CRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY is a classic of South African fiction. It was described by Nadine Gordimer as “the most influential South African novel ever written”.

I can’t quite understand why. I can only assume it is because the message it gives – that black people in South Africa in the 1940s are unjustly and entirely oppressed – which now seems so obvious, was, at the time it was written, revolutionary.

The book tells the story of a elderly black pastor from the rural areas who goes to Johannesburg to find his son. As is traditional for sons who go to Johannesburg, he has gone to the bad – but badder than most: he has shot a white man in a home invasion, and is sentenced to death. The old man’s search for his son, and then the reconciliation he attempts with the father of the murdered white man, gives a picture of the whole of South Africa in one small sad story.

What did surprise me in this book was the account of the scale of the violent crime in South Africa at that time. For some reason, I thought extreme and random violence was a more contemporary problem; but apparently it has been an issue for almost as long as Joburg has been a city

We shall live from day to day, and put more locks on the doors, and get a fine fierce dog when the fine fierce bitch next door has pups, and hold onto our handbags more tenaciously; and the beauty of the trees by night, and the raptures of lovers under the stars, these things we shall forego. We shall forego the coming home drunk and through the midnight streets, and the evening walk over the star-lit veld. We shall be careful, and knock this off our lives, and knock that off our lives, and hedge ourselves about with safety and precaution. And our lives will shrink, but they shall be the lives of superior beings; and we shall live with fear, but at least it will not be a fear of the unknown.

I come from a fairly dangerous city – not a Joburg, but certainly not an Amsterdam; not a city where you walk around after dark; and I never really thought before about the many small choices a society makes over time that end up with a situation where it feels normal to never ever be out after dark without a car wrapped around you

God, this novel has a great first line:

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there

I bet when Hartley thought of that, he was like BOOM.

The book opens with a man finding a box of stuff from his school days, full of bits of old junk and a diary.

It was a roll-call in reverse; the children of the past announced their names, and I said “here”. Only the diary refused to disclose its identity.

This diary opens the door to a rather painful coming of age story. A young man called Leo goes to spend the summer with his school friend Marcus. He gets involved in carrying letters between Marcus’ wealthy sister, and a local farmhand. It’s an interesting book, because the main action happens ‘offstage.’ It’s this love story where the main action is happening, and we just see it through the eyes of the go-between. It all ends very badly, almost impossibly so for a contemporary reader, for whom the chasm of class is hard to understand. The book’s narrator is an older man, living in the 1950s, looking back to his own boyhood at the turn of the century, and much of the appeal I think is the evocation of the mystery and melancholy of our own past; of how little our choices are in retrospect our own, but rather a product of our moment.

Also enormously successful this is evocation of schoolboy life at the turn of the last century. How is this:

But in those days schoolboys seldom called each other by their first names. These were regarded simply as a liability, though not such a heavy liability as one’s middle name, which it was just foolhardy to reveal.

Or this:

Schoolboys have a much clearer perception of each other’s characters than grown-ups have, for their characters are not obscured by a veil of good manners: they deal in hard words, they have no long-term policy, as men have, for asserting themselves, they prefer short profits and quick returns

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It’s a wonderful book, and I’m surprised it’s not more well known. Or perhaps it is, and I just missed it? If so, don’t make my mistake

This book solidified for me something I think I’d always known -something we all know – but which I’d never quite put into words: Tina Fey is just much better than Amy Poehler. I know! I feel bad to say it. But it’s just true. I read Amy Poelher’s YES PLEASE, and couldn’t quite understand why she’d written it. It didn’t seem to have much point, But now I get it – clearly, she wanted to write BOSSYPANTS. Who wouldn’t? It’s a really fun little book. I can’t quite tell you what makes this book so appealing. It’s partly that it’s comic. Here for example is a mother’s prayer for her daughter:

Lead her away from acting but not all the way to finance. Something where she can make her own hours but still feel intellectually fulfilled and get outside sometimes and not have to wear high heels

