Review of my 2012 Reading

As ever, the year has been one of delightful discoveries and occasional disappointments. My reading included a couple of books from the dim and distant past as well as several hot off the press. In alphabetical order of authors, here are some highlights.

“The Elegance of the Hedgehog” by Muriel Barbary, translated by Alison Anderson [London: Gallic Books, 2008]. The basic premiss of this delightful novel is that a widowed Parisian concierge of later middle age has profitably used her private time to study philosophy but, in order to enjoy a quiet, if erudite life, has managed to conceal her learning from those she serves until an unguarded remark is picked up by a new Japanese apartment owner. In parallel with her own story we are given the account of the angry, teenage, younger sister of another family who seems to be contemplating whether or not to contemplate whether or not to commit suicide. As the concierge seems to find real appreciation and the prospect of more besides, and as the teenager sorts herself out, the author, with bravura and good timing, uses her omniscient authority to stop the story before it risks getting out of control.

“Toby’s Room” by Pat Barker [London: Hamish Hamilton, 2012] – but do read her “Life Class” before this one which is, more or less, its sequel. The characteristic Barker traits of close observation of human behaviour and total immersion research allow her to take up again the lives of the artists studying at the Slade before the Great War under the real-life Henry Tonks, a surgeon and artists whose drawing of the appalling facial disfigurement of many war-wounded soldiers is both a work of record and an artistic achievement. The three fictional characters can, if one wishes, be read as composite pictures of a number of real artists who are fused together. Barker leads the reader through the self-discovery of each character to a final resolution in a very satisfying way.

“The Rise of Henry Morcar” by Phyllis Bentley [London: Victor Gollancz, 1967] is a book I have read at least ten times since it first appeared just after the war and it was the key to unlocking the several Bentley novels I went on to read, of which “Inheritance” is the most significant. “Morcar” is a story which runs in parallel with the final chapters of “Inheritance” and then takes the West Riding wool textile story forward another dozen years or so. In the dramatic opening scene, as a ‘doodlebug’ homes in on his London street, Morcar sees his life in flashback. He has grown up with a love of his craft and a gift for design and management and flourished materially while suffering psychologically the impact of a lost comrade, a failed marriage and a solitary life, until he meets the woman he can love but who will not be ‘free’ until the 1939-45 war is over. For a variety of reasons, the novel has many personal resonances for me and I read it again every so many years.

“When the Devil Drives” by Chris Brookmyre [London: Little Brown, 2012] is a fast-paced murder mystery set in contemporary Scotland but the seeds of the sudden death were sown in years gone by. The personal story of the private detective, Jasmine sharp, is wrapped up into the unfolding narrative and solving of the crime. Saying much more would risk spoiling your enjoyment but if this is your first Brookmyre don’t let it be your last. He writes about crime with a mordant wit and a love of language.

“The Sea Detective” by Mark Douglas-Home [Dingwall, Sandstone Press, 2011] is a debut novel and makes one hope and pray it will not be his only one. The protagonist is Cal McGill, a part-time PhD oceanography student with a macabre interest in floating corpses. His knowledge of ocean currents and the arrival of severed feet on various Scottish beaches not only draws him into the investigation of human trafficking but unwinds and explains his own personal family mystery. This was one of these ‘so gripping’ books that are hard to put down until the final page.

“The Sportswriter” by Richard Ford [New York: Vintage, 1995] came to my attention listening first to Radio 4’s “Book Programme” when Mariella Frostrup interviewed Ford about his latest novel, “Canada” and then when I heard him give a talk to the Royal Society of Literature earlier this year. “The Sportswriter” is the first of the first-person narrated Frank Bascombe trilogy. Bascombe is the laureate of the American suburbs and an American Proust in the sense that his entire novel takes place over the Easter weekend in and around fictional Haddam, New Jersey. The stories meanders always return the reader to the main flow and the novel’s language is a joy.

