Tricksy reading: "Sweet Tooth" by Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan, literary superstar. The astonishingly good Atonement and On Chesil Beach made it impossible not to buy and read his next book, Solar, which, though for me not so good, did not dilute the effect, which thus made Sweet Tooth a compulsory purchase. As with all the books mentioned above from the "second phase" McEwan (the first phase being rather more gothic), Sweet Tooth is deeply rooted in middle class Englishness, this time set, in what he has himself described as autobiographical style, in the late sixties and early seventies. 

Reformation reading: "Wolf Hall" by Hilary Mantel

In the last post, about a Pakistani interloper, I made mention of a "hefty historical novel" on which I was embarked and which the subcontinental tale briefly interrupted. So I now reveal that Wolf Hall was the novel in question, and its heftiness 674 pages in my paperback edition. 

This book earned Hilary Mantel her first Booker Prize (with, extraordinarily, the sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, winning her second), so it's good. I'm not being ironic, it is good. Mantel pulls off a totally immersive and page-turning evocation of an era made spuriously familiar to my generation by Ladybird history books and a privileged place in the nationalistic school curriculum of my youth, latterly much sighed over by educational and political conservatives.  Mantel's version of Tudor politics and history is of course much more sophisticated and ambiguous than the official version I was brought up on. It should be; her research is ferociously detailed and her understanding of the period profound, even without that research being worn in any way on her sleeve. Just historically, this book seems to me a magnificent achievement.