Worst Fears by Fay Weldon

Fay Weldon’s novel Worst Fears starts and finishes with bereavement. It examines how a woman deals with simultaneous loss and revealed betrayal. Alexandra is an actress, if I might be excused such gender specificity. She is also quite successful. She is currently appearing in a London West End production of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. She is therefore away from home a lot. Her husband Ned has just died, apparently discovered on the floor of the family home by a visitor. It was a sudden and massive heart attack. Alexandra wonders what might have brought it on. She takes time off work, thus allowing an understudy temporarily to take her role. 

She returns to the rickety, old, antique-stuffed cottage in the country. It is perhaps a rural idyll that now has to be rewritten. Her worst fears are that there is more than meets the eye. She also has some hopes, but from the start it seems unlikely they will be realised. She is greeted by the dog, Diamond, who seems to know something is wrong. She contacts local acquaintances, Lucy and Abbie, whom she suspects know more than they are saying. Hamish, her husband’s brother, comes to stay to help sort things out. Sascha, Alexandra and Ned’s little boy is with Irene, Alexandra’s mother. It happens often when Alexandra is away at work. 

Her husband Ned, as usual needed space at home to concentrate. He was, by the way, was an authority on theatre, a critic, an expert on Ibsen and also interested in costume design. As Alexandra delves into recent events, she discovers a tangle of interests, relationships and liaisons. All of them have implications for her, despite the fact that she was often not directly involved. The protagonists relate directly to one another. They socialise, if that might be the right word. They interact. They act. They play-act. Alexandra’s worst fears begin to materialise. Ned’s surname is Ludd. It is surely not a coincidence that he shares a name with one of the wreckers of history. He is the only developed male character in the novel, despite his being dead. He never speaks, but his presence pervades, perhaps even controls everything that the still living can do. The truths of his life have been at best partial, his interests specifically personal. It seems that the women are positioning themselves to lay claim to ownership of his memory. 

And thus recollection, rumour and revelation unfold their tangle. The above may suggest a rather one-dimensional approach towards a feminist moral, but it is much more subtle than that. This thread is there, of course, and is epitomised when Alexandra’s part in A Doll’s House – itself a play about women and emancipation – is exploited to success by her understudy via sexual stereotyping. And Worst Fears opens with two of the women involved viewing Ned’s body, their attention drawn to a part of his anatomy that is to become one of the book’s main actors. Their reverence is sincere as they genuflect before their flaccid altar. This accepted, it seems also that the book deals more fundamentally with the more universal issues of self-interest and selfishness. All of these characters, despite their often social or private relations, are in conflict. They compete with one another and even with themselves. When liberation becomes a possibility, it is revealed as no more than an opportunity for even greater self-obsession, a means of shutting out the interest of others. 

 As the plot of Worst Fears unfolds, the impression it leaves is that these accomplished, middle-class, apparently comfortable people are all still engaged in a primeval struggle for raw animal dominance. The currency that is hoarded in the process remains the same as it would have been if the characters had never evolved from quadruped apes in a forest gang. There is no liberation here, for anyone, except, that is, via their words, the very weapons they use to prod, punch, pierce the reality that effectively confines them to themselves. These could be anyone’s worst fears. View the book on amazon Worst Fears

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake presents the reader with a significant but rewarding challenge. Though as an author she rejects any association with the term “science fiction”, that basically is the genre in which this novel lives. And it really does come to life, though exactly which life-form might be open to debate. Oryx and Crake are nicknames. Both are animal species and both are extinct. Oryx is female and Crake is male. They are both acquaintances of Snowman, who is really Jimmy. We are in a dystopic future – a common enough setting for a sci-fi. 

But where Margaret Atwood’s work transcends such clichés of genre is in the development and description of character. Not only is their situation remarkable, so are their responses to it. What they sense as mundane is quite different from the reader’s. From very early on in the book, we engage primarily with the characters and their responses, but we know immediately that we are in a different world that we see only through their assumptions. This is writing of real skill.

Eventually it is the nature of the dystopia that provides the tension. We are all products of environment and circumstance., but in Oryx and Crake both of these are to some extent the products of the characters’ labour. Though there are no lengthy descriptions to set the scene, it is the events that led up to the world’s parlous state that are central to the story. We are in a future where human society is fragmented and disjointed. What began as the operation of a market has forced a complete separation of social classes. The clean, even sterile, world of the middle class intellectual is a closed world. Filtered, protected, disease-free. Genetic engineering has bred out of existence many of those annoying aspects of humanity. 

That was, of course, before the environment was declared toxic, a fact that is a mere given for the book’s characters. Growing up in such a world presents its own challenges. The usual ones of family break-up, unrealised aspiration, selfishness, self-obsession and power-lust obviously survive. But in a world where anything has a price and everything is sold, at least virtually, how is a growing lad to approach life? Well, no doubt, they’ll make a pill for it. Education is rigidly class-based, of course, so no change there then. And then enter, jointly, a genetic engineer so brilliant that he can transform every aspect of even the already transformed and a willingly sold-on sex slave who has starred in many a virtual experience. Bring the two together and the chemistry surely has to reach instability. Jimmy the Snowman is their admirer, colleague and acquaintance, though never in that order. And, if it can go wrong, it probably will, just like it did in the past. 

 Oryx and Crake is no “Genetic Mutants Rule Manhattan”. It is a much more subtle and engaging idea than that. But perhaps the idiom did take over too much, thus allowing Margaret Atwood to get just a little too much frustration with contemporary life off her chest at one go. When it came, the emergence of a plot and denouement seemed a little contrived. And there were places where things did seem to get bogged down. But Oryx and Crake is also an experimental book. It is written from inside the experience of characters whose values have been sold on as cheaply as life itself. When, eventually, you cut your foot, however, it still hurts, despite what the product claims on the tin. 

