Funny, Heartbreaking, Compassionate

Set in Rome, both during the Second World War and in the nineteen seventies, Early One Morning is the story of Chiara Ravello, a young woman, who witnesses the Jews being rounded up and driven away from the Trastevere Ghetto and who, on impulse, persuades the supervising soldiers that a mistake has been made and that one of the children is really her nephew, thereby saving him from the fate to which the rest of his family are consigned.

But this is not another Holocaust story. It is actually concerned with what happens next: the implications of this terrifying decision for Chiara herself, for her disabled sister Cecilia, for Daniele, the boy she impetuously decided to rescue and, thirty years after the event, for a sixteen year old Welsh girl called Maria whose world is about to be turned upside down by the discovery that she is not the person she has always thought herself to be.

Virginia Bailey's writing is beautifully observed. The evocation of Rome - its sights, smells sounds, even its weather - is extraordinarily vivid. It is the next best thing to actually being there. But what gives this book its compelling emotional core is the story of Chiara's fiercely protective love for the angry, uncommunicative little boy she has adopted. This is the story of parenthood writ large.

Funny, heart-breaking, compassionate, Early One Morning is undoubtedly the best book I have read in 2015 and I suspect the experience of reading it will remain with me for a very long time.

Structural Whimsy

A satire on the commodification of modern life, Number 11begins with ten year old Rachel and her brother visiting their grandparents in their quiet suburban house. Her brother drops out of the story entirely but Rachel grows older, goes to Oxford and becomes a tutor to the children of a super-rich family.

The story also follows the fortunes of Rachel's school-friend Alison and her mother, a former pop-star who only ever had one-hit . Alison becomes an unemployed art-student and is set up by a journalist to look like a benefits cheat. Her mother appears on I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here and the experience ruins her life. In different ways, Rachel and Alison and her mother all fall victim to the machinations of the Winshaws, an influential family at the the heart of the British establishment.

Like all Coe's work, this is a highly political novel and you are left in no doubt about the author's perspective. He is disgusted by the inequality in our society, appalled by the callousness of the rich and powerful, and sickened by the omnipresence of the market. I wouldn't argue with any of that. What wearies me, is his tendency to labour the point. There is no room for the reader to make up his or her own mind. You are constantly directed what to think and which conclusions to draw.

For me, the biggest drawback about this book, however, is not the polemic but the uneasy mixture of the real and the fantastical. Towards the end of the book the story becomes more and more surreal as people begin disappearing and their murders are investigated by a clownish policeman who is obsessed with his media image. Finally giant spiders emerge from excavations under the house of the super-rich family for whom Rachel works and begin dragging people off to their underground lair. It's deliberately left unclear whether this is real or simply the product of Rachel's exhausted imagination. I found this ambivalence something of a cop out.

The tone of the book veers between the sententious and the farcical and that's an uncomfortable combination. There are parts that are genuinely funny and parts that are intellectually engaging but they are all wrapped up in a kind of structural whimsy as the novel takes on the form of the narratives being studied by the characters Rachel encounters. Coe is playing with form here in a way that is certainly clever but which nonetheless left me feeling distinctly underwhelmed.

A Remarkable Piece Of Social History

Thomas Harding's great grandfather, a successful Jewish doctor living in Berlin in the early twentieth century, built a summer house by a lake just outside the city where he and his family spent all their leisure time. Then Hitler came to power and the family was forced to flee to Britain.

Their house underwent a series of incarnations. Seized by the Nazis, it was subsequently bought for a knock down price by a successful music publisher. But he, too, lost possession when the land it stood upon became part of the East German Republic. The house was appropriated by the local government and a series of tenants enjoyed the tranquillity of the the lakeside view until suddenly, overnight, the Berlin Wall was thrown up, right outside the back door.

This book is the story of all the individuals who lived in that house and by illuminating their lives Harding renders the colossal upheavals of the twentieth century deeply personal, and therefore understandable. Compassionate and full of insight, The House By The Lake is a remarkable piece of social history.

History As Theme-Park

Amory Clay has been enjoying an uneventful middle-class childhood until her father returns, deeply traumatised, from the trenches of the First World War and unsuccessfully attempts to kill himself and her by driving them both into a lake. Now it is Amory who is traumatised. Her promising academic career disintegrates and instead of going to Oxford to study History, she becomes an assistant to her uncle, a society photographer.

It turns out to be the beginning of a career as a photo-journalist that allows her to witness Berlin at the height of its pre-war decadence, Oswald Moseley's Blackshirts marching through East London and the Allied invasion of Normandy. She rubs shoulders with celebrities - even Marlene Dietrich makes a cameo appearance - and has a series of affairs, finally marrying a Scottish Lord and settling down with him on his estate where she is unable to prevent him drinking himself to death.

