NINTH BIRTHDAY SPECIAL FEATURE: guest Michèle Roberts chooses OFFSHORE by Penelope Fitzgerald

 

 "Her genius is to record her characters’ flounderings with infinite compassion. Her imagination works as a kind of embrace, both tender and supremely intelligent."

Photograph: Viv Pegram

Michèle Roberts is half-French and half-English. She has published fifteen novels, plus poetry, memoir, essays and artist's books. Her first cookery book French Cooking for One came out in 2024. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and Professor Emeritus at the University of East Anglia. She lives in London.

My (highly subjective) definition of a classic novel is one that I regularly re-read. Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore (1979) perfectly fits that bill. I enjoy it more every time I read it, relishing its celebration of unconventional attitudes, its sharp observations of the thrills and dangers of life afloat, its wry, dry humour that makes me burst out laughing. Fitzgerald’s humour is rooted in her lack of sentimentality, her honesty about human behaviour, the messes we make, our illogical yearnings, the way we sabotage ourselves. Her genius is to record her characters’ flounderings with infinite compassion. Her imagination works as a kind of embrace, both tender and supremely intelligent.

The novel’s ending is pre-figured in its beginning. Grace, a leaky old barge with a rotting anchor, no cabin doors and unreliable plumbing, is moored at Battersea Reach on the river Thames. Other nearby boats are in similarly dodgy condition. Sooner or later, we begin to suspect, disaster will occur; possibly even drowning.

On board these rickety, rackety craft live an eccentric crew of neighbours, all lovers of the water in different ways. Chief among them, on Grace, is Nenna James, her two young daughters Martha and Tilda. Nenna is estranged from her husband, who skulks in a rented room in far off north-east London. One strand of the engaging plot concerns Nenna’s hapless attempts to stay afloat morally and financially, to keep an eye on her truant children, to deal with her need for love and sex. Fitzgerald draws splendid sketches of the earnest priest visiting from the local convent school Martha and Tilda attend, the hopeful marine artist trying to sell his boat while knowing it is riddled with leaks, the chancer-thief hiding his stash of stolen hairdryers below decks on another craft nearby, the kindly ex-naval stalwart who tries always to do the right thing: “Duty is what no-one else will do at the moment. Fortunately he did not have to define duty. War service … and his whole temperament before and since, had done that before him.” Even Nenna’s cat, Stripey, is given a portrait, a place in the story.

Fitzgerald writes well about men. In these pages they may be unheroic, self-deluding and occasionally incompetent (just like the female characters) but they are never mocked. Richard, the ex-naval officer, says to Nenna: “I can’t for the life of me see why, if you really feel something, it’s got to be talked about. In fact, I should have thought it lost something, if you follow me, if you put it into words.” Later in the chapter he does manage to pursue his conversation with Nenna, and to act on his feelings. When they return from a trip in his dinghy and tie up alongside his boat, Lord Jim, he realises “He had to do the right thing. A captain goes last onto his ship, but a man goes first into a tricky situation … Their sense of control wavered, ebbed, and changed places.”

Nenna’s younger daughter Tilda regularly swarms up the mast of the barge, the better to survey the movements of people below, the swelling tides, the shifting light. These are all lovingly, beautifully and accurately described. Tilda stands for the novelist herself, sometimes seemingly omniscient and sometimes inhabiting a close-up perspective, surveying the world she inhabits and has brought into being and valuing its goodness mingled with its flaws.

The major delight of this short, packed novel, for me, lies in its brilliant writing, which of course creates and illuminates its story and its characters. In the gap between land and river, wharf and deck, Penelope Fitzgerald entrancingly suggests that we can find and explore both freedom and belonging.

Offshore is published by Harper Collins.

Michèle Roberts' Negative Capability: a diary of surviving is reviewed here by Jill Dawson.

 

EIGHTH BIRTHDAY SPECIAL FEATURE: our best reads of 2024 so far, by Adèle Geras, Linda Newbery and Celia Rees

 

Part two of our 8th birthday celebration!

Adèle:

Lionel Shriver's new novel Mania is about the near future where cleverness has been forbidden and it's a crime to be clever. There is no distinction between intelligence and stupidity, but no one is to be called stupid or dumb or thick or any synonym for these words. This conceit is taken to the extreme: our protagonist, Pearson, almost loses her job as a college lecturer because she dares to teach The Idiot by Dostoevsky in one of her courses. She was born a Jehovah's Witness but has escaped from her background and now has a husband who's a tree surgeon and three children. She has a son and a daughter, (born with the use of a donor) who are very clever indeed. Her second daughter, born to Pearson and her husband after the introduction of the new laws, becomes a danger to the household by her adherence to the rules. The results of such a law play out in disasters. Bridges collapse. Planes fall out of the sky. Doctors are no longer required to study medicine. There is no such thing as intellectual rigour or careful science. So far, so Swiftian. It's written with all the sharpness and brio we associate with the author of We need to talk about Kevin but it's also about the importance of close friendship and love (of your spouse and your children) and personal betrayal and forgiveness. It's about the way we navigate our lives in the face of horrendous goings on in the wider world. It's quite a short book and very fast moving and even if you don't agree with Shriver's take on things, you will never not want to turn the page.

I haven't yet watched the Netflix version of One Day by David Nicholls but I was very upset by the book because (no spoilers!) it didn't end in the way I was expecting. His latest novel You are Here is a joy from start to finish. And starting and finishing is relevant. It's about a walk undertaken by a group of people: the Coast to Coast walk. Maps are provided throughout and many details about this walk are included seamlessly in the story. The main narrative is about two people: Michael, a Geography teacher with problems and an editor, Marnie, who is also far from happy in her private life. She has made the mistake of bringing some work along with her for the walk and her descriptions of the book she's editing and her remarks about editing in general are a really hilarious highlight. The fact that Michael teaches Geography is a short cut to having the landscape and natural surroundings described for us with enormous skill and subtlety. We learn things without knowing we're learning them. I try to say as little as possible about the plots of novels but this is the perfect book to take on holiday. It's truly engaging and engrossing and totally satisfying. Read it before it's on Netflix.

