Republican reading: "Dictator" by Robert Harris

I am not alone in having waited inordinately long for the third part of Robert Harris' Cicero trilogy. The first two books, Imperium and Lustrum, were wonderful reads (though I read them in the wrong order) and left me eager to finish the story. In the event, I had to wait well over four years (see Imperium review), a period in which Harris published two other novels, both excellent, but seemed frustratingly disinclined to return to ancient Rome. (The intervening two were, The Fear Index and An Officer and a Spy, by the way.)

Dictator continues the story of the Roman Republic's last bulwark, Cicero, as related by his slave - and later freed friend - Tiro.  The book opens with Cicero in exile, having been ousted from his consulship by his bitter opponent, Clodius. However, as Cicero frequently remarks, nothing in politics lasts indefinitely, the wheel turns and Cicero is able to return to Rome and join in the daily political fight. One has a sense throughout - of course, we know how the story ends - that Cicero is engaged in an uphill struggle, his successes contingent and the forces against him ever stronger. While the daily machinations of Roman politics may offer alternations of triumph and disaster, the long-term trend is for the collapse of Cicero's beloved Republic. It is Julius Caesar, who Harris portrays beautifully as a high-functioning psychopath, who fatally wounds the Republic, and whose post-assassination aftermath turns decisively onto the road which will lead Rome to the dictatorship of emperors. 

The strength of Harris' work, which is extraordinarily well-researched, is to take us thoroughly inside the world of Roman politics, seen through the (acknowledgedly imperfect) eyes of one of its great practitioners. We live the vicissitudes of ancient Rome as Cicero lives them, albeit through the occasionally interpretative lens of Tiro, feeling the setbacks and flashes of hope as he feels them. Nor does Harris forget Cicero is a human being. Perhaps more in this novel than in its predecessors do we see the dimension of Cicero as a husband, father and brother, buffeted by storms personal as well as political. As a result, we care very much for both Cicero, and the man who is ultimately his best friend, Tiro.

Compromising reading: "The Noise of Time" by Julian Barnes

It’s a general principle: if Barnes writes it, I will read it. He is on that short list of buy-it-whatever writers for me. However, on this occasion, it was as much the subject of his latest novel as its author which persuaded me I needed to lay hands on the book as soon as possible. The Noise of Time is about Russia’s greatest twentieth century composer, Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich (though he, by this account, would himself have awarded that accolade to Igor Stravinsky), and his tortured relationship with Soviet power. 

Power, with a capital P, and its relationship with the man and his art, is the subject of Barnes’ slim latest novel. The book relates three episodes from Shostakovich’s life, each of them centring on a “conversation with Power”: one when he is a young man in the 1930s, though at that point already established as a leading composer in the Soviet Union, one from the early post-war period as he participates in a Soviet “peace delegation to New York, and one from later life, when he is cast in the role of Grand Old Man of Soviet music.

In all his encounters with Power, Shostakovich is forced to face the implications of being an artist in a totalitarian system. The first, in 1936 at the height of Stalin’s Great Terror, is sparked by the Dictator’s displeasure upon attending a performance of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Shostakovich’s only produced opera. Although the work had up to that point received favourable reactions, Stalin’s disapproval is manifest immediately in denunciations in Pravda for “formalism”, “cosmopolitanism” and all the usual litany of formulaic criticisms, normally sufficient to end a career, indeed even a life. When an article subsequently drops in the epithet “enemy of the people”, Shostakovich, understands how perilous his situation is and looks to help from influential friends. Whereafter his first “conversation with power”, a summons to the “Big House” in Leningrad, where a menacing NKVD apparatchik questions him about his circle of acquaintances and makes it abundantly clear that a second meeting, scheduled for two days later, is likely to be decisive. The composer’s escape is the result - or so it seems - of the arbitrariness typical of the Terror, and leaves him in a constant state of on-edge preparedness for the worst, and camped out in the hallway of his apartment block by the lift ready to be taken by his expected nocturnal nemesis, saving his family the trauma of watching him dragged from bed and home.

