In February 1967 ‘Armchair Theatre’ aired one such pilot under the title ‘A Magnum for Schneider’. It was written by James Mitchell, the author of a number of potboiler spy and crime novels, who would go on to have his greatest success with a nostalgic and romantic TV series called When the Boat Comes In about life in Tyneside during the 20s and 30s. But it was his spy fiction background he put into ‘A Magnum for Schneider’. Its central character was a professional assassin who had just resigned from a shadowy department of British intelligence, but who was just too good at his job for them to let him go.

The TV company must have been fairly confident of the success of this pilot, because the first six-part series of Callan was aired later the same year. It was followed by a second series of 15 episodes in 1969, with two further series of 9 and 13 episodes respectively (the only ones in colour) following in 1970 and 1972. I remember being glued to the series from the moment it first aired. The opening credits, a bare light swings at the end of a fraying cord, behind it we see only a bare brick wall and a ceiling from which the plaster is flaking. There is a shot, the light shatters, and the word CALLAN appears in stark white letters on a black screen. (The original header image for Big Other always used to remind me of this, it was one of the reasons I was attracted to the blog.)

Edward Woodward as Callan

It was the height of cold war angst, the great age of the anti-hero, when we were learning to distrust our own side as much as the others, and Callan matched the mood of the times perfectly. We were cheering for a cold-blooded killer, for heaven’s sake! It was a dark, bleak view of the world, betrayal was everywhere, Hunter, the head of the section, might be removed at any time and replaced with a new Hunter. Callan’s closest ally was Lonely, a petty crook whose chronic fear made him smell atrociously (hence his name). Callan used Lonely to break into places or provide illegal guns, and if Lonely was attacked then Callan would exact revenge; but it was not a friendly relationship, Lonely was justifiably afraid of Callan because Callan would regularly threaten to kill him. No one could be trusted, that was the whole point. And the one associate of Callan’s in the Section that we saw regularly, Toby Meres, repeatedly told us how much he despised Callan even while respecting his abilities. If the situation arose, neither would have any hesitation in killing the other. It was a view of the murky world of espionage closer to the so-called ‘Harry Palmer’ novels of Len Deighton than, say, James Bond or Patrick McGoohan’s Danger Man (though it shared some of the fashionable paranoia of McGoohan’s The Prisoner, which first appeared at roughly the same time, even though Callan’s black and white was a stark contrast to the vivid colours of The Prisoner).

Callan and Lonely

What I was probably oblivious of at the time, though it is screamingly obvious now I’m re-watching them on DVD, is the class consciousness that runs through the work. David Callan, as played by Edward Woodward, is working class who might just aspire to the lower middle class. He has served time in prison, and was in the army (though he probably never got above sergeant, the rank he unconsciously adopts whenever he takes on a quasi-official role); the job he tends to take on when under cover is bookkeeper (at which he seems to be very good), and though he always wears suit and tie, these tend to be creased and untidy. Lonely, incomparably played by Russell Hunter, first appears in ‘A Magnum for Schneider’ in a jacket and tie also, though he looks uncomfortable in them; by the start of the series he is in the shabby raincoat and flat cap that is almost his uniform. He is working class, will often put on a show of being bolshie, but is generally cowed and bullied by those above him, and everyone is above him. Within the Section, however, all is upper class confidence and disdain. Hunter, variously played by Ronald Radd, Michael Goodliffe, Derek Bond and William Squire, is effectively a senior civil servant, always impeccably turned out, always in control. Meres, played by Peter Bowles in the pilot before he left for a career in light comedy, and far better played by Anthony Valentine in the series, is slick, public school educated, speaks with that upper class drawl, and despises Callan for what he is while recognising his abilities. Callan is matter-of-factly good at killing people but he is morally sickened by what he does, which is why he tried to quit; Hunter and Meres have no moral qualms, for them everything is justified by the idea of duty. The implication is that moral sensibility is something only the working class can afford, the higher up the social scale you climb the more morality is squashed by one’s class role. Lonely, of course, is even more morally disturbed than Callan, but of course nobody pays any attention to him.