So, as ever with Margaret Atwood’s writing, it’s the humanity and character that comes through, making Oryx and Crake a strange but rewarding glimpse of a strangely familiar future. View the book on amazon Oryx and Crake

Another Part Of The Wood by Beryl Bainbridge

Another Part Of The Wood by Beryl Bainbridge first appeared in 1968. It was a significant year. The book’s vintage shows through via passing reference to recognisable ephemera. Characters rejoice in wearing flared trousers, for instance, and remark when P J Proby sings on the car radio. Quaint, wasn’t it? There’s a holiday retreat in the north Wales hills. There are some cabins in the wood. They offer what would sound like very basic accommodation in today’s terms. But back in the 1960s, when foreign package holidays were still not the norm and no more likely encountered than a week in a caravan at Flamborough, the holiday-makers in the book no doubt looked forward to the experience. It was then, as now, a trip back to nature. Beryl Bainbridge’s forté is the presentation and juxtaposition of characters. In many ways, the discovery of their relationships is the plot. So it does not help the prospective reader if I give a detailed description of them in a review. But a cursory glance at them reveals how, after more than forty years, their identities and their concerns have remained remarkably modern. There’s a couple of families. There’s marriage and not marriage. There are children, both vulnerable and exploitative. There are flashbacks to a wartime experience that still makes everyday life hard to bear long before the term “post-combat stress disorder” had passed a campaigner’s lips. There is both pride and fear wrapped together. There are others who can’t cope with who they are. Someone is overweight. How modern can you get? Someone else stammers when over-wrought. There is someone who is easily led, and someone who wants to lead. There are people getting away from it all, and other who actively want to seek out experience. There are those who regard the rural area as a threat because of its lack of urban familiarity, and then there are those for whom it is a liberation. While a family argues over a game of Monopoly, someone almost burns down the real estate. There’s even more going on under the surface. A contemporary reader might find the obvious lack of linear plot somewhat confusing. Reading Beryl Bainbridge is a bit like sitting on the sea. Waves come with regularity. They are all different, but eventually a pattern emerges. And it’s a pattern where all the usual – and remarkable – human traits can be found. The final act may be over-played, but the experience is lasting, just as long as it lasts. It’s a bit like life, actually. View this book on amazon Another Part of the Wood (Penguin Decades)

Julian by Gore Vidal

When you are born into greatness, you may be forgiven for exhibiting a sense of destiny or an assumption of purpose. When you also find yourself marginalised, you may also be praised for a decision to pursue philosophy and learning alongside religious purity. When the celebrity that is your birthright also suggests that others might prefer you dead, you might be excused for wanting to keep your head down. But then you were born into greatness and had no choice in the matter. Your head is permanently above the parapet. 

 Gore Vidal’s masterpiece of historical fiction works on every level. The Roman emperor Julian is his subject. The novel charts Julian’s origins and early years in the eastern part of the late Roman Empire. He thinks of himself as Greek, never really masters Latin and never willingly expresses himself in it. Neither is he one of those new-fangled Galilean types who espouse a new religion with three gods. No, Julian is a traditionalist, though not because of a propensity for conservatism, but more because the tried and tested has worked for centuries, continues to do so and, crucially, reveals itself to him. Like his own pedigree, the old religion has an identity and record all its own and, alongside that, proven power. He takes this stand despite the habit of conversion, manifest in Constantine’s adoption of the new faith, running in the family. Julian’s form - in the sense of literary form – works with remarkable success and consistency. It is presented as his own journal, jottings toward an intended autobiography. 

But these notes have been pored over by two readers, Libanius and Priscus, both of whom the emperor has known since childhood. Since they are both also teachers, philosophers and advisers, their marginal comments are themselves interesting, enlightening and definitely not to be trusted. The book, thus, is a linear progression through a life, something akin to an autobiography in note form. It describes Julian’s early formation and education in detail and his almost Masonic adoption into the old religion. It captures beautifully how pragmatism must rule, despite the necessity of being faithful to ideology. It relates with great skill how greatness can be thrust upon even a willing recipient, be accepted, and yet be no more than a manifestation of cynical pragmatism. So when Julian is summoned to the status of Caesar, we see immediately that power prefers him on the inside projecting minimally outwards, rather than outside and potentially polluting. 

His changed status warrants a posting to Gaul to clear up the mess left by others less competent, a hospital pass if ever there was one. But Julian astounds all. He succeeds. He has the Midas touch. Everything goes his way and his pragmatism marries itself to opportunism to generate a populist mongrel that fights better, schemes more ruthlessly and thus wins. What it never does, however, is forget its origins. Throughout it remains frugal, thrifty and to the point, the greatness thrust upon it is reinvested towards achieving a greater, but ever-receding glory. Gore Vidal’s Julian thus raises its subject to Augustan status and follows the new leader to the east where he engages Persia and dreams of conquering India. Is this Alexander reborn? What the book does not do – thankfully – is offer detailed descriptions of military matters, since Julian himself has already written on these things elsewhere. This neat ploy keeps the focus of the book on the man, not his exploits. Late sections are in note form only, since the emperor was engaged with his day job of attempted world domination. As historical fiction, 

Julian has it all. It recreates a feeling of the places. It relives decisions and options in a thoroughly convincing way. It fleshes out events with credible, fallible people, despite their occasional god status. Above all, it takes you there. View the book on amazon Julian

The Knot Of Vipers by Francois Mauriac

When you reckon your time is up and that you’d like to get a few things straight before you peg out, the temptation to take up a pen and use it as a weapon might become all-consuming. Louis does precisely this, and thus the text of Francois Mauriac’s novel, The Knot Of Vipers, comes alive. Louis is well-heeled. He has made millions from his business interests over the years. But, realising he can’t take any of it with him, he considers how best to dispose of his fortune and, at the same time, analyses various aspects of the relationships that have filled his life. 

He finds all of them wanting in one way or another. He might be accused of a lack of both optimism and charity! So Louis pens a letter, a novel-length letter addressed to his wife. It’s to be his final statement and his way of putting the record straight, perhaps also a means of exacting retribution. He has been married to Isa for many years. Their marriage has been good in the Catholic sense, but their bed has been a cool, reverential place for some time, rather than a seat of reverie. 

The wife is the husband’s prime target. He recalls her lack of conviction, her inability to respond to him. An entire marriage relived becomes a jumble of opinions, recollections, threats and judgments, many of them petty, but all heartfelt. Louis particularly recalls his wife’s description of an episode with another man. He conveniently ignores a fling of his own. There was a much-loved daughter called Marie. But for all kinds of reasons she is not going to inherit. How annoying it is when you want to wield the dagger and find the job already done! 

