A Study In British Identity

Set in the early years of WW2, Everyone Brave Is Forgiven is the story of Mary, the daughter of an MP, who rushes back from Finishing School when war is declared to volunteer and is assigned a rather unglamorous job as a primary school teacher, and of Alastair, a picture restorer at the Tate, who enlists in the army and is posted to Malta. Unashamedly a love story, this is also a study of British identity, or at least of a particular strata of it, and of how it responded to the cataclysm that engulfed the middle of the twentieth century.

These are people who were brought up to behave well and find themselves trying to cope with a world that is behaving unbelievably badly. They are used to treading lightly through a world of privilege and comfort but now that world is quite literally collapsing all around them.

It was queer the way things crept: the night, and these feelings. One was brought up to scorn the tendency to despair. But it seemed that the darkness knew this, and found a way to reach one nevertheless. It was patient and subtle, gauging the heart’s output of light. Her confusion grew, the heart lucent and the mind lucifugous.

Cleave writes beautifully, his sentences becoming more crystalline and lambent as his characters fall further and further into darkness. But this always an optimistic novel, one in which the possibility of redemption never vanishes entirely. Cleave’s trick is to make of the war itself a metaphor for the transformational processes of love.

What is remarkable is the feeling of authenticity that he generates, the particularity of his descriptions, the physical and emotional minutiae. At the beginning of this book I rather took against the characters with their chirpy banter and their irritating enthusiasm for the conflict. By the end I was totally caught up in their stories, hoping against hope that they would manage re-make their lives amid the ruins of London. To date, this is by far and away my favourite novel of 2016.

Between Victimhood And Complicity

The premise of The Widow is both ambitious and brave. It's an attempt to get inside the mind of the the wife of a man suspected of abducting and murdering a two year old girl.

Narrated from the point of view of the wife in question, now a widow, the detective investigating the girl's disappearance, and a journalist covering the case, the narrative proceeds like a dance of seven veils, gradually revealing more and more of the truth about the fate of the girl and in doing so laying bare the internal workings of the husband/wife relationship.

If you're looking for dramatic plot twists you won't find them here. The focus is instead on the characters who are boldly and largely successfully drawn. though there is just a little too much reliance upon stock traits - hard-bitten journalist, obsessed detective - and the narrative never quite manages to dig as far beneath the surface as this reader would have liked. There is also a lot of telling rather than showing. But that's a fault of so many crime novels.

Nevertheless, despite its nightmarish subject, The Widow is a remarkably compelling and even entertaining read, cleverly probing the line between victimhood and complicity.

Van Gogh In Saint Paul De Mausole

Set in Provence at the end of the nineteenth century, this is the story of the arrival of at the hospital of Saint-Paul-de Mausole of an unusual patient, a painter who has caused outrage in the nearby town of Arles by fraternizing with prostitutes, by wandering into the town completely naked, and by cutting off half his ear. He is, of course, Vincent Van Gogh.

But this is not Vincent's story, it is the story of Jeanne Trabuc, wife of the hospital's chief warden, a woman whose world has been steadily diminishing with the departure of her children and her husband's withdrawal into his work. The exotic, unpredictable new patient, and the extraordinary paintings that he produces, changes the way she views her world:

Jeanne looks beyond the yard. The sun has caught Les Alpilles, lightening their western sides. In the groves, too, she sees at that moment that the western side of every tree is golden with sunshine, row upon row, and there's a brightness in the depths of the waist-high grass.

When she is forbidden to talk to him her frustration provokes a rebellion against the narrow passivity that is expected of her and a crisis in her marriage.

There is a pleasing sense of authenticity about this novel. Susan Fletcher writes with a delicate intensity, lingering over the small details of domestic life and shining a painterly light on the landscape.

A European Identity Crisis

Italy correspondent for The Economist and Southern Europe editor of the Guardian and the Observer, John Hooper writes with authority about a country beset by paradox, where an obsession with bella figura (creating a good impression) goes hand in hand with dietrologia (suspicion of what lies beneath the surface).

Like all attempts to sum up the character of a nation, this one ocasionally falls into generalisations. Italian has no word for accountability, Hooper declares, with a breezy disregard for linguistic processes. But on the whole he avoids such pitfalls, marshalling the evidence with care and paying due regard to the arguments on both sides.

He's particularly good on the political and economic backdrop to modern Italy, the impact of the Vatican on cultural mores and the bureaucratic idiosyncrasies that bedevil every aspect of Italian life. This is a country which responded to administrative over-kill by creating a Ministry of Simplification. It is also the country that gave us both the Renaissance and Silvio Berlsuconi.

Hooper sifts intelligently through its complexities and contradictions. The result is an engaging and entertaining portrait of a country that for hundreds of years has been at the very centre of European identity, even when it has been unsure of its own.