This House of Grief

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I read “true crime” books very rarely. In fact, I can only think of a few. Capote’s In Cold Blood, of course, and one or two others. My aversion to the genre is simple enough to explain. Many such books, at least in my experience, are badly written and are motivated by a ghoulish and sometimes prurient interest in the misfortune and misery of others. They are, more often than not, the literary equivalent of slowing down to watch a car accident.

This House of Grief is something very different. It is mostly an account of the trial of Robert Farquharson who stood accused of the murder of his three sons on Father’s Day, 2005. The crime and the trial captivated Australian society at the time, but I was entirely unaware of them, and of the book (first published in 2014), until I started to get interested in its author, Helen Garner. Garner recently won the Baillie Gifford prize for her diaries, How to end a Story, and it was those that led me to look at her earlier work. On a visit to The Brick Lane Bookshop in London, This House of Grief was displayed prominently and I snapped it up. I am glad I did.

I think the book has become a classic for several reasons. As an account of the drama that can unfold in a courtroom, it is hard to imagine anything better. Garner has a very sharp eye for the peculiarities of human behavior and the trials gave her a great opportunity to train it on the lawyers, spectators, and witnesses. It is also a deeply disturbing report of the depths of wickedness into which a person might descend. It is a story that could have been recounted in a sensational and vulgar way, but in Garner’s hands it is all done with such humanity. This House of Grief is a truly brilliant and compassionate piece of reporting. Garner’s award winning diaries are now top of my Christmas reading wish list.

Eastbound

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Most books are published in a relatively small number of standard sizes. While there are good reasons for that, titles published in unusual formats or with distinctive designs have a good chance of standing out among the thousands of similar looking books stocked by the average bookstore. Imaginative publishers know that. Browsing one evening recently in a fairly undistinguished chain bookshop in a Massachusetts mall, my eye was caught by a small, almost square paperback called Eastbound by Maylis de Kerangal. No doubt it was the unusual format and pared down, minimalist design that made me pick it off the shelf.

Eastbound features Aliocha, a young Russian conscript on his way to report for compulsory military service in Siberia. Traveling on the Trans-Siberian Express, Aliocha is so frightened of what lies at the end of the long journey that he is determined to abscond. On the train he meets Helene, a French tourist traveling in first class, and sees an opportunity to escape.

It may seem an implausible tale, but the author (Maylis de Kerangal) creates such an intense and dreamlike atmosphere on board the cramped and claustrophobic train moving relentlessly towards the frozen wastelands of Siberia that it hardly seems to matter. This is a novella about shared humanity, people’s destinies and fates and how they intertwine in the least likely of circumstances. Fevered and almost surreal, Eastbound may be short but it sticks in the memory.

What We Can Know

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What can we really know about the past, even in a world in which almost everything – every email, every photograph, every recording – is preserved? What can we ever know about the figures of history, the writers, the artists, the politicians and so on? Do all those biographies that scrutinize every detail of a life ever capture what the living, breathing, and thinking person was truly like ? Do biographers and academics ever get close to the objects of their examination? And what does all that uncovering of the past teach us about the present? Perhaps instead of trawling through archives and reading books and manuscripts, we might learn more about today by imagining a future world and looking back at the present from that vantage point. What we can know is about what we can know. It’s about trying to understand what we can ever really understand, about the past and the present. That is vital because if we can really see clearly, if we can really understand, and if we can really know, from that understanding and knowledge perhaps we might start to value, protect, and preserve what is valuable and meaningful, and stop destroying what really matters before it is too late.

What we can know is is that unusual thing, a novel of ideas. It’s a wonderful accomplishment and to my mind one of the best things McEwan has written for a long time. The story is set in 2119 in Britain, a country which by that time is an archipelago, much of its earlier landmass having been left uninhabitable by rising sea levels. Tom Metcalfe is an academic and his research centers on a poem, written in 2014 and recited at a famous dinner party. No written copy of the poem has ever been found, making it that rarest of things, an unpreserved masterpiece known only by its reputation and by the memories of those who heard it spoken aloud on one occasion more than a century in the past. For Tom the effort to discover the whereabouts of this unread poem is his life’s mission. No spoilers here!

