SPQR by Mary Beard

 

I have just finished Mary Beard’s SPQR. I have just started Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation. The connection? Susan Sontag’s essay deals momentarily with the relation, if any, between form and content. She seems wary of the concept of form, seeing it often subservient to content. Perhaps the confusion is mine, since it may be the argument, rather than form, that stands out. More on this later.

SPQR is, put simply, an overview of the origins and the rise of Rome, from fabled Trojan settlement to Empire. It charts the growth of the state, from a probably mythical wattle and daub hut to an empire built of marble, from its assumed foundation in the middle of the eighth century BCE, as far as Caracalla’s offer of Roman citizenship in 212 CE. This is roughly, as the author labels it, Rome’s first millennium.

Remembering my first paragraph, it’s the form that Mary Beard imposes upon her work that makes the book’s argument. A less inventive mind would have started at the city’s foundation and progressed chronologically. Mary Beard profitably avoids this approach by beginning with the confrontation between Scipio and Catiline in the first century BCE, conveniently just over half-way through the author’s chosen era.

Catiline had led a revolt, not the first, or last, or most bloody, or most successful, against the established authority of the republic. The kings were already long gone, and the emperors has yet to assume their status. But the confrontation between the brilliant but rather condescending Scipio and the brash, brutal aristocratic chancer that was Catiline provides a starting point for an author who wants to stress what she defines as the essential cultural and political characteristics that can frame the reader’s understanding of this vast imperial achievement. For Mary Beard, this trial before the Senate symbolizes a couple of basic ideas that she uses as a cement to bind the various courses of the city’s history. These are the continual struggle for power alongside the surprising, for the uninitiated, but consistent, tendency for the Roman state to accommodate new ideas, new values, new religions and new citizens from those peoples it conquered.

The struggle for power was perpetual and ruthless. There were no rules apart from the winner took all, and then suffered the continual neurosis of how to hold on to it. Starting with the perhaps mythical fratricide that founded the city when Romulus killed Remus, ruling families or elites internally turned on themselves and one another to secure a hold on power. This is nothing special. Any visitor to Istanbul will vividly recall the rows of miniature coffins that were displayed when newly enthroned sultans disposed of their siblings to reduce potential competition. But Rome was, at least in extent, rather different, since it morphed from local warlords, perhaps, through kings, to republican presidents, in all but name, and then finally to emperors. Each manifestation of power brought its own kinds of struggle, but eventually struggles they all were, and usually involved eliminating the competition. The names and roles may have changed, but the methodology did not. You killed your way into power and killed to maintain it. There were, of course, exceptions.

The second characteristic that Mary Beard uses to create the form and thereby the content of this history is the Roman propensity for assimilation. This began with the rape of the Sabine women. Myth, perhaps, cites a shortage of breeding-age females amongst the early settlers, so what better way to obviate the problem than embark on the cattle raid? The logic, if that be the word, is quite simple. I do not have cows. My neighbour has cows, so I will steal them. It’s the same with women, it seems, and the booty seems to share the same status as the booty from a cattle raid.

But what ensues is change. There is inevitably a clash of culture that leads to accommodation and assimilation, resulting in complications of culture via marriage, albeit a marriage in chains. This process, argues the author, became a characteristic of Rome, in that kingdoms and peoples subjugated by force were culturally assimilated by Rome, and not necessarily destroyed by it. Indeed, some aspects of the defeated culture, such as their religions, were transported back to the centre, where they gained pragmatic adherents eager to try anything that might offer a competitive leg up. And it is this constant ability to change via assimilation that forms the second strand that gives form to this wonderful work.

But why finish with Caracalla, when the Roman empire endured for more than another century after his demise? Mary Beard is clear about this. It was Caracalla’s granting of Roman citizenship to all free men in the empire that change things. Until then the differences in status between men and women, between citizens and classes, between free men and slaves, between military and civilian that had set the boundaries on Roman life, boundaries that were admittedly fluid by virtue of people’s ability to be on either side and to change their relative status, gender apart. Mary Beard thus makes the case for the later years of the empire representing a different historical reality and thus warranting a different treatment. This change became even more apparent when the state adopted Christianity, which would brook no alternative and led to the conscious exclusion of further assimilation.

Mary Beard does offer the reader much detail. But her insistence on setting events in their wider political and cultural context really does clarify a bigger picture which then starts to reveal inter-related detail. By the end of SPQR, we fell we have been there.

In conclusion, Mary Beard warns against importing perceived values or solutions across the centuries in the belief that they might have relevance to contemporary society. Not only do we not really understand the values of this ancient age, nor do we really have sufficient material to be certain about anything. Rome did exist and is therefore worthy of study, but its example is relevant only to the furtherance of that specific study.

Form and content thus come together to create, in Mary Beard’s hands, a stunning, brilliant book that provides context, observation and profound insight into Roman history. It’s a book that only could have been written by someone who has both brilliant communication skills and perhaps unsurpassed in knowledge of her subject. This book is not recommended reading: it is nothing less than essential.

The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamond

This proves to be a surprisingly good read. He contrasts hunter-gatherer societies, especially those in New Guinea, with WEIRD societies – white, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic. A taste…

P174 Even studies of child development that claim to be broadly cross-cultural – eg comparing German, American, Japanese and Chinese children – are actually sampling societies all drawn from the same narrow slice of human cultural diversity…. As a result, those and other state-level modern societies have converged on a small range of child-rearing practices that by historical standards are unusual.

P300 real difference between hunter gatherer, traditional societies and WEIRD ones is that the traditional society allows you to have sex whenever you want, but you really worry about where the next meal is coming from…

P301 describes practise of pooling food resources in traditional societies... Even those who have not participated in the foraging or hunting get a share.

The Girl At The Lion D’Or by Sebastian Faulks

The Girl At The Lion D’Or, a novel by Sebastian Faulks, presents a love story which is both engaging and poignant. But because of the book’s setting in 1930s France, there is also much historical and political colour that significantly broadens the novel’s scope. Anne is a poor, but attractive girl. Her family life was disrupted by the First World War. In this she is not alone. But, as the narrative progresses, we learn that her story is rather more complex than the common, but still tragic one, of family members killed in action.

In Anne’s case there was also something to hide. Thus she was orphaned, and perhaps never really had a home she could call her own. 

At the start of The Girl At The Lion D’Or, Anne is about to make a change in her life – and not for the first time – by leaving Paris to find a job elsewhere. That elsewhere is Janvilliers, a provincial town, where she is reluctantly accepted as a waitress in the small hotel of the book’s title. Anne is a beautiful woman, perhaps more arresting even than that, and it is not long before some of the restaurant’s clientele are taking note of her charms.

One such client is a middle class businessman called Hartmann. He is married and lives in a large, rangy mansion whose rooms perhaps have their own stories to tell. There develops a liaison that forms the novel’s primary plot. Along the way we learn much about Anne’s background and the Hartmann’s modus vivendi. There are other characters, of course, and these are convincingly portrayed to create a picture of French inter-war provincial life. There’s the owner of the hotel, for instance, who seems reluctant to leave his flat. There’s the domineering – perhaps threatening – manageress who aspires to higher moral ground. There’s a builder who builds none too well and there are others whose attentions, lecherous and otherwise, are arrested by Anne’s beauty.

