There’s always something a bit silly about literary prizes. I’ve been a judge of several, and been judged myself, and I know there is rarely a “best” Book of the Year in any category. As it is, neither critics nor readers are likely to agree about much. So what follows doesn’t pretend to be anything but a note of new books I have enjoyed this year. There is no pretence that I am aspiring to speak ex cathedra.
The Horseman (Bloomsbury, 320pp, £8.99) by Tim Pears is a remarkable evocation of life on a country estate just before the First World War. Entirely free of sentimentality, it takes the hardships and sometimes cruelty of rural life for granted; the existence of class distinctions, too. It rings true, as if Pears was in the hayloft watching and listening to everything in the stable below. There’s a burgeoning, barely articulated, relationship between the horseman’s son, a boy who communicates more easily with birds and animals than with people, and the lord of the manor’s independently minded young daughter. It is apparently to be the first book in a trilogy – it will be extraordinary if sequels can be so magical.
Though setting, story and characters are different, the atmosphere of this novel recalls Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes, one of those books one keeps returning to.
The historical novelist who deals with public events has a problem. How do you create tension when the reader already knows the outcome? Well, the first thing you have to do is keep in mind that events which are now in the past were once in the future – when Neville Chamberlain flew to Munich in September 1938, everything was uncertain. The world held its breath and children were fitted with gas masks.
Robert Harris is the master of the intelligent political thriller. His Munich (Hutchinson, 352pp, £20) is utterly gripping, his portrayal of Chamberlain sympathetic and fair. Almost nobody except Hitler and his henchmen wanted war in 1938. Chamberlain, as the author of the Agreement, was cheered as lustily in Munich as in London. Harris’s plot involves the German aristocratic opposition to the Führer, but leaves open the question of how they might have acted if the Agreement had not been made.
Nicholas Shakespeare’s Six Minutes in May (Harvill Secker, 528pp, £20) might be read as a sequel to Munich, though it’s a work of history rather than a novel. That said, Shakespeare is also a novelist, and a good one, as is his account of the disastrous Norway campaign and the subsequent Commons debate which led to Chamberlain’s resignation. It is narrative history written with a novelist’s eye for character and an awareness that decisions are made often in ignorance of the facts, and always speculatively. The irony is that Churchill, the minister most responsible for the Norway fiasco, became the unavoidable prime minister. We may all be grateful that he did so – his luck and ours.
Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End (Faber & Faber, 320pp, £8.99) was actually published in the autumn of last year, but, since it won the Walter Scott Historical Novel Prize this summer, may reasonably be noted here. Set in America before, during and after the Civil War, it offers a wonderful picture of the Indian Wars and the expansion of the American republic. There’s an unconventional but convincing love story of the kind that Hollywood in the years of the classic Western would have shrunk from. Nevertheless, this is a novel like the best John Ford movies, unsparing, often harsh, yet also tender and chivalrous.
Francis Spufford’s Golden Hill (Faber & Faber, 352pp, £8.99) was a runner-up for that Walter Scott Prize, but has won other prizes since. This isn’t surprising, because first, it’s a strong narrative set in pre-revolution New York, when it was a dangerous and often perplexing small town for the novel’s hero, fresh from London; and, second, because it is a very clever novel, eminently discussible, not only on account of its theme, but also because of the manner in which it draws upon, and sometimes parodies, the classic 18th-century novels of Fielding and Smollett, as well as Laurence Sterne. Teachers of creative writing may fall on it with gleeful enthusiasm; some of their students too, I dare say. Happily, however, the common reader, whose first and sensible demand is that novels should be entertaining, will find this one richly enjoyable.
Entertaining and enjoyable, yes. Nobody, unless set a text for an exam or assigned a book to review, is compelled to read any published novel – and reviewers can always say “I’ll pass on this one.” Nevertheless accepting, as one should, that the first requirement of any work of art is that it should please and offer delight, such pleasure and delight come in different ways, and may be afforded by novels which are sad and low-spirited, with a quiet story sometimes in danger of disappearing. Such a one is Bernard MacLaverty’s Midwinter Break (Jonathan Cape, 256pp, £14.99). MacLaverty is an excellent short story writer; not, however, a prolific novelist – this is his first novel for 16 years.