So who else might Louis drag down with his pen? Well, there’s his son, naturally, and also a natural son. The former is Hubert, and his personal qualities rarely approach the old man’s professed standards. The latter, Robert, remains meek and unassuming. He’ll do all right! At least he won’t be plotting his father’s downfall! And so The Knot Of Vipers tightens itself around its own complications. Even lifetimes of highly profitable devotion produce complicated, internecine rivalries that have to be given space to dissipate. And, in Louis’s family, where even the obvious can be denied to preserve public face, what has not been expressed over the years just creates new layers of complication, layers that crowd out any negotiable space. 

I found on occasions that the scenario gave way under the weight of what had to be described. A private letter to a wife does not need descriptions of mutual acquaintances. The reader might demand this, but shared experience would only need an occasional reference. This, however, is The Knot Of Vipers only weakness. It’s a real tour de force of the concept that families f*** you up, especially Catholic ones, especially uncommunicative ones, especially… And then, of course, the book ends. View the book on amazon The Knot of Vipers (Capuchin Classics)

A Burnt-Out Case by Graham Greene

Monsieur Querry never reveals his Christian name. Perhaps it’s because he doesn’t want to admit his Christianity. Perhaps he possesses it, but resists it. Perhaps... Monsieur Querry is the central character in Graham Greene’s A Burnt-Out Case. The novel examines the relationship between motivation and religious belief and contrasts this with the gulf between personal experience and its interpretation by others. A significant gap emerges, a gap that ascribes status on the one hand or infamy on the other, depending on who might witness and later interpret events. Querry is an architect, and a very famous and successful one. When he arrives up the river at a leprosy hospital in Central Africa, however, no-one knows this. 

He is perhaps just another European running away from something and arriving ahead of a chase, perhaps to depart again just as quickly when the exigencies of daily life crowd out the self-serving romance of doing good. He meets Dr Colin who has devoted his life - and that of his wife! – to his fight against the disease. His hospital is in tatters. He has little equipment and fewer resources, and his wife is dead. He works, however, every waking minute to serve the needs of his leper patients. There are cures. If only he had the means. 

Querry, the Querrry, the famous architect, reinvents himself as a builder to realise a new hospital. So in this remote African backwater, a person who has slogged through life apparently to achieve little is partnered by a celebrity who comes with nothing, asks nothing, but can make things happen. Deo Gratias is a leper. He has lost all of his digits from both hands and feet. He is totally stumped. He is also regularly in pain, driven mad by the nervous reaction to his condition. One night he goes missing. A community member goes off in search and finds him semi-submerged in a pool. Might he be in danger of drowning? He stays with Deo Gratias until daylight and thus save a limited life. Was this Christian charity? Was it something more basic? Were there any motives whatsoever? Or perhaps was it a miracle? To judge on the latter, why not consult with the Fathers in the Mission, or the nuns in the convent? Why not try the opinion of a devout believer, someone like Rycker? He lives along the river with his wife, Marie. He is considerably older than her. His demands on life are within the confines of the box, and the box has the instructions printed on the outside. Marie’s demands on life have yet to locate the box. Querry spends some time talking to him, and then to her, and then him, and then her again... 

Rycker likes a drink. So does Querry. Arguably it is a miracle that the hospital gets built at all. Thus it’s also a story, and Parkinson arrives in its pursuit. The Querry has been located and an apparently unscrupulous paparazzo arrives via the fastest available canoe to secure the scoop. He writes for the highest bidder and is well syndicated. He’s a mercenary, an opportunist. Querry gives him the interview he requests. The resulting published piece, only a first instalment, is surprisingly supportive. Querry, meanwhile, has been supportive of Marie Rycker in a time of personal challenge. For Dr Colin at the leproserie, a burnt-out case is a leper who has lost everything that can be lost before a cure takes hold. For more than a decade, perhaps, the leprosy hospital has been a place where neither the road not the river goes any further. This Graham Greene contrasts the selfishness of professed religious conformity with the improvisation born of a humanism that dare not call itself Christian.

From outside, the exploits of both approaches only mean something when they are interpreted and, in this respect, any beauty is firmly rooted in the combined prejudice and assumption of the beholder. And when those interpretations invent something that never happened, or translate the ordinary into something transcendental that was never intended, then it is by these falsely recorded and misunderstood consequences that we become known. A Burnt-Out Case is undoubtedly a masterpiece. View the book on amazon A Burnt-out Case (Vintage Classics)

Chatterton by Peter Ackroyd

Peter Ackroyd’s Chatterton presents an enigma seen from several contrasting, some related standpoints. It seems to deal with the concept of authenticity and its consequences. In general we like things to be authentic. We like the people we meet and the possessions we own to be genuine. But what if they are not? Does it matter? The historical basis upon which Peter Ackroyd hangs the plot of his novel is the life of Thomas Chatterton, the poet who committed suicide at the slight age of eighteen. Wallis’s iconic painting of the death adorns the book’s cover and its creation in the mid-nineteenth century forms a major element of the book’s plot. There’s also an eccentric English lady who has made money from writing and drinks gin incessantly from a teaspoon. There’s an art gallery offering some works by a famous painter. They are declared fakes. 

Charles Wychwood is an ailing, none too successful poet. He has a wonderful relationship with his young son, and a cooler one with his wife who has grown used to supporting her husband’s apparent lack of achievement. One day Charles decides to raise a little capital in a sale-room, but then ends up blowing his money on a painting. It’s a portrait, professedly of a middle-aged Chatterton. So perhaps he faked his own death so he could continue his trade anonymously. The idea captivates Charles because he knows a little of the poet’s background. 

Chatterton was born in the later part of the eighteenth century. He became obsessed with a series of medieval texts and started to copy their style. Thus he became the author of bogus medieval poetry, some of which he managed to publish. Unfortunately, he chose to publish not in his own name but in the name of a lost and forgotten medieval writer, thus passing off his own modern work as “genuine”. Writers, like academics, tend to regard plagiarism as a capital offence. But in Chatterton’s case, it wasn’t plagiarism, was it? He wasn’t trying to pass off another’s work as his own. He was merely adopting a pen name which implied that the material came from a different era. One brings to mind the myriad of pop singers, pianists, opera stars, actors or even television personalities who have adapted new names and apparently different personas in their attempts to open doors. What price a genuine article? 