But also this is France just prior to the outbreak of World War two. There are rumblings about Jews, about ultra-nationalism, about political leaders in disarray who sway this way and that. There are many stories of loss still vivid from the previous war, stories whose pain has not yet dissipated and whose memory will soon be obliterated by new conflict. Sebastain Faulks’s novel is not a spectacular read. It does not try to be so. It is, however, a sensitive, informed and often beautiful portrayal of love set against a backdrop full of quite real humanity.

The Impressionist by Hari Kunzru

In his impressive and successful novel, Hari Kunzru explores the nature of identity. For some people a sense of belonging is very strong, whereas for others such feelings are mere illusion. The former group may cite social group, language, culture or religion as evidence of their stance, while the latter group, perhaps, may cite exactly the same subject matter to prove the opposite. The more politically inclined may even cite our relationship to the means of production as the primary source or personal and social identity.

In that case, the way that we make our living provides much of what we perceive as identity, and, in Hari Kunzru’s book, The Impressionist works through several quite different lives. It’s not that The Impressionist, the principal character of Hari Kunzru’s novel, has no identity.

Indeed, The Impressionist has a whole host of them, and all of them are both complex and, at the same time, completely credible. It is those around him who endow him with the trappings that confirm who he is. 

And he, of course, responds, donning new lives according to each new coat he wears. The book’s style seems to owe much to the magical realism of Salman Rushdie. There is also a superficial similarity of subject matter, since The Impressionist begins in colonial India where we witness our hero’s chance conception. There are royal parlours, low-life slums and chance encounter. We see the inside of an English public school, a prestigious university and eventually travel to Africa in a professional but doomed role. 

And throughout, The Impressionist seems to do no more than merely fit into the niches that have apparently been prepared for him. Everything he tries on fits him well. So, as we follow The Impressionist on his personal travels through multiple identities, we are challenged by the transformations. They are opened up by chance encounters, but yet they also seem inevitable. We are thus encouraged to look at our own lives and ask how many times we might have changed our own spots. A reader with a strong sense of identity might find such a challenge quite threatening. But then it’s just a story, isn’t it?

Several characters in search of a plot – The Country Life by Rachel Cusk

The Country Life by Rachel Cusk presents several promises, but eventually seems to break most of them. When Stella Benson, a twenty-nine-year-old, leaves home suddenly to take up a private care assistant’s job in darkest south England, it is clear that she is running away. From what we do learn later, but by then we perhaps care rather less about the circumstances.

From the start there was a problem with the book’s point of view. Stella presents a first person narrative couched in a conventional past tense. Events – albeit from the past – unfold along a linear time frame, but despite her removed perspective, she apparently never reflects beyond the present she reports. Given Stella’s character, this may be no more than an expression of her scattered immediacy, but that only becomes clear as we get to know her via her actions. This apparent contradiction of perspectives has to be ignored if the book is to work, but once overcome The Country Life is worth the effort.

 Stella - to say the least – is not a very competent person. But then no-one else in this little southern village seems to have much about them. She becomes a live-in personal carer for Martin Madden, a disabled seventeen-year-old who lives with his rather dotty parents on their apparently luxurious farm. Stella has neither experience, nor presumably references, nor the pre-requisite driving licence. Her employers don’t check anything, despite their reported bad experiences in the past.

Thus Stella becomes part of a rather mad family called Madden. Stella steadily learns more about the Maddens. They have their past, both collectively and individually. Pamela, a wiry, sun-tanned matriarch, is married to Piers. They have children, all of whom seem to have inherited different mixes of the foibles on offer. There’s a local scandal or two, rumours of mis-treatment, sexual impropriety and more, but it always seems to dissolve into innuendo. This, perhaps, is the country life. Stella herself is incompetent in the extreme. She gets sunburnt - in England(!), soils her shoes with melted tar from the road, gets drunk several times, falls into the pool, gets lost, cuts up her clothing, behaves inappropriately, steals on demand and can’t find the garden gate. It’s quite a week.

As the book progresses, it seems unsure whether it should be a sit-com or a farce. But at the centre of The Country Life is Stella’s developing relationship with Martin. He is used to being the centre of attention and knows how to play the part, how to manipulate. He may, it seems, have inherited much from his mother and perhaps a lot less from his father. The Country Life is beautifully written. It is both funny and engaging. Stella’s life becomes increasingly a farce, however, and this crowds out some of the other themes that might have come more interestingly to the fore. Rachel Cusk’s writing is always fluent, perhaps overdone here and there, but when you are that good at it, a little over-egging just adds to the richness.

Between The Assassinations by Aravind Adiga

Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger won the Booker Prize and was notable for its intriguing form. I thought it would be a hard act to follow. It would need a great writer to be able to make a repeat match of both originality and style with engaging content. So on beginning Between The Assassinations I was prepared to be disappointed. I need not have worried because Aravind Adiga’s 2010 novel is perhaps a greater success than the earlier prize winner.

The novel does not have a linear plot, nor does it feature any resolution to satisfy the kind of reader that needs a story. But it does have its stories, several of them. Between The Assassinations is in fact a set of short stories, albeit related, rather than a novel. But the beauty of the form is that the book sets these different and indeed divergent tales in a single place, a fictitious town called Kittur. It’s on India’s west coast, south of Goa and north of Cochin. Kittur presents the expected mix of religion, caste and class that uniquely yet never definitively illustrate Indian society.

And by means of stories that highlight cultural, linguistic and social similarities and differences, Aravind Adiga paints a compelling and utterly vivid picture of life in the town. The observation that this amalgam both influences and in some ways determines these experiences is what makes Between The Assassinations a novel rather than a set of stories. It is the place and its culture that is the main character. The title gives the setting in time.

The book’s material thus spans the years between the assassinations of the two Ghandis, Indira and Rajiv. So it is the 1980s, and politics, business, marriage, love, loyalty, development, change and corruption all figure. Aravind Adiga’s juxtaposition of themes to be found in Kittur town and society thus leads us through times of questioning, rapid change and wealth creation. The book’s major success is that this conducted tour of recent history never once leads the reader where the reader does not willingly want to go.

The stories are vivid, the personal relationships intriguing, the settings both informative and challenging. Between The Assassinations is a remarkable achievement. The author has succeeded in writing a thoroughly serious novel with strong intellectual threads via a set of related stories that can each be enjoyed at face value, just as stories, if that is what the reader wants. Writing rarely gets as sophisticated as this or indeed as enjoyable, since humour, often rather barbed, is always close to the surface. Between The Assassinations is a wonderful achievement.

Bel Canto by Anna Patchett

As a music lover, I wish I could sing the praises of Anna Patchett’s Bel Canto. I always look forward to reading books about musicians, especially composers, and usually I am disappointed. Bel Canto was no exception. Anna Pratchett is in good company, however, for I was not convinced by Ian McEwan’s character in Amsterdam, nor Carpentier’s in The Lost Steps, to name but a couple. Being a singer, I thought that Bel Canto’s principal character, Roxane Coss, might be more responsive to a writer’s pen, but she wasn’t.