Anthony Valentine as Toby Meres

By 1972 a whole era of cold war unease was passing. We didn’t want a stark, morally compromised world any more. Callan ended after just four series. James Mitchell produced a novel version of the original play, ‘A Magnum for Schneider’, which was itself turned into a film in 1974. Then, in 1981, Callan was brought out of retirement for another one-off play, Callan: Wet Job, but this was mostly about changing times, even the malodorous Lonely had become respectable. It ended well, but it ended.

But there was a period when Callan was an indelible part of my adolescence. Watching it again today (or, at least, all of it that survives: the original play, 11 out of 21 black and white episodes, all 22 colour episodes, plus Wet Job) it is surprising how well it holds up. The technology is dated, and things like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy have made our knowledge of spycraft far more sophisticated, yet the morality, the characterisation, seem perfectly suited to the modern moment. Or maybe times have just moved around once more.

Parts PLURAL NOUN 1. Personal abilities or talents: a man of many parts. 2. short for private parts.

Both of these readings are clearly sustained throughout the novel. Wells is clearly a man of talents, which are varied if not always compatible. He is also a man driven by his private parts, a priapic adventurer whose sexual conquests often undid much of what his talents might have achieved. But having read much by and about Wells over the last few years, I am inclined to a third reading: that he was a man in parts, a man whose life was in bits that in a sense even he could not put together. He was not whole.

Ever since the postscript to his Experiment in Autobiography was published under the title H.G. Wells in Love in 1984, our focus on Wells’s life has been as much sexual as literary or political or scientific. The problem, I think, with all writing about Wells, this novel as much as the biographies or the critical texts, is that they tend to concentrate on one or other of the four. But you cannot think about his gadfly involvement with the Fabian Society, for instance, without also bringing in the sexual scandals that undermined his efforts to reform that Society. And those scandals, in turn, fed into and just as often emerged from his fictions. And his scandalous ideas about sex emerged not just from his priapic nature but from his scientific, and especially evolutionary, ideas. In other words, the different aspects of his life all interacted, you cannot separate them. So in writing about Wells you really need to balance all of the aspects of his life.

Yet I get a very strong sense, reinforced by every new thing I read about the man (although none of the critics, biographers or novelists actually make this point), that Wells himself did compartmentalise them. And, indeed, was constantly surprised and undermined by the fact that they would not stay within their separate compartments.

Jane with HG just after the publication of The Time Machine.

Let us take sex, since that is what Lodge and most others now concentrate on. Wells married twice. His first wife, a distant relation, Isabel, was very conventional not to say provincial in her attitudes (this was, we must remember, the height of Victorian sensibility). Wells himself says that they were sexually incompatible, and there is no reason to doubt this, but I think it is probably more significant that they were intellectually incompatible. When he left her for one of his students, Amy Catherine Robbins whom he called ‘Jane’, I think he was as much looking for an intellectual equal as a sexual partner. After all, he said of Jane also that they were sexually incompatible, but he never divorced her. She was his match in most things: Jane like HG served on the executive of the Fabian Society; she typed and helped to edit all his writing (and if Lodge is correct in the number of times she warns him that, for instance, Ann Veronica will be controversial or that Boon should not be published, her judgement seems to have been far better than his); she wrote herself (Wells arranged to have a collection of her stories published after her death); she kept up with him on the cycling trips and Alpine walks that he so loved; and she provided the steady, secure centre in a life that was constantly flying off in every direction out of control. The more I read, the more convinced I am that Jane must have been a remarkable woman.

So, Wells says that both of his wives were sexually incompatible. And I begin to wonder if they were not sexually incompatible because they were wives; if Wells saw being a wife as an intellectual and a social role, and sex belonged in a different compartment altogether.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Jane was that she knew of, and seemingly condoned, most of HG’s sexual adventures. She advised him when a relationship was likely to be dangerous, and she maintained friendly relationships with most of the women. And when, for instance, Rebecca West tried on numerous occasions to persuade him to leave Jane for her, he flat out refused. In the compartment of marriage, Jane clearly provided something far more important than sexual incompatibility. And it wasn’t just a Victorian loyalty to the mother of his children, since both Amber Reeves (later, after her marriage, the wonderful colour combination of Amber Blanco White) and Rebecca West bore him children, and HG felt equally fatherly towards the children without for a moment thinking that he should ‘make an honest woman’ of their mothers.

