Although I’ve read many of his novels over the years and consider him a fine writer, I’ve never been one of those diehard fans that John Le Carré seemed to have in such large numbers. That has nothing to do with the fact that the spy story was his chosen genre. I’m a book snob in some respects, but not in that way. Le Carré was a brilliant novelist, not just a brilliant spy novelist, but I’ve never fully understood his appeal or the reverence he attracted.

Silverview was published after his death in December 2020. It will in some respects be familiar to anyone who has read one of his earlier books, set as it is among the cultured and well educated community of senior British spooks. It’s tightly plotted, meticulously constructed, and absorbing, just like all the Le Carré novels that came before it. But it also has something else – the feel, quite appropriately, of a valediction, a veteran’s farewell not just to the world of espionage, but to the craft of storytelling at which he had labored so skillfully for nearly sixty years.

Dr. Quirke, a booze-sodden curmudgeon who happens to be Ireland’s state pathologist, is taking a vacation with his new wife in San Sebastian when he comes across a young woman he’s certain is an old friend of his daughter. But how is that possible? The young woman had been murdered by her brother in Ireland some time earlier, her body never found. A phone call to Dublin brings Quirke’s daughter to Spain, accompanied by one of Ireland’s finest, Inspector Strafford ….

A story that in the hands of a lesser writer might be a pleasing crime yarn is elevated by the beauty and elegance of John Banville’s prose. Anyone looking for something engrossing and somewhat comforting (well, as comforting as a story about murder, incest, and corruption can be) to read during the holidays could do worse than curl up for a couple of days with April in Spain. Something tells me we have a series in the making here.

Is it too soon to write novels about the pandemic? Nearly two years have passed since we started to hear reports of a mysterious virus in China, a virus that has now taken more than 5 million lives around the globe. As I write, the world is still in the grip of COVID-19. Just yesterday 4,600 people died. Do we need to wait until its full horror is behind us to properly reflect on what this meant for us? Sarah Moss, a storyteller I’ve discovered quite recently and admire greatly, doesn’t think so. The Fell is set in a small English village at the time of the most stringent lock-down. Kate, a single mother, furloughed from her job, no longer able to sing in her local folk group, is growing increasingly cabin-fevered, stuck inside day after day with her teenage son. One evening, unable to bear it a moment longer, she heads out on to her beloved fells for a quick walk. Surely no one can object to that. Surely no harm can come of it …

Presented as a sequence of interior monologues (Kate’s, her son’s, their neighbor’s), The Fell records the simple and difficult confrontations – with mortality, with meaning, with life itself – that the pandemic has provoked and focused in all of us lucky enough not to have been struck down by it. There will be much more to say about these terrible times in the years ahead, but for now Moss has captured with simple directness and poignancy one moment in one life in a time none of us will ever forget.

Prize-winning novelists aren’t always great storytellers. With little effort I can think of several, many of them garlanded with the most prestigious awards, who don’t even seem to care very much about the business of crafting a compelling story. However strange that might seem, it’s a topic for a different day because my short post today is a small celebration of a writer who tells wonderful stories and who, along the way, has attracted more awards than most. Colson Whitehead is perhaps best known for The Underground Railroad, though The Nickel Boys was my introduction to his work. That harrowing story stayed with me long after I turned the final page, so I’ve been eager to see what he would do next.

Harlem Shuffle is a much less grim book than its immediate predecessor and seems to have been crafted more explicitly as entertainment. I’m in no way suggesting that it’s light or trivial. Far from it. In fact, the story it tells of one man’s attempt to pull himself free of an upbringing marked by poverty and neglect and to create a stable and conventional family life is an important and moving one. But the serious intent has an entertaining wrapper, a caper set in Harlem in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Whitehead has range. There’s no doubt about that. And he writes here with real tenderness, affection, and humor. But Harlem Shuffle isn’t perfect. The problem for me was the central character, Ray Carney – the good man trying hard, but not always hard enough, to live the straight, law abiding life. For me he never rose off the page as a fully formed person, and that ultimately made the difference between what could have been a great novel and what proved to be an enjoyable story.