Music is always a strange, inconstant friend. Though it never revolts, it can often disappoint. Even when programmes and performers seem completely matched, a spark may fail to ignite the whole into complete experience. Bel Canto lacked that spark. Bel Canto’s programme presents much promise.

Roxane Coss is a world renowned singer. She has performed everywhere, sung all the famous roles in the greatest houses and worked under the baton of every maestro. People don’t just admire her: it goes much further than that. Mr Hosokawa, a Japanese corporate bigwig, is one such worshipper.

When, for some reason, he finds himself in an unnamed amalgam of South American countries on his birthday, he is treated to an invitation only recital by said soprano at the house of Ruben Iglesias, Vice-President of the republic, no less. It’s interesting to note that the President himself had been invited, but he never attends any function that clashes with Coronation Street, or its Spanish language equivalent on the tele.

So, while Roxane Coss is waxing lyrical through her arias, the President no doubt is up to his neck in innuendo, melodrama and pouting looks that tell of treachery, infidelity, scorn and envy. Not a bit like opera… just add soap. Back in the Vice-President’s house, an admixture of invitees lap up the Italian in their diverse languages. There are Japanese speakers, Italian, French, Russian and Spanish, amongst others, as well as the occasional sentence in English.

A young Japanese interpreter in the employ of Mr Hosokawa, a lad called Gen, has all the gen needed to translate, sometime with a touch of humour. His skills were always going to be needed, but they become essential when the evening is hijacked by a terrorist group seeking hostages and their leverage. It’s not quite, “Take this residence to Cuba”, but it’s well on the way. While Graham Greene in his Honorary Consul used the incompetence of the act as plot device, strangely Ann Patchett never really explores just why it was that her own gang of terrorists missed their own boat by such a long way.

But then these guys – and gals – are not real terrorists, at least not the real terrorists that actually kill people. They are of a more refined type, a kind of semi-professional bunch with military connections as well as pretensions, but not much of an ideology. Early on, the unfortunate Vice-President gets one in the mush and needs sewing up around the face. It’s a pity that wound seemed not to affect his speech.

So here are the elements. A worshipping assemblage of music lovers divided by language but united by their interpreter are held hostage in a prominent residence which becomes besieged. They are held together by the commonality of their plight and the heavenly voice of Roxane Coss, which, luckily for all of them, holds up despite the strain. The relationships between the hostages, their love of music, their situation alongside tensions provided by captors and their pursuers ought to offer a wonderful opportunity for character, plot, relationships and reminiscences to come to the fore.

Unfortunately, they don’t and frankly, not much else emerges to fill the void. There’s a couple of romances, French lessons in the broom cupboard under the stairs, unlikely endings, even less likely beginnings. There’s a modicum of humour, but neither of the book’s threads, its music and its languages, are developed. It’s worth reading, but, like a concert where the performers didn’t gel, it ultimately disappoints.

The Housekeeper and The Professor by Yoko Ogawa

Yoko Ogawa has written a novel called The Housekeeper + The Professor. At least that’s what it says on the front. On the back it’s title replaces the + with “and”. It’s a good book, well written, engaging and thoroughly enjoyable, but it’s also a book that falls well short of its stated intention. Personally, I blame the designer, because on the title page there’s “and”, not the + symbol. The difference is important. The book’s content affirms that.

The Professor of the title is a former specialist academic mathematician and, guess what, the Housekeeper is his housekeeper. Back in the 1970s, the professor suffered a serious road accident, a head-on collision that left him seriously disabled, not physically, but mentally as a result of head injuries. He needs care, not least because his memory span is precisely eighty minutes. 

Anything that happened longer ago than four times twenty minutes is unknown to him. His life and knowledge from before the accident have been indelibly etched into an unchanging recollection of the past, but the present is eternally and precisely eighty minutes of age. His new housekeeper takes up her post. She finds a dishevelled old man with post-it notes stuck to his suit. It’s his way of remembering things that happened an hour and a half ago. His apparent disorganisation is something of an illusion. She soon finds that somehow memories trivia associated with the adhesive notes are stored. He loves baseball, and collects player portraits. But his sport dates from before his accident.

He has a sister-in-law who organises and oversees his care largely without intervention, except when needed. Gradually the single mother housekeeper becomes involved with the professor’s passion for mathematics – mainly numbers, it has to said. For him, it’s an order that originated with God. Some interesting conjunctions of number are identified. She cares, he enlightens. She learns. That’s the deal. The housekeeper has a young son. He has a rather flat head that reminds the professor of a square root sign. From that moment, the lad is known as Root, even by his mother. I find this not credible. Root and his mother get to know the professor and via him some aspects of mathematics that you might also find in puzzle books.

There’s a bit of number theory – Pythagorean engagement rings, perfect numbers, triangle numbers, series sums and – strangely out of place – Euler’s formula, without explanation or development. An odd conjecture surfaces and our previously non-mathematical housekeeper suddenly adopts all the technical language, the specialist names and even a concept or two without problem, despite typographical and technical errors in the text. Personally, I adore novels that deal with the concept of identity. Usually, however, it’s not its contrast with the concept of an equation that provides the spice.

The professor in Yoko Ogawa’s book seems not to notice the difference, despite his penchant for minute accuracy everywhere else in his life. Via a combination of baseball and numbers Root becomes enthralled, educated and inspired. It’s a good read and I applaud the author’s attempt at blending a mathematician’s passion for his subject with an initiate’s joy of revelation. But disbelief has to be suspended here. When Root is not there, the professor and his housekeeper seem to discuss his needs, despite the professor’s declared inability to remember his existence. There’s the equation versus identity issue above, but then that is related by the housekeeper, so the error might be hers. She, however, seems surprisingly unruffled by the renaming of her son and with ideas that would surely have seemed to be in a foreign language. It’s a bit of fun and worth reading, but as a novel it’s not an achievement.

Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz

Like father, like son… This could be the motto that underpins Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz. This might be a rather flippant way of summarising a novel approaching 250,000 words, and yes, there is much more than this in the Egyptian Nobel Prize Winner’s book. But it should be said at the outset that it is family relationships that dominate the book. 

The work has a broad canvas, but its substance is generally writ small, often within the walls of the family home. Palace Walk is the first of Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy, a series that spans that spans Egypt’s twentieth century. It features the family of al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al Jawad, a shopkeeper. Strangely, there seems to be little that is seen from his point of view, except of course that which he demands. Throughout he remains somewhat aloof, even inscrutable. I would not want to claim this to be a deliberate portrayal of paternal power. But whatever the case, planned or implied, these sketches of family relations are wonderfully credible as well as enlightening.

By contrast, we see much through the eyes of Amina, Ahmad’s long-suffering wife, who appears to tolerate her husband’s nightly excesses without either question or judgment. She even acts independently, just once, and is made to pay for it. There are two daughters, Khadija and Aisha. Khadija, the elder, has unfortunately inherited her father’s looks. Aisha, by contrast, is known for her beauty, and there is much discussion of potential husbands, associated with much anguish on the subject of who should marry first.

