BOOK CHOICE: AUTUMN READING

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Maggie Fergusson on the best new books, from the second world war to Sarah Bernhardt and Seamus Heaney ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Autumn 2010

HISTORY

Bomber County by Daniel Swift (Hamish Hamilton, hardback, out now)

Bombing was to the second world war what the trenches were to the first: shocking, devastating, irresistible to poets. Daniel Swift’s bomber grandfather died in 1943, and the story of his last days is threaded through a narrative that plumbs the mindset of the bombers and the dark fascination of their craft. As cities were flattened, poetry sales leapt, and poets such as T.S. Eliot, Stephen Spender and C. Day Lewis became obsessed with the paradox of this new warfare: its horror and its thrill. This is a debut of stunning originality, in which Swift engages the reader as an accomplice in his research.

Operation Mincemeat by Ben Macintyre (Bloomsbury, paperback, out now)

The girls of St Trinian’s could not have cooked up a bolder prank than Operation Mincemeat. Devised in a basement under Whitehall by a bunch of genius oddballs, some of whom became seduced by their own story, it arranged for the corpse of a homeless Welshman, dressed in British military uniform, to be floated into German hands in April 1943. Planted on the corpse were forged “top secret” papers indicating that Britain intended to invade not Sicily, but Greece. Macintyre is riveting on the psychology of deception, and shows how Hitler swallowed Mincemeat, despite its glaring flaws, because he wanted to believe it.

FICTION

The Small Hand by Susan Hill (Profile Books, hardback, out now)

A ghost story is not a horror story, and Susan Hill understands the distinction. Beginning on an autumn evening, when an antiquarian bookseller, lost on his way home to London, feels a small hand slip into his own, she builds suspense through easy, elegant prose and welcoming surroundings: Duke Humfrey’s Library in Oxford, a book-infested flat in Chelsea, a peaceful monastery in the Alps. It becomes clear only gradually that the phantom toddler is driven by revenge. If the proof of a good ghost story is a bad dream, this one worked for me.

The Misogynist by Piers Paul Read (Bloomsbury, hardback, out now)

Geoffrey Jomier is a retired barrister bruised in the “punch-up of life”. His wife has left him for his best friend; he’s lonely, morose and short of funds. It’s his own fault: he’s undemonstrative, outrageously un-PC, and mean (he weighs up the pleasures of an affair with an old flame against the cost of Viagra). Yet he’s oddly endearing, and in a surprising final twist proves himself, like a flawed Graham Greene priest, heroic. “No one wants to publish books by old men”, Jomier broods, “because no one wants to read them.” But this might spawn a vogue for “Git Lit”.

Nourishment by Gerard Woodward (Picador, hardback, out now)

The passing of the last survivors of the first world war has prompted an urge to capture the essence of the second before it is too late. Here, a prosaic London housewife is filled with disgust when her husband, a prisoner-of-war, pesters her to provide “a spring offensive of sexual narrative” to lighten his confinement. She finds herself able to oblige only when she embarks on an affair with her employer at the local gelatin factory—and the consequences are devastating. This is black comedy with a sufficient hold on reality to leave a melancholy aftertaste.

MEMOIR

What to Look for in Winter by Candia McWilliam (Cape, hardback, out now)

I devoured this in two long sittings, and then wondered if that was mawkish. Candia McWilliam, hitherto a novelist, has written a tale of loss: loss of a mother to suicide, of self-respect to alcohol, of a beloved husband, and, finally, of sight. What makes it gripping is not its sadness, but McWilliam’s dogged determination to tell the emotional truth, the beauty of her prose, and her capacity, despite everything, for gratitude. Writing chiefly by dictation as she pursues cures for her blindness, she calls this “a bread-and-butter letter to life from one who has loved but not sufficiently belonged to it”.

BIOGRAPHY

Sarah: the Life of Sarah Bernhardt by Robert Gottlieb (Yale, hardback, October)

Sarah Bernhardt took it for granted that she was the greatest actress in the world, said Maurice Baring, “as Queen Victoria took it for granted that she was Queen of England”. For Robert Gottlieb, a former editor of the New Yorker, she is “still the most famous of all Frenchwomen since Joan of Arc”. His pacy, inquisitive narrative explores the turbulent off-stage dramas and puzzling personal history of one who was pursued by Gustave Doré, Victor Hugo and the then Prince of Wales (later Edward VII). “I’m an incomplete person,” Bernhardt told one of her legion of lovers. This portrait of the incomplete person is sometimes inspiring, often salutary. (Reviewed by The Economist here)

POETRY

Human Chain by Seamus Heaney (Faber, hardback, out now)

Seamus Heaney once told me that he thanked his Catholic upbringing for giving him “a right to joy”. In this collection, joy is reflective, as he considers the “not unwelcoming emptiness” left by departed friends, and anticipates his own final “letting go”. In response, he turns to the precise memory of small moments—filling a pen with ink, staring down a rat hole: “If you know a bit/About the universe/It’s because you’ve taken it in/like that.” Here’s a recipe for wisdom open to all. If you’ve time for just a handful of poems this autumn, turn to these. (Reviewed by The Economist here)

(Maggie Fergusson won four prizes for her life of George Mackay Brown, published by John Murray. She is secretary of the Royal Society of Literature. Her last Book Choice column was published in the summer issue of Intelligent Life.)

Picture Credit: ginnerobot (via Flickr)