My final choice is a poetry book. Nic Aubury writes short, rhyming poems in the Wendy Cope tradition and I guarantee that even if you think poetry is not your thing, you will find something here to make you laugh and think at the same time. The collection is called Things my Children Think I'm Wrong About. Instead of telling you about it, I will quote two poems in full. They're that short!

No Right Turn

We'd rather go on suffering the pain of our mistakes,
pretending this was really what we wanted all along,
and promising to see it through, no matter what it takes,
than face the mild discomfort of admitting we were wrong.

Polonian

If I were more convincing and
my children more convincible
then this would be the wisdom I'd impart:
be ready to abandon an
opinion, not a principle,
and learn to tell those different things apart.

Linda: 

All Among the Barley by Melissa Harrison is set in rural Suffolk in 1933, narrated (with hindsight) by fourteen-year-old Edith. The First World War is still a recent memory, the farm affected by the loss of Doble's son and the emotional scarring of horseman John, while there are also foreshadowings of the war to come, brought into focus by the arrival of Constance, a young journalist from London. At first Constance seems to offer Edith an escape route from the inevitability of marriage to a local lad, childbearing and farm work; but her obsession with rural traditions soon reveals a disturbing affinity with Nazi ideals of nationalism and racial 'purity'. Melissa Harrison's beautiful observations of countryside, weather and routines give the novel a real grounding in time and place, with a sense of wistfulness - the corncrakes, nightjars and turtle doves are part of Edith's experience but largely lost from ours.

Middle England by Jonathan Coe moves from 2010 through general elections, the Brexit referendum and London Olympics and on to 2018 (in the future at the time of publication). Known as a chronicler of our times and the various attitudes, biases and aspirations of the public, Coe looks at this turbulent time from the perspectives of characters including political journalist Doug, Ben Trotter who finds unexpected success as a novelist, and lecturer Sophie who deplores her mother-in-law’s casual racism, finds herself at serious odds with her new husband over Brexit and is suspended from her university post over a casual remark to a transgender student. In this larger-than-life, still topical, left-leaning but not one-sided novel, Coe blends pathos, seriousness and comedy with a deft touch. I especially enjoyed the snippy conversations between socialist Doug and a Downing Street press apologist for ‘Dave’ (i.e. Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton). 

Lauren Bravo's How to Break Up with Fast Fashion may seem a peculiar choice for someone too old and certainly not enough interested in fashion to be the target audience. But a friend lent it to me because I was organising a Clothes Swap for Great Big Green Week, and I found it both entertaining and a source of information and advice. Knowing nothing of Lauren Bravo, I immediately warmed to her humour and empathy. Once a self-confessed fashion victim, she challenged herself to a year of nothing new, and realised how addicted she'd become to the thrill of seeking out and buying new garments - something the fashion industry is adept at encouraging, with temptations and 'must-haves' flaunted everywhere. Alongside shocking facts about the waste and pollution of fast fashion and the abysmal working conditions and pay for many textile workers, she suggests ways to do better: seeking out charity shop bargains or vintage clothes; swapping with friends; hiring outfits for special occasions like weddings instead of buying something that will spend the rest of its life in a wardrobe; and of course simply buying less and making the most of what we already have. She looks too at ethical fashion and how to avoid 'greenwashing'; most brands now make some kind of sustainability claim, but how can we be sure we're not paying for worker exploitation, use of hazardous chemicals in the dyeing process, or animal abuse? There are websites such as Good On You and Ethical Consumer where fashion brands are assessed and compared. An irresistible read that looks beneath the surface of new-new-new.

Celia Rees

I first read George Orwell's 1984 in the sixties but I was seeing so much that is relevant to our world now, that I really had to re-read it. The year, 1984, is never mentioned in the novel. Clearly, the writer's deliberate choice. One neat theory is that Orwell reversed the numbers of the year in which he was writing his dystopian future, arriving at 1984. Sufficiently distant, but unsettlingly close. When 1984, the actual year, arrived, Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister. I remember her crowing that Orwell had got it wrong and I remember thinking, 'No, you're wrong, Maggie. He was spot on.' 1984 is a novel of no time and all time. Orwell was writing when television was in its infancy. Now his tele screens are everywhere. I'm looking at one now and have another beside me on my desk, another downstairs in the living room and still others scattered round the house. We carry the means of our own surveillance in our homes and outside it we have CCTV and Facial Recognition. The slogan Orwell coined, Big Brother Is Watching You, is universally recognised. He might be, might not be, we don't know, not for sure, but we've made sure that he can. So much of the novel has uncomfortable modern resonance. The world has changed in ways he could not have imagined but the underlying impulse towards totalitarian power and control that he foresaw remain the same. The destruction of language and thought complexity, which he calls Newspeak, is present in the deliberate limitations of X (ex Twitter) and TikTok and in the Gifs, text language and emojis of WhatsApp, social media posting and messaging. The inversions of meaning: Ministry of Truth for Lies,  Love for Hate, Peace for War, and so on, are present in Alternative Facts, False Truths, Fake News and are part of of our everyday lives. Technology has brought Orwell's dystopia that much closer. He might not have got it all right, but he gave use fair warning. Let's hope we heed it.     

The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson. I first came to Jon Ronson through his podcast series, Things Fell Apart. The title is taken from the W. B. Yeats' poem, The Second Coming. Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. In the first series, Ronson looked at the plethora of conspiracy theories swirling on the internet and traced them back to their sometimes surprising origins. The second series, explored the culture wars and did pretty much the same thing. Ronson is an engaging journalist but beneath his informal, gonzo, faux naive cover he is a serious and meticulous investigator. The Men Who Stare at Goats begins with the disclaimer: This is a true story. It then goes on to describe how a man hurls himself at his office wall convinced that he has the power to pass through it into the office next door by mind and will power alone. He doesn't, of course. He ends up with a bruised nose. All a little bit weird and quirky, except that he is a Major General,  the U.S. Army's Chief of Intelligence with 16,000 soldiers under his command.  From this starting point, Ronson tracks backwards to the Vietnam War and 1960's alternative culture, forwards through the U.S. Military top secret psyops goat staring operations to the chilling application of torture techniques developed during the Bush Administration's war on terror. 