The sons are very different characters, but perhaps they each display different aspects of their father. The older ones of course develop an eye for the local talent and this leads to unexpected encounters with their father in unfamiliar surroundings in which he displays talents that no-one in the family suspected he had. The other talents on show are very much anticipated. When the youngest son befriends members of the British garrison in Cairo at the end of World War One, he is treated very much as a clown, a figure of fun, a role he seems to enjoy. This is clearly not dissimilar to the way the British appear to want to treat the country, not to mention the hated Australians.

Later, when this particular generation marches to demand political representation and power, it is British bullets that deny all rights. Like father, like son, the issues go round and round. Does anything change? If the reader approaches palace Walk as if it were a nineteenth century novel, its style, length and content will provide great enjoyment and insight. But don’t expect in this great work overt philosophy, analysis or comment. Egypt as described, especially within this family, was just not that sort of place.

Ladder Of Years by Anne Tyler

Delia, short for Cordelia, is the central character of Anne Tyler’s Ladder Of Years. As usual for Anne Tyler, Delia is a Baltimore resident, a wife, a mother and probably, at least from the outside, a pillar of strength and dependability in both family and community. The children are growing up. Which children don’t? Bet then it’s how they grow up that matters, isn’t it? 

Sam, the husband, is doing moderately well. Moderate seems to be the word, as far as Sam is concerned. He’s hardly made a success of the business he inherited from Delia’s father, but the family survives to inhabit a middle class, rather liberal niche in the common psyche. As Ladder Of Years opens, the family is holidaying by the sea and Delia is dressed, mentally, for the beach. And then, without warning, even to herself, she takes off. Just like that, whatever “that” might be.

She absconds. Goes missing. Disappears. There’s suspicion of drowning. A report appears in a Baltimore paper. The family fears she has come to harm. But no, she hasn’t. In fact, still dressed for the beach she is heading off to a place she doesn’t know with a stranger. It’s no particular stranger, just a stranger. Quite soon, and with new clothes, a new address and a changed life, Delia takes on a new identity. 

Though Baltimore wife and mother still lives in her head, she’s become a new Delia, single, independent and employed. In this new guise, she inter-reacts with her new community and gradually becomes part of it. Why did she leave the apparent safety, security and responsibility of her family? Not even she can answer. What slowly begins to emerge, however, is that Delia’s choice of opting out becomes increasingly one of opting in. 

By degree the characters in her new life start to become more demanding. Without needing to state everything explicitly, they start to assume Delia’s support and claim reliance upon her. She, of course, responds and finds that she now has two levels of responsibility created out of the demands of her new life and continued contact with her family. Interestingly, Delia, this pillar of support, never feels either at home or secure in either role. 

 And so it is via this scenario of identity change, relationships of dependency, insecure self-image, alongside a fixation of demand that Anne Tyler relates how Delia’s life unfolds. Delia notices a lot about people, but she’s no great analyst. Surely she’s the type to apologise before expressing an opinion, but would harbour unspoken bigotries like the rest of us. At the start of the book she seems confused. By the end, a few more rungs along the ladder of life, she apparently remains so. Perhaps the ladder is horizontal … and with irregular spacing… But then Delia has little time to consider such arcane ideas. After all, there are things to do, people to talk to, arrangements to be made, jobs to be done…

The Reader by Bernard Schlink

In his novel The Reader Bernard Schlink provides us with a pair of strong characters. As we get to know them, we find a challenge for ourselves. How would we have reacted in those circumstances? What would we have done? The challenge surfaces many times in the book and, by the end, the reader is probably confused by conflicting answers.

A review should not reveal plot. In the case of The Reader, this makes writing a review very hard, since what happens to these characters is the whole basis of the book. In some ways the relationship between them has to be interpreted and reinterpreted through a prism of what we know about them, and this should not be revealed. So what follows is mere outline. 

We first meet Michael Berg in his mid-teens. He’s a frail young man, rather disaffected and, as a result of missed time at school, an under-achiever. As the story progresses, he finds new energy and direction, completes a university degree, embarks upon a successful career and the usual muddled personal life. Michael, however, always wants to reflect, to analyse responses. At first glance Hanna is a rather different kind of person. She is in her thirties, has a son and works as a conductor on the trams.

One day she ups and leaves without notice, despite having been offered promotion by her boss. She resurfaces later, on trial in a distant future, accused of crimes from her past, crimes she shared with many others. Hanna seems to have an uncomplicated directness. It appears that she sees what she wants in life and pursues it. Michael and Hanna have a relationship. She is twice his age and in public everyone assumes that they are mother and son. But they have an intense, highly erotic arrangement. It changes Michael’s life, but perhaps merely occupies Hanna’s. At least that’s what we initially fear. 

When the couple are not coupling, Hanna demands that Michael read to her. He becomes her reader, and they spend many and regular hours at the pastime. When Hanna ups and leaves, Michael is devastated. They have had their arguments, but he cannot understand why she has gone. Then, years later, after lives have changed and they have drifted apart, Hanna resurfaces along with her dubious past. She is on trial.

Over a period of years Michael contacts her regularly. He makes sure she always has tapes of him reading to her. He makes no allowance for her taste, choosing to record what he personally wants to read. Hanna, it seems, cannot get enough of this. It is Hanna’s past that is on trial and the events in question are carefully documented and related in detail by those involved. But what were the motives? Why did these people do what they did? And exactly who might be culpable? And what would you have done under such circumstances? That is the challenge. By the end of The Reader, Bernard Schlink has turned our perceptions of these people onto their heads and back again. As you read, you, the reader, should always remember the book’s challenge. What would you have done?

The Captain And The Enemy by Graham Greene

The Captain And The Enemy is one of Graham Greene’s late works. Like most of his novels, it is quite short, deceptively intense and, despite what might appear to be a quite literal plot, highly enigmatic.

Then captain of the title is a man we hardly get to know. His name might be Smith, or Baxter, or even anything he might have noticed in passing that morning. His title might be captain, or colonel, or sergeant, or even plain mister. Doubtless he had been Lord at some point.

He can become anyone he wants, but at heart he’s a pirate, sailing alone through life in search of elusive treasure. One day he was whiling time away with an acquaintance, a man always called The Devil, playing backgammon (or was it chess?). The stakes rose and The Devil wagered his son. The colonel won.

The book opens with the colonel claiming ownership of Victor Baxter, then a boy at a boarding school. The colonel abducts the boy. They both agree that Victor is a naff name and from then on the boy is called Jim.

At home, if home it be, is Lisa, the woman to whom the captain continues to devote his life, even if the norm is devotion from afar. Lisa gets irregular cash or cheques through the post to cover the housekeeping and never questions the source.

The Captain, of course, never offers anything more. Jim, as the lad Victor has become, becomes part of the insoluble equation. He keeps a journal for some reason and, discovering it years later, he embarks upon an edit. And then Jim is grown up and in search of the man he now calls his father.