Grant her a rough patch from 12 to 17. Let her draw horses and be interested in Barbies for much too long, for childhood is short – a tiger flower blooming magenta for one day – and adulthood is long, and dry humping in cars will wait

It’s also very wise:

A friend once told me, “don’t wear what fashion designers tell you to wear. Where what they wear.” His point being that the most designers, no matter what they throw onto the runway, favour simple, flattering pieces for themselves

And full of fine observation:

At a certain point your body wants to be disgusting. While your teens and 20s without identifying and emphasizing your “best features, “your late 30s and 40s are about fighting back decay. You pluck your patchy beard daily. Your big toe may start to turn jauntily inward. Over night you may grow one long straight white pubic hair.

I recommend it. It made a long flight fly by.

I have apparently now become the sort of person who occasionally reads mass market thrillers. Does this mean I am losing my youthful idealism? My mental energy? Or does it just mean I was in an airport and was facing flying back across the Atlantic for the fourth time in ten days? Anyway never mind, there it is: I’ve been reading a best seller.

It was kind of fun book, with a female central character who was, for once, not strong. Indeed, she is an unreliable narrator and that is where half the fun of the novel lies. Paula Hawkins is Zimbabwean, I’m proud to say, but she’s obviously lived in London:

We used to go to that pub all the time; I can’t remember why we stopped. I never liked it all that much, too many couples just the right side of 40 drinking too much and casting around for something better, wondering if they’d have the courage

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Yes, that’s definitely a common London scene.. I won’t tell you too much else about the book. It’s a thriller so it’s hard not to give away spoilers. All I’ll let you know is that I read it, and I can’t decide what it means about me that I enjoyed it.

I didn’t like this book at first because it was so dreamlike and weird. Then I started to like it, because it was so dreamlike and weird.

Set in the near future, or what was the near future in the 1960s (which is now, I suppose, the past) it tells the story of a world grown too hot and of all the major cities underwater. It’s a pretty contemporary view of the apocalypse. The story centres on a man called Kerans, who is a scientist conducting tests. Most of humanity is clustered in the Arctic Circle, but he is way south, in England. His team is recalled as the water keeps rising. He refuses to return. Here is where it gets weird. The world is regressing to a past age – the Triassic – with huge plants appearing, alligators everywhere, etc. So human beings are apparently also regressing back to a more primal sort of life form. Kerans, and some of the other scientists, are beginning to lose their humanity, their individuality, and frankly they’re rather liking lettin it go. It’s the joy of the lower life form.

The key delight of this book is this vision of abandoned cities. Here they are in drained London:

They stood in the entrance to one of the huge cinemas, sea urchins and cucumbers flickering faintly across the tiled floor, sand dollars flowering in the former ticket booth. Beatrice gathered her skirt in one hand, and they moved slowly down the line of cinemas, past cafes and amusement arcade, patronised now only by the bivalves and the molluscs

That sort of thing is the heart of the book really. But aware that this doesn’t fill very many pages, Ballard does a reasonable job of knocking together a few other characters and a bit of a plot. A bunch of pirates arrive, and managed to drain the city he is in. Leicester Square appears spookily out of the water, fountains full of weeds. In a half-hearted way Kerans falls in love with strange woman called Beatrice.

While Ballard may be prescient when it comes to rising seawater, he, like other science-fiction writers of the mid-20th century is extremely un-prescient about the rise of women. Beatrice is beautiful and useless, a woman of the 1940s stranded in what’s supposed to be the 21st-century. It’s an odd blindspot across vritually all classic science fiction that I can think of. They can imagine a flying car, a zombie apocalypse, a cyborg nation, but a lady with a mind of her own: let’s not be crazy.