I recall hawkers parading through Kuta in Bali with their open wooden boxes of watches shouting, “Rolex, Cartier, genuine imitation.” But Chatterton’s mimic status was uncovered. Scandal ensued and he earned no more. Penniless in a London garret he poisoned himself. Wallis painted the scene, albeit more than a generation later, it’s apparent verisimilitude pure fake. We know the picture. The poet’s red hair contrasts with his death pallor. An arm trails on the floor, the open window above suggesting a world beyond. But, of course, the man in the picture is a model, none other than the novelist, George Meredith. He made it into this picture of faked death only because the painter fancied his wife. So if the painterly aspects of the canvas might be genuine, its context is mere reconstruction, perhaps invention. Does this devalue it? 

But what if Chatterton did not die at that young age? What if Charles Wychwood’s painting of Chatterton in middle age is genuine? Did Chatterton fake more than poems? (Even if he did actually write them!) Charles buys the painting and then visits Bristol to uncover some roots. He meets Joynson, an elderly man who speaks only in riddles. A box of the poet’s memorabilia is secured. Is any of it real? Is any of it genuine? And so the novel unfolds. What is authentic is often fake and what is genuine is often impersonated. But if a painting is worth looking at, does it matter too much if it is merely the content of a painter’s imagination? Does it have to possess authenticity, even a pedigree to be an artwork? And so what if Chatterton did, or did not die? If he did, he died accused of being a fake, which he wasn’t, because he did write his poetry. If he did not die, then perhaps he was a fake, because in that case we have no idea what else he did not write! Like all Peter Ackroyd’s writing, Chatterton makes the reader think. And by the way, Chatterton’s characters are themselves creations of the author. They aren’t genuine, are they? View the book on amazon Chatterton (Abacus Books)

Moorish Spain by Richard Fletcher

In Moorish Spain Richard Fletcher achieves a significant feat. In a short book he not only chronicles the bones of nearly a millennium of history, but also offers much that adds to our understanding of the social context, both of his chosen era in particular and of history in general.

Moorish Spain does not aspire to scholarly excellence. Richard Fletcher’s stated aim is to provide a fuller and more accurate account of Islamic rule in the Iberian peninsula than the cursory accounts offered in travel books. He also aspires to a treatment of the subject that is more accurate than the romanticised position of nineteenth century travellers, accounts that served to create and then perpetuate myth.

And paramount in this myth is the received opinion that in Moorish al-Andalus all things social were both sweetness and light and pure harmony. Not so, says Fletcher, as he chronicles power struggles, intrigues and repeated conflict. He describes the different interests that ensured that conflict, both small-scale and local or larger-scale and spread across a wider front, was never very far away. When competing parties felt that they could all benefit from interaction and trade, it was, he suggests, largely pragmatism that kept the peace.

His story begins in the early eighth century when the first invasion of what we now call Spain arrived from Morocco. It ends with the expulsion of the Mozarabes in the sixteenth century. In between, in a quite short and accessible book, he illustrates how shifting alliances and opportunity for short-term gain mix with broader views and humanitarian concerns to present a patchwork of history. And this patchwork is characterised, above all, by our inability to generalise. Throughout, it is the particular that is important.

In contrast he presents a number of generalised overviews and illustrates how none of them is more than partially correct. In a short but telling final chapter he offers a generalisation of his own to illustrate how dominant contemporary ideas can filter history in order to enhance its own credibility. Tellingly, he also reminds us of how much chronicled history relates only to the recorded opinions and lives of a wealthy, sometimes educated elite. How much detail of life in the twentieth century USA could be gleaned half a millennium from now if the only source was a telephone poll of Hollywood celebrities?

Richard Fletcher’s book therefore transcends its own subject matter. It presents a rounded, carefully reconstructed picture of an immense swathe of history. In such a short account, of course, he can only present a relatively small amount of detail, but what is there goes a long way beyond what the average reader might ever discover from a shallow tourist guide. The style is easy but never racy and the content has a feeling of reliability that suggests a second visit would be worthwhile.

View the book on amazon
Moorish Spain

The Viceroy Of Ouidah by Bruce Chatwin

Bruce Chatwin’s The Viceroy Of Ouidah masquerades as a small book. In 50,000 words or so, the author presents a fictionalised life that has been embroidered from truth. History, hyper-reality, the supernatural and the surreal and the cocktail that creates the heady mix through which strands of story filter. Overall the experience is much bigger than the slim book suggests. We meet Francisco Manuel da Silva, a Brazilian born in the country’s north-east in the latter part of the eighteenth century. We learn a little of his background and then we follow him to Dahomey in West Africa, the modern Benin. 

He finds a place in society, consorts with kings, encounters amazons and conjoins with local culture. He also becomes a slave trader, making his considerable fortune by moving ship-loads of a cargo whose human identity is denied, as if it were merely the collateral damage of mercantilism. Francisco Manuel survives, prospers and procreates with abandon. He fathers a lineage of varied hue, a small army of males to keep the name alive and further complicate identity, and a near race of females who inherit the anonymity of their gender.  

But The Viceroy of Ouidah is much more than a linear tale of a life. Bruce Chatwin’s vivid prose presents a multiplicity of minutiae, associations, conflicts and concordances. Each pithy paragraph could be a novel in itself if it were not so utterly poetic. A random example will suffice to give a flavour. “Often the Brazilian captains had to wait weeks before the coast was clear but their host spared no expense to entertain them. His dining room was lit with a set of silver candelabra; behind each chair stood a serving girl, naked to the waist, with a white napkin folded on her arm. Sometimes a drunk would shout out, ‘What are these women?’ and Da Silva would glare down the table and say. ‘Our future murderers.’” 

 Within each vivid scene, we experience history, place, culture, and all the emotions, disappointments and achievements of imperfect lives. A jungle vibrates with untamed life around us. Treachery sours and threatens, while disease and passion alike claim their victims. It is a book to be savoured almost line by line. It provides an experience that is moving, technicoloured, but, like all lives, inevitably ephemeral. Like the outlawed trade that endowed riches, it eventually comes to nought, except of course for those who are inadvertently caught up in its net and whose lives were thus utterly changed if, indeed, they survived. 

I read The Viceroy Of Ouidah without a bookmark, always starting a few pages before where I had previously left off. Each time, I read through several pages convinced that it was my first time to see them and then I would reach a particularly striking phrase and realise I had been there before. The extent of the detail and complexity of the images present a rain-forest of detail that is completely absorbing. The Viceroy Of Ouidah is thus surely a book worth reading several times. View the book on amazon The Viceroy of Ouidah (Vintage Classics)

The Virgin Blue by Tracy Chevalier

The Virgin Blue by Tracy Chevalier presents a vivid story. It features two central characters, both women, who inhabit the same places but are separated by four hundred years. The two women discover not only similar experience, but also suffer similar responses, perhaps because they share the same genes. The two women are of the same stock. Ella Turner is an American, a trained but not practising midwife, who has moved to France. Her husband, Rick, has a new overseas posting. 