Aspirational reading: "Five point someone" by Chetan Bhagat

In the course of my recent trip to India, I became fascinated by the whole idea of "Rising India" (that's a compound noun, note) and what that means for society. I was also struck by the sheer number of billboards advertising schools, always "English medium" schools offering glittering future prospects for their alumni, possibly the most common commodity promoted by large format advertising in the cities we visited. (I will upload a little photo gallery at the end of this post.)

 One way to get an insight for what this ongoing transformation of India implies for ordinary people, I thought, might be to read a popular novel on the subject. I had flicked through a book in Delhi airport's WH Smith (yes!) entitled Half Girlfriend, which from the blurb seemed pretty on-subject, but didn't buy it thinking I could pick it up next time I passed though a couple of days later, after finishing the book I was on (last review). However, next time the book had disappeared, so I had to scout for another. The result was Five point someone. 

Only now, writing this, do I discover that both books are by the same author, Chetan Bhagat, who describes himself on the inside cover as a writer "focusing on youth and national development issues", as well as "motivational speaker", and ex-international investment banker who gave the job  "to devote his entire time to writing and make change happen in the country". Yes, that's a mite off-putting, I'll concede, but if this guy can't tell me about social change in India, who can?

OK, this is a slight novel. It was easily read in a day - the day of our return journey from India - but it did the job, it did provide an insight into how things work for the aspirational Indian middle class, even if Bhagat is using his book to argue against the extremes to which the students in elite institutions are pushed by the system. 

Erudite reading: "City of Djinns" by William Dalrymple

I have read William Dalrymple before, The Last Mughal (2006). This astonishingly powerful account of the Indian Mutiny (or the "First War of Independence", as I now know it to be termed in India) made a huge impression on me, to the extent that when, in preparation for an upcoming trip to India, I spotted the name "Dalrymple" in the travel section of Nottingham Waterstones, I could hardly not pick up the book. 

City of Djinns is an autobiographical account of a year spent by a young William Dalrymple, together with his newlywed wife, Olivia, in Delhi. The book is a mix of the personal recollection of an (initially) rather wide-eyed Brit decamping in the chaos that is Delhi and the learning he acquires while there: tales of the British Raj (a brief interlude), the Mughal empire it supplanted and indeed the preceding centuries, fading into the semi-myth, semi-history of the Mahabharata. Correspondingly, the book provides a marvellous introduction to the reality of contemporary Delhi (though the 12 years since its publication have wrought many changes, I suspect) as well as to the history with permeates the city, both through the monuments and sites any tourist will visit (Humayan's Tomb, the Red Fort...) and through the oral tradition and backstreet religion the casual visitor will find it much harder to encounter directly.

Consequential reading: "Canada" by Richard Ford

I am, I confess, a bit behind. Two subsequent read books lie between me and Canada, which is a shame, as this book deserves comment while still entirely fresh in mind. So apologies, both to the book and to those who read this. 

Richard Ford is a consequential writer, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a man whose personal appearances can fill theatres. Indeed, he recently appeared at Bozar in Brussels, where 300 people grilled the "legendary author" about his life and work. I was not there, thus adding another #fail to laxness in sitting down to write about this admirable book. 

I had never read anything by Ford before, so came to Canada completely fresh. The book, a nice rough-cut hardback edition, was a birthday gift from my most literary friend, Neil, and recommended itself sufficiently to jump the queue of books on the "to read" shelf upstairs. 

Canada is about consequences. Here, the consequences flow from a seemingly anomalous event in the life of a otherwise ostensibly rather bland Midwestern family (though, beware, consequences apply here too), the decision of the parents to rob a bank. The story is told by their son Dell Parsons, 15 at the time, from a perspective which is both contemporary and from the perspective of fifty years later, when Dell looks back to his life-defining event. The tone is meditative, the pace slow. Ford is not interested in twists and turns, dramatic tension, but with looking at perceptions and at how events play out and the effect they have on his characters, Dell, and, to a lesser extent, his twin sister, Berner. The first line of the novel, one of the best I have encountered for a while, encapsulates nicely how it is going to go. 

First, I’ll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later.