BOOK CHOICE: A NEW COLUMN

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PAST GALLERIES

In "Book Choice", the first of a series, Maggie Fergusson, secretary of the Royal Society of Literature in London, tells us what good books she's read lately ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Spring 2010

MEMOIRS

Waking up in Toytown by John Burnside (Cape, hardback, out now)

“Not so long ago, when I was still mad, I found myself in the strangest lunatic asylum that I had ever seen”: from the first sentence of John Burnside’s second volume of autobiography, you do not willingly stop reading. He is afflicted with an addictive personality and a psychological condition, apophenia (seeing things that are not there: “finding God or the devil in the last scrapings of Pot Noodle”). Moving from Scotland to a village off the M25, he exchanges barbiturates, alcohol and AA meetings for hedge-clippings, office life and a Samsonite briefcase, and attempts to vanish into “a Surbiton of the mind”. But his demons pursue him, and suburbia is filled with characters as bizarre as any from his “mad” days: Greg, for example, who enlists him to murder his wife. Harrowing and hilarious by turn, Burnside’s prose is spliced with moments of heart-stopping beauty, and rings unfailingly clear and true.

My Animal Life by Maggie Gee (Telegram, hardback, out now)

Prompted by a cancer scare, the novelist Maggie Gee turns to memoir. Reflecting on a childhood circumscribed by Fifties caution, which she then threw to the winds of the Sixties’ sexual revolution, she sees herself as part of a web of creation: human, animal, plant. Her task here is to bind this web, through forgiveness, where it has snagged in her own life – principally through relations with her complex, frustrated father. There is sorrow – “tragedy sits heavier in the scale-pan than everyday contentment” – but the keynote is gladness. Her writing brims with gratitude and appetite for life.

The Music Room by William Fiennes (Picador, paperback, out now)

The 14th-century castle in which William Fiennes spent his childhood becomes, in this beautiful memoir, a metaphor for the human mind: part open, gracious, outward-looking; part dark and mysterious. These contrasting elements appear at their most extreme in Fiennes’s older brother, Richard, who is brain-damaged through epilepsy and oscillates between sweetness – “She’s like red roses, shining, in a way,” he says of a psychologist who has won his favour – and terrifying violence. Both a celebration and a lament, the book poses large questions about human nature: how is character formed? Are any of us truly free?

The Last Resort: a memoir of Zimbabwe by Douglas Rogers (Short Books, hardback, out now)

Lyn and Rosalind Rogers’ Zimbabwean roots go back 350 years, so, when things got tough, they were determined to hang on to their home in the Eastern Highlands. In a pacy narrative, swinging from Orwellian nightmare to Evelyn Waugh farce, their son tells the story of this brave, bewildered couple from the murder of the first white farmer in April 2000 to the present fragile peace. Movingly, he conveys both the beauty of a benighted land, where beatings, betrayal and torture take place against a backdrop of grapevines, bougainvillea and baobab trees, and the extremes – good and evil – to which human beings will go when lives and livelihoods are on the line.

POETRY

The Wrecking Light by Robin Robertson (Picador, paperback, out now)

Courtesy of the British Council, I was with Robin Robertson in Kolkata when one of these poems, “Kalighat”, was conceived. As the blade fell on a sacrificial goat, I looked away; but Robertson’s level gaze, involved yet detached, never wavered. Whether revisiting classical myths, or rounding St Kilda in a glorious drum-roll of Norse/Gaelic names, or dwelling on the bitter fruits of middle-age (shame, regret, fear) in Hammersmith, uncompromising concentration distinguishes all the poems in this fourth collection. Do not look to them for comfort, but for an austere, vigorous beauty: the language is both lyrical and taut as a bow-string.

FICTION

The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds (Cape, hardback out now, paperback May 6th)

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (Fourth Estate, paperback, out now)

In Mantel’s recreation of Thomas Cromwell, and of the fear, intrigue, smells, sights and sounds of the Tudor court, the Man Booker judges picked a true winner: deeply imagined, compellingly portrayed, a deserved best-seller. But don’t let its success blind you to “The Quickening Maze”, one of the Booker runners-up. Adam Foulds feels his way, tenderly but precisely, into the mind of John Clare during his stay in an asylum in Epping Forest in the late 1830s. Foulds writes with forensic sensitivity, and, better than any biographer, teases out the heart-breaking genius of England’s Peasant Poet, enabling us to see the world through his eyes.

HISTORY

The Thirties by Juliet Gardiner (HarperPress, hardback, out now)

This 957-page “intimate history” benefits richly from the documentary impulse of the 1930s. It was a decade that recorded itself voluminously in the new media of the day – radio and television – as well as Picture Post and Mass Observation. The book feasts on detail, from the Glen cinema disaster of New Year’s Eve 1929, when 71 children died in Paisley, to London Zoo’s plans, as war loomed, for the destruction of poisonous snakes. Why was greyhound-racing such a craze? And what did the first customer buy at the opening of the 1,000th branch of Boots, in 1933? Gardiner makes a decade way beyond the scope of most readers’ memory feel oddly familiar.

(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.)

Picture Credit: austinevan (via Flickr)