Amber Blanco White with Ann Jane, HG's daughter

In this separate sexual compartment, therefore, we find Rosamund Bland (the daughter, or perhaps more accurately step-daughter, of Edith Nesbit and her husband Hubert Bland), Amber Reeves, Rebecca West, Elisabeth von Arnim, Odette Keun, Moura Budberg and any number of others. Of these, Lodge suggests that Rosamund, Amber, Rebecca and Odette threw themselves at HG, and all brought trouble for him. The relationship (Lodge uses the word passade  throughout for these sexual affairs) with Elisabeth was one of mutual convenience, and she seems to have been the only long-term mistress who tired of him first. And Moura, the presumed Russian spy (so far as I know, it has never been proved, but it seems likely), was the woman HG wanted to marry after Jane died, but Moura refused. Significantly, both Elisabeth and Moura were mature and experienced women when they began their relationships with HG, these were relationships of sexual equals, which certainly wasn’t true of any of the others.

Moura Budberg

Rosamund, Amber and Rebecca were all in their late-teens or early 20s when they began their relationships with Wells, who was at least 20 years older. All three seem to have deliberately targeted Wells to end their virginities. And though Lodge portrays Wells as something of a sexual predator, which is dressed up by Wells’s oft-stated political belief in the equality of the sexes, in each of these relationships we get a distinct impression of the woman being the predator and Wells being rather ignominiously unable to say no whenever sex was offered. I think the fact that HG saw his life as compartmentalised, was indeed unable to envisage that things from one compartment might overflow into another, is clearly shown in his relationships with Rosamund, Amber and Rebecca.

Rosamund and Amber were both the daughters of prominent Fabians, and he began these affairs just at the point when he was leading a campaign to radically change the nature of the society. He put details of these affairs, only very slightly fictionalised, into such novels as In the Days of the Comet and Ann Veronica. The central figure in Ann Veronica is an unmistakeable portrait of Amber Reeves, and he was surprised when she was affronted by this. This was all during the first decade of the 20^th century, well before women even got the vote in Britain, yet he was astounded when these books were denounced from the pulpit and the newspaper editorial as immoral. He had presented, in In the Days of the Comet, a subtle argument that in a truly rational society (one of the early versions of the world government he wrote so often about) where men and women were fully equal, each would be free to take their sexual pleasure where they wished; the book ends with a group marriage. He seems to have been incapable of seeing that this argument is too subtle for his audience, and all they will see is free love. Yet, having expected the reading public to pick up on a very subtle argument in In the Days of the Comet, he assumed they would not be subtle enough readers to see through the light fictionalisation with which he disguised himself and Amber Reeves in Ann Veronica. He was, in effect, carrying on a secret affair in one compartment and publicising it in another, while at the same time utterly failing to understand that the fall out from the relationships in one compartment and the outcry caused by the books in the other compartment might also affect his political ambitions in the third compartment of his Fabian ambitions. (One of the best passages in Lodge’s book is his account of this complicated interplay of sex, fiction and politics leading to the multiple humiliation of his exposure as a philanderer, the complete failure of his attempts to reform the Fabian Society, and the public denunciation of his work.)

Rebecca West

Yet many of the same public and personal catastrophes that attended his affairs with Rosamund and Amber would be echoed during his affair with Rebecca. The way Lodge writes it, Jane warned him repeatedly, but he seems to have been unable to learn the lessons of his own past.

