Louis de Bernières is just home from a week in Italy. Yes, a lovely week, thank you, though the weather was disappointing. Not that it made much difference to Louis, since he spent the whole week on a bedside table, sandwiched between Roy Hattersley and the Michelin guide.
But by now he is used to that, since it's happened so often since I acquired him in late 1997. That was just too late for Louis to come on our trip to Florence in October, which I see from my list was pleasantly occupied by Sebastian Faulks - that must have been Birdsong - and David Newsome's The Victorian World Picture. He was due to have gone to Jordan early the following year along with Thomas Love Peacock and Ted Hughes's version of Ovid, but that got cancelled.
Never mind: our next port of call was Pembrokeshire, where there's plenty of time for reading since it rains so much of the time. An ideal climate, surely, for starting on Captain Corelli. Except that I found in a bookshop at St David's cathedral Giraldus Cambrensis's ripe account of his journeys through Wales in the late 12th century. As assertive in death as in life, he pushed his way to the front of the queue, and that was the end of Louis.
For several months he sat patiently on the pending shelf while his next move was plotted. And, sure enough, when we set off for Lake Garda, Louis was booked for a place in the travelling bag. Except that when the moment came to pack him, he'd gone missing and Thomas Love Peacock had the week to himself. Next up were Vienna, Prague and Budapest, with coach journeys linking the cities. Ideal to get down to Captain Corelli. But only when I had finished a new life of Lewis Carroll, begun before the holiday started. And I'd also packed Giles Foden's novel about Idi Amin. Somehow between them Lewis and Idi squeezed out poor Louis.
That brought him back to the top of the list for Lake Maggiore this May. But one often needs - don't you think? - to get into the way of reading novels after some time away from them, and for any journalist nothing does that so well as a book about Fleet Street. So the book for the plane was Ink, by John Preston, which lasted a further couple of days. After which it seemed wrong not to use the chance of prime time on the balcony in the early mornings to read something substantial, of the kind one cannot attempt during the working round. That meant one of two books about great Victorians: Karl Marx, by Francis Wheen, or Roy Hattersley's Blood and Fire, the story of William and Catherine Booth and their Salvation Army. But the Wheen had somehow unpacked itself, which left the floor to Hattersley. And very good it is too: hugely researched, right down to the Nottingham Weekly Gazette and the East London Evangelist, and for someone you'd never expect to find in the Coach and Horses flogging copies of War Cry, stupendously fair to the Booths.
Once you get in the mood, of course, you can run two books in tandem: the Hattersley for the early mornings and a novel for wet afternoons. Which of course was going to be Louis: except that I'd also brought An Equal Music, by Vikram Seth. So before I settled down with the Captain I took a quick peek at the crits on the back of the Seth. "The finest novel about music ever written in English" - the Daily Telegraph. Could that really be true? Has the Telegraph read all the others? "A masterpiece... as clear, lovely and civilised as a Schubert quartet" - the Mail. Only one way to find out if such wild claims were true. So I tasted the opening chapter. Then the second, then the third. And was hooked. What empathy; what a sense of music; and above all what faultless judgment, just like one of those Haydn trios adored by Seth's hero, where you cannot imagine one note being changed for the better...
So now Louis is back on the pending shelf. Not back among other novels, like E Annie Proulx, whose The Shipping News accompanied us on most of our trips in the middle 90s, always returning unread; but on the shelf which contains those books I still really intend to get round to. (This is not the same as the guilt shelf, which mainly contains valued presents too big to start on until retirement and books by one's friends which one ought to have read but now possibly never will). Louis is now enjoying a favoured spot on the pending shelf along with the memoirs of Berlioz (£3 second-hand from Darcy Books of Devizes) Andrew Roberts's life of Lord Salisbury, Ted Hughes's version of Ovid (still) and quite a lot more. The sun through the front room window just touches Louis lightly at around 11 o'clock, which is more than it ever did in Italy.