McEwan’s probing intelligence is one of the features I most associate with him and in his least successful novels it can be on full display unleavened by emotional insight. In What we can know the balance is almost perfect. It’s certainly a clever and thought-provoking story, but it also has tenderness, wit, and compassion.

Ho Chi Minh City

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10 million or 14 million? That’s how widely the estimates vary when it comes to the population of Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC). Either way, it’s a large and crowded city. My first impressions of it were probably no different from every other visitor’s. With more mopeds than I’ve ever seen in one place, crowding not only the streets but also every inch of every sidewalk, HCMC might just be the least pedestrian-friendly city I’ve ever visited. Hot, humid, and with daily thunderstorms (when I visited), it’s not a comfortable place, but it has undeniable energy and character.

Its reputation as a great place for food precedes it and, certainly on the evidence of my few days there, is well deserved. From high-end restaurants to the most casual street food hawkers, HCMC has something for every palate and budget. I sampled as much as I could in my brief stay, focusing on Vietnamese specialities, and enjoyed every mouthful, though no one can convince me to appreciate the local coffee, served with sweetened condensed milk.

I managed to see only a few of the city’s landmarks. One highlight was my tour of the Independence Palace which gave me a concentrated and quite moving history of Vietnam in the troubled and tragic years of the 20th century. Unmissable for the first time visitor, as is the Saigon Central Post Office, competed in 1891 and a masterpiece of French colonial architecture.

Not the calmest or easiest city I have ever been to, Ho Chi Minh City nevertheless has the sort of vibrancy that seduces a visitor. I’m already looking forward to exploring more.

Death of an Ordinary Man

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Another beautifully written and important book about death and fathers. Death of an Ordinary Man is a memoir, but it comes from the hands of a celebrated and prize winning English novelist, Sarah Perry, who brings to this deeply felt and moving account of the death of her much loved father-in-law an artist’s particular sensitivity and insight. It may be a story about death, but it’s also about illness, the care of the dying and ultimately about love and faith. It may be very particular, but it is also universal. And as the blurb on the cover says, “Please read this book. It may very well change how you live“. This unforgettable book deserves to win every prize available. I have not read anything as deeply moving for a very long time.

Death and the Gardener

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I have the impression that fewer novels are written about fathers and fatherhood than mothers and motherhood. That may simply reflect my reading choices and experience. Anyone who loved their father and lost him to illness is likely to be moved deeply by Death and the Gardener, the most recent novel from the Bulgarian writer (and winner of the International Booker prize in 2023), Georgi Gospodinov.

The book reads like a memoir. The narrator is a celebrated Bulgarian writer and his story is told with the apparently unflinching candor that one normally associates with journals or autobiographies. His account weaves memories of his father with a description of the old man’s illness, treatment, and death, all told in a style marked by simple directness with flashes of real tenderness. It’s one of those books that you find yourself wanting to read more slowly, more carefully, going back over particular sentences and paragraphs to embed them firmly in your memory and experience.

In remembering his father, and telling those remembrances, the narrator creates a eulogy and a memorial that will outlast the father and the son. And Gospodinov, in creating the story, creates a eulogy and memorial for every father that was loved and lost, so that perhaps the sons still living might realize and cherish what they had and what will never return. “We will never be as safe as we once were in our father’s arms“.

Seascraper

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Thomas Flett is a shanker. Every morning at low tide he takes his horse and wagon to the beach, scrapes the sand and the shallow waters for shrimp, and delivers his haul for sale in the nearby town. He does it reluctantly and even resentfully, dreaming all the while of the folk music he would like to write and perform. Thomas lives with his mother in a rundown cottage. Money is scarce, so he conceals his ambitions from her, hiding his guitar and everything of his inner life. Work is hard, leaving him little or no time to follow his dreams, until one day, without warning, an American film director shows up scouting for suitable locations for his new project.

