book-review

All the Beauty in the World

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I rarely notice museum guards. When I do, I find myself pitying them. The job looks exhausting and boring in equal measure. Being surrounded by priceless treasures cannot be much compensation in the circumstances. Patrick Bringley’s delightful account of working for ten years at The Metropolitan Museum did little to change my outlook, at least as far as that particular job is concerned.

All the Beauty in the World tells his story. Leaving behind an enviable position at The New Yorker magazine, Bringley, devastated by the illness and death of his much loved older brother, sought (and found) refuge and consolation amid the beauties and wonders of The Met’s collections. In his decade as a guard, Bringley learned a lot about art and history, but much more about himself and the life he wanted to live. It’s no exaggeration to say art saved his life. It taught him how to look and to live. Whether one believes there is a “purpose” to art or not, surely no one who loves looking at pictures and sculptures denies their power to heal, console, educate and transform. The book is a deeply felt account of his journey, and along the way it gives us a fond and funny insider’s account of that extraordinary institution and some of the people who protect its treasures and educate its visitors. I recommend it highly.

Ripley’s Game

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In need of some vacation reading, I dropped by a local bookstore in Sorrento with a couple of shelves of English-language novels and found Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game. That seemed like a perfect choice because the film and TV adaptions of The Talented Mr. Ripley had been shot, at least in part, along the beautiful Amalfi coast. And so it proved. Ripley’s Game is a tightly plotted and psychologically convincing novel, written by a master of the genre when she was at the height of her powers. Highsmith’s preoccupation is a simple and important one. If the circumstances are propitious, can a conventional, respectable person be convinced to commit an evil act? What does it take to tip a good man into murder?

I have read more plausible stories, but I enjoyed every page of my first Ripley novel and am now looking forward to the others.

Twelve Post-War Tales

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Graham Swift has for me been the most consistently satisfying storyteller from that generation of British writers that began to publish in the early 1980s. Some of his peers have been more prolific (Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie), and others have won greater acclaim (Kazuo Ishiguro and Julian Barnes), but Swift is the one whose books I look forward to most and have been the most dependably rewarding.

Twelve Post-War Tales is, I think, only his third collection of short stories in a writing career that began in 1980. Many of the stories feature, directly or indirectly, a moment or incident of great crisis for the world. A retired doctor volunteers his time to help out at his local hospital during the COVID pandemic. The attacks of September 11th upend the plans of a family due to return to America after a diplomatic posting to London comes to an end. Pearl Harbor, the assassination of JFK, the burning of Crystal Palace, and the Blitz; incidents of global or national importance become the lens through which a small, individual life is examined for signs of impact and trauma.

The writing here is masterful, as anyone who knows Swift would expect, and there’s something arresting and truthful in every story. Having said that, it’s an uneven collection, and one or two of the tales miss the intended marks. A small quibble. This is a wonderful book by a master of the short story art.

Our Evenings

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Critics love Alan Hollinghurst’s work. They receive every new novel with rapturous reviews. They applaud the elegance of his prose, the emotional precision of his observations, the brilliance of his characterizations, and celebrate him as the great chronicler of gay lives and experience in recent decades. His most recent novel, Our Evenings, has been greeted in very much the same vein, with some critics saying it is his best yet.

We meet Dave Win at the beginning of the novel looking back on his early life from the vantage point of middle age. With an English mother and an absent Burmese father, Dave’s dark skin makes him a target at a rural boarding school in postwar England. Dave is a scholarship boy of very limited means (his mother is a seamstress), and the beneficiary of a rich patron’s generosity. His school friends are well aware of his precocious intelligence and his relative poverty, and his status as the outsider looking on from the sidelines is confirmed as he moves to Oxford. He excels there as a student actor and, after university, drifts into acting jobs in television and theatre.

