On Eclectic Reading

Recently I have been immersed in two utterly different universes: the Netherlands in the 1600s heyday of Golden Age Dutch art, and the ‘Murder Triangle’ of County Down during the Northern Ireland Troubles. Being utterly immersed is what I want from books, and what I also want is insight into new places and points of view, a sense that my mental universe has opened up further - in John Donne’s words in a different context,

An expansion, / Like gold to airy thinness beat. 

In this sense, diversity in its broadest sense is a driving impulse in how I select my reading. Sometimes ‘select’ is too deliberate: I can come across books serendipitously, without planning.

The worlds in the opening sentence are evoked and explored in two excellent recently-published books, Laura Cumming’s Thunderclap: a memoir of art and life and sudden death, and Martin Doyle’s Dirty Linen: The Troubles in my Home Place. The differences are obvious, but then there are the connections: both combine research and personal history, both are about intensely-connected small communities, and in both stories life is scarily contingent.

These are the experiences I want from reading, and these surprising, interesting and fruitful juxtapositions are what I explore here, using some of my reading over the last two years.

I have finished another new book, Catherine Taylor’s memoir The Stirrings, a Memoir in Northern Time, which I flew through. Here again we have a world richly realised, and an apprehension of life’s fragility. Her friend suddenly dies just as life as an adult is starting to take shape, but that sense of fragility has been there throughout - the Yorkshire Ripper is murderously active during her teenage years, England is in the turmoil of the Thatcher years, her parents’ marriage falls apart, she is unknowingly harbouring a dangerous medical condition. None of those experiences are ones I had, but this was also my time growing up, albeit in Ireland, and Taylor’s world is both familiar and strange.

Other versions of England: J.L. Carr’s beautiful short masterpiece A Month in the Country, set in the aftermath of war (more below); Benjamin Myers’s The Perfect Golden Circle (partly parallel with The Stirrings, connecting with it in an England being disturbed, but this time in a countryside in which the characters surreptiously make crop circles at night, with echoes of the television genius that is The Detectorists); Ali Smith’s extraordinary and densely woven Seasons Quartet, and its coda Companion Piece, which also touches on the territory of The Stirrings on occasion; and, closer to my family’s story, Neil Sentance’s beautiful Ridge & Furrow: voices from the winter fields and Water and Sky: voices from the riverside, set in the modest landscape around the River Witham in the East Midlands.

Growing up is a golden thread of so many books here, including Thunderclap (in Scotland for Laura Cumming), and Dirty Linen (all those poor children who lost parents to sectarian violence). Claire Keegan’s stunning Small Things Like These looks at County Wexford in the 1980s, approaching the stain that was the Magdalene Laundry scandal obliquely at first and, through the story of the decent but unsettled Furlong, a provider of fuel and much else. Straight after this I read Fintan O’Toole’s We Don’t Know Ourselves: a personal history of Ireland since 1958, a superficially very different text (far longer, journalism/history, by a man) but which shares a lot with the Keegan: I wrote about the connections. O’Toole of course addresses the all-too-frequent scandals and stains of recent Irish history. Growing up right now in Ireland is the background to Kevin Curran’s fizzing new novel Youth, set in contemporary multi-cultural Balbriggan, a world of ‘socials’, of deprivation and aspiration, a racially-mixed society unimagined in the New Ross of Small Things Like These, or Fintan O’Toole’s childhood in Crumlin, or my own further down the country at almost the same time as O’Toole’s.

Those racial complexities are another thread. Toni Morrison’s fascinating (only) short story ‘Recitatif’ truly makes you think carefully, one of the responsibilities of literature (and Zadie Smith’s top-class introductory essay helps). A joy was Deesha Phillyaw’s The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, a sparkling collection of short stories about Black women that gave me great pleasure while sitting on a beach near Venice (reading about one world while being in an utterly different one adds a tang to the experience). I caught up with Nella Larsen’s short novel Passing (1929), too, focussing on ‘racial passing’ in Harlem in the 1920s. Racial and historical complexities were also seen in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Afterlives, about German-ruled Tanganyika in the early 20th century: the best kind of fiction, rooted vividly in a Deutsch-Ostafrika I knew almost nothing about. A few months later he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.  Germany and Africa also met in Musa Okwonga’s In The End, It was All About Love, a sinuous examination of identity. Before that, I read Okwonga’s One of Them: an Eton College memoir, the startling and again beautifully-composed story of being one of the few Black boys in that famous school in the 1990s.

As an English teacher, of course schools interest me. One of Them is set in the élite boarding school in England. Scholastique Mukasonga’s Our Lady of the Nile is a novel set in the élite Rwandan boarding school in the years before the 1994 genocide: life about to be shattered by another thunderclap. Then I discovered James Harpur’s lovely collection of poems The Examined Life, set in an English boarding school in the 1970s - protected and privileged certainly, but also sensitive to the fragility of all life, as seen in the story of his friend Jonesy. A week earlier I had read William Wall’s collection Smugglers in the Underground Hug Trade, a response to the fragilities exposed by the recent pandemic.

War exposes those fragilities like nothing else. One day, while shaving, I heard on the radio mention of Innsbruck, capital of the Austrian Tyrol. Since it’s a city I know very well for family reasons, I paid attention, and heard of a new book, The Lost Café Schindler: one family, two wars and the search for truth, by Meriel Schindler, and then bought it. An account of one Jewish family, mostly in the Tyrol, across many years which culminate in the Holocaust, it brings a fresh angle to a story which cannot be told often enough, as did Jonathan Freedland’s amazing and shattering The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World, about the heroic Jewish prisoner Rudolf Vrba. Joseph O’Connor’s novel (the first of a series) My Father’s House re-imagines another hero in that war, Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, who helped run an escape line out of the Vatican, risking his own life (wartime Rome is so vividly evoked). Another Irish writer, Billy O’Callaghan, wrote The Paper Man, a novel about a real-life character, the Austrian footballer Matthias Sindelar (the Messi of his day), set in Jewish pre-war Vienna, and Cork.

More on war, and back to schools: Alice Winn’s novel In Memoriam attracted me initially because I have also done research in my own school’s magazines on the First World War. Winn’s angle is to tell the story of what it might have been like to be gay during such an horrendous experience. Such re-imagining is fundamental to reading, as brilliantly achieved by my book of 2022, Katherine Rundell's Super-Infinite: the transformations of John Donne (back to that sense of expansion at the start)  in which her novelist’s skills also come into their own in evoking the physical texture of everyday life in London (tantalisingly overlapping with Shakespeare’s time there). Now I find myself reading the first novel in her new children’s fantasy series, the Waterstone’s Book of the Year Impossible Creatures, to my daughter before bed-time, the two of us cuddled beneath the duvet. And what I hope for her is that through her life she experiences the same interweaving richness of the eclectic reading experience. That will of course be unique to her, just as it is for every single reader.