The narrator of Heaven is a teenage boy living in a kind of hell, bullied relentlessly and violently by his classmates because of his lazy eye. His only friend, Kojima, suffers the same fate day after day, week after week, because of her appearance. Their friendship, tentative and uncertain, is the single haven in an endless storm of humiliation and brutality, the only solace in a world of sadness and loneliness.

Does suffering have meaning? For Momose, one of the bullies, no. People hurt others because they can. It’s as simple as that. Countering this nihilism, Kojima asserts that her suffering has significance. “There’s meaning in overcoming pain and suffering.” I don’t want to spoil the ending, but the final word is given to the narrator whose vision of beauty and hope closes the novel.

It has been more than a year since I read Mieko Kawakami’s bestseller, Breasts and Eggs, a novel I remember particularly for its distinctive, unusual voice. I recommended the book to several friends and it was one of those friends who kindly gave me Kawakami’s latest work, Heaven, after spotting it in a London bookshop. I think it’s safe to say it won’t be the voice I remember when I think about Heaven. It will be the harrowing subject matter and Kawakami’s unflinching description of bullying and its consequences.

The quickest of glances along my bookshelves confirms that England has produced some remarkable – and remarkably prolific – diarists. I doubt there is something special in their character that makes the English particularly inclined to the sustained self-absorption, curiosity, and sheer discipline that are necessary for maintaining a diary over years or even decades, but I am at a loss to explain why so many English men and women have kept such compelling diaries. Are there great American, Irish, or Australian diarists? Probably, but none come to mind immediately.

Another oddity is the fact that the best diarists were often not especially distinguished in other respects. James Lees-Milne, for example, did valuable work saving important British houses and estates after the war and was influential in the formation of The National Trust. Alan Clark was on the fringes of power during Margaret Thatcher’s period in office, but was never himself a central figure. The same might be said of Harold Nicolson earlier in the century. Frances Partridge, a friend of everyone in the Bloomsbury set, never achieved the distinction of those to whom she was closest like Lytton Strachey or Dora Carrington. Yet all of them were wonderful diarists and their fame is assured because of the journals they kept.

Henry ‘Chips’ Channon was American by birth but adopted England and Englishness in his early twenties with the most extraordinary passion and commitment. (On the evidence of his diaries, he never passed up an opportunity to be rude about America and Americans). His apparently effortless entry into England’s high society from the 1920s onward may have been eased by a generous allowance from his father, but what sustained him there was charm, wit, and a good marriage. He had some success in politics, but his fame rests on the unusually frank diaries he kept for decades and which are now being published in their unexpurgated form for the first time. (Two further volumes are in the works).

It’s easy to poke fun at Channon. He was an incurable snob. His appetite for socializing with aristocrats was remarkable, as was his indolence, at least in the early years. A large part of the 1920s seems to have passed with little more happening than lunch with Princess so-and-so followed by dinner with the Duke of such-and-such. Although some of his descriptions of this social whirl are entertaining and insightful, the early sections of the Diaries are a bit of a slog for the reader, as they were occasionally, I suspect, for Channon himself.

Things get a lot more interesting in the 1930s when Channon’s social position gave him a close-up view of the unfolding Abdication crisis and, following his election to Parliament, in the years leading to the outbreak of war in 1939. At this point the diaries show him on the wrong side of history. Channon admired Hitler and supported appeasement. In those respects, he was like many of his class and generation, as he was in his casual, uncritical, and horrible antisemitism and racism.

It’s barely believable that only a century ago Britain was led (and largely owned) by the few families that Channon befriended. Little could they have known that within a century most of them would lose their fortunes, houses, lands, and power. And little could Channon have known that he would be the chronicler of a dying way of life and a dinosaur class. On the evidence of these diaries it’s not difficult to understand why Channon never attained high office. His snobbishness must have offended many while his vast wealth and tireless socializing must have made him seem like a dilettante. Above all, his contemporaries must have seen what is all too evident in these private journals, that despite all the charm and all the advantages, Channon suffered from a persistent ennui and self-doubt that prevented him mustering the effort required to climb the political ladder. He may have had charm in abundance, but there’s no disguising the darker sides of his personality. He had terrible judgement, was wrong on all the big political issues of the time, and was an incorrigible snob. It’s a paradox that a man like Channon should have provided one of the most vivid chronicles of a fascinating period of history.

Two summers ago I decided to devote my vacation reading to Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy. I had been told the three novels were best appreciated if read back to back. This year I did the same for the four novels by Ali Smith that have come to be known as The Seasonal Quartet. I had previously read (back in 2017) the first in the series, Autumn, and decided to re-read it before moving on to the three others.

Autumn is so many things all at once. A plea for compassion, tolerance, and love in times marked by injustice, divisiveness, and hatred of others. An appeal to look carefully and see clearly, to try to understand what is happening right in front of us and what is being done in our name, to use and value the stories and images that artists give us to make sense of it all. That makes Autumn sound high-minded and grave. It is, but its tone is light and its prose shines with all the brilliance and vividness of a Pop Art painting. It provokes sadness at people’s apparently limitless stupidity and wickedness, but leaves you hopeful for the possibility of better days transformed by uncomplicated love.

Winter, the second in the series, has no plot or character connections to Autumn, but in terms of tone, style, and cadence they are very alike. It continues and intensifies the celebration of those who look beyond the reality presented to them, those who search for deeper meanings, and those who refuse to swallow the lies and distortions served up by the ruling “elites”. The oddballs, the refuseniks, the protestors, the non-conformists, and, of course, the artists. If Pauline Boty was the artist of Autumn, in Winter we have Barbara Hepworth, representing a shift from the city to the countryside and a concentration on the dangers posed to the natural world by the shortsighted destructiveness of humans.

Spring is my favorite of the four, perhaps because the main characters felt so vividly and realistically rendered. Richard, the maker of TV films, is himself unmade by loneliness and loss of purpose. Brittany, a prison guard in a horrible detention center for “illegal immigrants”, finds her life upended by a chance encounter with a mysterious child. The two travel to the north of Scotland where they meet Richard at his lowest ebb. It’s all brilliantly done and with such compassion and humor. At a time of cruelty, stupidity, and dishonesty in public life, Smith calls us to hold on to individual kindness, watchfulness, and honesty.

Summer brings the quartet to a perfect close, gathering the strands of the earlier novels and binding them together into something that by now is obviously a perfect whole. The full sweep of the series becomes clear, embracing a century marked by cruelty, horror, division, and ignorance and a present that shows all the signs of having learned nothing and of being more than enthusiastic about repeating it all over again. But, in the midst of it all, is the potential for individual acts of love, of courage, of seeing clearly, of standing up for what’s right, of not being fooled.

What an extraordinary achievement this series is. Anyone who has lost faith in fiction, or anyone who never had that faith to begin with, should read these four novels.