Salley Vickers

Mothers and memoirs are fashionable at the moment. We’ve had Edward St Aubyn’s novel Mother’s Milk and few respectable books’ pages appear without a brand-new set of tragic, comic or tragi- comic reminiscences, leaving us grateful, if apologetic, for our own drearily staid lives. Yet it is a fact that a really good memoir usually owes less to life than to the author’s shaping imagination. Indeed, the best are often largely fantasy (Trollope’s captivating autobiography is a case in point). Rarely does a completely authentic recollection make compelling reading. Too often, as Henry James’s great short story on this theme reminds us, compared to art the ‘real thing’ disappoints and ultimately fails to enchant.

Dorothy Whipple was once a highly regarded bestselling novelist and it is typical of the excellent Persephone books that they have restored her glory within their elegant silver jackets and distinctive floral end papers. In They Were Sisters, with its, surely intentional, Chekhovian undertones, Whipple explores the fortunes of three sisters: Lucy, Charlotte and Vera. Lucy is clever and studious but must abandon her intellectual aspirations when their mother dies and, in the custom of the times (the novel is set in Thirties Britain), Lucy, as the eldest, becomes duty-bound to raise her siblings. Charlotte is sensitive but wilful and, dis- regarding all the signals, marries an out-and-out rotter, while Vera, an egocentric beauty, marries a mother’s boy and a bore.

As a rule, I disapprove of reviews which review the author and not the book, but some occasions demand it. The British, I don’t know why, are notoriously myopic, mean-spirited even, about multiple talents. In France one could be a poet and a stripper and be taken equally seriously as either. David Baddiel is best known as a comedian and thus his chances of being read as anything but a comic novelist will be compromised. I know this, for I was guilty of the prejudice myself when I served as a Man Booker judge in 2002 and learned that David was to be a colleague. He was, I presumed, to be the media floozy; I could hardly have been more wrong.

Books about wartime experiences are thick enough on the ground to make one wonder if it is really worth the trauma of reading yet another, but Adriaan Van Dis’s book, translated, a little clumsily, from the Dutch, offers a fresh angle. Set in Holland, it tells in retrospect the story of an illegitimate boy, born to a Dutch mother whose first husband was executed by the Japanese, while she is interned with her three half-Indonesian daughters. The fractured family return to Holland, acquiring on the way a new father, who — bizarrely but convincingly — shares the same name as the dead one, and who, like the mother, is Dutch and, like the father, a native of Indonesia, but whose precise racial origins remain obscure.