Empire of Pain by Patrick Redden Keefe is the story of the Sackler family, one of the richest families in the world, best known, until relevantly recently, for their patronage of the arts, museums and academia. Their name adorned the walls of the National Gallery, the Tate, the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Louvre, Harvard and Oxford Universities but a visitor to any of those institutions today, would find that name removed. Empire of Pain tells us why. Extraordinarily secretive, three generations of Sacklers deliberately obscured the source of their immense fortune.  It lay in the manufacture and marketing of two highly addictive drugs that they made ubiquitous, first the tranquillizer, Vallium (Mother's Little Helper) and then the powerful, opioid painkiller, OxyContin. The relentless, aggressive marketing of OxyContin, particularly the claims that the drug was virtually non addictive, generated thirty billion dollars of income for the Sackler family and triggered an opiate epidemic in America that has brought misery to millions of Americans and claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. The story of how this happened, the unmasking of the family behind the crisis and the extraordinarily challenging task of bringing them to account is unputdownable. A real life thriller.  

Don't miss the guest post by our birthday guest, award-winning crime writer Simon Mason!

SEVENTH BIRTHDAY FEATURE: our books of the year so far, by Adèle, Celia and Linda

 

As usual on our birthday, the three of us recommend books that have caught our attention so far this year.

Adèle:

End of Story, by Louise Swanson, is a lockdown-influenced dystopia and the premise is so ghastly (all fiction, stories etc firmly banned by the state) that I absolutely had to read it to find out what happens. I’m going to say very little about it so as not to spoil the pleasure of anyone coming to this book for the first time. Try and avoid looking up any reviews…that way, the twists as they occur will be all the more startling. I’m looking forward to seeing what this author does next. She manages a many-layered story with terrific virtuosity.

Yellowface, by Rebecca F Kuang, is the kind of book I call a “frying onions” book. Once I start one of these, I really can’t put it down, even to cook and I’ll be stirring a pot with one hand and holding the book up to read with the other. This is a story of a writer becoming hugely successful by stealing another writer’s novel. It’s tremendously good about the often mad world of publishing, and such hot button topics as cultural appropriation.  Though there are various bones one could pick with it, while you’re actually reading this book you notice none of them. It was a huge bestseller, and Rebecca E Kuang has a big following as a fantasy writer.

The North Shore by Ben Tufnell is the last book I read, but it’s so unusual and so perfectly conceived and written that I know it will stay with me in a way that only special books can. I’m not sure what to call it or how to describe it. It helps to know that the author is also a botanical illustrator, and a curator and knows a great deal about art. It’s a short book, and only partly a story about a storm on the Norfolk coast and what or who a teenage boy brings into his house…weaving in and out of this plot strand are short essays about all kinds of things and careful digressions in which various works of art are described and considered. The Green Man makes several appearances and Linda Newbery (of this parish) will be especially pleased about that. I can’t urge this book o you enough. It’s mind-boggling. I was tremendously grateful to have my phone handy, ready to look up specific art works on Google as I went along. It’s a book that has echoes of W G Sebald here and there but which is really unclassifiable. I loved it. 

Linda:

Eleanor Catton won the Booker Prize for The Luminaries, a Victorian mystery which was adapted for TV. Birnam Wood, a very different follow-up, also set in her native New Zealand, pitches a group of guerilla gardeners, led by the idealistic Mira, against Lemoine, a venture capitalist; both have ambitions, very different ones, for a farm abandoned after a landslip, and without the knowledge of the owner. When Tony Gallo, former member of Birnam Wood and aspiring journalist, learns of the deal struck between Mira and Lemoine, he's horrified that Mira has so readily sacrificed the group's ideals, and conducts his own investigation into Lemoine's activities. A catastrophic accident raises the already high tension, leading to a high-octane denouement. A compellingly literary and character-driven eco-thriller.

Naturalist Colin Tudge is well known for The Secret Life of Birds and The Secret Life of Trees. I was lucky to hear him speak recently; he's immensely knowledgeable and an engaging thinker. The Great Re-Think is an ambitious and heartfelt project in which he examines sustainability, government, ethics, environment (though 'biosphere' is his preferred term, 'environment' having been degraded by over-use and commodification), food and farming, the past and the future of how we see the planet and our place in it. His outline is that "All human action should be guided by moral/metaphysical principles on the one hand, and by the principles of ecology on the other"; neoliberalism has led to a belief that we can ignore planetary and ecological boundaries in our quest for endless growth. We do indeed need a great re-think of how we use and abuse the planet's resources - and urgently. If only there were the political will for this to happen ...

The Help by Kathryn Stockett is set in 1960s Jackson, Mississipi, 'where black maids raise white children but can't be trusted not to steal the silver'. College graduate and would-be writer Skeeter returns home to find that the maid who reared her, and whom she loved, has been dismissed. Setting herself apart from her privileged social group, she finds her niche as an author when she determines to give a voice to the black maids who service their homes and bring up and love their employers' children, only to see those children trained to share their parents' prejudice. It's been criticised as a 'white saviour' novel (of the kind condemned in Adèle's choice Yellowface), and Viola Davis, who played Aibileen in the film, said afterwards that she wouldn't now take the role, as she felt that the film wasn't focused enough on the black characters. But the novel, moving between the perspectives of Skeeter, Aibileen and Minny, does give powerful insights into the background and daily lives of black women and the stark differences between their homes and neighbourhoods and those where they work (and don't miss the Afterword by Kathryn Stockett). In fact, if anyone is thinly-drawn, in my view it's a couple of the bitchy, entitled white employers. If you've read the novel or seen the film, what do you think? Have to say that I found it completely gripping and sympathetic.

