Articles & Extracts

The Orchid Man

I owe the discovery of The Passing of a Hero and Conventional Weapons to a fellow-visitor to the London Library who, shrewdly interpreting the glazed stare of a fellow shelf-crawler, urged me to make my way to English fiction and look for Jocelyn Brooke. Brooke is known today, although not widely, for three wartime novels – The Military Orchid, A Mine of Serpents and The Goose Cathedral, which were reissued in 1981 by Secker & Warburg as ‘The Orchid Trilogy’. Unashamedly autobiographical, they use the twin devices of orchids and fireworks, subjects on which Brooke had acquired a rich store of recondite knowledge, to tell the story of Brooke’s upbringing in Kent, his years at Oxford and his experiences as a soldier posted to Italy in the Second World War.
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Verse and Worse

Verse and Worse

If the name Baring-Gould seems vaguely familiar, perhaps you grew up as I did, exposed every Sunday to Hymns Ancient and Modern. The Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould (1834–1924) wrote many of them, including such traditional favourites as ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’ and ‘Now the Day is Over’. He was a hagiographer and an extraordinarily prolific writer, credited with over 1,240 publications on various subjects. He also found the time to father fourteen children, one of whom emigrated to America where his grandson, William Baring-Gould, was born in Minnesota in 1913.
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A la Recherche

Halfway through Marilynne Robinson’s gorgeous novel Gilead, the narrator, John Ames, a 77-year-old preacher in Iowa, makes this observation: ‘Calvin says somewhere that each of us is an actor on a stage and God is the audience. That metaphor has always interested me, because it makes us artists of our behaviour, and the reaction of God to us might be thought of as aesthetic rather than morally judgmental in the ordinary sense.’ It is unusual for moral responses to be set aside in favour of aesthetic ones in a theological context, especially (one might think) where the context is Calvinist. The practice is more familiar, even if it often goes unrecognized, in literature. It is, for example, one of the sustaining tensions of Tolstoy’s work – Anna concludes that Karenin is a bad man immediately after being disgusted by his clammy hand. More directly than most fiction, Gilead portrays an individual trying to make sense of his life. This might also serve as a description of the art of autobiography, and I immediately found myself applying Ames’s remark to a clutch of autobiographies I had recently read.
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A Word in Your Ear

A Word in Your Ear

I am, literally, a bad reader. I have mild dyslexia and well remember, when reading Peyton Place in my youth, taking ‘sonofabitch’ as ‘sofabitch’ and thinking it was a piece of bordello furniture. I am also partially sighted and have difficulty reading in either bright or low light; and with poor peripheral vision I tend to miss the ends of lines. So the advent of audio tapes and of the Talking Book (pioneered by the RNIB) has been a splendid thing for me.
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Too Sharp for Her Own Good

Too Sharp for Her Own Good

Stella Gibbons is hardly a forgotten writer, but she wrote more forgotten works than almost anyone else. Her first book, Cold Comfort Farm (1940: see SF no.10), has a secure and well-deserved place in the literary pantheon – it is a funny, sharp, tender and hugely quotable novel. Nothing else she wrote equalled its popularity, even the sequels, and by the turn of the millennium it was pretty much the only Gibbons book, out of twenty-five novels, three collections of short stories and four volumes of poems, left in print.
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Voyage in the Dark

Voyage in the Dark

Good Morning, Midnight is in fact the fourth in a series of novels that draw largely on Jean Rhys’s own life. Sasha Jansen is a lonely, ageing alcoholic who, at the instigation of a worried friend, goes to spend a recuperative fortnight in Paris, where she had lived during her brief marriage. Now she wanders the streets, ‘remembering this, remembering that’. She has been so damaged by men that when happiness is within her grasp she is unable to prevent herself seeking revenge with a futile gesture of self-destruction.
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A Bad Chooser of Husbands

A Bad Chooser of Husbands

Do your favourite authors have a recognizable voice, so that you can identify them from a paragraph in the same way that you identify a voice over the telephone? Angela Thirkell has just such a voice, but even so she has been out of fashion since the 1960s – partly, I suspect, because her later work had a strongly rancorous tone. I’d never heard of her until I came to weed a technical college library in the ’70s and happened upon a hardback novel with a map of Barsetshire as a frontispiece. Who was this Thirkell woman?
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High Life

Bad News by Edward St Aubyn is, quite simply, the best book ever written about drugs. Thomas de Quincey, Charles Baudelaire, Jean Cocteau, William Burroughs, Hunter S. Thompson, Irvine Welsh and Will Self may all be writers roped together like mountaineers heading for the summit, but it is St Aubyn they will find at the top. I first came across the book about five years ago. There it was, quietly glowing away on a friend’s shelf. And from the moment I picked it up I knew it was a work of perfection. It fitted my own experience as seamlessly as a silk glove.
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A Kind of Redemption

I’ve been a passionate reader all my life, be it of labels on jam jars or the small print on the back of tax forms, aged copies of free newspapers left on seats on the London Underground, Peter Rabbit or Plato. Reading is more than pleasure, it’s like breathing. Generally, though, I read for aesthetic reasons (literature, to enjoy the writer’s skill), to keep up (newspapers and periodicals) or for escape (thrillers, the blacker the better). Or that was true before my mother died.
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Posh but Down-to-Earth

Posh but Down-to-Earth

Recently, I noticed a rather irritating poster on the Underground proclaiming: ‘You never forget your first time.’ It was an advertisement for a villa holiday company – bizarrely – but the irritation I felt (since I am not annoyed by villa holidays per se) had to do with the too obvious double entendre. In fact, one does not forget the first time that one does quite a lot of things – seeing one’s name in print, for instance, or walking along Striding Edge, that most vertiginous of paths on to the top of Helvellyn – and certainly I have never forgotten the first time I read a gardening book.
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Maxwell’s World

A curious thing: the New York literary world is smaller than the London literary world. It also has a strange feeling of being more old-fashioned. I was edited there by the legendary Joe Fox. I don’t think he liked me, but we would have dinner at a hotel restaurant, the last place where he could smoke in New York, and talk about great writers, including William Maxwell. Joe Fox died at his desk in Random House behind a huge pile of copies of the New York Times, cigarette on his lips.
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