I felt peculiarly detached from Our Evenings. It was easy to admire Hollinghurst’s style, but little here really engaged me, other than perhaps the touching portrayal of Dave’s love for his mother. I think that may be because so much of the ground felt well trodden by novelists of the past. The man, defined as an outsider by his race, skin color, social class, and sexuality, looking into, but never fully joining, the lives of his “betters” is a theme that many others have felt drawn to, and it takes some special ingredient to elevate it to somewhere that feels new and special. I could not detect or experience that ingredient and I closed the book at the end with a feeling of admiration but no real sense of immersion.

Heart, be at peace

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Novelists who choose to narrate a story using multiple voices set themselves a very difficult challenge. Making a handful of characters sound distinctive and recognizable is tricky enough, but deploying a chorus of twenty-one voices to tell a story pushes the skills of the writer, and the tolerance of the reader, to the absolute limit. Donal Ryan is clearly a very accomplished writer (some earlier work won prizes), but on the evidence of Heart, be at peace, he just bit off more than he could chew.

I didn’t feel this way in the early stages of the novel. In some of the initial chapters, the voices seemed distinct and some of them struck powerful and poignant notes, but as the novel progressed it all melded confusingly into something of an amorphous blob, a soup where few of the ingredients could be identified reliably from the others.

The Ireland portrayed by Ryan here is a gritty and edgy place. There is little sense of ease. People are troubled and their emotions frayed, trying to make their way or just survive. Relationships are similarly uneasy. There is betrayal, jealousy, disappointment, and very little that’s simply loving and kind. My hunch is that Ryan has powerful stories to tell but has chosen the wrong way to tell them. This is a book where the whole is less than the sum of the parts.

The Land in Winter

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I have written here in the past about my admiration for Andrew Miller’s fiction, so when I saw The Land in Winter showing up on critics’ “best books of 2024” it was bound to be one of my first priorities in 2025. The winter referred to in the title is the infamous one of 1962-1963 when Britain recorded some of the lowest temperatures ever recorded and heavy snowfalls persisted in many parts of the country until early March. Miller’s story is set in a frozen and fog-bound village not far from Bristol and has as its central characters two young couples living as neighbors. Eric, the local doctor, and his genteel wife, Irene, occupy a cottage next to a small farm where Bill is struggling in his first farming venture while his young, bohemian wife, Rita, stays at home reading science fiction novels. At the opening of the novel, both women are in the early stages of pregnancy.

It’s ostensibly a novel about marriage and love, about the accommodations and compromises that individuals make as they seek to manage the task of living with someone else. Miller is superb at exploring the nuances of relationships, but this is just the foreground and he has bigger ambitions. England in 1963 was still a country living in the shadow of a world war and a place where its horrors were still vivid for some. Miller’s theme is how we avoid madness and how we carve out lives and futures when those horrors are so close and so real. The snow, ice, and fog that have frozen and paralyzed Somerset foreshadow a world broken beyond repair by environmental catastrophe.

The Land in Winter is a novel of unusual subtlety and nuance. That won’t surprise anyone who has read Miller’s earlier work. He’s an ambitious and cunning writer, and understands better than most how the conventions of traditional fiction can be adapted and subverted to explore and explain the deepest workings of human behavior. It is not a perfect novel. Some of the story’s tension is dissipated when the plot moves beyond the confines of the snowbound village and some of the peripheral characters are sketched rather than drawn. These are quibbles. The Land in Winter should be on the reading list of anyone interested in the best of contemporary English literary fiction.

The City and its Uncertain Walls

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A book’s dust jacket can tell you a lot. The one covering the UK hardcover edition of The City and its Uncertain Walls has the word Murakami printed in large letters on the spine and front cover. No first name. Not Haruki Murakami, just Murakami. The author’s name is much larger than the title. The message is clear. Murakami is special. Murakami is a big deal. Murakami is a brand.

The publication of a new novel by Murakami is an event these days. Lots of advance publicity building anticipation among his millions of admirers around the world. Lots of talk about the Nobel Prize (which still eludes him), and pages of critical reviews. Has he lost his edge? Are the novels too bloated and self-regarding, etc. etc. All of this reflects the enormous global following he has attracted and can sometimes detract from what matters: the appreciation of the work.