They seem to get on well, but Rick is very focused on his career and hardly seems to notice how difficult is Ella’s transition to European life. Ella’s surname, Turner, is in fact derived from the French Tournier. There is a recorded immigrant in her family’s past. So life in France is potentially a return to roots of a kind and she decides to take the opportunity to do some research. Luckily, her family used to live in the region where she and Rick have settled. And thus she discovers a family of Hugenots, French Protestant converts who migrate to Calvin’s Switzerland in search of security and tolerance. As Ella carries out her search, her hair, perhaps coincidentally, changes colour. Isabelle de Moulin was the ancestor that Ella discovers.

She found herself moved by a vision of the Virgin Mary in which a blue, a vivid, variable blue of a fabric features memorably. It’s a blue that appears in dreams, is recalled when her sexual maturity beckons experience. And her hair turns red, giving her the nickname, La Rousse. She is soon pregnant. And the father, Etienne Tournier, does the honourable thing, but, as is customary for him and his family, without a great deal of honour. But there is turmoil around. There is a new faith, a protester’s church that the Tourniers espouse. Isabelle’s visions of Virgin Blue cause internal conflict, a conflict that seems to focus in her daughter, Marie. 

Threat of persecution forces flight over the border. Ella, meanwhile, is learning a lot about France, Hugenots and her family’s origins. She visits a library, finds a family bible and meets a librarian called Jean-Paul, perhaps not coincidentally named after a Pope. They share and interest, pursue it and then find more in common. Ella begins to suffer blue visions of her own. And, with her own life in turmoil, she follows her ancestors to Switzerland to uncover more of their history. What she finds shocks her and reveals how a fundamentally female energy has the power to transcend time in order to colour experience. The novel’s denouement is truly surprising and not a little shocking. But what Tracy Chevalier does not do in The Virgin Blue is tie up all the ends or explain all detail. And this is eventually one of the book’s strengths. 

When all of Isabelle’s and Ella’s trials and tribulations have passed by, there are still questions, loose ends and unmade decisions. The Virgin Blue thus presents rounded characters whose vulnerabilities and inconsistencies render them thoroughly credible. There are few writers who present women as complete characters pursuing their own independent, incomplete lives, but Tracy Chevalier is one of them. View the book on amazon The Virgin Blue

Antonio Mari on show at the Sculpture Garden in Alfas del Pi

Sometimes, perhaps rarely, people have a vision. They not only see, they see through or beyond, allowing them to appreciate, often quite suddenly, a bigger space, more powerful than the immediate. Often it’s an artist that prompts such realisation. After all, it’s the artist’s role to help us see and, at the same time, to interpret. But alongside the art it’s sometimes also the setting that helps us to find an experience that lies beyond mere sight. Such a perfect blend of expression and content can be seen at the Jardin Escultorico in Alfas del Pi on Spain’s Costa Blanca, where works by Antonio Mari are on display. 

Toni Mari is a Javea-born artist who sculpts in iron. His work is often highly naturalistic, with bulls, birds, fish and sheep and other farmyard animals featuring. But it is the human form that dominates his work, despite the fact that most of his figures are often more air than substance. His figures often stride like a Bocchioni or dance like a Degas. 

Charging bulls display a life-force. A strangely light iron bird seems ready to take flight. A Good Shepherd strides, superhuman in scale, across his meadow, his joints – characteristically for Mari – twisted tendons of metal. At the hip a lunch satchel swings, no doubt crammed with the cheese of his following sheep, whose delicate fleece is soldered springs. A welded dog eagerly awaits its master’s call. A series of dancers add pure grace, their clothing and costume flowing into ribbons that do no more than punctuate their back-drop of sky. Though welded to their rusted plinths, surely they move, thus claiming their freedom of life. 

But Antonio Mari’s work is also revelatory, an aspect that is only amplified by the setting. This special exhibition sits alongside a permanent sculpture collection, amongst which are other works by the same artist. The whole is set in the beautiful gardens of the Jardin Escultorico in Alfas del Pi, on Spain’s Costa Blanca. 

Established in 1998, the gardens are the vision of Johanna Klein-Schreuder and Johannes Klein. Twelve years ago they bought a plot with some three hundred decrepit orange trees. Their unique vision was to create a sculpture garden, a space to exhibit human and natural creation both to contrast and complement. Now more than a decade into the project, Johanna and Johannes have achieved their goal. 

Their garden is worth a visit in itself. Though formally laid out, its main features are trees, themselves apparently living sculptures presenting a remarkable variety of shape and form, some in flower, some hardly yet in leaf. Interspersed between these natural forms are works of contemporary sculptors, including other works by Toni Mari, including Love Dance and Man On Stilts. In the former, angels dance a round while in the latter a perfectly formed person who has hardly any physical form seems to stride through the garden at tree-top height. 

Ausencia by Jorge Castro Flóres is a reclining figure whose very substance has been torn away. Here the reduction of the human to a kind of essence is as painful as Mari’s use of the same idea is uplifting. Elsie Ringnalda’s On Top Of You features two elongated but anonymous figures. He is lying on his back. She is upright walking towards him along his legs. Thus natural and human creativity mix, the whole producing its own life. The vision of Johanna and Johannes works beautifully with the joint focus of garden and sculpture augmenting and amplifying each other. The Jardin Escultorico is a wonderful place to visit for residents and tourists alike. And it would also repay repeated visits, since the featured exhibitions change regularly and, of course, the trees are never the same, even from one day to the next. You can visit this beautiful place at Cami del Pinar 23, Alfas del Pi. See http://www.klein-schreuder.com for further details and opening times.