There is a similar sense of the compartmentalisation of his life in the rather sad Boon affair. Wells and Henry James had been friends ever since Wells moved down to Sandgate, just a bicycle ride away from James in Rye. During his brief time as a theatre reviewer, Wells had been one of the few critics to write favourably about James’s theatrical disaster, Guy Domville. The two regularly sent each other copies of their new books, and exchanged many letters over the years. But there were always disagreements. Although James was older and more established, Wells was more successful, more popular, and considerably richer. James believed that the focus of any fiction should be on the art with which it is presented; Wells believed that fiction served a political function. James’s letters praising each new work by Wells would always contain a nugget of dislike; Wells’s letters in response would, over the years, come to parody (perhaps unconsciously) his friend’s increasingly convoluted sentence structure. Then, in 1914, James wrote a two-part essay on ‘The Younger Generation’ of novelists for the TLS, which included a very pointed attack on Wells and Arnold Bennett. Any writer taking them as a model, James warned, would produce work that was lamentably heavy on content and light on form. I don’t imagine James intended this to sting as much as it did, but it really hurt Wells. He retaliated by returning to a literary satire he had been writing, off and on, for 10 years already. Now he added a vicious satire on James, and Boon was published the following year, despite Jane strongly advising against it. It ended their friendship for good; in many ways, I think, it also ended Wells’s critical reputation. His great years as a writer were already behind him. He would produce one or two more decent novels (Mr Britling Sees it Through in 1916, for instance), but the ones that would stay in print and which are still read today had all been published before this point. His biggest success after this, indeed the biggest commercial success of his career, was his Outline of History. But serious critical and academic attention was already the preserve of the modernists and their followers, and from that moment on Wells was denied this sort of attention. His reputation suffered as a result. But Wells had been unable to tell what belonged in one compartment might do irreparable harm in another compartment. He always regretted the severing of his relationship with James, but he could do nothing about it.

Of course, much of this is taken from Wells’s fiction, which leads us to the inevitable problem with fiction and biography. At one point, Lodge has Wells say that a novelist has nothing else to draw on but his own life. Which is true. But how close are the two? How much can the biographer draw from the fiction in a recreation of the life? To an extent, Lodge has it easy. His book is avowedly fiction, so he is free to imaginatively expand from the fiction into the life. But at the same time, the novel follows the biography pretty closely, to the extent that for large portions of the book it reads more as a lightly fictionalised biography than as out and out fiction. And then, of course, we have the extent to which Wells really did put his own life into his fiction. In the social comedies of the first years of the 20^th century and in the so-called ‘prig’ novels that followed over the next half decade or so, in Love and Mr Lewisham, Kipps, Tono-Bungay, Ann Veronica, The History of Mr Polly, The New Machiavelli and so many others of that period, Wells was very consciously putting his own life into his books. In this period, which is the major focus of Lodge’s novel, you almost cannot help but read the biography in the fiction. What is almost harder is reading the fiction out of this biography. Lodge pays almost no attention to the early scientific romances (some of what he presents as the genesis of The Time Machine is plain wrong), and, except for the postscript to the Experiment in Autobiography and Mind at the End of its Tether, covers nothing written after 1915. And the novels written during that period of his most extravagant sexual affairs are mentioned only to the extent that they cast light on the character. So, although we know that Wells is a writer, this novel doesn’t actually tell us much about what sort of writer he is. Indeed we learn more about the size of his penis than we do about 90% of his literary output. Wells is compartmentalised again, we see only parts of him, but maybe that is the only way to write about Wells.

Still, A Man of Parts is an excellent novel, I read all of its nearly 600 pages in just two days, which is an almost unheard of rate for me. And what is interesting, in an oddly Jamesian way, is the form as much as the content. It is clear that Lodge is aching for the chance to interview Wells himself, so he has cast the large part of this novel as an interview. Wells, in the last years of his life, in the home on the edge of Regents Park that he has refused to leave throughout the Blitz, effectively interviews himself (his sons, Gip and Anthony West, and Gip’s wife, who look after him, see him constantly mumbling to himself). It is a constant refrain of ‘why did you do that?’, with Wells regularly going to his bookshelves or digging out a letter as a way of reminding himself of what really happened. There is, therefore, an air of self-justification, offset by self-recrimination. Neither are guaranteed to lead to the truth, of course, and this is always Wells’s own version of his own story. Somehow it works as a portrait of one of the most singular and most fascinating characters in British literary history.