Worth waiting for, it’s exquisitely done. The setting of the midwinter break is a wet and chilly Amsterdam. The couple taking the break are, like MacLaverty, Ulster Catholics long resident in Scotland. Their marriage is withering, though not yet dead. The husband, a more or less retired architect, is increasingly dependent on alcohol, practised in concealing the amount he drinks from his wife. She is contemplating a separation. Her husband has lost all but the remnants of his faith, even as her religion comes to matter more for her. He thinks this is merely a holiday. She is seeking a place she has found years before – the Begijnhof – a religious house for lay Sisters. If they accept her she will leave her husband and seek to give a deeper meaning to the last years of her life. It is all beautifully and persuasively done. MacLaverty is a writer who understands that, as more is often less, so too less may be more. There isn’t a wasted or superfluous sentence in the novel.
In one sense, of course, all fiction is lies. Novelists invent action. They make up people and give them words to speak and thoughts to think. We all recognise this, though we may not admit it. But what happens when the novelist meets a real-life liar? Enric Marco was one of the most famous men in Spain. A Republican fighter in the Civil War, a trade union leader, deported to Nazi Germany and held in the concentration camp of Mauthausen, he became after the death of Franco and the return of democracy the spokesman for the deprived and the victims of fascism. His personal testimony made audiences weep.
Then he was exposed as an impostor. He had indeed gone to Nazi Germany, but as a voluntary worker, and wasn’t a survivor of the camps. His story, told in The Imposter (MacLehose Press, 442pp, £20), was a natural for Javier Cercas, a novelist who had repeatedly probed the working of memory and the distortion of history – while uneasily conscious that in aiming at the truth through fiction he might be little different from Marco. It’s a fascinating book, very much of our time in this era of fake news and what is called “historical memories”.
Novelists often make big claims for their work. Gustave Flaubert, walking through the ruins of Paris after the bloody suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871, told a friend that the disasters of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune would have been averted if only people had read and understood his last novel, L’Éducation sentimentale. I think he was making a joke – for one thing that novel was published only in 1869, to puzzled reviews and poor sales. Still, this makes a nice starting point for Peter Brooks to write about Flaubert and his friend Georges Sand. The novel is set at the time of the 1848 Revolution, the war, the Commune and its suppression, and even the Catholic Revival that followed and found expression in the building of the Sacré-Coeur. Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris (Basic Books, 288pp, £25) is fascinating and the contemporary photographs of the destruction are riveting.
Two other books I have greatly enjoyed: Stevenson in Samoa (MacLehose Press, 352pp, £20) by Joseph Farrell, a warm and intelligent account of the novelist’s life and work in his last years in the South Seas; and Jonathan Gaythorne-Hardy’s The Sultan’s Organ (Propolis, 288pp, £10.99), which, hanging on a voyage to deliver a remarkable organ as a present from Queen Elizabeth I to the Ottoman Emperor, gives a wonderful picture of Constantinople, and offers the reminder, if needed, that Christians were free to practise their faith in the Muslim empire.
Finally, as a seasonable lollipop, there is a charming anthology, An English Christmas (John Murray, 288pp, £15). Edited by John Julius Norwich, it offers a nice mixture of the expected and unexpected. Dickens is here of course, with excerpts from A Christmas Carol and The Pickwick Papers, but also that marvellously uncomfortable dinner young Pip had to endure. Chesterton is represented with that lovely story “The Shop of Ghosts”. But there is also – new to me – an essay by Winifred Holtby in which she recounts, among much else, the coronation by Leo III of Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor on Christmas Day.
(Dr Walter Ullmann, who knew more about the medieval papacy than any medieval pope, told me Charlemagne was furious, because he had intended to crown himself, not receive the crown from the pope – the first step as it were in the centuries-long struggle for primacy between the empire and the papacy.)
There are accounts of Queen Victoria’s Christmases – they sound ghastly – and more modestly there’s a little list composed by our own Queen aged 10 for her six-year old sister to help her send thank-you letters to the right person. Queen Mary (“Grannie”) gave her only a calendar, which sounds a bit stingy.
There’s also poetry – Herrick, Milton, Hardy, Tennyson; and there’s Mr Pooter and Agatha Christie’s memory of childhood Christmases – dinners and pantomimes. It’s a lovely book to dip into and fall asleep over beside a real log fire. An ideal present, but buy two copies, for you’ll want to keep one for yourself.
Allan Massie is the Catholic Herald’s chief book reviewer
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