I enjoyed this book, but it also annoyed me. Or to be more exact, the author annoyed me. She is 28, she’s just won the Booker, and she’s done it with an 800 page pastiche of the Victorian thriller. Who on earth thinks to themselves, I know – I’ll just write an 800 page pastiche of the Victorian thriller. That’s a good idea! That will get published! That will win the Booker! And yet it did. I guess in a way it reminds me of Donald Trump; and that almost in an inspirational kind of way. Now, hold your pitchforks: what I mean is, Donald Trump is almost inspirational, when looked at in a certain kind of way. It shows you that you can dream wild dreams, and no matter how improbable, how little qualified you are, how laughable they may be, they can still come true. But back to THE LUMINARIES.

The plot has many twists and turns, and I suspect this is what many people will most enjoy about this book. For me however, what I enjoyed was the confident Victoriana. I’m a great lover of the Victorian novel, and there’s something really fun about seeing a new one produced. One tends to think that the stock of Victorian novels is set; that once I get to the end of Dickens and Trollope and Collins and, scratching around a bit – Carlyle, there’s nothing left to read. But what do you know – here’s a new Catton! I’ll give you this, as a flavour of the whole book:

Moody was not unaware of the advantage his inscrutable grace afforded him. Like most excessively beautiful persons, he had studied his own reflection minutely and, in a way, knew himself from the outside best; he was always in some chamber of his mind perceiving himself from the exterior. He had passed a great many hours in the alcove of his private dressing room, where the mirror tripled his image into profile, half-profile, and square: Van Dyck’s Charles, though a good deal more striking. It was a private practice, and one he would likely have denied – for how roundly self-examination is condemned, by the moral prophets of our age! As if the self had no relation to the self, and one only looked in mirrors to have one’s arrogance confirmed; as if the act of self-regarding was not as subtle, fraught and ever-changing as any bond between twin souls. In his fascination Moody sought less to praise his own beauty than to master it. Certainly whenever he caught his own reflection, in a window box, or in a pane of glass after nightfall, he felt a thrill of satisfaction – but as an engineer might feel, chancing upon a mechanism of his own devising and finding it splendid, flashing, properly oiled and performing exactly as he had predicted it should.

Isn’t it charming? I also enjoy the idea, and think it’s true. Appearance can very much be manufactured, but it takes significant effort, and that effort needs to start early. I wish I’d known about this as a teenager. I wish I’d spent more time on it. I wasted my adolescence reading books, when I should have been looking in mirrors, practising my face. Too late now: the lines are all set, and getting deeper every year.

This book definitely had me at hello. Here is the opening:

Phil always did the castrating; firstly sliced of the cup of the scrotum and toast at the side; next to force down first one and then the other testicle, split the rainbow membrane that included, toilet out, and tossed into the fire where the branding iron glowed. There was surprisingly little blood. In a few moments the testicles exploded like huge popcorn.

Don’t pretend you don’t love it. Here is what it’s about: homophobia in the wild West. SOLD! The book tells the story of two brothers, one of whom is fat and ugly. He marries, and this marriage infuriates the other. I won’t tell you tell you to much more about the plot, as its full of interesting twists and unexpected turns but I will say that the homophobe gets what’s coming to him in satisfying Cowboy style.

I read Graham Greene’s THE END OF THE AFFAIR a couple of years ago, in which I learnt that Graham Greene has a lot of issues with God. BRIGHTON ROCK is an earlier work, for me less successful, but still jam packed with Catholic anxiety.

It tells the story of a seventeen year old called Pinkie, who kills a man, and then has to keep on killing other people to keep it secret: “Christ! he thought. Have I got to massacre the world?”

Pinkie is something of a sociopath, so the murdering doesn’t worry him except as an inconvenience. What concerns him more is that he also has to marry a young girl to ensure she can’t testify against him, and he finds the idea of sex deeply repellent. His strange little sixteen year old wife agrees to marry him, though she regards a city hall wedding as – actually, literally, a mortal sin. It’s quite interesting how free your life can be once you have committed a mortal sin. I guess I’ve probably committed lots of mortal sins, but it’s not the same if you don’t believe in them.