Anyone growing up in England, at least anyone from my own generation, knows something of the poets of the First World War. Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, and Wilfred Owen all featured in the curriculum when I was a schoolboy. I don’t remember if Ivor Gurney’s work was covered, but I certainly became aware of his poems in my university days and, much later, his music.

Much of Gurney’s life was blighted by mental illness. He first suffered a nervous breakdown while a student at the Royal College of Music, but his condition was much exacerbated by his exposure to the horrors of trench warfare in 1916 and 1917. He fought at Ypres and at the Battle of the Somme, and was shot and gassed. Returning home from the front, he got some support from friends and patrons, but his condition was sufficiently serious for him to seek what proved to be fairly rudimentary treatment in a series of asylums. He died in 1937 in a public asylum in Dartford.

Gurney got some recognition in his lifetime for his poems and songs and was admired by many of his more celebrated peers like Vaughan Williams. Nevertheless, it was only after his death that his work started to be appreciated properly. With Dweller in Shadows, Kate Kennedy might enhance his reputation even further. She has written a compassionate, insightful, and thoughtful account of the life and work of a brilliant and troubled man. My hope is that her biography brings a wider audience to the poetry and music of someone who was at least the equal of his much more famous contemporaries.

The first volume of Channon’s diaries, which I read earlier this year, weighed in at a massive 1,000 pages and covered twenty years. He clearly got more loquacious in his middle years because the second volume is even longer and covers only six years. He can perhaps be forgiven because those were momentous times for England, Europe, and the world, and Channon had a ring-side seat.

On the evidence of these diaries, Channon in middle age was much the same as he was in his younger years: a snob, a social climber, a casual anti-Semite, and a very poor judge of people and situations. But something in the background in the early diaries comes to the fore in these middle years – a certain bitterness and melancholy. Expressions of joy and delight are much fewer. Was it the crisis in his marriage, his failure to achieve high office, separation from his beloved son, or the depressive effect of the war years? Some mixture of all of these things is the most likely explanation, but Channon here looks more lonely, more bitter, and more isolated than ever. His growing sexual feelings for other men, especially for Peter Coats, offer little comfort.

The diaries covering 1938 to 1943 are engrossing but somewhat frustrating. Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler and his last years in office are described brilliantly. Channon, pro-appeasement, pro-Chamberlain, pro-German, and pro-Franco is, as usual, wrong about almost everything, and his antipathy to Churchill and Halifax is enough to ensure he’s banished to the political sidelines when he longed for the powerful role he thought he deserved. Momentous events like the evacuation of Dunkirk are dismissed in a single line while routine and often dull politicking gets excessive attention. He’s further from the center of royal and political intrigue than he was a few years earlier, a consequence, I suspect, of his growing unpopularity and declining influence. As the war progresses, we find Channon with fewer political allies and disconnected from the fashionable society that had dominated his life in the happier times of the 1920s and 1930s. Middle-age has arrived and with it a more nuanced appreciation of life’s gifts and disappointments, all recorded with Channon’s customary honesty.

Roger Deakin’s name crops up time and time again in the work of Robert Macfarlane, and always with affection and admiration. It wasn’t until I read The Wild Places that I felt the urge to learn more about the writer, film maker, and environmentalist who died in 2006. Deakin only published one book in his lifetime, Waterlog. Two others, Wildwood and Notes from Walnut Tree Farm, appeared posthumously. The latter collects together entries from Deakin’s notebooks made over several years and organizes them into a sort of monthly anthology. Here you’ll find descriptions of and reflections on the natural world, most of it within easy reach of the ancient cottage Deakin restored in Suffolk. Sometimes he strays further afield (Devon and Somerset, for example), but it’s mostly the woods, hedgerows, and animal life of East Anglia that catches his attention. And what attention it was. The color of a bird’s eye, the movement of a spider, the smell of newly cut logs – these details were pure joy for Deakin and noticing them was, in his mind, an obligation. Deakin’s life was one lived in the natural world, not distanced or separate from it, and his writing communicates so well the intense pleasure that came from that.