Russell Hoban has died.

I first discovered his work, as I suspect so many others have done, through Riddley Walker. It is a book that looks off-putting, the broken language that reflects the broken society, but read it aloud and it is perfectly plain. There are other novels that have played with language in a similar way (Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, Banks’s Feersum Endjinn), but none of them have quite the grace of Riddley Walker.

And when it came out I had not long moved down to Folkestone, and here was a novel set in the landscape I now knew. The Warren, an area of wilderness and fallen cliffs here in Folkestone, is one of the key settings in the book. And, of course, the legend of St Eusa that provides so much of the narrative structure of the book, is based on the medieval painting of the legend of St Eustace that is on display in Canterbury Cathedral. I could follow the novel. I had yet to discover how firmly all of Hoban’s work is tied to the actual landscape in which it is set, so this discovery was a delight.

And having read Riddley Walker I had to rush out and read his previous novels, The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz, Kleinzeit in which inanimate objects talk to the narrator, a device that he continued to use in most of his novels, and Turtle Diary in which the narrative shifts between the two central characters, again a device that he continued to use.

And not so long after Riddley Walker came out I was involved in organising the first Mexicon, and at least partly on my instigation we invited Hoban to be one of our guests, along with Alasdair Gray. It was an inspired choice that set the tone for how we wanted these conventions to be. We decided that I would interview Hoban on the convention programme, so he suggested I come round for lunch so we could prepare. Which is how I came to visit him at his home overlooking that stretch of the District Line that runs overground, a home that has subsequently featured in several of his novels.

The kitchen, where we ate, was clean and bright and tidy and clearly the domain of his wife. The ground floor lounge that served as his study was anything but. It was cramped and crowded and piled high with tapes and books and LPs, there was what seemed like a solid wall of radio equipment on which he listened to short wave radio all through the night while he wrote. It was the sort of room where you feel you have to breathe in in order to move around, the sort of room where you are convinced that piles of something or other are going to topple over at any moment. He talked to me about writing his first novel, when he didn’t know how to write a novel or what it was supposed to look like. So he laid all the pages diagonally across the floor and ran up and down the lines trying to get a sense of the rhythm of the thing. I suspect that is the reason all his books are made up of such short chapters.

And then came the interview. It was the first interview I had ever done, and I’d prepared carefully, written out a list of questions. The room was crowded and I was nervous and I turned to the first question in my notebook and said: ‘Okay, can we begin by talking about your first novel, The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz?’ And he said, ‘No, let’s talk about the one that was really my first novel, The Mouse and his Child.’ And he proceeded to talk for half an hour about a book I hadn’t even heard of at that time. He’d brought along the original mouse and its child, which he played with along the front of the desk where we were sitting, and he’d brought a head of Mr Punch from Riddley Walker, and every single one of the questions I’d prepared was now useless. And it didn’t matter because he was just so wonderfully, effortlessly entertaining.

And after Pilgermann, which was sort of an historical novel and sort of a ghost story, there was a long silence, broken only by The Medusa Frequency and that odd collection The Moment Under the Moment. Then came Fremder, a clunkingly awful little sf novel, but that was followed by Mr Rinyo-Clacton’s Offer and then Angelica’s Grotto and he was away on a whole string of seemingly linked novels in which characters and settings (usually London) kept recurring. There was an awful lot of sex, usually rather perverse, which seemed rather creepy coming from an author who was already well over 70; but there was also a mass of pop-culture references (Linger Awhile, which is one of the worst of this series, is all about bringing a black and white movie actress back to life), there were endless references to the ghost stories of Oliver Onions, the songs of Dory Previn, the paintings of Odilon Redon, and more. I’ve written about all this before at the New York Review of Science Fiction and here at Big Other, so there’s not much point in me repeating it all again.

