WHAT BOOK?

... are you reading now?

The Childhood Of Jesus by J.M. Coetzee. The word ‘strange’ comes up in every review of this novel, and how could it not.

Two refugees — Simon, a middleaged man, and a child, David — arrive in a city where the citizens are all motivated by goodwill and live on bread alone. What else to do but rebel against the blandness of it all. Like the Hotel California, the city could be heaven, or it could be hell. However, one thing is clear: Coetzee has spent time trying to reason with a five-yearold boy. David is an utterly convincing creation, a stubborn, explosive child with a relentless will to power that takes no prisoners. Nothing strange about that.

... would you take to a desert island?

THE Dictionary Of Imaginary Places, compiled by Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi. This is a guide to fantastical worlds, from Circe’s Alaia and Middle-Earth, to King Kong’s Skull Island and Harry Potter’s Hogwarts.

With detailed descriptions of the geography, politics, diets and customs of the inhabitants of over 1,200 imaginary lands, along with maps, diagrams and illustrations, this book is all I will need to make the most of my own opportunity to be entirely out of this world.

… first gave you the reading bug?

JANE EYRE by Charlotte Bronte. My friend’s mother had an illustrated edition with dark and scary wood engravings. I read it one summer in her living room, flat on my stomach on the first wall-towall carpet in our neighbourhood. I wept when Helen died. A problem for me was that Mr Rochester was very ugly in the engravings, and he was so gruff with poor Jane, I couldn’t get why she was enthralled by his patronising praise. I still don’t get that.

… left you cold?

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD’S The Great Gatsby. A tepid and vacant immorality limply animates the characters, who appear to have nothing in common save geographical proximity. I never could picture ‘the valley of ashes’, where the trashy women live.

The plot is contrived and rolls out lumpily, and the end — oh, my God — the end! Daisy was driving the car that killed Myrtle, Gatsby took the rap, and Daisy’s cheating husband shot him for his trouble. The death of three people is described as a ‘holocaust’.

Mrs Gulliver by valerie Martin (serpent’s Tail, £16.99) is out now.