I can’t pretend to have thought deeply about modern farming. Like many people, I’m aware in general terms of what the industrialization of farming and the demands for ever cheaper food have done to our environment and to rural communities. James Rebanks, on the other hand, has thought deeply about the subject. His family has farmed in England’s Lake District for more than 600 years. Just think about that. Six centuries of uninterrupted labor on the land, striving to eke a living generation after generation. English Pastoral is his sustained reflection on farming’s past, present, and future. It’s simply an extraordinary achievement and one that has been lauded since its publication last year. I’m not sure I would have become aware of it if it wasn’t being so widely promoted in London’s bookshops when I was there recently. Pretty much every store I entered had it displayed prominently, no doubt to capitalize on the huge interest in books about nature that we see at the moment.

Rebanks writes with deep compassion for his family, his land, his livestock, his community, and the wider world. He asks the tough questions. How do we feed a planet without destroying it? How do farming families make a decent living while respecting and preserving the lands they love? Rebanks doesn’t have all the answers. He doesn’t pretend to. Weaning the world from a diet of cheap food may be a commendable goal, but how do you achieve it when poverty is on the rise? English Pastoral is one man’s reflection on the serious challenges we face, informed by expertise, decency, and a determination to preserve the land for future generations. It’s a must-read.

It was simple luck. I didn’t know when I bought the ticket weeks before that the game would end up being the second coming, the return of Cristiano Ronaldo to Old Trafford, sporting the famous number 7 shirt he had last worn in 2009. A good seat at an ordinary game was suddenly the hottest ticket in town, changing hands for thousands of pounds. It never occurred to me cash in. This was unmissable.

United won 4-1. Ronaldo, always one for the big occasion, scored twice. But this was never about a game of football. This was all about the return of arguably the greatest footballer ever to the club where his career took flight. I will never forget the storm of noise that marked his appearance on the field as more than seventy thousand people screamed his name in unison. The rest of the team – even the minor gods like Fernandes, Varane, and Sancho – were forced out of the spotlight and relegated to the supporting cast. Things will calm down. Most likely even the arrival of CR7 won’t be enough for United to compete this season against the likes of City, Chelsea, and Liverpool. We’re not stupid, just very sentimental, but it was a great day for dreamers.

I’m glad that Bernard MacLaverty’s new stories appear so infrequently. Glad because they unfailingly show the time and care he devotes to them. Glad because the enjoyment they give is so intense that it’s best rationed and savored. It’s a pleasure tinged with melancholy, like the enjoyment of an autumn day when you feel suddenly an intimation of winter ahead. Only the best storytellers can pull it off; the sweetness of life infected yet intensified by loss. John McGahern, Colm Toibin, William Trevor, even James Joyce can do it. So can MacLaverty.

The twelve pieces in Blank Pages and Other Stories all seem to me to be, to some degree, reflections on aging and on the delicate and sometimes painful adjustments to relationships that come with it. A man loses his grandchildren on a day trip to the botanical gardens. Another makes a visit to his frail and declining mother in a far-off nursing home. A widow grieves for a son lost at sea. The settings may change, but not MacLaverty’s approach – the precise uncovering of the layers in a human life to expose the things that are common for all of us but unique to each of us. That’s his brilliance. Each of us lives through and endures in unique ways experiences that are known to every one of us.

There isn’t a mediocre story in this collection and there are at least two masterpieces. Sounds and Sweet Airs, apparently so simple and effortless, is a brilliant and poignant telling of a simple encounter between the old and the young. The End of Days, set during the pandemic of 1918, has Egon Schiele witnessing the death of his pregnant wife from Spanish influenza. Each captures an entire world in a few pages.

None other than Hilary Mantel once asked “Why is Bernard MacLaverty not celebrated as one of the wonders of the world?”. Well, he is by me, but the truthful answer is the world seems to show little appetite for the un-showy yet masterful art, crammed with nuance and subtlety, to which he has dedicated his writing life.