Celia:

I’ve always been a fan of the brooding, complicated, brainy detective – from Sherlock Holmes to Hieronymus Bosch by way of Adam Dalgleish. I can now add Jane Harper’s Aaron Falk to the list. I also like a good detective series and have now read all three of the books that feature Falk as the hero. I was upset to read that Exiles might be the last. Apart from their likeable hero, the books share seemingly effortlessly clever, seamless plotting. As a writer, I’m always looking for the sleight of hand, the shadow of the puppeteer’s strings. Each of the novels begins with a profound puzzle. As with all good puzzles, the solution is impossible to predict but ultimately completely convincing. It’s the steps leading to it that make for such compulsive reading. The novels are set in Australia and the continent itself is a powerful presence. The people, the landscape, the weather, extreme or benign, make these novels very much of their place. I’ve never really wanted to visit Australia, they have poisonous spiders and snakes, but after reading Exiles, I was prepared to brave such dangers and go to see this extraordinary place for myself.

Broken Light, by Joanne Harris, is as brilliant as the shards alluded to in the title. Many of the chapters are prefaced with a quotation from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s The Lady of Shallot and mirrors, glass, brittle, sharp reflective surfaces, provide a running motif from the first chapter to the last. As does Magic. Joanne Harris is a clever, restless writer who has written in many different genre since her beginning in the Magic Realism of Chocolat. Magic Realism is a notoriously difficult genre to handle and Joanne Harris does it superbly, walking a razor thin line between reality and, well, magic. The book begins with the memory of a magic show, a dazzlingly beautiful female magician, the Great Corovnik, and a trick done by mirrors. It also begins with a dream about woman being murdered in a local park: #shewasonlyrunning. The dream and the memory belong to Bernie Moon, late forties, menopausal and vanishing fast. Now she is remembering the words whispered by the Great Corovnik to her eight year old self: Make them look and Bernie does just that. Joanne Harris acknowledges Stephen King’s Carrie as one of her sources of inspiration. In King’s novel, the onset of womanhood unleashes her superpower. Joanne Harris reverses this, one of her many mirror tricks. The child Bernie had a superpower, she could see into people’s lives, into their minds, into their ‘houses’ but with her first period, she lost that power. The onset of the menopause brings it back - with a vengeance. Instead of accepting the invisibility brought on by having reached ‘a certain age’, Bernie comes to see who she really is and she Makes Them Look!

Adèle Geras and I are enthusiastic supporters of The Rest is History podcast, hosted by Tom Holland and Dominick Sandbrook. The podcast ranges far and wide. I’m constantly learning new things and new ways of looking at history: areas I already thought I knew about, subjects completely new to me. In March, they broadcast an episode rather alarmingly titled, Climate Apocalypse. Their guest was Peter Frankopan, Professor of Global History at Worcester College, Oxford and author of The Silk Roads: A New History of The World.  His latest book, The Earth Transformed: An Untold History, is if anything even more ambitious. A history of the world, written from a fundamentally environmental perspective and spanning time from c.4.5bn BC to the present. Truly global in scope, Frankopan examines the powerful effect of environmental change, how it has shaped life on earth and the lessons we can learn from previous civilisations and their responses, or their persistent failure to respond, to changes in climate. Ambitious indeed, and a very lengthy read, but fascinating and informative. As an early adopter of James Lovelock’s Gaia theory, I found it very interesting indeed and in a week when global temperatures have reached historic highs and wild fires rage across several continents, it couldn't be more timely.  

What are your best reads of the year so far? Please tell us in the comments! (They don't have to be new books.)

SEVENTH BIRTHDAY SPECIAL FEATURE: guest Anthony Horowitz chooses THE ESCAPE ARTIST by Jonathan Freedland

 

"A study of humanity like no other and an unforgettable read."

Anthony Horowitz is one of the most prolific and successful writers working in the UK – and is unique for working across so many media. A born polymath, he juggles writing books, TV series, films, plays and journalism. Anthony has written over 50 books including the bestselling teen spy series Alex Rider, which is estimated to have sold 21 million copies worldwide and has been turned into a hugely successful TV series by Amazon Freevee. A third series has just been filmed and the fourteenth Alex Rider novel, Nightshade: Revenge will be out later this year.

Also an acclaimed writer for adults, Anthony was commissioned to write two new Sherlock Holmes novels, The House of Silk and Moriarty. He was commissioned by the Ian Fleming Estate to write continuation novels for James Bond with Trigger Mortis and Forever and Day, published in 2015 and 2018 respectively. A third novel in the series, With a Mind to Kill, was published in May 2022.

Anthony’s award-winning novel Magpie Murders was published in October 2016 to critical acclaim and was serialised on BritBox at the beginning of 2022 with Lesley Manville in the lead role. It was televised on the BBC in 2023. The sequel, Moonflower Murders, will begin filming in September 2023. His new series featuring Detective Hawthorne and a sidekick called Anthony Horowitz has four books so far: The Word is Murder, The Sentence is Death, A Line to Kill and the recently published The Twist of a Knife. Anthony has just started work on a fifth: Close to Death.

Anthony is responsible for creating and writing some of the UK’s most beloved and successful television series including Midsomer Murders and he is the writer and creator of award-winning drama series Foyle’s War, which was the Winner of the Lew Grade Audience award for BAFTA.

Anthony was awarded a CBE in 2022 for his services to literature.

(photo credit: Canneseries/Olivier Vigerie 2022)

 

I’ve always had misgivings about books about Auschwitz. The evil of the place is so overwhelming, its darkness so profound, that how can any writer find anything new to add to what is already an extensive library on the subject? And there is a danger that repetition will only blunt the horror of it all. I visited the camp one February, a few years ago, and standing there in my jersey, gloves and puffer jacket, but still colder than I had ever been, I wondered how anyone could have survived even a week there (the average life expectancy was actually four months). Meanwhile, all around me, other visitors were taking selfies. 

The Escape Artist by Jonathan Freedland, which came out last year and is now in paperback, is a brilliant and important piece of writing because it tells a story that is less well-known, because it finds fresh details to illustrate the horrors of life inside the camp but above all because its focus extends far beyond the gas chambers and the electrified fences. In terrible detail, it explains how the world allowed the Holocaust to happen.

