Oliver Soden

Naomi Mitchison is now renowned for being the author of ‘lost classics’ – famous for being forgotten. She lived to be 101 and wrote nearly as many books. She supported anti-Nazi movements in 1930s Vienna, ran a sexual health centre for women, became an octogenarian campaigner for nuclear disarmament and an ‘adviser and mother of the Bakgatla tribe in Botswana’. Despite two biographies and attempts to revive her masterpiece, The Corn King and the Spring Queen, she remains undervalued – perhaps because of her refusal to settle into one genre and her determination to venture into the territory of historical epic spiced with mythic ritual and dark magic. Travel Light was originally published in 1952 as a children’s book.

It is hard to believe that the 1983 Nobel Prize in Literature would have been awarded to the author of titles such as The Chinese Have X-Ray Eyes, Here Be Monsters or – yes – An Erection at Barchester. But if William Golding had had his way, so it might have proved. Charles Monteith, his loyal editor at Faber & Faber, saved him from himself; and thus it was that those books were called instead Pincher Martin, Darkness Visible and The Spire. For whatever reason, Golding thought himself a monster and his journals seethed with self-disgust Even Golding’s first and most famous novel, Lord of the Flies (1954), started life as Strangers from Within. Its publishing history is almost as well known as its plot (of boys stranded on an island turning savage).

Somewhere, there must be a PhD: Flashing: Exhibitionistic Disorder in the Oeuvre of Alan Bennett. It’s there in the first of his Talking Heads monologues (‘He’s been had up for exposing himself in Sainsbury’s doorway – as mother said, Tesco, you could understand it’) and in the last, Waiting for the Telegram, which opened with Thora Hird, one-time presenter of Songs of Praise, saying: ‘I saw this feller’s what-do-you-call-it today.’ It takes three pages for a what-do-you-call-it to appear in Killing Time, Bennett’s new novella, which is set in Hill Topp House old people’s home. Mr Woodruff, a resident, is indefatigable, his self-exposure a running motif as ‘not for the first time, he tried to show Audrey his willy’.

One of my favourite cartoons is of the owl and the pussycat going to sea in their pea-green boat. The caption is the owl’s guilty admission: ‘I’m afraid there have been… other cats.’ Caleb Carr, in this memoir of his own love affair with a pussycat, is straightfaced: ‘I should own up to the fact that I’d had similar relationships with other cats – even (and in some cases especially) cats who were not mine.’ I have a high tolerance for cat books, but after this one I turned in relief to a ‘Simon’s Cat’ animation on YouTube. There’s one in which a hapless man opens the door for a kitten who has spent hours scrabbling hysterically at the glass like a prisoner longing for escape. The animal then decides that, on reflection, outdoors is overrated.

Large cats cannot miaow. (Lions and tigers, I mean, not moggies who have overindulged on Whiskers Meaty Selection in Gravy.) The largest feline ever to have lived was a sabre-toothed cat in South America, which weighed nearly half a tonne. Female house cats can copulate up to 20 times a day when in the mood. Male cats have a bone in their penis. Cats are green-red colour blind. There are probably more than half a billion cats alive in the world at this moment. These are gleanings merely from the footnotes of Jonathan Losos’s The Age of Cats, which is portly with information. The book, surveying cats’ evolutionary history, behavioural habits and potential future, has a lovely cast list of felines wild and domestic, large and small.

Ten years ago, recently graduated and unemployed, I sent my CV to a raft of radio producers. Just one replied. ‘Dear Oliver,’ wrote Marilyn Imrie, in an email with the subject line ‘YOU’: ‘How nice to hear from you and about you.’ Her generosity and enthusiasm were writ large in those three capitals, which headed a letter that came festooned with advice, offers of work experience and an anecdote about her adaptation of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. It takes skill to shorten one of the longest novels in the language, but then Imrie was a legendary figure in the world of radio. We briefly corresponded but did not meet. Runcie’s real subjects are not death and disease, but love, and the object of his love Motor neurone disease runs the following course.

Were this a less good book than it is, it would be called How Bach Can Help You Grieve. As it is, Counterpoint serves very well, describing the American art and architecture critic Philip Kennicott’s intertwined themes: his reaction to the death of his mother, with whom he had a fractious and traumatic relationship, and his attempt to learn Bach’s Goldberg Variations, through which he considers the ability of the greatest music to ease us out of a senseless pit of grief. This is a deeply serious and often affecting book, combining the ‘grief memoir’ with the genre created by Alan Rusbridger in Play It Again, an account of an amateur pianist learning Chopin’s Ballade No. 1.