Swinging sixties reading: "Funny Girl" by Nick Hornby

I knew a while ago that Nick Hornby had a new book out, but the potted plot summaries I happened across didn't quite persuade me I should go out and get it. Although I have hugely enjoyed and highly rate some of Hornby's books (About a Boy, Hi Fidelity, Fever Pitch), he never quite qualified for me in that "automatic buy" category of author, being a bit too obviously located in that laddish-but-sensitive-contemporary-male-writer genre. In other words, I thought I could harmlessly give it a miss, as it would be more of the same. 

What persuaded me otherwise was a March 2015 episode of one of my favourite podcasts, NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour, in which the book was discussed. This show, which, as its title implies, focuses on the popular end of the cultural market, is both articulate and fun, and has proven itself, to me at least, as a reliable guide. Anyway, on this occasion, there was a clear consensus that Hornby's latest was a hit: engaging, touching, page-turning and funny. (You can listen to the podcast, if you like, embedded at the bottom of this post.)

In a sense, this NPR consensus was perhaps a little surprising, because Funny Girl is very, very English, and to understand it, you surely need all kinds of cultural reference points I would not expect to be common currency in New York City. That said, from what I hear, British is currently extremely cool stateside, so perhaps the pop culture cognoscenti are now completely clued up about Steptoe and Son, Hancock's Half Hour and Till Death Us Do Part. 

In any case, the story of Barbara (later Sophie) begins in the quintessential working class English North of Blackpool, where we first meet our heroine as the local girl winning a wind-chilled, goose-bumpy and mottled limb beauty contest to become Miss Blackpool. The scene oozes the aura of a rather bleak provincial England just beginning, though only at the margins, to discern the contours of a new post-austerity world. Barbara is one who seems to detect change in the air, and this, combined with the advantages of ambition, looks (she is in late-fifties, hourglass, "Sabrina" mode, we are told), and a comedic talent only she understands at this stage, is what drives her to renounce her beauty queen title and head for London, with the time-honoured objective of getting into show business, though, less usually perhaps, into radio or TV comedy in particular. The novel is the tale of how Sophie's (she changes her name at the suggestion of her agent) fortunes progress in London and of how she builds a career in a wildly successful BBC TV comedy series called Barbara (and Jim). 

Sabrina, in case you
were wondering

Hornby's story observes a changing society with a sympathetic and gentle eye. His cast of characters allows him to illustrate different aspects of the social revolution underway. Besides Sophie, we have the BBC comedy writing duo Tony and Bill, who live out their homosexuality (still illegal in England as the novel begins) in contrasting ways; the handsome co-star Clive, whose vanity and paradoxically naive eagerness not to miss out on any aspect of the sexual revolution are his undoing; and Dennis, the producer and loyal BBC man to his core, stuck in a loveless marriage with a humourless wife of Third Programme pretensions, who yearns silently for the lovely Sophie, but is far too much of a gentleman to compete with the more obvious Clive. Hornby does such characters well - according to the NPR podcast, better than Sophie herself - with delicate observation and wry humour. 

Unheroic reading: "Red Love: The Story of an East German Family" by Maxim Leo

This was one of those unplanned, serendipitous purchases. It took place in the new Hatchards in St. Pancras station, thereby providing some hope that the role of that station in providing me with unexpected good reads is not over following the tragic disappearance of the old Foyles bookshop. Maybe it was prompted in part by an upcoming visit to Berlin (just concluded), but, as regulars will know, I am in any case a sucker for Cold War era history and anything to do with Berlin in general, so it stood a fair chance of jumping off the shelf into my hand anyway. 

It was a good choice, it seems. Only after reading it did I notice all the highbrow accolades and commendations this book had received, including a citation from Julian Barnes on behalf of the European Book Prize jury, which awarded Maxim Leo the Prize in 2011. Said Barnes: 

He describes these 'ordinary lies' and contradictions, and the way human beings have to negotiate their way through them, with great clarity, humour and truthfulness, for which the jury of the European Book Prize is delighted to honour Red Love. His personal memoir serves as an unofficial history of a country that no longer exists... He is a wry and unheroic witness to the distorting impact - sometimes frightening, sometimes merely absurd - that ideology has upon the daily life of the individual: citizens only allowed to dance in couples, journalists unable to mention car tyres or washing machines for reasons of state.

"Red Love" is the maybe slightly questionable English title of the translation of the original Eine ostdeutsche Familiengeschichte (An East German Family Story). The original title (and the English subtitle) however sums it up: this is a family memoire covering three generations of Maxim Leo's family. And a remarkable story it is too.

Green reading: "Honourable Friends: Parliament and the Fight for Change" by Caroline Lucas

If in the decade between 1999 and 2009 you had taken a poll of British officials in the European Parliament (such as are left) as to who their favourite MEP might be, there is a pretty strong chance Caroline Lucas would have come out top. One of the two UK Greens in the Parliament, she left the European Parliament in 2010 to stand in a by-election for the Westminster seat of Brighton Pavilion, which she has represented ever since. She was the first Green MP in the House of Commons and, after the 2015 election (the overall outcome of which she must deplore) the first Green MP to be re-elected. She remains however the sole representative of her party there, but, in part as a consequence, something of a national celebrity.