Its central protagonist, Walter Rosenberg, was just nineteen years old when he became the first Jew to escape from the camp, hiding in a tiny dug-out beneath a pile of wood and covering himself in petrol-soaked tobacco to put off the guard dogs. This breathless sequence – he and his fellow escapee, Fred Wetzler, were just seconds away from being discovered – is extremely tense; a reminder that, under another name, Freedland has written many successful thrillers.

Once out, the two men had to travel 75 miles through enemy territory to reach the border with Slovakia. “Just nineteen and twenty-five years old, Walter and Fred were entirely on their own. The way Walter saw it, they had been written off by the world…” And this is the nub of the matter. The descriptions of life inside Auschwitz are horrific enough. The casual murders, the starvation, the daily torture are detailed in sombre, effective prose. But as incredible as it may sound, what happens to Walter (who renames himself Rudolf Vrba) is in some ways even worse.

He had escaped in order to tell the world what was happening. “If the Jews knew what was coming, what sand might they be able to throw in the gears of the machine that was poised to devour them?” A scientist and a mathematician gifted with an extraordinary memory, he described his ordeal to a Jewish organisation in Bratislava – the UZ – and the result was The Auschwitz Report which detailed everything from the arrival of the transports from different parts of Europe to the numbers and even the names of those who perished. The final list numbered 1,765,000 dead in just two years.

Almost nobody cared. Nobody did anything. The Catholic church responded to their report with silence. Copies of the report got ‘lost in the post’. Jewish community leaders who did receive it dithered. The Americans were lethargic. Churchill read the document but his response was ineffectual. “What can be done?” he wrote to Anthony Eden. “What can be said?” The British did consider air strikes on Auschwitz or even on the railways leading to the camp. They decided not to.

Jonathan Freedland does not lose faith with his subject. “His life was defined by what he had endured as a teenager. But he was not crushed by it.” Even so, reading the second half of this book, it’s hard not to feel that Rosenberg does not come out of it as quite the hero he most certainly was even if he is credited with saving the lives of 200,000 people. For him, it wasn’t enough. The last part of the book describes a life that self-destructs. He falls out with Fred Wetzler and also with his daughter. An inveterate womaniser, he divorces his childhood sweetheart and wife. He moves from country to country and seems to have few friends. When he dies, in 2006, just forty people come to his memorial service.

The Escape Artist is a complex portrait of a man who was no artist and who never really escaped from the shadows of Auschwitz or, indeed, from himself. It is a study of humanity like no other and an unforgettable read.

The Escape Artist is published by John Murray

Sixth anniversary special guest: MICHAEL ARDITTI chooses THE RECTOR'S DAUGHTER by F M Mayor

"F B Mayor stands as a link, both stylistic and historical, between Jane Austen and Barbara Pym."

It's our birthday - today we are six! Since July 2016 we've posted 328 articles by an impressive array of guest authors and independent booksellers, with features including round-ups, anticipated reads, virtual awards and Q&As with authors. As usual on our anniversary we feature a very special guest; this year we're delighted that novelist and dramatist Michael Arditti has kindly written this piece for us about a great favourite of his.

Michael Arditti has written twelve novels and a collection of short stories. He began his professional career writing plays for the radio and stage and has worked extensively as a literary and dramatic critic. His novels have been short- and long-listed for several major prizes. He has been a Leverhulme artist in residence at the Freud museum, a visiting professor at King’s college, London, and was awarded an Honorary D Litt from the University of Chester. His most recent novel is The Young Pretender.

F M Mayor doesn’t feature in my copy of The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English, although she surely merits a place between children’s writer William Mayne and Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge. The unjustly neglected Mayor (1872 - 1932) wrote a collection of stories and three novels, of which The Rector’s Daughter is generally considered her masterpiece.

The Rector’s Daughter was first published in 1924 by Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press and, in an early chapter, the protagonist, Mary Jocelyn, is taken up by a London artistic coterie, which is surely based on the Bloomsbury Group. The novel was well received, and Mayor was compared to three of her literary heroines: George Eliot, Mary Gaskell and Jane Austen. All of them, incidentally, are referenced here: Mary reads to her father from Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life; she alludes to ‘the Cranford ladies’; more obliquely, a maid is named Mansfield.

Mayor insisted that the book wasn’t autobiographical. Although a spinster who, in later life, divided her time between her parent’s home in Kingston and her brother’s house at Clifton School in Bristol, she had a far more active and eventful youth than Mary, having been one of the first women to matriculate at Newnham College, Cambridge, and enjoyed a brief career on the stage. What she does have in common with her protagonist is the clerical background. Indeed, whereas Mary is merely the daughter of a clergyman, the octogenarian Canon Jocelyn, Mayor was the daughter of one and niece of several others, including the Cambridge professor of Moral Philosophy, John Grote.

This ecclesiastical heritage suffuses the novel and gives it its authenticity. The village of Dedmayne (the name is a clue to its character) is defined as a series of negatives. It is ‘insignificant’, ‘without a station’, ‘ugly’, ‘treeless’, ‘on the way to nowhere’ and, most damningly, ‘the social advantages of Dedmayne were on a par with the scenery.’ Mary and her father are the only gentry in the village and act as moral and social arbiters of its rigidly stratified community.

Mayor allows 35-year-old Mary even fewer physical attractions than Charlotte Bronte allowed Jane Eyre. ‘Her uninteresting hair, dragged severely back, displayed a forehead lined too early. Her complexion was a dullish hue, not much lighter than her hair. She had her father’s beautiful eyes and hid them with glasses. She was dowdily dressed.’

Although the rectory is staffed with a cook, housemaid and coachman, Mary is little more than a drudge, caring for her mentally ill sister, Ruth. When Ruth dies, Mary devotes herself to her father, who shows few signs of gratitude, let alone affection. Her life changes when Robert Herbert, the son of one of the Canon’s old friends, takes over the neighbouring parish of Lanchester. Mayor skilfully delineates Mary’s attraction to him, which she hardly dares admit to herself. After one of the most tentative love scenes in literature, Mary is convinced that an understanding exists between them. Then, on a short visit to Buxton, Herbert meets, falls in love with and becomes engaged to the brittle social butterfly, Kathy Hollings.

