A few reviews I didn't write

Thomas Hardy, Lamorna Ash, Thomas Peermohammed Lambert &c

For various reasons, I thought I was going to get a lot more reviewing done this year than I did. And now the summer’s almost over (though we’re only just going away). So, here’s an inexhaustive selection of thoughts about books that have been rattling around my head over the last few months, some old, some new, some in between. Just novels and non-fiction for now, I’ll do poetry and short stories another time. See you in a few weeks…

The Mayor of Casterbridge - Thomas Hardy

More so than any other ‘social’ novel I’ve read, the characters are pushed to the side of their own lives. I don’t think I cared that much about any of them. Critics who want to sound clever will often say that this is the wrong way to approach a novel, something only shallow readers bother about, but really it depends on the story. If you are supposed to care about the chacters (if the interest lies in what happens to them) it really does matter if you don’t. If it’s something like Invisible Cities it’s not so important. The Mayor of Casterbridge is strange and enthralling precisely because it seems like it should be the first kind of novel and is actually the second.

Don’t Forget, We’re Here Forever - Lamorna Ash

Lamorna Ash is a searcher: her first book was an account of moving to a Cornish fishing village. Don’t Forget, We’re Here Forever is a very personal study of people, mostly young people, finding Christianity in modern Britain, often losing it and finding it again. Ash has an uncanny ability to enter into another person’s perspective, which sometimes reminded me of Larissa MacFarquhar’s Strangers Drowning (this is a compliment, read Strangers Drowning). We also get a lot of her own journey, which is a bit predictable, as well as some enthusiastic and eloquent advocacy for the Bible as poetry. Which it is.¹

The book's publication earlier this year conveniently coincided with an ongoing discussion in the media: are young people in ‘the West’ turning to religion? If they are, nothing here suggests that the turn will stick. This sounds cynical: Ash and the people who trust her with their stories are nothing if not serious. But taken as a whole there is a kind of deafness here to any experience that can’t be told through the terms of personal transformation: Christianity is about finding out who you are, deciding what you believe, finding your own faith. But religions are also traditions, institutions and cultures, kept alive (or not) between generations and in the home. For many of us, religion isn’t a personal adventure so much as a kind of weight passed down. This isn’t always or necessarily a bad thing: there are things you can do with weights. Perhaps all I am saying is that this book made me (a new-ish, Jewish, no-longer-young-ish father, thinking about inheritence) feel very, very old.

Shibboleth, Thomas Peermohammed Lambert

I really wanted to like Shibboleth. If I wanted to sell it to you I would say: think Lucky Jim spliced with The Trial in the form of a satire on ‘Oxbridge’ student politics post-2020. But then, if I wanted to warn you off, I would say: think Lucky Jim spliced with The Trial in the form of a satire on ‘Oxbridge’ student politics post-2020. Unfortunately it starts as the the first book and ends up as the second.

Lambert’s problem is a pretty typical one for a new author. He tries to do too much. The book wants to be more than a satire, which is not a bad ambition (though there is nothing wrong with satire). But it bets on the wrong plot, getting bogged down in an unconvincing love story (unconvincing at best, you would feel sorry for the women in this book if they weren't so thinly drawn) and neglecting the ineffectual protagonist's charismatic friend, Youssef. Youssef, who encourages our hero Edward to play up his own Muslim heritage (Edward has a grandfather from Zanzibar) for social status, steals every scene he’s in. He also winds up as the book’s moral lodestar, despite spending much of his time on stage being casually antisemtic and indeed offensive to everyone (we’re not supposed to approve). He is, in short, the only engaging presence, but he gets relegated to a supporting act just as his story gets interesting.

. . . and the best of the rest

I read lots of poetry, but I’m going to write about that another time. I dropped Jenny Uglow’s biography of Edward Lear (Mr Lear) two-thirds of the way through, not because I wasn’t enjoying it but because I felt I’d got to know Lear already and didn’t need to know how it ends. Which is often the way with biographies.

Lear must be best known now for his nonsense poetry, but he was also an incredibly talented, astonishingly hardworking and well-travelled painter (Auden: He became a land). Lear also hero-worshipped Tennyson and spent a lot of time with the poet's family on the Isle of Wight. Tennyson, being Tennyson, kept him at arm’s length: Lear’s friendship was with Emily, Tennyson's wife. Lear was very good at making friends, yet always seemed to be at arm’s length, everywhere. Uglow brings out just how important the cartoons are to the limericks: and how often his character's expressions complicate his words…

I read a lot of short stories, too, but I’m going to write about them another time. I read John Wyndham’s Chocky again, which is one of his best books, despite the overly-didactic ending. It is partly a parable about the enviromentment: the worst horror isn’t so much the way in which Chocky (an alien consciousness, of course…) possesses twelve year-old Matthew, but the vision which Chocky offers Matthew before finally departing - of their own distant, hot and barren planet.²

I was completely taken in by The Fire Next Time. James Baldwin is apparently undergoing a resurgance on TikTok, but it was seeing his face (carrying his nephew, I think) staring back at me from the shelves in our local library in south London one too many times that did it for me. I had somehow put off reading him until now by telling myself that he is, or was, an American writer, but this is no good. He has designs on all of us. My notes are all quotes:

“All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits us there. It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so convincingly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”

Is that true? Almost certainly. Does it sound good? It does. Incredibly.

1. On that note: countless recent studies agree that reading for pleasure is a dying art. I wouldn’t describe myself as particularly religious, but I have always thought about literature as a kind of secular religion. I wouldn’t be surprised if it can’t, in the end, survive without the real thing. Someone should probably explore this further.

2. “You have not done badly with electricity in a hundred years. And you did well with steam in quite a short time. But all that is so cumbersome, so inefficient. And your oil engines are just a deplorable perversion - dirty, noisy, poisonous, and the cars you drive with them are barbarous, dangerous…”