Disappointed and disillusioned young men, tied to labors they loathe, tethered by poverty, and dreaming of other lives are something of a literary staple. Think of Thomas Hardy, for example. Seascraper is firmly within that tradition. That in no way is intended to diminish Benjamin Wood’s achievement here. His tale is a memorable and poignant one, and he writes with great feeling for the frustrations of daily life and especially of thwarted ambition. In spite of that, Seascraper for me didn’t quite come off. It’s filled with atmosphere and the character of Thomas is written with subtlety and insight, but minor characters feel sketched rather than fully drawn. Nevertheless, this is a fine novel and one I’m pleased to have read.

Les Tres Riches Heures

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Some experiences really are once-in-a-lifetime experiences. About a year ago it was announced that in mid-2025 one of the rarest and most exquisite medieval manuscripts would go on display to the public. Les Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry is an illuminated book of hours (a book of prayers intended to be read at specific hours of the day) first created between 1412 and 1416 for John, Duke of Berry, the brother of King Charles V of France. The manuscript, believed to be the work of the Limbourg brothers, was left unfinished because the brothers died, most likely victims of plague. Further work was done on the manuscript later in the 15th century by Barthelemy d’Eyck and Jean Colombe.

The manuscript is very rarely displayed because of its fragility and has only been seen by the public twice since the end of the 19th century. Even scholars have been denied access since the 1980s and forced to rely on facsimiles. The need to repair its binding gave an opportunity to exhibit some of the unbound pages at the Chateau de Chantilly where it is usually housed, an event so rare that it was described as one of the cultural highlights of the century. Needless to say, art lovers, historians, and bibliophiles have descended on Chantilly in huge numbers since June, but by the time I arrived in mid-September the crowds had subsided and I was able to see the exhibited pages up close.

Twelve pages were on display the day I visited, each one representing a month of the year. It is hard to describe how vivid, rich, and elaborate the illumination is on these pages, as well as the perfection of the calligraphy. It is a credit not just to the artists, but also those charged with the care and conservation of this treasure, that the illustrations look as if they could have been painted yesterday, such is the depth and brilliance of the color.

Some works of art defy categorization. This precious manuscript, a priceless example of medieval art, is one of them. I feel privileged to have seen it.

On James Baldwin

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When I heard that Colm Toibin, one of my favorite writers, had written a book about James Baldwin, I was intrigued. I saw the obvious biographical similarities between the two. Both of them gay men, both with experience of living and writing in adopted homelands (Baldwin in France, Toibin in the US), and both touched deeply in different ways by the religious traditions in which they were raised. Intrigued and enthused I might have been, but I was also a little concerned that the book might demand a deep knowledge of Baldwin’s work (something I don’t have), and might be academic or dry (it’s published by a university press). I need not have worried. No doubt I would have got more from On James Baldwin if I had read more of Baldwin’s work or if I knew better books such as Giovanni’s Room, but this is as much a book about Toibin as it is about Baldwin. It’s also one that draws insightful parallels with the work of other notable emigre writers such as James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry James. Best of all, it made me want to read more James Baldwin, and I guess that’s mission accomplished!

A Bigger Message

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Martin Gayford wrote a book a few years ago about the experience of having his portrait painted by Lucien Freud. Man with a Blue Scarf proved to be not only an insightful, up-close-and-personal look at Freud, but also an engaging account of what it took to be one of his sitters. It’s one of my favorite books. Gayford has now focused his attention on David Hockney, transcribing a series of conversations he had with the prolific artist over more than a decade.

The portrait that emerges from the book is of an inexhaustibly inventive, restless, curious, and thoughtful artist. Now in his late eighties, Hockney has spent some seven decades not just painting and drawing, but thinking deeply about the act of looking. The book is filled with his insights on his own working methods, on other painters (Constable, Fra Angelico, Picasso, Van Gogh and many more), his fascination with new technologies, and the tireless determination to see clearly and record faithfully. It’s not in any sense a conventional biography, but Gayford’s clever and sensitive questioning tells you more about the personality, passions, and compulsions of this extraordinary painter than a traditional account might.

A Bigger Message is a book for Hockney fans for sure, but also for anyone interested in the mind and work of a great artist.