Mary behaves with absolute propriety, calling on the new Mrs Herbert, who patronises her. She feels utterly isolated, unable to confide in her one girlhood friend, Dora, who is visiting her sister in China, where (in a phrase that would not get past today’s sensitivity readers), ‘the natives are just like children.’ Afraid to admit that Herbert kissed her to her father, whose enjoyment of Scenes of Clerical Life is marred by knowledge of George Eliot’s adultery, Mary is left to deal with her desolation alone.

The second part of the novel shifts its focus from the rector’s daughter to the vicar’s wife. Mayor expertly depicts the wretchedness of the Herberts’ marriage, from which Kathy flees to the Riviera with her malevolent sister-in-law, Lesbia (in this case, the name is not a clue!). There, something occurs, which it would be unfair to disclose, but which effects a sea change in Kathy. These passages inspire Mayor’s finest prose and reveal her deepest sympathies, as she endorses Mary’s belief that ‘Mistakes sometimes turn out right in the end.’

Notwithstanding its excursions to London, the Riviera and Southsea, The Rector’s Daughter is steeped in a village life which was old-fashioned even at the time of writing. Virginia Woolf may have published the novel, but its subject, style and concerns could not be more remote from The Voyage Out and Night and Day, which had appeared, respectively nine and five years earlier, let alone Mrs Dalloway, which appeared the following year. Nevertheless, the book is a middlebrow classic, and F B Mayor stands as a link, both stylistic and historical, between Jane Austen and Barbara Pym.

The Rector's Daughter is published by Virago Modern Classics.

Michael Arditti's The Young Pretender is reviewed here by Adèle Geras.

Fifth birthday round-up by Adèle, Celia and Linda

 

What have we been reading?

Next week we celebrate our fifth birthday, and an exciting special guest is lined up to help us mark the occasion. Meanwhile, the three of us indulge in our own summer round-up. (We've been busy writing, too - each of us has published a book during lockdown! See the end of this post.)

Thank you so much to all the guest authors and independent booksellers who send us reviews, keeping us supplied now for five whole years and 275 blog posts - we couldn't do this without you! Don't forget to come back next week ...

Adèle Geras:

I love novels set in Cathedral Closes. I am a sucker for stories about the clergy and their families, like The Rector's Wife by Joanna Trollope and various books by Anthony Trollope. I also love soap operas. It's a term people use sneeringly, but they've never considered what gifts it takes to manage a cast of many people and keep us interested in every single one of them. I admire writing that's both witty and emotional, and a tale that introduces me to a whole crowd of new and interesting characters. I'd read all three of Catherine Fox's previous Lindchester Chronicles. She's married to a bishop and clearly knows what she's talking about ecclesiastically, as well as being a whizz at structure and in this fourth chronicle she casts an intelligent and sympathetic eye over what happens to her characters during the Pandemic. The phases of the moon are being studied by a young teenager and her diary threads the beads of this particular chain of events together. It's great to be back with the inhabitants of Lindford and I am now following their further adventures on Catherine Fox's Twitter account (@FictionFox) I must also admit to being envious of a writer who used the Pandemic to such good effect and has this to show for it now.

This novel has more than 2000 four and a half star reviews on Amazon and has been widely reviewed and raved over in the press. All I can say is: I quite agree with them. This is not the kind of book I thought I would love because I've lately felt I'm a bit too old for 'my life is falling to pieces' novels and also I'm not that keen on "will she find Mr Right?" novels. But I can honestly say that once I started reading Sorrow and Bliss, I literally couldn't put it down. I was up far too late into the night. I read it at odd moments....turns out it's my old friend, the frying onions kind of book. Which is, if you haven't met me saying this before, the sort of story where you hold the book with one hand even while frying onions with the other. It's most spectacularly well- written and deals in part with a wonderful depiction of the relationship between two sisters. I'm very fond of books about sisters because I'm an only child and this one is wonderful. You will laugh. You will cry. You will thank me for pointing you in the direction of this novel.

"Kieran Watts has been dead for over two years when I see him standing on the roof of a building in Shad Thames" says the narrator of this gripping thriller which isn't out till August 5th but which I read in proof. She knows what she's talking about because she killed him. So begins a twisty, atmospheric novel which has at its heart the fear and hatred which can arise when your beloved son come under the influence of someone you believe is truly hateful and evil. The reader is so swept up in the narrative that every shock comes as a real surprise. Your allegiances move around all the time. It's a book about fears, both real and imagined. My advice: read at once because The Heights a natural for TV adaptation and even though dramatisation will add to the visual representation of a London full of glittering high buildings, you won't get the obsessed tunnel vision nearly as well. It's a corker and just the thing for a holiday, at home or abroad.

Linda Newbery

The High House by Jessie Greengrass could perhaps be considered as dystopian science fiction by those who still, in spite of all evidence, don't take the climate emergency seriously, but for those of us who do it's a realistic and terrifying picture of the imminent future. Although it's a huge issue, the focus is on a small cast of characters, centred on Caro and her half-brother Pauly, sent to the house on the Suffolk coast that's been prepared for them as a refuge for when disaster strikes, looked after by the practical Sally and her wise grandfather. Along with the characters we realise how much we take for granted: that there will be light and heat at the flick of a switch, that there will be food available in shops ... and how inadequately we're prepared for survival when supply systems fail. I won't say more, as I'm planning to write a longer review of this engrossing, timely novel.

Like many others, I was mesmerised by Ridley Scott's TV dramatisation of The Terror earlier this year, and decided to read the novel by Dan Simmons too. In both we join the doomed Franklin expedition with the two ships, Erebus and Terror, locked in sea ice as they attempt the forbidding north-west passage. Although the ships were supposedly equipped to over-winter in the ice, crew members begin to fall ill and die from scurvy or lead poisoning, leading to the awful realisation that their tinned food is contaminated and their only hope of survival is to set off with sledges with the aim of reaching help farther south. Qualities of leadership, loyalty, resilience and self-sacrifice are to be found even as conditions become ever more desperate - but also there's malice and rebellion. Both novel and TV drama are spell-binding, though I did wonder whether the lurking presence of a vengeful spirit bear was really necessary. It was certainly used to dramatic effect, but to my mind it was the human interactions, disputes and allegiances in this dire situation that were so compelling.  