He left Lisa and the household years before in search of fortune. Jim tracks him down to Panama and discovers a strange life packed with intrigue. When they meet again, Jim finds a changed man, someone he hardly recognises. Jim’s response is to lie to him. The Colonel is eventually revealed as a man with principles, principles worth personal risk. At least that’s what he says today, and who ever knows about tomorrow?

And so we are left with memories of people who live towards the edge of even their own lives. They adopt identities bestowed by circumstance and change apparently at will. Who cares about contradiction? I mean really cares?

The Enchantress Of Florence by Salman Rushdie

The Enchantress Of Florence by Salman Rushdie is a thoroughly entertaining read. It’s a super-real experience, so vivid and sharp that the focus starts to blur even imagined distinction between the real, the unreal and the surreal. And when everything becomes clear, the process starts again.

We are transported to the sixteenth century and the court of the Mughal Emperor, Akbar the Great, who has many concerns. Akbar, indeed, has all the concerns you would expect any self-respecting emperor might have. He agonises, for instance, over being “I” or “We”. Usually, of course, as befits his status, he is “We”. He has grown up as “We”, assumed himself to be “We” and continues to recognise himself as “We”. But recently he has tried “I” and found it lies strangely on the tongue and might even have changed his reflection in the mirror.

On top of this, he worries about his succession, the indolence and ambition of his offspring, the comfort of his harem, the performance of his armies, the future of his fortunes. But Akbar is also the ruler of a vivid imagination. His favourite queen, the one who adds grace to his harem, the one whose every step must be upon polished tiles, exists only in his imagination. He spends more time with her than with any other of his wives, and she probably consumes more of the palace budget than anyone, so perfectly does Akbar desire to provide for her insatiable needs.

So what might Akbar the Great make of a fair-haired young man in a multi-coloured coat who arrives with a story to tell, a claim to make and tricks of the hand that can be explained as illusions? His name is Uccello, bird, when we meet him aboard ship. Then he is Vespucci, a relative of he who had in the recent past sailed to and named the real new world that Columbus had both missed and misinterpreted. 

And later he transforms into Mogor dell' Amore, the mughal of love, or perhaps with a little imagination, the Mughal’s love-child. And more than that, he arrives bearing a letter from the Queen of England, herself a virgin in her own legend. Uccello Mogor Vespucci, whoever he might be, also has a claim. He is a direct descendent of the Mogul royal line by virtue of an almost forgotten princess, Qara Köz, who as an infant was abducted, traded, swapped, travelled, perhaps trammelled until she emerged in Florence as a young woman of enchanting, perhaps bewitching beauty.

Mogor Vespucci Uccello related how he and her apparently permanent, inseparable assistant, her Mirror, captivated the interest of Medici Florence. Suitors queued at the door, including Argalia, if indeed that be his name, a soldier of fortune. The abandoned princess is then adopted by European high society and learns to live by its rules. She has liaisons whose confusion is only doubled by the constant proximity of the Mirror, and offspring springs outward. Now for an emperor who already has the facility of imagining his favourite wife, Vespucci Uccello Mogor’s story fires the mind, re-ignites memory and raises possibility.

He dreams dreams, interprets them, re-interprets what he doesn’t like and then seeks them in reality, only to find them. A conjoined history that spans Asia and Europe unfolds and he, alongside the reader, sees the familiar in a new, conflicting light. But in the end, who is telling stories? Are the stories true? And, if we can imagine, who might judge them to be false? Is this trickery? Or is it claim? The Enchantress Of Florence is an enchanting read. It is provocative, humorous and in places iconoclastic. Fiction and fact become blurred and, even in reality, we can hardly distinguish between them. We create stories to enhance our experience and sometimes we believe them. Sometimes we also deign to believe what is real, but often we cannot agree on a definition of the label. It’s a magical experience, a conjuror’s achievement.

A Grain Of Wheat by Ngugi wa Thiong’o

Returning to a masterpiece to re-examine its brilliance is always a risky business. There is always the threat of disappointment, a gradual realisation that an earlier decade’s evaluation might now reveal merely one’s own naiveté, a contemporary – and no doubt illusory - sophistication of falsely-assumed wisdom. Perhaps it might all be just appear a little mundane from new detachment.

So it was with some trepidation that I again began A Grain Of Wheat by Ngugi wa Thiong’o. I first read it in the 1970s when I lived in Kenya. In those days, the author still answered to ‘James’ and the novel was on the Literature in English syllabus for the East African Certificate of Education. Our students came from a poor area, weren’t the most academic and studied in their third language. I wonder daily at their commitment, hard work and achievement. A Grain Of Wheat is not an easy book. Over-simplification of a complex world was not amongst its author’s intentions.

I read it again a couple of times a decade later. Then I found layers that as a relative youngster I had missed. This was no longer just a work of historical fiction offering illustration and interpretation of Kenya’s struggle for independence. It was now also a committed political novel, never a polemic, however, since it was via the actions of its characters that the images and relationships were defined. And this time, nearly twenty more years on, I find the book’s stature has grown again. Not only has it passed the test of time, its themes have, if anything, become even more pertinent. And this time, confirming the book’s now unquestioned status as a masterpiece, I find yet another strand of meaning laced into its construction. It is not merely a masterpiece. Indeed, it ought to required reading for British students, just in case there might be anyone left with any doubts about the reality of colonialism.

A Grain Of Wheat is a novel. It is set in Kikuyuni, ridges rising north from the Nairobi area towards Mount Kenya, Kirinyaga, Girinyaga. The setting is real. Its story is placed firmly within a particular place and time. We are in the last years of Kenya’s struggle for independence, the goal of Uhuru. But Ngugi describes and illustrates this history via the lives and experiences of characters who inhabit a small town, Thabai. History tells us blankly the sum of their efforts, the eventual victory against the British, the lowering of the Union Jack in December 1963 and its replacement by Kenya’s black red and green. But via fiction, Ngugi gives us far more than this. We feel history develop via the experience, the detail, the suffering, the commitment, the inadequacies and the treachery of people who lived through the time.

Thabai has a small town’s usual share of freedom fighters, collaborators, colonial officers, whites of both sexes, beautiful girls, ambitious men. There are Christians, traditionalists, traitors, old codgers and plenty of others who claim to be human. Acts perpetrated by the colonial administrators and their lackeys are sometimes nothing less than raw sadism. They seem to be motivated by a keen, though unjustifiable sense of superiority, an apparent mission to Anglicise an unwilling world. Ngugi could have concentrated on these acts, vilified their perpetrators and thus created simple bad-boys to serve his plot. But A Grain Of Wheat is much more subtle than that. In many ways, these people are victims as well. Their only advantage is that, for a while, they have power on their side. And it is the struggle of motivated people that must wrest this advantage from them.

A Grain Of Wheat presents characters who suffer for what they do, struggle to achieve what they want to become. They want to remain faithful to their convictions, but in a time of strife motives are often provided by the most pressing influence, and often that does not have right on its side.