But I’ll miss him. I’ll miss the round face with the impish grin. I’ll miss the uncategorisable novels. I understand there’s a new young adult novel to be published early in 2012, but after that, how the silence stretches out.

 In 1927, Dorothy L. Sayers published the third of her Lord Peter Whimsey novels, Unnatural Death, which introduced the character of Miss Climpson, who would re-appear in later novels. Miss Climpson is a spinster who helps Whimsey solve crime by her ability to talk to anyone, by being the sort of person no-one pays attention to, by her insights into normal human behaviour.

There are big differences between the characters, but they have a lot in common as well. I suspect Sayers must have been writing her novel at the same time that Christie’s story appeared. I do not suspect that one influenced the other. I think it is pure coincidence. But it is the coincidence that is interesting.

Sayers would often write insightful novels about social conditions disguised as crime novels. The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (which came out just a year after Unnatural Death) is a telling account of the long-term social and psychological effects of the First World War; Murder Must Advertise is not just one of the best novels about advertising that I know, it is also very sharp on the profession’s ethics. And Unnatural Death fits into this model; without making any fuss about it, it is a novel about the position of women in post-First World War England. It is a novel crowded with women, and with very few men; there are at least two lesbian relationships within the novel though nothing much is made of either of them. We see a social world that is almost entirely made up of women, there are spinsters everywhere, there are independent women (including both the victim and the murderer), there are women faced with new freedoms and not at all sure what to do with them.

The First World War destroyed a generation; that has been a cliché of British history, probably since the end of the war itself. It is only recently, it seems, that historians have started to look at what that meant for the women of Britain. But that meaning, that effect, was there in the novels of the time, and it is overt in this novel by Sayers. I suspect that Unnatural Death and The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club can be read as a dyptich on the consequences of the war, but it is the women who come first.

Christie was always more mechanistic, less socially astute, than Sayers. Her plots are well-oiled machines, but the world around those plots is a never-never land, unreal and uninteresting. But she was still living in the world, she cannot have been totally unaware of how things were, and I suspect that Miss Marple grew out of the fact that the 1920s was a world of women not of men. Miss Marple and Miss Climpson may both have been gifts to crime fiction, but they were both victims of the First World War.

Not because his prose is dense or complex or difficult. Quite the opposite, his prose is usually quite simple, reliant more on familiar words than strange or unexpected ones. Sometimes the rhythms of his writing are unexpected in written prose, hesitating, repeating, dodging back and forth through the thought; but since this echoes the relatively unstructured character of our thought and speech this does not make it difficult to follow.

No, we read him slowly because we sense there is something going on behind the prose. His stories are not crystal clear but rather frosted, translucent; through them we discern shapes that are slightly blurry. Rather like Gerhard Richter’s image of Ulrika Meinhof that lies at the heart of the story ‘Baader-Meinhof’.

We get this idea of something behind the words from Delillo himself, of course. In the stories that make up this new collection, The Angel Esmeralda, he is forever harping on about the power of words. ‘I want words to be secretive, to cling to a darkness in the deepest interior’ (30) his narrator says in ‘Human Moments in World War III’, in a voice that sounds suspiciously like Delillo’s own. And again, in ‘Midnight in Dostoevsky’, the Delilloesque narrator says: ‘Let the words be the facts. This was the nature of our walks – to register what was out there, all the scattered rhythms of circumstance and occurrence, and to reconstruct it as human noise.’ (122)

Part of this registering of what was out there comes in the form of lists, of knowing the names of things. But there are always words missing. In ‘Human Moments in World War III’ he notes that ‘there ought to be a term for this ironic condition: primitive fear of the weapons we are advanced enough to design and produce.’ (35) Something like this lament for a lost or non-existent word recurs in just about every one of these stories. In ‘The Starveling’, for instance, ‘He also thought there had to be another word, beyond anorexic, that would help him see her clearly.’ (202) The right word, control of language, brings everything into focus, lets us see clearly, it is what brings with it control of the world. As old Sister Edgar complains of the street kids she deals with in ‘The Angel Esmeralda’, ‘They spoke an unfinished English, soft and muffled, insufficiently suffixed, and she wanted to drum some hard g’s into the ends of their gerunds.’ (80) And we know, because their language is incomplete, that their lives are incomplete also. But we don’t see clearly in these stories because words are missing, key words, the clue to what is behind the frosted glass.