For those fascinated by the exploration of the treacherous north-west passage, I also recommend Michael Palin's Erebus - the Story of a Ship.

Miss Benson's Beetle, by Rachel Joyce, is also the tale of a journey of exploration but with a much lighter touch. Fascinated by beetles, disappointed in love by the Professor who has taught her all she knows, and disillusioned with her job teaching domestic science, Margery Benson vows to find the elusive golden beetle of New Caledonia. When she advertises for a travelling companion, she ends up with the least suitable person imaginable: Enid Pretty, who arrives in a pink outfit complete with dainty pompom-trimmed shoes, and only the vaguest ideas about beetles or travel - but with the one fixed idea that she must have a baby. All slightly larger than life, the story combines Rachel Joyce's signature warmth and humanity with the dangers of travel and a murder mystery in the background. This reminds me very much of Lissa Evans' Old Baggage, with its wit and humour and the affectionate, often exasperating friendship between women.

Celia Rees

During lockdown, I joined my friend Julia’s book club via Zoom. They had invited me to talk about my novel, Miss Graham’s Cold War Cookbook and at the end of the discussion they asked if I would like to join them. I accepted readily, welcoming the chance to read books that I might not have read otherwise. One of their choices was The Long Petal of The Sea.

The title is a quotation from the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, his description of his homeland as a ‘long petal of sea and wine and snow’. This is an epic novel spanning decades and crossing continents, following the lives of people both real and fictional. It begins in the brutal reality of the Spanish Civil War. A young medic, Victor Dalmar, is on the losing side and is forced to flee with his sister-in-law Roser Bruguer and thousands of others; his brother has been killed, his mother lost in the confusion of the retreat. After a gruelling crossing of the Pyranees, they are interned by a hostile French Government. From here they are rescued with many others, taken on a ship chartered by the poet Pablo Neruda to find refuge in Chile.

The novel follows their lives through changing years and circumstances from impoverished beginnings in a new country to successful careers, Victor as a heart surgeon and Roser as a musician, but they are strangers in a strange land and progression is anything but straightforward.

As Victor and Roser settle into their life in Chile, other stories are brought into the narrative. Effortlessly tracking her characters through time and across countries and continents, Allende exquisitely demonstrates the vulnerability of the individual to forces beyond their control, from the cruel exile forced on Victor and Roser by the Spanish Civil War to the defeat of the Allende liberal democracy in Chile and the brutal military dictatorship of Pinochet. This is a powerful novel of identity and belonging, love and loyalty but, above all, the resilience and endurance of the human spirit.

I’ve just finished reading A Place Called Winter by Patrick Gale. I confess to arriving late to his work, but after reading Notes from an Exhibition and now A Place Called Winter, I’ve joined my fellow Writers Review bloggers as an admirer of this supremely intelligent and sensitive writer.

A Place Called Winter is set in the first decades of the twentieth century and follows the life and adventures of Harry Cane. Discovered in an illicit affair, he is ostracised by his family, exiled from his comfortable metropolitan life, he leaves to start afresh as a homesteader on the prairies of Canada in a place called Winter, a place as bleak and inhospitable as it sounds. Ill equipped in every way, Harry nevertheless survives, more than that he thrives, relishing the physical work, appreciating the beauty of the country, enjoying the rural simplicity of his new life. He finds friendship here in a place where neighbour depends upon neighbour, companionship, a love he hadn’t known before but even in this idyll, old prejudices endure…

This is a novel of great compassion, a celebration of difference, a round and eloquent condemnation of the kind of small-minded prejudice that continues to blight lives.

Iain Sinclair’s Lud Heat is one of those books I’ve always meant to read. I’m very interested in his brand of occult psychogeography. He has a deep fascination with London and its dark history from the ancient origins of the City to the outer circuit of the M25. In Lud Heat, he explores the mythical and occult patterns underlying the modern city, detecting invisible lines, a web of pentacles and triangular patterns connecting the East London churches of Nicholas Hawksmoor to plague pits and the sites of the Whitechapel and Radcliffe Highway murders. His opaque style is difficult at times but there is a mystery in what he writes and an energy which has inspired and informed the writing of many authors who share his fascination with London and the esoteric from Peter Ackroyd to J. G, Ballard and Hilary Mantel.

Our own recent titles:

FOURTH ANNIVERSARY: a special Q&A with Celia Rees about her new novel, MISS GRAHAM'S COLD WAR COOKBOOK

"There is a definite magic in that first moment when the ideas begin to swarm together ..."

Celia Rees is a leading writer for Young Adults with an international reputation. Her titles include Witch Child (shortlisted for the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize), Sorceress (shortlisted for the Whitbread - now Costa - Children's Book Award), Pirates!, Sovay and Glass Town Wars. The chance discovery of an old family cookery book has now taken her writing in a new and different direction. In 2012, she began researching and writing her first novel for adults, Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook, out now. Here she answers questions from Adèle Geras and Linda Newbery. 
Twitter: @CeliaRees Instagram: @celiarees1

Linda: The idea of using recipes to conceal coded messages is such a clever one, used to brilliant effect throughout. How did you think of it?

Celia: I found a battered old cookery book among my mother's effects and was both intrigued and moved by the handwritten recipes that I found inside. I recognised my mother's writing, my aunt's and what I took to be my grandmother's but I'd never seen the book before. It was pre-war and must have belonged to my grandmother, then passed to my aunt and on to my mother who must have kept it when my aunt died. I'd been executor for both my aunt and my mother and had found no letters. These recipes were the only written connection between these women. There was something I wanted to write about in that but I didn't know what it could be. Years later, I was in the Imperial War Museum with my daughter. We discovered that the British Zone in Post War Germany had been a hotbed of spying. My aunt had been there. Could she have been a spy? On the surface, the idea was ridiculous. My respectable, Head Mistress maiden aunt a spy? But then again, it was perfectly possible. She had led a bit of a hidden life... If she was a spy, how would she pass on messages? I thought of the handwritten recipes passing between women. The two ideas connected and I knew I had a book.