“Life and Fate” by Vassily Grossman [London: Vintage, 2006]. Inevitably one is drawn to compare and contrast this book with Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”. It has a cast almost as numerous as it tells the story of the siege of Stalingrad. The book almost never appeared in print and its author did not live to see its current success. The BBC cleared every slot of its drama schedule for a week to broadcast a massive adaptation of the novel but unless one happened to be a bedridden insomniac it was impossible to follow in that medium. If you have a large hole in next year’s reading plan, this can fill it for you.

“Now all roads lead to France: the last years of Edward Thomas” by Matthew Hollis [London: Faber and Faber, 2011] is the first prose work by one poet recounting beautifully the final years of another: yet another poet who was slaughtered in the Great War. Maybe most widely known for “Adlestrop”, Thomas might never have become a poet and remained an insightful literary critic and hack prose writer but for his friendship with Robert Frost whose work he admired. Frost was responsible for encouraging Thomas to begin writing verse and, once started in 1914, for the next three years he produced a steady stream of image-packed poetry that uses language as straightforwardly as does Frost. Nick Dear has written “The Dark Earth and the Light Sky” which premiered at the Almeida Theatre in London this year and draws on the Hollis account and other sources for a profoundly moving play.

“Bring up the Bodies” by Hilary Mantel [London: Fourth Estate, 2012] was eagerly awaited and, for those who enjoyed “Wolf Hall”, was the sort of sequel we had all wanted to read. Justifiably, it won its author a second Booker Prize and set readers wondering not only when the promised third volume will appear but whether it will win again. The book is both a delight and a challenge to the reader’s concentration. The pace is in part sustained by the effective use of the historic present in which to recount Thomas Cromwell’s story from Henry VIII’s divorce until the death of Anne Boleyn.

“Provenance” by Laney Salisbury & Aly Sujo [New York: Penguin Press, 2009] is another art-related, crime story but every word of it is a true account of how a self-deluding fantasist enlisted the, at first, unwitting help of an accomplished painter who, in a harsh world for creators, had not made a sufficiently rewarding impact with his own work, in order to generate a series of wonderfully realised forgeries and pass them off in front of experts and auction houses. Why the fakes, made from house paints and K-Y jelly, were not discovered sooner and how the fantasist still probably believes all his own contradictory stories despite being jailed, is recounted with the excitement of a detective story. There is also one semi-innocent victim, John Myatt, who has now gone on to make a reasonable living as the painter of acknowledged ‘genuine’ fakes and who drew the cover illustration for my own novel “Rembrandt Sings”.

“Umbrella” by Will Self [London: Bloomsbury, 2012] was also on this year’s Booker short list and would have been a worthy winner if there had been a tie with Hilary Mantel. “Umbrella” does for Barnet what James Joyce did for Dublin although Self’s story extends over a longer time period. The novel’s epigram is in fact taken from Joyce’s Ulysses: “A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella”. In one cintinuous narrative, uninterrupted by chapter breaks and moving through different times and narrative streams without warning, it recounts the reflections and observations of, inter alia, a psychiatrist, Dr Zak Busner, and of his sometime patient Audrey Death, to whom he administered L-Dopa. The story has echoes of “Awakenings” by Oliver Sacks that translated so well to the screen but these parallels only heighten the intensity of the story given that one is aware of how the experiments will turn out. As psychiatrists will understand, the umbrella of the title becomes at different stages a penis and a syringe as well as a means of keeping off the rain. I confidently predict the novel will be on university syllabi before the end of 2013.

“The Hopkins Manuscript” by R C Sherriff [London: Gollancz, 1939] is an apocalyptic but very witty novel, after the style of H G Wells, but seemingly narrated by someone as innocent and naïve as the Grossmiths’ Mr Pooter. The end of the world is forecast when scientists realise that the moon is slowly but surely falling out of its orbit and will collide with the earth. Mr Hopkins’s manuscript is, according to the foreword from ‘the Imperial Research Press, Addis Ababa’, all that survives from that prehistoric period when, apparently, life and civilisation was flourishing in Europe. After all that I have been reading about forgeries and fakes, it is salutary to realise how easily uncorroborated accounts of earlier events can become accepted as the Ur-text.