The Woman In The Dunes by Kobo Abe

Novels in translation always present at least twice their share of pitfalls for the reviewer, or even the reader. A translated novel has to be approached as a package, experienced as such and reviewed in kind. After reading The Woman In The Dunes by Kobo Abe I am presented with a wholly new dilemma, however. An entomologist disappears while out bug hunting. He finds himself a virtual prisoner in a sand pit, a pit inhabited by a woman with whom he soon finds a predictable solace. He tries to escape, and does not. He dreams of escape, and does not achieve his goal. The characteristics of his new environment seem to contradict all of his assumptions. Nothing helps. The Woman In The Dunes might be described as absurd. Equally, the term nihilistic might be appropriate. It might even be deliberately trivial. As such it presents an intellectual challenge to the reader who, of necessity, must constantly interpolate the banality of the book’s inaction into a sub-text of potentially enormous significance. I say “potentially” enormous significance because I remain unsure, having finished the book, whether any significance at all might apply. But then again, perhaps that’s the point. The Woman In The Dunes has been likened to Kafka’s Trial or the absurdity of Samuel Beckett’s plays. As an experience, however, none of the suspense of the former nor the bald linguistic power of the latter. Perhaps the novel’s rather one-paced prose was a true reflection of the original. If so, then I might suggest that the writer rather over-stated his point. View the book on amazon The Woman in the Dunes (Penguin Classics)

Sir Phoebus’s Ma by Zoë Teale

Zoë Teale’s Sir Phoebus’s Ma is more of a travelogue than a novel. It’s a series of impressionistic reflections, experienced during a year in Japan. The year was spent by a twenty-two-year-old English teacher in a regional northern town, where the students are not as motivated as the stereotypical oriental swot. Teaching methods are traditional, downright boring from the point of view of a recently-qualified practitioner, but they are as unquestionable as they are ingrained. Anna’s supervisor is a traditional Japanese male, at least that’s what Anna thinks. He is called Moriya sensei. There is a suggestion of eccentricity in his habit of translating tombstone inscriptions. There is also a hint of a willingness, nay desire to sample a foreign taste or two, especially when it comes in the shape of a young female teacher subordinate. 

If only our central character, the teacher herself, who is the book’s first person narrator, could have willingly sampled a few of the local tastes for herself… Not that I thought an affair between herself and Mr Moriya was ever likely or desirable, perhaps from either party’s point of view. But without that tension, the book would have been quite plot-less, since the plot was never allowed to intrude on recalled experience. Anna and some other expatriates are keen to experience tradition and the indigenous. They can’t cope with the food, of course. 

Anna herself travels to the other side of the world eager to seek out the authentic, but she refuses to leave her vegetarian preference at home. She compromises on eating fish, but when seriously asked an opinion on whether she would eat whale meat, she seems to have no position, which is strange, which ever way you view the character. In some ways Anna embodies the confusion of Western identity. She is keen to experience the authentic and professes respect, a romanticised, perhaps self-obsessed respect, of course, for its assumed value. But at the same time she is unable to participate in what she encounters and is thus rendered a permanent spectator by the pressure of her own neuroses. She emanates from a culture that is ignorant of itself, but afraid to be anything else. Anna’s Japanese hosts are tolerant. Imagine a Japanese visitor to a rural English town insisting on eating only Japanese rice. How far would she get? 

 But Sir Phoebus’s Ma is still worth reading. We are told snippets of legend, participate in the odd celebration or two and nose our way into a taste of Japanese domestic life. Anna’s trip to Kyoto, though brief, is mildly evocative, despite her difficulties at the Golden Temple. There is a sense of contemplation, a ceremony of tea and a hint of wasabe. But a hint is as far as Anna will go, since the tingle in the mouth seems to repel her. Eventually, we see this as inevitable, given the confused, arm’s length English reserve with which she cloaks all life. View the book on amazon Sir Phoebus's Ma

The Successor by Ismail Kadare.

Things are often not what they seem. Usually when this applies something ostensibly great turns out to be merely mundane. Occasionally, however, we meet an iceberg, an apparently small presence that becomes something vast and consequential. This latter case applies to The Successor by Ismail Kadare. The Successor is apparently a small book. The cover shows a head in silhouette while a hand with a gun points from the left. “Just another predictable little thing in a predictable genre,” were my initial thoughts. The cover illustration is apposite, however, and remains so throughout the book’s short duration. But in fact The Successor then reveals itself as a vast work, despite its obvious brevity. It’s about nothing less than a whole country, its politics, its very identity in a world that is changing around it. The country is Albania and Ismail Karade is clearly born of its very soil. At least that truth is reliable. But how would we describe a successor who does not succeed, a guide who has lost the power of sight, an architect whose plans are ignored and a young woman engaged to be married who is not in love? Things are often not what they seem to be. The Successor has been shot, hence the cover. And yes, The Successor is a whodunnit, but in no way is it predictable. When a whole nation identifies with and is driven by the political choices of its leadership, how can it ever change organically from within? The figurehead has to go, even if he has already gone! And if change was the product of poor judgment, then should history record a suicide? And from whose perspective do we assess success? And who has the right to change history? In his preamble, the author humorously sets the tone by announcing that “any resemblance between characters and circumstances of this tale and real people and events is inevitable.” Thus, in a short book about a feud within an inner circle, Kadare creates a poetic world that mirrors reality, whose delicately-drawn images beautifully construct much larger ideas. The poignancy of a secret door that can only be opened from the outside is an idea that will last for a long time in a reader’s memory. The Successor is a great little book. View the book on amazon The Successor

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

Leaves From His Life, essays by Leoš Janáček, edited by V and M Tausky

About twenty years ago my wife and I were on a train that came to a halt. It was late afternoon in mid-August. We were on holiday. A weak sun was already casting long shadows from the power-line gantries across the heavy industrial landscape in view. It was a local train with low priority at the signals. The carriage was nearly empty on this service form Kutná Hora to Prague. As we awaited the passing of an express, the only sounds came from steam hissing from vents in the pipe-work of nearby factories.

A young man on a seat opposite started to doze. His head nodded forward. His dark checked shirt opened wider at the neck to reveal white skin which, unlike his head and neck, had remained untouched by the sun while he had worked his day on a construction site. His boots and trousers had streaks of earth and cement that confirmed his trade. The express passed by, slowly, without much noise and then, just seconds later, our train lurched into slow motion. The young man woke up with a start. “Pfui,” he said as he rubbed his palms against his face.

And, for the next few minutes, all I could hear in my head was music replayed from memory. There is a moment in an opera, a Czech opera, where a character awakens from sleep. He not only says this word, but he sings it with exactly the same intonation and stress as my fellow traveller did that August afternoon on a stalled suburban train. I ought to have realised immediately that this was no coincidence. 

