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.

The Idea Of Rome

Over the years writers from Suetonius onwards have created ruts in the road by focusing on a biographical approach to the history of Ancient Rome. Mary Beard prefers to avoid those ruts, concentrating instead on the idea of Rome, and the many ways of defining oneself as Roman, as evinced in the everyday lives and pre-occupations both of the ruling classes and of those who were ruled, including the very poorest and the slaves.

She is particularly interesting when examining what foundation myths tell us about the mind-set of Romans, how they projected their anxieties and identities backward into the past and how those identities were changed by the processes of empire.

Of course Beard cannot avoid the temptations of biography altogether. This is the history of Rome after all and we are dealing with the likes of Nero. However, one of the more intriguing conclusions she comes to is that the empire created the emperors as much as vice versa.

It's a development that begins with Pompey who could arguably be described as the first emperor, and who was defined by territorial acquisition and the power and wealth it provided. The process was formalised in the life and legacy of Augustus who was transformed into a model of imperial identity to which his successors were obliged to conform for the next millennium.

Beard's main argument, however, is that what made Rome unique in the Ancient World was not that its rulers were more cruel or excessive than those of other people, or that its people more ingenious, or even that its soldiers were more ruthless, but the fact that from very early on its rulers untethered the concept of being Roman from its geographical limitations. You could be a Roman and a Greek, even a Roman and a Briton.

In an age of identity politics, this doesn't sound so startling but more than two thousand years ago it was a radical development that made possible the construction of an empire which assimilated local customs, incorporated many different languages, and in which many different gods were worshipped - at least until the appearance of Christianity which refused to co-exist alongside other religions and ended up assimilating the Roman empire itself.

Variations On A Theme

Enjoyable and emotionally satisfying, All The Hopeful Lovers is a set of variations on an age-old theme. A large cast of inter-connected characters struggle with their emotional lives and find themselves caught between twin poles of idealism and compromise.

Young, old and middle-aged, they weave in and out of each other's lives, some impeded by selfishness, others by honesty; some gifted with good-looks, others with sensitivity, some borne aloft on confidence, others crippled by self-consciousness, all in search of love.

It's a challenging narrative structure - so many plot-lines, so many different solutions to the same essential problems. What carries the novel forward is the acute observation of human nature and the authenticity of the characters. These feel like real people, their weaknesses and strengths are familiar to us all.

Nicholson is always looking for the truth about the individual under the chaos of impulse and he finds that truth in the small details. As one of his characters, an elderly artist whose portraits have long ceased to be fashionable, observes, "You paint what you see and what you feel. I can see you but I can't feel what you feel, I can only feel what I feel. So I latch on to the little clues I get from your face that take me to my own feelings."

A Society On The Brink

Set in nineteen thirties London, Curtain Call depicts a network of contrasting characters - a pompous gay theatre critic, his long-suffering secretary, a West-End actress, a prostitute, and a society portrait-painter - all caught up in a series of sadistic murders that changes their lives irrevocably.

What sets this novel apart from the average run-of-the-mill thriller is the skill with which the author summons up a picture of London between the wars. It is a two-faced society, proffering glittering rewards to those who succeed, but merciless towards those who fall by the wayside.

It is also a society on the brink of radical transformation, the gaze of many of its inhabitants still fixed upon the end of the nineteenth century while a series of seismic events - the rise of fascism, the abdication crisis, the dawn of the movie industry - are beginning to change their world forever.

Intent upon their own desires or simply struggling to find security, the characters are oblivious to the changes being wrought around them. Only Madeline, the prostitute around whom much of the plot revolves, glimpses the truth about the killer hiding in plain sight as well as possessing an intuitive awareness of the impending catastrophe that will overtake them all and end in the cataclysm of world war; but she has no idea what to do with this knowledge.

Colourful and well-researched, Curtain Call is an intelligent and richly-textured novel that manages to transcend the limitations of its genre