How To Be Good
Nick Hornby
Penguin £6.99, pp244
Katie and David are tottering on the brink of divorce. He’s ‘the Angriest Man in Holloway’ (does Hornby ever leave north London?) and Katie, the narrator, is (a little adultery aside) a good person. She’s even a doctor. One day David stumbles across a faith healer, GoodNews, who comes to live with them. The result is that David becomes genuinely good - he brings homeless people in - and Katie is forced to reconsider how far she’s really prepared to go to honour her liberal outlook. The problem largely lies with Katie, perhaps because Hornby seems uncomfortably in awe of her. The rest of his characters aren’t as well thrashed out as usual, either: GoodNews, in particular, disappears from the novel without even a whimper. If How to be Good were by anybody else it wouldn’t be half bad. But coming from Hornby, it’s a disappointment.
Days Like Today
Rachel Ingalls
Faber & Faber £7.99, pp289
There’s a steely meticulousness about Rachel Ingall’s short stories that could leave you cold. She thrives on subjects that most of us shy away from, and is particularly harsh on women, frequently weighing up battles held on the domestic front against military manoeuvres. Thus in ‘Correspondent’, when a wife suspects her husband is having an affair, she steals his good luck charms and, after the ensuing accident, bars the opposition from his hospital bed. In ‘Fertility’, her lover’s mother steals her new-born child and teaches the boy to call her a whore. It’s the older woman’s cruelty that leaves the young woman desperate, as it is an older woman who dragoons her into prostitution. Ingall’s gaze is open, unflinching and often brutally well sustained; her writing often makes for uncomfortable reading.
The Emperor’s Babe: a novel
Bernardine Evaristo
Penguin £6.99, pp250
Exotic, erotic and incredibly entertaining, this is, amazingly, a verse novel you can’t put down. It’s AD 211, and Zuleika, a Londoner and Nubian, is only 11 when she catches the senator’s beady eye. Her immigrant father can’t believe his luck, but for Zuleika it’s a life sentence. And then the emperor comes to town. Both refreshingly contemporary and littered with Latin slang, Zuleika’s story is also that of Roman occupation, of the rough and tumble of everyday colonial life. From her lowly origins to her exalted status as the emperor’s lover, Zuleika has access to all levels of society, whether visiting her transvestite friend in local bars or travelling on the royal barge to witness the gladiator’s gory glory. Saucy and sexy, The Emperor’s Babe even manages to be educational. It certainly beats the Cambridge Latin course.
Spike Island: The Memory of a Military Hospital
Philip Hoare
Fourth Estate £8.99, pp373
The Royal Victoria Hospital at Netley, Southampton was the biggest military hospital in the world, built to serve an empire that matched its magnitude. It was an entirely self-contained unit - even boasting a museum with an unrivalled collection of Asian and African skulls - from which none need ever escape, and, as Hoare points out, many didn’t. Yet the hospital is probably best know for D block, the first military mental institution. It was here that soldiers suffering from shellshock - Siegfried Sassoon among them - were patched up before being re-dispatched for battle, and where the young R.D. Laing assisted in administering potentially lethal insulin overdoses in an attempt to shock patients into sanity. Immensely readable, broadly referenced and yet intensely personal, Hoare’s excellent history is both erudite and eloquent.
Our Weddings
Dorit Rabinyan
Bloomsbury £6.99, pp245
If the sins of the fathers are visited on their children, what impact might their blessings have? Our Weddings is the story of Iran and Solly, whose fairytale love becomes a family legend. And yet their children can’t find happiness or love. Bitter Maurice resents his sisters; all Sofia cares about is her sickly son; Marcelle loses herself in pulp fiction; Lizzie is beaten by the husband she openly betrays; and on her eleventh birthday, Matti is still communicating with her stillborn twin. Iran, their mother, can’t seem to stop crying. Our Weddings is an onslaught on the senses. A sensually physical writer, Dorit Rabinyan is alert to the intricacies of family guilt and the wars that are waged in the name of love. Her depiction of a family trying to shoulder the burden of a loved one’s grief is claustrophobically convincing.
Evelyn Waugh
Selina Hastings
Vintage £8.99, pp723
This exemplary biography, a launch volume in a new series, treats the complex and turbulent life of a greatcomic writer with a succinct elegance that puts it in a class of its own. As well as compressing a great deal of material into a single, highly readable volume, Hastings brings to her subject a witty and perceptive intelligence that is compellingly readable. From the enfant terrible of Decline and Fall to the irascible country squire of The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold , Hastings charts the evolution of Waugh’s literary and artistic vision with a subtle sympathy that makes it an essential addition to the already monumental Waugh bibliography. It’s timely, too; Waugh died (on the lavatory) on Easter Day 1966, shortly after celebrating a Latin Mass.