In part I did, but I was not prepared for how perfectly the composer had set that strange little word. The music literally came to life. The opera in question is by Leoš Janáček. He spent much of his time listening to and notating the music of everyday sounds and speech. These he used to set the words of his own libretti, all of which are highly naturalistic rather than stereotypically operatic. He repeats very little. There are no set pieces. The people are never counts or kings, princesses or heroes. There is the occasional fox and frog, however, and many chickens. But for the most part, Janáček’s characters are like the slumbering builder on the train, ordinary people, working class, middle class, merchants or labourers, sometimes artists, sometimes prisoners. 

On first hearing his music can sound disjointed, lacking the flowing lines that lyric opera fans might expect. But Janáček’s music is both cubist and yet still wholly naturalistic. People really do speak like that. Of course he stretches the points. It is opera, after all. But it is not only speech that is naturalistic in Janáček, as anyone who reads this beautiful little book, Leaves From His Life by Vilem and Margaret Tausky, will soon realise. Janáček notated the sound of the sea, birdsong, the trickling of water in streams, the wind, coughs and sneezes, and about anything else that took his fancy. 

Above all he notated the sounds of speech, words married to their expression. In one respect, he was the complete impressionist, but in another the complete opposite because he then reassembled these snippets of collected reality to form something wholly original. Some of essays, reminiscences, musical analysis and occasional literary reflections that fill leaves From His Life were written for the composer’s own column in local newspaper in Brno. 

I first read the book over twenty years ago, just before my holiday in then Czechoslovakia, during which I visited Brno to stand in Janáček’s study. Re-reading it now is something of a revelation. If anything it seems fresher now than then, but there again perhaps it’s me that’s mellowed with age in a way that Leoš Janáček never did. If I had another life I would learn Czech to gain a fuller appreciation of the man’s music. It must be worth it! As an example, just imagine the sound of the opening of the Credo from the Glagolitic Mass. In Czech, the word is vĕruju, I believe. Janáček’s setting is three notes with a long stress in the middle. Try saying ‘I believe’ or even worse, ‘credo’ to the same sound. It only works in Czech. Anyone who is the least bit interested in opera and certainly anyone who as listened to Leoš Janáček’s music will love Leaves From His Life. 

The writing style alone is a wonderful insight into his music. The man really did think in those terse little aphorisms. But what shines through his music and his words is his love of and devotion to the experience of ordinary folk, and the occasional bird, furry creature or insect: life, in short. View the book on amazon Janacek: Leaves from His Life

Saint Augustine by Garry Wills – a biography of the early Christian saint.

A young African man with a taste for sex and a highly developed sense of both religion and mission travels across the Mediterranean. He decides to sail. Once in Italy, he communes with the rich and powerful and then, some years later, makes the return journey via the same means of transport, and thereby completes the sum total of his life’s travels.

We know a lot about the man, not only from his own writings which are both extensive and preserved, but also from the accounts of many of those contemporaries who met him, engaged in intellectual and theological debates with him, or merely reported. The Roman Empire had only recently espoused Christianity. It was an era when the young faith was divided by schism. A strength of this biography of Augustine is that it brings home the passion that characterised these differences. A weakness, however, is that the different variants of fourth century Christianity are not clearly delineated. This would, perhaps, be too much to ask in a short account of a life, but there are times when understanding of the text is compromised because of this omission. What does come alive, however, is how recent were the memories of persecution under Diocletian. It was a difference in attitude to some of those who succumbed to denial of their faith under that persecution that created one major schism.

Donatists refused to re-admit those who had renounced their faith under threat and were the main expression of Christianity in North Africa. Our young African man chose to ally himself with the Roman church, thus placing himself in a local minority. Pelagius who was around at the time denied the concept of original sin. Quite often it seems that he didn’t, then he did, and then he didn’t again. It was a heresy, needless to say. But, and I feel it might be an attractive concept even today, the idea that the Church was not full of sinners had its adherents. Arians stressed the humanity, not the divinity of Jesus Christ. This allowed them to avoid at least some of the problematic concept of three deities in one, a holy trinity. The concept has been a confusion and for many outside of Christianity it appears to be a wholly unnecessary complication. Arian thought, however, Gary Mills points out, is only reported by those who opposed them, so an accurate representation of their philosophy is difficult to establish. Manicheans, unlike Christians, saw the universe in black and white, a competition between good and evil. There were aspects of light and dark in everything and everyone, but it was the interplay between the two that determined where an individual might be placed in the overall scheme of things. Manichaeism has largely disappeared from world religion, its only remaining bastion being Hollywood, where it provides the basis of most films aimed at the popular audience.

All of these ideas, heresies and religions were themselves in competition in the homeland of Augustine of Hippo. And through Gary Wells’ book we gain an insight into how an individual thinker and philosopher grappled with the contradictions and tried to make sense of what he regarded as the correct line. The book is a window on Augustine’s thoughts , thoughts that often deal with the base as well as the obviously spiritual. Gary Wills provides real insights into Augustine’s charm, the magnetism of his rhetoric and the logical processes of his thought. And he manages to this in just 150 pages, pages that also include significant and poignant quotes from Augustine’s work. The stained glass analogy on religion applies. If you look at windows from outside, they are merely sold grey. On the inside, they reveal full and splendid colour. There might be many a modern reader who would be confused as to why it matters that a concept is associated with this or that belief. But for a Christian and certainly for someone who sees the windows in full colour it clearly does matter.

Gary Wills’s book brings the debates and issues alive even for the general reader, though it has to be said that sometimes the detail of the theological debate is less than penetrable. This is a book of many surprises. View the book on amazon Saint Augustine (Lives)

Don Quixote de La Mancha

I’d like some advice from other writers. I’ve just finished a book. It’s my fourth time through it. It might be a bit over-written, perhaps over-read. The writer found the manuscript on a stroll through a street market in Toledo, Spain. It was written in Arabic, a language of which the author only know a little, but he could see from page one that there was something special about this text. He translated it into Spanish, and then others rendered it in English. 

The book is a little less than five hundred thousand words. It has no plot, and little obvious characterisation. The style varies, and there are several quite glaring inconsistencies, most of which I just laugh off as inconsequential. There are no intrigues. There may be a few murders, but none within the book’s pages. There are no spacecraft, aliens, plots that threaten the earth, spies, terrorists or dog lovers. There’s not much sex, and what exists is largely imagined from afar and is unconsummated, or is very close at hand and is perpetrated by a hag with excess kilos and few teeth. 