In all of this, my guess is that most parliamentary officialdom, regardless of personal politics, will have been cheering on throughout. She is a breath of fresh air in the political world: smart (in fact, ferociously intelligent), principled though not doctrinaire, hard-working and actually quite an agreeable person. Indeed, in her book, she mentions one or two lucky breaks she got as a new MP (a nice office, some helpful advice...) which she attributes to helpful House of Commons staff. It figures.

Anyway, all of this made me well disposed when, on a recent visit to the Charing Cross Road Foyles, I noticed her book. Not hard to notice, actually; her book was very much in evidence, heavily promoted in the politics/current affairs section. It looked quite approachable, not too long, and centring on a novice insider's view of Parliament.

Perhaps it's me, but it was that insiderish stuff which appealed to me most. I enjoyed her tales of absurd parliamentary ritual, the minutiae of the battle to get an office, the arcana of Westminster procedure and so on. I liked her accounts of the struggle to get anything done and her proposals to change the way Parliament works, even if she does sometimes over-egg the one-woman-up-against-the-system stuff. But this is not an exercise in self-aggrandisement, nor is it humourless. There is a lot of wry amusement over ridiculous hidebound tradition, such as all MPs being allocated a place to hang their swords before entering the chamber or Members who have mistakenly entered the wrong voting lobby hiding in the toilets until the vote is over, because it is not allowed to back out of a lobby once it is entered.

Pre-enlightenment reading: "Ingenious Pain" by Andrew Miller

After two quickly-read, but not totally satisfying, books, this was a still quickly-read, but unambiguously excellent novel from Andrew Miller. This is in fact Miller's debut novel, published in 1997. Like his latest novel, Pure, which greatly impressed me a few months ago, Ingenious Pain is set in the eighteenth century in a world undergoing a fundamental shift, towards the Age of Reason. In Pure, the story is told in Paris, with hints of the impending Revolution infusing the story of a rationalist project in still largely pre-rationalist times. Ingenious Pain, notwithstanding episodes in France, Prussia and imperial Russia, is rooted in Georgian England, a mostly still-traditional pre-modern society, but one in which even relatively humble village parsons can grapple with loss of faith, and where gentlemen amateurs exhibit feverish scientific interest in anatomical dissections and freaks of nature.

Into this world, as the outcome of a sort-of rape of a young village woman in the icy darkness of the severe winter of 1739, is born James Dyer. He is a remarkable child: tall, handsome, confident, blue-eyed (when he should not be), but indubitably strange. Though he understands perfectly, he does not speak until he is ten years old. He seems impervious to pain. His first words come after he has fallen from a tree, shattering his leg. The leg is set and he recovers remarkably quickly, never complaining even of discomfort. At the same time he is oddly detached, uninterested in stories and plays, strangely unaffected when most of his family are carried off by smallpox. His interests are more what we would call "scientific"; his favorite object is an orrery, a mechanical model of the solar system, which accompanies him throughout his life, and his closest interest that of human anatomy. You might even say he rather resembles something which today we might call "autistic".

It transpires that James is indeed impervious to pain. This is spotted first by a travelling showman, actually the one who set his leg and - it is hinted - may be his father, and is exploited by him up and down the land in a stage show to sell quack remedies. The second to see the truth is a scientific gentleman, member of the Royal Academy no less, with an interest in freaks of nature, who sees through the showman's act and abducts the boy to safety in his vast country house (a weird disorientating prototype of the Versailles Palace in Pure) to become an object of study, along with a pair of conjoined twins and (perhaps) a mermaid. James lives through these experiences, which involve lots of needles being pushed through his hands, a tooth extraction, and the ripping out of fingernails (all for the sake of a sale or scientific investigation - the two come to seem oddly equivalent) with a curious detachment. He is only spurred to act when he witnesses a gruesomely botched public operation to separate the twins, an event which persuades him it is time to move on.

Mischievously upending reading: "Anansi Boys" by Neil Gaiman

Since my discovery of the wondrous Gaiman, I have periodically turned to this extraordinary writer for intensive reading relief. His astonishing imagination (American Gods), his powers of evocation (The Ocean at the End of the Lane) and his adept intermingling of the real and unreal (Neverwhere) are all extremely satisfying and come in page-turning packages.

So it was that on my last book-shopping spree in Nottingham, I decided to add "something by Gaiman" to the pile. I was slightly surprised to find that I have already read all the Gaiman  novels on the shelf (if we include Stardust, where I have seen the film), except one, this one, Anansi Boys. And so it was that this book was added to the pile.

In some ways, Anansi Boys revisits the world of American Gods. It depicts the real world, inhabited mostly by real people, but dispersed among them a set of their rather ragged, half-forgotten gods, still capable of malevolence, mayhem and mischief but nonetheless still largely ignored, forgotten or unknown. In Anansi Boys however, it is the real world story which predominates; the gods meddle and interfere, but the human outcome is ultimately the one that counts.

The story centres on Fat Charlie, who is not really fat, but whose nickname, like others bestowed by his father, tends to stick irrespective of reality. This is because, as we discover following Fat Charlie's father's unexpected death in the middle of a karaoke party, his father was no ordinary father, but Anansi, a notorious trickster among gods. This revelation, courtesy of a foursome of redoubtable Florida-based ladies Fat Charlie knows from his childhood, is swiftly followed by another. Fat Charlie, who has since settled in London living out an undistinguished life as a bookkeeper for a (it transpires) thoroughly crooked theatrical agent, discovers he has a brother, a brother who, seemingly, has inherited all the magical tricksterishness of the father so evidently absent in him.