is always going to be, ‘Didn’t he write Akenfield?’ Akenfield is the unclassifiable classic of over 30 years ago, the portrait of Blythe’s birthplace in rural Suffolk and the memories and reflections of its people, and it is probably the first and best of its kind. But since then he has written in a steady stream histories, novels, short stories, literary criticism, studies of poets and diarists and divines (he’s an authority on George Herbert) and books about places, like the stunning Divine Landscapes about Britain’s holy sites.

There is no introduction to this collection of essays, reviews and ‘think-pieces’ by Doris Lessing, but they are presumably chosen by herself from the quantity of her literary criticism (the hardest work, or so they say) over a long political and literary lifetime. The pieces must have been difficult to assemble, for the acknowledgments in the back of the book include some very obscure sources alongside the blue-ribbon publications where you would expect to find ‘one of the most influential writers of the 20th century’. Some are from the Guardian, the New York Observer, the L. A. Times; more from The Spectator, the Literary Review and the late lamented Books and Bookmen; but others must have had to be dug out.

Here are 90 furious little spats about our extraordinary and inadequate attitudes to God. Alice Thomas Ellis has subtitled them her ‘assembled thoughts’ on her Roman Catholic faith and what she sees as its suicidal attempts at liberalisation. She is impassioned, funny, fearless and has been in hot water a number of times with the Church and the periodicals she writes for. The Universe sacked her. There is an affectionate introduction by Richard Ingrams, who says that he loves misfits and drop-outs and likes to provide them with soapboxes (e.g. in The Oldie, he describes her as a woman who has suffered in her time but keeps at the heart of the fight). She is no recluse.

The unpretentious title of this excellent, delicious book is clever. Does it mean ‘a modicum of garden history’ or, in a Victorian sort of way, ‘a little volume’ of it? Either, for it is beautifully produced, would make you want to buy it but neither would prepare you for nearly 350 pages of entertaining, scholarly riches; fine type, fine text, colour plates, MS reproductions from Aelfric to The Ladies’ Flower Garden, illustrations, drawings, cartoons and photographs. British gardens began early BC, with nomadic clearings in the wilderness and thorn hedges to keep out wild animals. The book ends with 2003 AD and the children’s Mughal Garden in Bradford and the Eden Project in the south-west.

Where are the songs of Spring? Well, certainly not in these short stories about people in crabbed old age or looking hard at death. Only in the last one, ‘The Silence’, where an ancient composer who believes that ‘the logic of music is eventually silence’, is any longing expressed to see ‘the cranes fly south again’ towards the wine-growing countries that nourished Beethoven, not these where ‘soured milk rules the roost’. Most of the collection is set in soured milk countries: pale, Nordic places. Yet in the title Barnes uses the symbol of a lemon. But the lemon, he says, has nothing to do with sunshine. It is the Chinese symbol of death and those who want to reflect together on mortality can sit round ‘the lemon table’.

The constant command in the works of Alberto Manguel is ‘look closer’. From his terrifying novel, News from a Foreign Country Came to his A History of Reading and Reading Pictures, A History of Love and Hate and Into the Looking Glass Wood and his book of notes that analyse the film The Bride of Frankenstein he surprises, shocks and awakens us. He is both the wizard releasing coloured doves from a black top hat and the dedicated scholar soberly at desk. He is fascinated by duality (duality is the whole message of his early novel) and it is everybody’s duality that is the subject of this new story.

The head of history at a well-known English girls’ school was wont to say that she had learned nothing at Cambridge and all her history had been set in place at the age of ten by The Children’s Encyclopaedia. Rebecca Fraser will know exactly what she meant. Massively informed, she is as unstuffy as the rest of the Fraser historians. On page one of her introduction she mentions ‘the immortal words of 1066 and All That’. She has written this splendid history of Britain — 800-odd pages from the arrival of the Romans to Queen Elizabeth II’s Golden Jubilee — because she could find nothing like it for her own children.

Byron Rogers for years wrote the 'Village Voice' column in the Daily Telegraph, and this collection of articles on his life over the past 22 years in an English village is published because of the continued weekly requests of his readers. Blakesley is not a picture-book village. Rogers found 'a lost triangle of land where Oxfordshire, Warwickshire and Northamptonshire meet, which the main roads circle and where no tourists come'; not at all unlike Ronald Blythe's 'Akenfield' in Suffolk in the early Sixties. By leaving the city for the country in the Eighties, Rogers was ahead of his time. It was rare then to settle in the dead centre of England in a place of no 'outstanding natural beauty', far from anywhere and knowing absolutely nobody. He was married.

I once met a thoroughly heterosexual old naval officer who had been a midshipman on the ship that sailed to Gallipoli with Rupert Brooke on board, the voyage during which Brooke died. I asked him what Brooke had been like. He said at once, 'He was a god. Extraordinary beauty, law to himself. Like Lord Byron, I expect. There are these people.' Fiona MacCarthy says towards the end of her thoroughly researched and very readable 600-page biography of Byron, the first to come from John Murray, keeper of the Byron flame, for nearly half a century, that 'there are always private reasons behind the choice of a biographical subject'.

This is a selection of the original letters written in the 1870s by the Victorian globe-trotter, Isabella Bird, to her younger sister, Henrietta on the Isle of Mull. They were posted from the USA, Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, China and the Malay Peninsula. Henrietta edited them, it is thought heavily, and on her brief spells at home Isabella added to them and prepared them for publication by the great travel publisher, John Murray. They all turned into best-selling travel books. Henrietta must have worked hard.