What comes across this time from reading A Grain Of Wheat is the book’s intense Christian allegory. Joseph and Mary here are Gikonyo and Mumbi, perhaps an original coupling of legend. He is even a carpenter and Mumbi’s child actually belongs to someone else, Karanja. He is a man tainted with the sins of a previous age and surely he has passed these on to his child, who is born with their originality. And as far as Gikonyo is concerned, Mumbi’s child is a virgin birth.

The child, of course, is the new Kenya, born with all the injustices and sins of the past, but charged with its own independence, its potential to develop into its unknown future. The fact that it will be offered in sacrifice on the cross of capitalism is a reality lived in Ngugi’s later work.

A Grain Of Wheat not only bears re-reading. It is a powerful enough vision to sustain re-interpretation, though of course only at the level of detail. The book’s message was always clear, though always subtly drawn. It is a great, great achievement.

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A Grain of Wheat (Penguin Modern Classics)

Coasting by Jonathan Raban

Jonathan Raban’s Coasting is a book that defies labels. It’s not a novel. It might be a travel book. It might also be an autobiography, or even a politicised journal. What it is not is dull. Back in the 1980s, Jonathan Raban decided to chill out on a boat. He found the Gosfield Maid, a hearty, old-fashioned wooden thing that could chug along at a few knots and decided to circumnavigate the circumnavigable Britain. He failed. He opted out of the northern challenge and took the easy route through the Caledonian Canal. None of this is at all relevant to the book, by the way, because it’s not a travelogue. And who cares if, on a quest to record the intricacies of an island’s coast, you miss out a bit? 

 But Jonathan Raban does travel Britain’s coast. And here and there he describes experience, recalls memories and reacts to current events, but in no particular order. He is particularly enamoured with the Isle of Man. Its insularity seems to mirror, perhaps concentrate, the insularity of the English. The Isle of Man’s microcosm occupies much of the early part of the book, so much in fact that the reader wonders how the author will manage to cover the rest. Rest assured, however, for he has no intention of doing that. 

The book might also not be an autobiography, but we learn a lot of the author’s parents and family life in the Raban household. They started as fairly conventional Church of England vicar and vicar’s wife cassocked and aproned in rural serenity. We meet them later, slightly hippied, father bearded and radicalised, both CNDed and residing alongside Pakistani grocers and amidst less salubrious activities along the Solent. The author’s school years also figure. He was unlucky enough to attend a less than prestigious public school. For Americans, for whom the label will be incomprehensible, I qualify that in England public schools are private. Don’t ask. But they are renowned for their unique, often idiosyncratic cultures. 

 Jonathan Raban regularly found himself at the fag-end of upper middle-class society, but without the personal economic base to back up his pretensions. Coasting, by the way, is not an autobiography. Neither is Coasting a memoir. But Jonathan Raban calls in at Hull on England’s east coast. He finds a largely forgotten city that once fished. By the 1980s its giant fish dock was deserted, its trawlers chased out by Britain’s defeat in the Cod war with Iceland. He went to university there and befriended one of the nation’s great poets of the century, Philip Larkin. Their meeting is precious. He had also conversed with Paul Theroux along the way. 

 Coasting is also not a political book. Jonanthan Raban, however, does record some detail of Margaret Thatcher’s conflict with the Argentine over The Falklands and with the English over coal mines. Coasting is also not a personal confession on identity, but the author clearly does not number himself amongst the victorious Tories who idolised their imperatrix. Coasting is a compelling read, a snapshot of personal and societal priorities from 1980s Britain. If you lived through the influences and references, the book presents a vibrant commentary on the period. If you didn’t, either because you are too young or not British, it’s a good way of learning how history surely does repeat itself. Coasting is a book that can become almost whatever you want it to be. It is superbly written, journalistic in places, poetic in others. It’s a travel book that goes wherever it wants. View this book on amazon Coasting (Picador Books)

The Road Home by Rose Tremain

I approached Rose Tremain’s The Road Home expecting a vivid story drawn on a life of struggle, whose central character might grapple with life’s traumas, opportunities, joys and disappointments. I also expected that all of this would be placed in a setting where landscape, physical, social and psychological, but perhaps not political, would both inform and influence the characters’ lives. I was not disappointed, but for the most part I remained less than surprised, apart from the fact that Rose Tremain in The Road Home approached a contemporary political issue. 

The Road Home has modern day economic migration at its core. Lev is Polish. He has worked in a sawmill in his home town, the less than prosperous Baryn. He has a family and he used to be married. But now, as a single parent, despite the assistance of friends and family, he finds there is no future at home, no visible means of support. So he leaves for London on a bus in search, presumably, of streets paved with gold. On that journey he meets Lydia, a compatriot with connections and in some unlikely way or other they manage to stay in contact throughout the book.

Clearly their lives were never meant to intertwine, but circumstance, in The Road Home, is forever a local confinement. It simultaneously restricts and empowers, and then conspires with time to create a bond of friendship between Lev and Lydia that transcends class, interest, geography, expectation and assumption. Rose Tremain’s story takes Lev to different jobs, a kebab shop, two quite different restaurants, an old people’s home and a vegetable form. She has him encounter low life on the street, the high-brow in a concert hall, and also the other-worldly in a theatre. He spots pretence – it might not be that difficult! – but he also appreciated sincerity. He encounters self-obsession, honesty and love, always in unequal measure in every aspect of life. 

Eventually, his travels become both self-revelatory and enriching. He comes to terms with loss and turns the void in his life to personal gain. There is no fairy-tale get-rich-quick ending for Lev. The Road Home is no sugary advertisement for individuality, no attempted apology for market capitalism. This is a personal quest to cope with personal tragedy and unacceptable economic reality. The road does eventually lead home, but only when Lev and his destination have both been transformed. In their own way, neither is the same as they were at the start. 

And, I suppose, that’s the point. Life takes us wherever it goes. As it drags us along, either we learn and survive, or merely survive, or not. The process is given. The result is speculative. Lev survives. And he learns. He is a credible, real character, with a credible, real life. But there were aspects of The Road Home that I found disappointing. The scenario that adopted Lev at his destination was, for me, too isolated. Migrants often rely heavily on networks, but Lev has no contact save for Lydia, whom he met on the bus. He has no relatives to phone, nor friends, nor relatives of friends, nor someone from his home town who knew someone from somewhere else who just happened to be in business in Essex. This I found unlikely.

In a literary sense, this liberated Lev from his background and thus enabled Rose Tremain to layer upon his experience exactly what she wanted. This was convenient. It also rendered Lev’s point of view wholly individual. He apparently experienced everything in the naiveté of complete isolation, the foreignness of British behaviour thus presented as if seen in a laboratory analyst’s test tube. In this context, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Rose Tremain used Lev’s trials and tribulations merely as a vehicle to let off some steam about aspects of contemporary British culture that she finds abhorrent, embarrassing or reprehensible. This, and not Lev’s economic migration, is the rather failed political aspect of the book. Christy, Lev’s Irish live-in landlord, was rather more stereotypical than he needed to be. A plumber with a broken marriage and a drink problem might be plausible, but the last Irish plumber I met in London had so much work he earned a fortune and owned several London houses on which he collected rents. Maybe his name was Christy. Lev’s relationship with the eventually predictable Sophie also seemed unlikely. They worked together in a ground-breaking new restaurant, encountered the pretentiousness of a cutting-edge playwright and together even got involved in some social conscience. 