Gambling debts and her husband's carelessness about his will, leave her in greatly reduced circumstances. So she dusts off her camera once more and sets off for Vietnam. She's in her sixties now but it doesn't stop her dodging bullets and having sex with men half her age.

Structured as pseudo-autobiography, the text is peppered with photographs purporting to be by Amory herself and there is an acknowledgements page at the end in which, I suspect, real and fictional names are deliberately mixed together to bolster the illusion. It's a clever device, allowing the author scope to include almost anything he likes from the compendium of the twentieth century's worst excesses. The downside is that the overall effect is somewhat episodic and the impact of the novel depends to a very great extent on what you feel about the central character.

Therein lies my principal dissatisfaction with this novel. I didn't really care about Amory Clay, perhaps because I wasn't entirely convinced by her. She always felt to me a bit too much like a man's idea of a free-spirited woman. And if you don't care about the protagonist the whole thing feels a bit like history as theme-park. It's highly readable and very entertaining but I was always slightly troubled by a sense that terrible events were being trivialised.

An Inter-textual Jigsaw

Iain Pears' latest novel begins by with a description of a pastoral landscape that feels just a shade derivative; and that is entirely is as it should be since we soon discover that it's part of a story being written by Henry Lytten, a lecturer in English literature.

Lytten is a former colleague of Tolkien with a past life in espionage that is a little reminiscent of George Smiley. His feudal fantasy is a donnish indulgence but the elaborate fiction he is concocting to uncover a traitor in British Intelligence is rather more serious.

What Henry doesn't know, however, is that his fantasy world is about to be hijacked and activated as part of a time-travelling mathematician's experiment to create an alternative reality.

All of these plotlines become deliciously entangled as characters invade each other's narratives and create unforeseen plot-twists for their respective stories, A schoolgirl from the nineteen seventies is mistaken for a fairy. Security officers from the future are arrested as Soviet spies. Lytten enters his own story and is worshipped as a deity.

Sometimes sombre, often farcical, Arcadia is a glorious inter-textual jigsaw that is also a witty commentary on the creative process. I can see it becoming a cult book.

Dystopia As A Metaphor For Adolescence

The Age Of Miracles is a coming of age story set in a near-future in which the earth's spin has begun to slow, leading to a gradual unravelling of society as crops become harder to grow and the earth's magnetic field begins to deteriorate.

However, the emphasis is not so much on the disaster as on the emotional life of Julia, the teenager narrator, who has to deal with exactly the same problems that all adolescents face but against a backdrop of slow-motion global catastrophe. People's behaviour - including her own - begins to change as they adjust to the new reality:

'We took more risks. Desires were less checked. Temptation was harder to resist. Some of us made decisions we might not otherwise have made.'

It is hard to concentrate on school, harder still to believe in the future. Her best friend, a Mormon, takes off with her family to Utah to live in a purpose-built complex and await the end of the world. Her parents' marriage seems to be collapsing.

Julia takes refuge in an all-consuming relationship with a boy from school and together they wander through their stricken world finding a precarious happiness as the situation around them grows gradually more hopeless.

Although this is a disaster story, it's really all about the everyday. This is dystopia as a metaphor for adolescence and it's beautifully done. The voice of the teenage narrator is pitch-perfect. The tone is sweetly poignant. It's an accomplished debut.

A Window Into Italian Society

Offering an alternative view of Italian society from the usual gastronomic travelogue ,Interpreting Italians consists of a series of essays on historical, political and cultural topics that have had a significant influence of the development of Italian mores and behaviour.

Discussions include: the admiration for furbizia, or shrewdness - something that goes some way to explain the enthusiastic support enjoyed by Silvio Berlusconi; attitudes towards the official Italian language and the various other competing languages and dialects spoken by Italian nationals; the importance of bella figura - which could be translated as beautiful appearance, except that this goes nowhere near explaining its true significance; and the symbiotic relationship Italians enjoy with tourism.

Obviously, a book like this could easily descend into meaningless generalisations but the author is always aware of that danger. He is not seeking to describe a fictional Italian temperament, merely to point to influences on the society and to try to consider their possible impact. My favourite example of this was his suggested explanation for the many different varieties of pasta:

"That pasta achieved widespread popularity in Italy during the Baroque period is more than coincidental; the vast array of pasta shapes and sizes is itself a consummately Baroque expression. Each form of pasta has its own accompanying sauce which can be mixed with other forms in any desired manner to augment not only taste but also presentation – in other words, to enhance the aesthetic appearance of food."

At the end of the book there is a series of appendices packed with suggestions for further reading and additional information about Italian history, geography and cuisine. Altogether, this is one of the most useful books about Italy I have come across.