Adèle: Apart from the personal link of the recipe book, can you identify what it was that drew you to the story of some of the things that went on both before and more especially after the War? It's not a subject I've seen written about before.

Celia: I began to research Germany in the immediate post war period and was shocked by the utter chaos: the widespread physical destruction, the lack of even the most basic foodstuffs and the millions of displaced persons there from all over Europe. The Germans call midnight on 8th May, 1945, 'Stunde Null' - Zero Hour. In and amongst all this, there were Nazi fugitives hiding in plain sight. They were being hunted but not always to be brought to justice. The Allies were looking for useful Nazis even before the war ended, not just rocket scientists like Wernher von Braun, but others, too. Anyone who might be useful because the world was turning, the Cold War starting and Germany was the country where the erstwhile Allies met. I found this intensely interesting. By one of those chance things, on a visit to the Jewish Museum in Paris, I saw a chilling group photograph of doctors and nurses lined up outside a hospital, a mental facility, part of the Euthanasia Project which was devoted to systematically killing patients deemed 'a life unworthy of life'. I knew almost nothing about this and found it deeply shocking and I thought it should be more widely known.

Linda: How did you find the confidence to write about this period and these settings, with so much complexity involving the different factions, protocols and motives? What was the most difficult thing to find out?

Celia: I did a lot of reading and didn't start writing until I felt I was in command of at least the basic facts and knew where to go if I needed to know more. The most difficult things to find out were the details of the day to day lives of the people living and working in Germany. There are plenty of books about various aspects of Post War Germany but not many which tell you how much the butter ration was or how a billet was organised. I had to go to the Imperial War Museum and read the letters and diaries of women working for the Control Commission. The food was difficult, too: finding menus, dishes, recipes. I'd set myself a bit of a challenge with that!

Adèle: This novel is what's known as multilayered. Several time frames, quite a few different narratives going on at the same time. Did this give you any particular problems? Did you go through various versions before arriving at the ideal order?

Celia: I didn't have a problem with the framing device, that was always set. If I had a problem, it wasn't so much with the order of events but the order of telling, especially the flashbacks, which couldn't be jettisoned because they carried vital backstory that the reader needed to know. The trick is to know where to put them, then weave them into the thought patterns of the close third person narration in a way that seems entirely natural and doesn't disrupt the main narrative thrust. That took a bit of working. For a while I had a reader who didn't like flashbacks and that made things difficult!

Adèle: One of the things I most love about this book (and indeed about all your writing!) is the care and love you give to things like descriptions of clothes and settings. Did you have to fight editors about keeping this detail intact? In my experience, they sometimes want to cut a lot of that.

Celia: We share that, Adèle. I love all those details. There was a brilliant exhibition at the Imperial War Museum, Fashion on the Ration and a great book to go with it by Julie Summers and that was a huge help. It's strange how things like that pop up just when you need them. I like researching clothes and makeup. It's fun and I can spent all afternoon on the internet chasing down the right hairstyle or shade and make of lipstick, but these kinds of details help to accurately evoke the period. Clothes, hairstyles, makeup, jewellery, accessories are important in other ways, too. They tell you a lot about the woman wearing them and at a time when so much was rationed, where and how she acquired them tells you what is going on at street level. I didn't have too much trouble from my editors. Luckily, they could see the value of that kind of detail.

Linda: In similar vein, I was struck by the scenes of utter devastation in the cities and suburbs - you describe them so vividly. Were these derived from photographs and first-hand accounts, and where did you find them?

Celia: My aunt had photographs of ruined cities and ships half submerged in harbours. Some she'd sent to my mother, so I remember seeing them as a child, others I found in her effects. There are plenty more on the internet. One thing people did was take photographs of the devastation. Touring the ruins was quite the thing to do. I also found eye witness accounts of Hamburg and Berlin, so I had those for reference.

Adèle: Is the Swiss hotel based on a real hotel?

Celia: Yes, it is. The Beau Rivage Palace. I haven't been there but it looks fabulous! I bought a vintage post card and trawled their website. The wonders of the internet!

Linda: You obviously visited Lübeck for research - did you visit other settings for the novel, for instance Vipiteno Sterzing?

Celia: I did visit Lübeck, also Hamburg and Berlin but I didn't get to Vipiteno Sterzing. Again, internet to the rescue: tourist information and TripAdvisor, also Google Maps and Google Earth. I did cheat a little bit and put a lake where there is no lake...

Linda: Often, when a writer is researching, something crops up that's a gift to the plot, or that's useful thematically. Did you come across any unexpected bonuses of that kind?

Celia: There is a definite magic in that first moment when the ideas begin to swarm together. After that, you are on a journey and it is remarkable how things pop up, exhibitions that are on just the right subject, a chance find in a bookshop or the person you just randomly met and who is actually from Lübeck and whose aunt and uncle still live there and would love to show you round the city. The most surprising the thing was how my aunt's seemingly unremarkable life and character lent itself so perfectly to this kind of novel, especially when I found a box of bullets hidden in her writing case. I took that as a Sign! Maybe she had been a spy after all...

Adèle: If this became a movie (which it should!) who would play Dori, Edith, Kurt and Harry? (Ps. I know who I'd like to play Elisabeth: was in The Night Manager.)

Celia: Endless hours of idle speculation... Well, and they are a bit disparate but I think Anna Maxwell Martin would make a good Edith, Rachel Weisz as Dori, Thomas Kretschmann as Kurt, Cate Blanchett as Elisabeth (although, agree Elizabeth Debicki if Cate unavailable) and Ben Whishaw as Harry - I had a photo of him pinned to my board!

Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook is published by Harper Collins.

Photograph of Celia Rees at Compton Verney, by Linda Newbery. Compton Verney is the setting for many a conversation about books in progress, and also where Writers Review was first hatched, four years ago.