I would have no criticism here if Lev, throughout all this experience, had seemed more engaged, rather than experiencing everything as if he were merely a recipient. Out of your own context and background, you have the opportunity, even the right, to be super-opinionated, and this is a right that Lev seems to forego. Overall, The Road Home is an excellent read. Its characters are engaging and its events are eventually both credible and poignant. I felt, however, that it lived too much outside its principal figure’s psyche. But then it chose to concentrate on his experience of change, one aspect of which is travel, itself, rather than his responses and judgments. Sometimes travel itself intensifies responses, and it is possible that Lev’s experiences explore this aspect of experience. So when he returns home, as the book’s title requires he does, he is a changed man. But now he is also newly skilled, enriched and motivated. The Road Home does more than a little of that for the reader as well. View the book on amazon The Road Home

City Of Spades by Colin MacInnes

Colin MacInnes wrote City Of Spades over fifty years ago. At the time its depiction of London from an African immigrant’s point of view both shocked and revealed. I wondered whether a contemporary reader might now find its perspective hackneyed, its impact diminished by changes in attitudes towards race that we assume have happened in the intervening years. Half a century ago, the bones of Johnny Fortune’s story might have shocked. Somehow, at least for those anywhere near the issues, I doubt it. 

He arrives in London from Nigeria to study meteorology, an activity that, for a whole host of reasons, he manages singularly to avoid. A newly-appointed welfare officer is charged with the task of easing the exigencies of life for youngsters from the warmer parts of the Commonwealth who come to be weaned by the mother of the Empire. He is appointed to care for Johnny’s file. But before long, while Johnny designs his own curriculum, it is our young civil servant who is receiving the education, an education about the nature of his own society, or at least a side of it that he might previously have been totally and blissfully unaware.

Perhaps paradoxically, Johnny meets people who regularly do things that are less than legal. He encounters substances with their associated informal retail trade, dubious service-sector occupations with their associated facilitators, activities behind closed doors that would be unseemly at the street corner. In short, opportunities in several shapes and sizes appear at almost every step. And then, of course, the police turn up and try to call a halt to the party. Suffice it to say that Johnny Fortune’s fortunes lead to various encounters, some of which are within the law, and some with the law. Invariably, they involve little prosperity and even less formal learning. 

If the plot’s content might have shocked residents of areas outside inner London in the late 1950s, then today it would not. Times certainly have changed. But then shock was not the book’s intent, even fifty years ago. Shock would have encouraged exaggeration which Colin MacInnes only ever suggests to create comedy. What City of Spades tries to do, in my opinion, is question those assumptions we all make about the nature of our society, our identity, our ideas of culture, nationality and history. And the book still manages to achieve this, because those themes, if not their settings, are eternal. I was reminded, on this reading, of The Rake’s Progress. When we follow the exploits of Tom Rakewell, we make allowances that accommodate differences between eighteenth century life and its contemporary manifestation in order to see through to the principles and ideas. We do not, for instance, need to believe that Nick Shadow is actually the embodiment of The Devil, as advertised, to understand the folly of Tom’s decision to seek personal aggrandisement in London rather than a slower-paced but perhaps more sincere provincial predictability. We do, however, have to understand a certain moral landscape in order to interpret the schemes that Tom pursues, despite the fact that they now seem strange and a tad unlikely. It’s in this spirit, I believe, that we should approach City Of Spades in order to identify, experience and understand much in the work that clearly transcends merely historical significance.

Also like The Rake’s Progress, City Of Spades is a highly witty and humorous look at some aspects of its contemporary society. In the latter’s case, it reveals double standards relating to race, class difference and a host of societal characteristics whose existence received middle class sentiment might seek to deny. Nowadays, we might see many of these revelations as highly unremarkable, despite the fact that, for many, they remain not quite mundane. Colin MacInnes’s City Of Spades still retains the ability to make its point in its original, apparently durable terms. In the 1950s, a stereotypical view of Britishness might have included claims to trust, honesty, integrity in public life, a police force that was the toast of the earth and a society that both cared for the vulnerable and had time to love animals. In City Of Spades, Johnny Fortune had drugs planted on him, was beaten up in custody and lived ordinarily in layer of society whose existence the polite either denied or ignored. But then he has African. Times don’t change. But the title might have. View this book on amazon City of Spades

Hotel de Dream by Edmund White

In Hotel de Dream, Edmund White presents a fellow writer, a fellow-countryman called Stephen Crane. Stephen is well connected, but ill-equipped. We are in turn of the century England. That’s old-England, by the way, and we are tuning into the twentieth, not twenty-first century. Henry James drops by occasionally. Conrad sometimes stumbles hereabouts and Arnold Bennett throws in an occasional sentence. 

But Stephen’s social life is hardly hectic. He is ill, tubercular, and in need of treatment. He seeks what might be a last chance, perhaps, to deny or merely postpone the inevitable. A clinic in Germany might be able to offer an answer. If only he had the money. While his carer, Cora, struggles to meet his needs, Stephen recalls a street-waif in New York. Elliott is in his mid-teens. He sells newspapers and does a little thieving on the side. Prostitution fills otherwise unproductive hours. Stephen further recalls the boy’s beauty, his wholly pragmatic approach to securing a livelihood and also his syphilis, a condition for which the writer tries to arrange treatment.

Via the germ of memory, Stephen, despite his own failing health, begins to invent a narrative. He writes from his sick bed, his weakness eventually requiring he dictates to his partner. He tells the story of Elliott’s arrival in New York and his introduction to the ways of the street by an Irish red-head boy who is in need of an accomplice. He describes the petty larceny and the occasional servicing of specific services for casual clients that provide the boy with a living. When Theordore, a middle-aged, unhappily-married family man takes a liking to the boy, everyday life takes a different twist. Elliott and his accomplice have just done for Theodore’s wallet. The older man, however, hardly notices the loss, so taken is he with the lad’s delicate, almost porcelain but ailing beauty. 

Theodore and Elliott the lad become lovers and Theodore’s respectable career as a banker becomes increasingly compromised by the pressure of having to provide with the boy’s needs, his own desires and his family’s respectability. Stephen Crane’s own condition deteriorates. As he heads to the Continent for last-ditch restorative treatment, he has to dictate his writing to his carer, herself a former brothel owner. And so Edmund White skilfully presents parallel narratives relating Stephen’s treatment and decline and Theodore’s self-destructive obsession with Elliott. Together, they proceed towards their perhaps inevitable conclusions. 

All of this happens in around 80,000 words. Hotel de Dream is far from a long book, and yet it manages to pursue both themes adequately. Edmund White’s style is nothing less than beautiful throughout. He is economic with language, but also poetic and in places highly elegant. The book is a real joy to read. But there remains the problem of the subject matter. Edmund White appears to believe that the homosexual, even paedophilic nature of the writer’s fiction is inherently interesting because of its subject matter. Without that, the predictable decline of the writer would be less than interesting. The process was hardly original. After all, Chopin had already trod this path three quarters of a century earlier! And to greater effect! Edmund White does ask some questions about attitudes towards homosexuality, about double standards and also about loveless marriage. But they are questions merely asked. 