Eventually Pinkie is brought to justice by a middle aged woman who hunts him down on the basic assumption that good ought to triumph. She is in an odd detective, particularly it seems to Greene, who is always on about her cleavage. Try this: “Her big breasts, which had never suckled a child of her own, felt a merciless compassion.” Very odd. I’d be willing to bet a large sum that no one reading that sentence could possibly doubt the gender of its author. She has a fantastic general principle in life though, often repeated, and which I really enjoy: “The world is a good place, as long you don’t weaken.” Wise advice.

All ends reasonably well, even for the strange little bride, who is comforted by her priest with the reflection that “You cannot conceive, nor can I, of the appalling strangeness of the mercy of god.” And with that cheerful reflection, the relatively happy ending is upon us.

Given all the real problems that Eastern Europe faced in the twentieth century I’m not sure why so many twentieth century Eastern European books are about imaginary problems.

In this book a couple goes to Italy on their honeymoon. The husband, Mihaly, gets left behind by the train at a junction, and somehow decides that this is the ideal moment to leave his wife. The reason? Extreme nostalgia (?). Apparently he is nostalgic for his high school friends, especially one girl he was in love with and her brother who he nearly killed himself with because of death being so beautiful (??).

In an unlikely coincidence he meets one of his other high school friends who is now a monk. His advice is to go to Rome, but for no reason (???). In Rome, he meets an academic who tells him what he should do – the practice that will set him free – it’s obviously the study of religious history (????).

And that’s where I had to quit. I just couldn’t take it anymore. Though I do want to know where it ends. I suspect I was about ten pages off a talking cat.

I’m an enormous admirer of Gibbons’ classic COLD COMFORT FARM, a book about how not to take yourself too seriously, but I had this idea somehow that she was a bit of a one-hit-wonder, and so had not tried any of her other books. Last year I attempted so tried WESTWOOD, which was good, but not exactly a wonder; and now have tried THE BACHELOR, which while not close to her classic, was really pretty great.

THE BACHELOR tells the story of a brother and sister in their forties who have settled into their life in rural England and are gently rotting there, until the second world war brings with it change and – unexpectedly – romance. Most of the joy of this book is in the comedy. Here we are on a young woman who has been involved in a scandal:

Young men, on hearing that a young woman has been betrayed do not clench their fists and call the betrayer a villain. If they are good young men they make a note to avoid the young woman as a possible bore and if they are bad young men they make a note of her telephone number. While we are on this painful subject it may be added that a recitative on her sufferings from the young woman’s own lips to a new young man is about as favourable to her hopes as if she had proffered him arsenic

Or here’s a description of a woman:

Mrs Feilding had been the possessor of one of those personalities like an enormous old fashioned battlepiece, all over rearing horses and hussars hauling cannon out of the mud and soldiers expiring in the arms of their comrades with Napoleon or somebody of that sort in the middle of it; no one can ignore it, although it exhausts everybody to tears, and weaker spirits simply avoid the room where it hangs

Or there’s a bus, that’s since the war has been able to vary its schedule and is now so erratic it “generally behaves more like a medieval baron than a bus” Brilliant description of public transport everywhere (except in Switzerland, or so I’m told).

The book does have it unusual side, in showing a young woman actively planning to seduce a young man – rare in books of this period, that typically assume, with ISIS, that woman are utterly free of sexual interest. It also has its serious side. The brother has long been dismissed by his mothers and sisters as rather a lightweight, and he has tended to laugh along with them, and agree. They have also typically tried to disrupt his romantic endeavours, so at 45 he is unmarried. He’s not unhappy; or perhaps he is. That’s part of the interest: even he is not really sure.

He ends up engaged by the end of the story, but it’s interesting how near a thing it is; how close he is to not really caring one way or the other. As Gibbons puts it: “Another ten years, even another five, and Habit and Comfort and Humorous Self-depreciation, the great stones that lie on such roots and bleach and dry them, would have done their work.” It’s interesting that such a funny book should be so interested in the dangers of comedy.