This most recent novel has not been well received critically. Reviewers have focused a lot on the fact that it re-works an earlier novel and an even earlier novella published many years ago. Murakami himself addresses that in an Afterword. I have not read either of the earlier works, so my appreciation of The City and its Uncertain Walls was entirely unaffected. I found it to be an engaging, thought-provoking novel, marked by that distinctive atmosphere that is unique to Murakami. It is a novel, at least in part, about how to live. How to connect with others, how to be separate from them, and what that final separation – death – might mean. Murakami’s legions of fans won’t be surprised by any of this. What it really means to be an individual in a world of other individuals has always been his great interest. Our fundamental “aloneness” and singularity and how we deal with the expectation and reality of interaction with others. The boundaries and intersections between things, between individuals, between life and whatever might (or might not) come after, between what’s real and what isn’t, between fact and fiction – this is Murakami’s territory, and it’s all on display and explored in his inimitable style in his latest work.

Life, Death and Everything in Between

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The earliest picture in this retrospective of Don McCullin’s career was taken in 1960 and the most recent in 2022. McCullin will always be pigeonholed as a “war photographer” because of the searing images he took in places like Vietnam, Cyprus, Northern Ireland, and Biafra. Many of his best-known photographs from such conflicts are included in this collection. The grieving Turkish widow, the shellshocked American soldier in Vietnam, the starving child in Biafra holding an empty corned beef can – pictures that shocked the world at the time and still have enormous power fifty or more years after those particular horrors were recorded. New battlegrounds have replaced the old, but the horrors persist. The grief, starvation, mutilation, and death that war and famine bring never go away. McCullin, who will be 90 this year, has turned his lens in recent times away from the war zones, choosing to focus in old age on landscapes and ancient monuments.

McCullin’s subject has always, it seems to me, been the resilience, dignity, and fragility of people tested to their limits by the cruelties and horrors imposed on them by their fellow human beings. What he has seen and recorded are experiences that words cannot describe. We need pictures to get anywhere close to those experiences and their meaning. That has been McCullin’s mission for more than sixty years and no one has done it more powerfully.

Back to the Local

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It was clever of Faber & Faber to re-publish Maurice Gorham’s delightful book on London’s pubs. Back to the Local was first published in 1949 (with its illustrations by Edward Ardizzone) and even then had a whiff of nostalgia about it. Gorham mourned the destruction of some of his favorite pubs in World War Two and complained about the changing habits that had led to the modernization and gentrification of others, all the while celebrating what he loved and wanted to see preserved. It’s fun to wonder what he would make of things seventy-five years on.

Londoners love their pubs and tend to be sentimental about them. Every generation discovers them and bemoans the changes they see. For myself, I celebrate the survival of the true neighborhood local. Even today there are more of them than one might think. Of course, like everyone, I deplore the trends that some others might cherish – the sports bars, the themed pubs, the fake “historical” pubs, and so on. Gorham’s little book is a fun reminder that preferences and prejudices are what being a London pub lover is all about. If one pub is not to your liking, move on to one of the other 3,500 that London has to offer.

Death at the Sign of the Rook

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Kate Atkinson’s latest novel is the sixth to feature Jackson Brodie, the sour and sweet private investigator. We find him back in the north of England, Yorkshire specifically, hired to investigate the disappearance of a valuable painting. The missing painting leads to another missing painting which in turn leads to a shadowy woman who may (or may not) have stolen them both. Brodie’s sleuthing takes him to a country house hotel in a snow storm. Not just any country house hotel, but one hosting a Murder Mystery Night for its guests ….

If this all sounds a little like Agatha Christie, that’s exactly what Kate Atkinson intends. In the hands of a less accomplished writer, not to mention one with a less sure comic touch, it might all seem more than a little self-conscious or twee. That is not the case here. Atkinson is having fun adapting a well-worn genre to her popular Brodie series and the fun is infectious. Having said that, the build-up to the gathering of the characters at the hotel (roughly the first two thirds of the novel) was what I enjoyed the most. The denouement was a bit too contrived for my tastes.

Death at the Sign of the Rook is a light and frothy tale and a great addition to the series. Perfect holiday reading.