There are only cameos of the detailed scenarios that might suggest answers. But at the core of Hotel de Dream is the assertion that Stephen Crane is one of America’s greatest writers. An early death and an interest in risqué subject matter conspired, however, to keep him from the wider public gaze. Though Edmund White’s book works in itself, it fails to convince the reader of this grand assertion about its subject. To make its point, it would need to be weightier, broader and offer much more evidence. Its apparent self-satisfaction with the mere statement of sexual proclivity falls well short of real substance. But then lives may be substantially less than substance. Hotel de Dream is a captivating read and an engaging, often beautiful study. View the book on amazon Hotel De Dream

The Book Of Illusions by Paul Auster

Paul Auster’s The Book Of Illusions offers the reader pretty much what the title promises. It’s a book and there are illusions! By the time we arrive at the end of the tale, however, we perhaps see the two terms as synonyms. Throughout, reality changes to fiction, fantasy becomes fact. An academic’s study of an actor’s comedy leads to an intimate involvement with the subject’s life. That life has itself become a fiction, lived with a declared aim of producing films that no-one will see. In the films, fantasies are enacted which later become real, and by design, thus rendering the original merely rehearsal. Meanwhile, the academic translates a biography so long it seems a lifetime’s work is needed to recreate it afresh.

But who knows what in that memoir might be invention, mere illusion? Hector Mann is a silent movie star. He has an enigmatic style that was never fully exploited in the industry because of interpersonal relationship problems with others in his studio. He would never have made it in talkies anyway because of a thick immigrant’s accent. I have just used a relative term as if it were an absolute. I meant, of course, that Hector Mann was an immigrant to the United States. Hector Mann, incidentally, is also Hector Spelling, amongst others.

Professor Zimmer, a recent victim of family loss via the indisputable finality of an air crash has spent much effort researching the life and career of Hector Mann. He has written a book on the star’s silent movies. The comedy, it seems, is all in the slight movement of the hairline moustache, the actor’s trademark. But there was much more, such as innovation, poetry and inner meaning within Hector Mann’s characters and plots. One day, Professor Zimmer’s wife and kids are no more and, decades earlier, Hector’s tenuous working relationships dissolve to nil via conflict. The learned professor descends into booze and an apparently interminable translation of Chateaubriand’s history. Hector leaves film and wanders elsewhere, soon to make a living out of live pornography. It’s a role he was born for, but his true identity, at least the one he has publicly shared, once discovered, becomes his downfall. He runs away from the revelation of his self.

In the middle of a mid-West backwater, a place out of which Hector created a fiction only later to render it real, an act of heroism brings a couple together. They gel. But the resulting arrangement is complex. An inheritance facilitates a totally private exploration of personal interest and thus imprisoned talent. New films are made, but they are never aired. They are different, even revolutionary, but no-one ever sees them because Hector and his new partner have opted for remote obscurity. Professor Zimmer, having assumed that Hector had died, finds out that he is still alive. There’s a chance that his book is incomplete. Another relationship gels when Alma, the daughter of one of Hector’s collaborators, visits the professor to share a project. Together they travel to New Mexico, where Hector lies close to death. 

There they discover a life’s work that might change the history of cinema, but it’s a life’s work that was created for purely private purposes and carrying its own death warrant. In The Book Of Illusions, Paul Auster seems to juxtapose a reality that seems less than real with fiction that feels immediate. It’s a blurring of experience and invention, with only one reality, itself unreal, definitive. It’s a superb book, brilliantly constructed, utterly credible, but constantly surprising. The characters’ lives turn in circles. They seem only in part control and yet they always retain the option of decision. Their creativity produces a string of illusion, much of it quite real or destined to become so. And be under no illusion, the amount of destiny that we control could depend on how ruthlessly we pursue it.

View the book on amazon The Book of Illusions

New York Days, New York Nights by Stephen Brook

I have just done another tour of New York. It’s a city whose streets I have walked, whose life I have encountered, whose people I have known. But I have never been there. New York, Like Paris and London, is a city where writers switch on their professional noticing and recording. A good proportion of novelists seem to want to live there. It’s a city where journalists apparently never have to travel far for a story and where social commentators uncover endless lines of interest.

And in the early 1980s Stephen Brook, an English visitor, took his turn at plodding the streets, buttonholing the affluent and dabbling with low life in order to generate his book, New York Days, New York Nights. It was a task he took seriously. His mission covered the city’s politics, food, shopping, sexuality, power, social structure, ethnic relations, commerce, crime and apparently every other aspect of its existence, but with only scant regard for its history.

We learn how on Manhattan air space can be traded, how the city’s craving for constant change means that there is little sense of permanence. We visit late night bars and clubs, experience the gay-scene low-life at first hand, then at second hand and eventually at the level of the mutual anonymous grope. We visit jails, courts, police beats and other arresting areas. We talk to mayors, ex-mayors and would-be mayors. We feel debt and wealth in unequal measure. Stephen Brook appears not to want to leave any concrete block unturned.

But though Stephen Brook’s journey through New York’s unique experience is nothing less than encyclopedic, his experience seems to remain that of the outsider, the committed but still detached tourist. As each of the book’s many chapters runs to its close and another opens, we can almost hear the writer begin with, “And here’s another thing…” Well before the end we feel that the author is on a mission to collect in order to exhibit. In the end, we feel we have been on a city tour bus and listened to the commentary, but that we still have to walk the streets to begin the real experience.

But like all impressionistic descriptions of contemporary life, it becomes both less relevant and more interesting as it ages. It becomes irrelevant because its original concept is superseded, rendered mere whimsy by the passing of time. Its intention is to be contemporary, after all, and that quality is soon lost. But twenty-five years on, having been reminded that the city remains eager for constant change, it becomes fascinating to reflect on what has or might have changed.

In 2009, we have a financial crisis, rich man’s crime, an economy laden with unemployment and debt, recession and portent of doom and gloom. We also have celebrity, overt riches and conspicuous consumption alongside poverty, near-destitution, drug addiction and poor man’s crime. So what’s new? One major change is that during Stephen Brook’s journey, the existence of AIDS deserves mention, but little more. During visits to bath houses, the author experiences at first hand the workings, insertions, thrusts and suspended machinations of gay promiscuity – sorry, there is no other word – and the scenes he describes seem better fitted to a fantasy porn movie than any reality. A dimension we don’t feel in all of this is the contrast with attitudes that one would expect to be prevalent in middle America. Surely it is that contrast that illustrates the difference between New York and the rest of the country?

But New York Days, New York nights remains a rich and rewarding trip. (The city’s drug scene, but the way, is such an aspect of daily life that it deserves frequent but only passing comment.) Though the reader may occasionally tire of Stephen Brook’s lengthy trek through the city, it is an account that has endured and that still interests, perhaps because the place itself and its people remain interesting. View this book on amazon New York Days, New York Nights (Picador Books)