Lockdown Reading

MICHAEL BARBER suggests some books to enjoy in these strange times

In 1940, with the enemy at our gates, British readers turned to Anthony Trollope, ignored since his death 60 years before. The machinations of Lady Glencora and Mrs Proudie, the profligacy of Burgo Partridge, the chicanery of Augustus Melmotte – these proved soothing antidotes to total war. Today it is Albert Camus, also 60 years dead, who unexpectedly commands our attention. Originally intended as an allegory for the German occupation of France, his novel The Plague, about a deadly contagion that shuts down the Algerian port of Oran, seems to have struck a chord.

The Plague is not a long book. Nor, with its graphic descriptions of bubonic plague, could you describe it as soothing. So where should you go for balm? Surveys suggest that while young people immerse themselves in the parallel worlds depicted by writers like Philip Pullman and Terry Pratchett, oldies prefer semi-autobiographical sequences like Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet Chronicles, enthused over by the Duchess of Cornwall, or Anthony Powell’s Music of Time, which the American critic Edmund Wilson said he would ‘read in bed late at night in summer’. Did it ever give him nightmares, I wonder? Because Powell’s urbanity is deceptive: horrible things happen to many of his characters, confirming his belief that ‘the world is never a very nice place’. I suspect that Proust, to whom Powell is often, erroneously, compared, shared this view. Proust is an author whom many people vow to read once they have time on their hands. If they do, they will not only encounter a surfeit of subordinate clauses, but also the sorrows of love, the tortures of jealousy and, appropriately, the tyranny of time.

But do we all have time on our hands right now? Might ‘the pram in the hall’, that traditional impediment to writing, also impede reading? So too the absence of cleaners and gardeners. No wonder some of us, oppressed by intensive parenting or unaccustomed chores, seek solace in ‘the land of lost content’. Enid Blyton, persona non grata for many years, is back in fashion. The launch of a television adaptation of her Malory Towers series, about a girls’ boarding school, prompted ‘sack-loads of mail’ from fans of the books. Not to be outdone, prizewinning novelist Jonathan Coe recommended Anthony Buckeridge’s Jennings series, ‘a safe space, when the worst deprivation you can expect is detention’. (But isn’t detention what we’re all in now?)

Another prizewinner, Hilary Mantel, put her money on Ivy Compton-burnett, describing Dame Ivy’s bleak domestic conflicts as ‘Downton for the intelligent’. Rather more money, I’m sure, has gone on The Mirror & the Light, the triumphant conclusion to Dame Hilary’s epic Tudor trilogy. We know that Thomas Cromwell is doomed, but as one reviewer noted, ‘Mantel creates suspense and apprehension where none should exist.’ A word of warning. At over 900 pages this book is not for the limp-wristed.

It may seem perverse, when social distancing has become the new norm, to recommend a series about someone you’d least like to be stuck in a lift with. I refer to Jackson Lamb, the gross, flatulent, rebarbative monster who runs Slough House, the knacker’s yard to which ‘slow horses’ – MI5’S damaged goods – are consigned. ‘I don’t think of you as a team,’ says Lamb to his minions. ‘I think of you as collateral damage.’ Mick Herron, from whose fundament Jackson Lamb emerged, has won golden opinions and numerous awards. In the absence of a vaccine, his black humour cauterises our toxic predicament.

So perhaps laughter is the best medicine, as witness the number of readers who say humourists like PG Wodehouse and EF Benson are a tonic. Myself, I prefer humour with an edge, like the jests Elizabethans made about the pox. Kingsley Amis’s Ending Up, a short, serio-comic novel about a bunch of oldies precariously co-existing in a country cottage, is a fine example of this. The last time I read it I laughed so much my wife tried to smother me (we were in bed at the time).

If, as I did, you came of age during the Sixties, then one rite of passage you may have undergone was reading John Fowles’s bestselling bildungsroman, The Magus, which provided, it was said, an experience ‘beyond the literary’ – in my case, a vicarious ego trip. How flattering to have so much time and energy expended in order to make you a better person. No wonder Fowles himself, in a foreword to the revised edition published in 1977, described it as ‘a novel of adolescence written by a retarded adolescent’.

Fowles also described the film it inspired, starring Michael Caine, as ‘a disaster’, adding that if you want your book reproduced, ‘Go to television and ask for an eight-hour serial.’ Too late for him – he died in 2005 – but not for us, Sam Mendes has stepped up to the plate. Goodness knows when his version will reach the screen, but now might be a good moment to try to recapture the spell the book cast. Finally, from the pages of Gibbon’s

Decline and Fall, which I really will try and finish this time, a palliative reflection: ‘Hope, the best comfort for our imperfect condition.’

‘Mantel creates suspense where none should exist’