There’s a lot of largely unintelligible games and role-plays, some fantasy, most of which is at the level of fairy-tale, some satire and a lot of innuendo. The main protagonists are rather sexist, racist and, by modern standards, religious bigots. Could anyone suggest a publisher?

On the other hand, I have a novel that contains such familiar scenes that a good proportion of the world’s population would recognise them. It’s accessible, written in an easy prose that makes few demands on the reader, and whose protagonists are just ordinary people, not unlike those who might read it. It features a man who is so obsessed with celebrity and deluded by popular culture that he believes he too can become a star. No-one, of course, in modern society would ever think that. And, incidentally, it’s been a best seller in multiple editions and languages for over four hundred years. Could anyone suggest a publisher?

I have just finished a fourth reading of Cervantes’s classic Don Quixote. I have now read it in two quite different translations, one via Wordsworth Classics and the other Penguin. The book is more like several years of soap opera episodes, series such as the Archers, Coronation Street or Emmerdale and definitely not Dr Kildare, Ironside or Kojak, let alone Dallas. It comes to an end because its author wanted to kill it off, since even in its own time it had become something of a cliché. In some ways it’s a book that’s so ‘modern’ it’s ahead of contemporary fiction. At the same time, its scenarios need footnotes because they are unfamiliar to us. After all, soap opera installments from a month ago are out of date. The ones in this book are four hundred years old. In essence, however, the delusion presented by popular culture is precisely the same.

At its core, we have a middle-aged, in his day perhaps elderly man who is obsessed with popular culture and celebrity. He doesn’t want to be a film star, footballer or pop singer. He wants to be a knight, travelling the countryside, doing good deeds that the role demands. One day he decides that this is the life for him and, to the consternation of his household, he decides he must live this life of fantasy. Unlike his heroes, however, his sports car is a clapped out old banger, his designer clothes are rejected junk from charity shops, and his millionaire’s mansion is the local pub. His contemporaries merely laugh at him, but he remains utterly convinced of his call to stardom. But, and this is the crucial fact, he never loses his wisdom, however false its basis might have been. Neither does he lose his faith, though misplaced, in his own superiority.

No-one else shares these faiths, except perhaps his travelling companion, Sancho Panza. He is a peasant, with a down-to-earth view of life and a thoroughly bucolic interpretation of its challenges. He proves, however, to be as wise as his master, a lord he hardly ever questions. No-one else shares this faith in the master, but then that’s the point. Life is once through. If we dream, it’s as good as any reality. So, after four times through this great novel, I have no more idea what it’s about, or what it says than when I started it for the first time. It’s funny, and in places it’s incomprehensible. It’s absurd. It’s serious. It’s stupid, inane, both intellectually challenging and inconsequential at the same time. I am also a few thousand words from the end of a modern parody of Don Quixote, which I hope is as focussed as its inspiration. Can anyone suggest a publisher?

View the book on amazon Don Quixote (Penguin Classics) Don Quixote (Wordsworth Classics)

Perilous transition – Imaginings Of Sand by André Brink

Imaginings Of Sand by André Brink was a second novel I recently encountered where an old woman, close to death, related a life story. The book’s central character is Ouma Kristina, an unconventional Afrikaner lady, bed-ridden and severely burned after her house was torched by raiders. André Brink has her relate a family history to her near-namesake granddaughter, a modern, independently-minded thirty-something, and in her own time and way also unconventional. She seems to have broken free from her past, perhaps even rejected it, has lived in London and has even joined the African National Congress.

Through her grandmother’s stories, the younger Kristien rediscovers her heritage, her family history and via that her people’s history. It’s a long story and is delivered, eventually, directly from the coffin. While Sebastian Barry’s heroine in Secret Scriptures relates a purely personal tale from her deathbed, André Brink’s Ouma Kristina tells not only her own story, but also that of the family ancestors, and always via a matriarchal lineage. It’s the women that make the history, and that history reflects the story of an entire people, spanning two centuries

 In both books, the scenarios lack credibility, but equally, once suspension of belief has been achieved, both work beautifully as literary mechanisms. In Brink’s novel, however, Ouma Kristina’s project is much bigger than telling her own story and eventually it even begins to illustrate how myth can create history and vice versa. Not bad for an old lady burnt to a cinder! Imaginings Of Sand is also for me a third recent novel examining the fears, hopes and realities surrounding South Africa’s transition to legitimate statehood in the 1990s. Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People dealt mainly with imagined fears alongside valued relationships, whereas J M Coetzee’s Disgrace encountered messy reality.

André Brink’s project in his novel is both more ambitious and more mundane, and it is also more successful. It concentrates on one family and its history, but it’s a history that mirrors that of the Afrikaner people. Young Kristien, newly returned from London where she lived a life that was perfectly inconceivable for her grandmother, her parents and even her own sister, learns much and understands more from her grandmother’s stories. We sense the widening perspective that she sees. We feel the character grow. Of course, the contemporary family also has its current issues. Caspar, husband of Kristien’s elder sister is a rampant Boer, a boer and a boor. He figures significantly in the book’s denouement, acted out as the old woman predictably and eventually expires, South Africa elects a new government and Kristien, herself, makes a decision she would not have thought possible just weeks before.

The subtlety of Imaginings Of Sand lie in how André Brink uses the family dispute as a metaphor for what is feared in the wider society. Suffice it to say that after a period of oppression and exploitation, it is possible that the repressed, guilt-ridden middle ground is the most likely source of over-reaction. The family’s history related by the dying grandmother might occasionally stray into too much detail, and sometimes the fantasy, the myth that André Brink seeks to introduce through their embroidery, might seem a tad false or confused. But then that’s myth, isn’t it? But Imaginings Of Sand is as close to a masterpiece of fiction as anything I have read in many years. Its successes are on many levels, across a multitude of parallel themes. It’s an historical novel. It’s a political novel. It enacts a subtly-constructed psychological drama. It also, ambitiously, sees everything from a female standpoint, thus binding both the reality and the myth of regeneration and reproduction into the fabric of the story.

The book is thus a novel that demands to be read by anyone with an interest in Africa, South Africa in particular, history, politics, psychology, women or merely people. And it you don’t fall into any of these categories, read it anyway! It’s a masterpiece.

View the book on amazon Imaginings of Sand