Reading list
From Jonathan Franzen’s intimidatingly- titled new novel to a revisionist biography of George III, there’s fascinating reading in the publishers’ schedules
The last days of the year are for comfort reading, familiar favourites like Redgauntlet, Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour, The Wrong Box and any of the early Dick Francis novels. Nevertheless one looks forward to what next year may bring. For January there is my first and very timely review book, by another Francis – Gavin in this case: Intensive Care: A GP, a Community and Covid- 19, which may help me to understand where we are, and how we best move on.
Then there are two just out, which I haven’t yet got round to: The Habsburgs by Martyn Rady, a family history spanning a thousand years, and a might- have- been thriller, Franco’s Map, by the veteran Irish journalist Walter Ellis, which poses the question “Why did Franco rebuff Hitler?”
Another question may be answered by John Preston’s Fall: The Mystery of Robert Maxwell. Did the aboutto- be bankrupt proprietor of the Mirror Newspaper group fall or jump to his death from his yacht, or was he pushed? Maxwell, formidable, sometimes frightening, grotesque and even absurd, was a remarkable figure, winning the MC as a teenage Czech who had become a British Army Officer, hence known as “Cap’n Bob.” Was he also a Mossad agent, beside being a Labour Member of Parliament, fantasist and crook?
I am also eager to read the new biography of George III by Andrew Roberts which promises to be an agreeably revisionist work. Thanks to Alan Bennett George is now best known for his madness in later life, but he was a much more interesting man, also a dogged, if sometimes devious, politician. Roberts is a historian who remembers that people read history for pleasure as well as information, and that it is the historian’s duty to please as well as teach. I hope this book will do well enough to encourage some publisher to bring out a new edition of Richard Pares’s masterly and very entertaining George III and the Politicians.
The big novel of the year is, I suppose, Jonathan Franzen’s new one, with the somewhat daunting title Crossroads: A Novel: A Key to all Mythologies. For some Franzen
is the greatest American novelist of the day, and he is certainly one who aspires to be that. For others, his work is marred by self- indulgence and pretentiousness. I’ve never come to a settled opinion about him. Perhaps this new book will help me make up my mind. Perhaps. It’s more probable, I fear, that I shall find this novel like its predecessors something of a curate’s egg, parts of it excellent, others anything but. Nevertheless it can’t be ignored.
Colm Toibin wrote a good novel about Henry James, a novelist whose most intense life was lived in his imagination. The same might be said of Thomas Mann, the subject of Toibin’s new novel The Magician, though emigration from Nazi Germany meant that his outward life was more disturbed than Henry James’s had been. Mann was one of
the greatest European novelists of the 20th century, and writing a novel about a great novelist is audacious: can the author measure up to his subject? Still, as one fascinated by the Mann family and by Thomas Mann’s recognition that Hitler was essentially a failed artist, a down- atheel bohemian, I am eager to see what a novelist of Toibin’s skill makes of his life – a life lived so much in his head, a life conventionally haute- bourgeois, its surface scarcely disturbed by his repressed homosexuality.
Francis Spufford’s first novel On Golden Hill set mostly in colonial New York, shortlisted for the Walter Scott Historical Novel Prize, delighted me. Light Perpetual is described as being the story of “the imagined lives of five people killed in the London Blitz.” I’m not clear as to whether this means it is a reconstruction of the lives they had lived, or, as I first thought, a projection of the lives they might have had if they had survived the bombing. Perhaps the former. Otherwise Spufford will be entering the Muriel Spark territory of The Hothouse on the East River.
I am eager to see what a novelist of Toibin’s skill makes of Mann’s life