At least, that is what Delillo is telling us. But is there really anything there, is that blurry image on the frosted glass really anything more than a flaw in the glass itself, a trick of the light? Sometimes.

Again and again, the words in these stories are used to create the world. In ‘Hammer and Sickle’, for instance, the global financial crisis is created by the curiously incantatory reports of two young girls on television. Or at least, so it seems to their father, watching them from the minimum security prison where he is serving a sentence for financial crime, alongside a bunch of other men convicted of various types of fraud. The world is no longer real to them, so they conjure it out of the words of children. ‘Hammer and Sickle’ is, for my money, one of the better stories in the collection, but the whole book is filled with characters for whom the world is no longer real. Usually, they use words to create another person. In ‘Midnight in Dostoevsky’, two students tell themselves elaborate stories about an old man they see in the street; in ‘The Starveling’ a fat man who spends his days hanging around in cinemas creates an elaborate story about a thin girl he follows from one cinema to another. In both these works, it is when story and reality collide that the fictions stutter to a somewhat inconclusive halt.

One of the characteristics of Delillo’s stories is that they are never whole. Every single one of them starts after the beginning of the story, and Delillo does not use flashbacks to fill in the gaps. We are left forever unsure of how these particular events were actually set in motion. And more often than not, the story closes before the end. Real life has no neat beginnings and endings, when we look around us, when we interact with any other person, we can be aware only of part of the middle of the story. I think that is an effect Delillo is striving for in this collection. It can work. In ‘The Runner’ a jogger running laps around a small lake in a park, sees a car drive onto the grass beside a woman who is picnicking there; moments later, the car drives away, taking the woman’s child. Why? Who? How will this drama be resolved? We never know, but then, this is the sort of little everyday tragedy whose resolution we never do know. The story works precisely because of that irresolution. In contrast, ‘The Ivory Acrobat’, about a foreign teacher in Athens and the tentative relationship she begins in the wake of an earthquake, feels too incomplete, as if we need  to go back earlier in time to properly understand the woman, and go on later in time to properly understand the relationship.

Meanwhile the title story, ‘The Angel Esmeralda’, was incorporated wholesale into Delillo’s finest novel, Underworld, so it is as if it has belatedly acquired a before and after, making it hard to read now in the ascetic isolation that this collection would demand.

One other recurring aspect of the work that I won’t go into at any length here is art. ‘Baader-Meinhof’ begins and ends at an actual exhibition, of Gerhard Richter’s pictures, in exactly the same way that Point Omega begins and ends at an actual exhibition, the 24-hour Psycho. Delillo engages with these artworks in a way that he doesn’t engage, for instance, with the films in ‘The Starveling’ (indeed, we never actually register a single thing that is on screen). I wonder about this, but I don’t want to pursue the idea at this point.

In the end, though, the archetypal Delillo characters are the two we encounter in the archetypal Delillo story, ‘Human Moments in World War III’, in orbit around Earth while, it would seem, a war rages below. We learn nothing about the war, not even whether it is actually happening; we learn nothing about what brought the characters to this situation, nor what might become of them. They float above everything, disengaged, playing with words. If it ever came down to earth, there would be no story.

But I’ve just come to a passage which suddenly makes me think that Kermode’s book is, at least in part, a response to Frye. It is not explicit, Frye’s name is not mentioned either in the text or anywhere in the endnotes, but …

Kermode is talking about myth and fiction. Frye is very careful to see these as part of the same project, one feeding into the other, serious literature partaking of the sense of myth. Kermode takes a determinedly opposite view:

We have to distinguish between myths and fictions. … Myth operates within the diagrams of ritual, which presupposes total and adequate explanations of things as they are and were; it is a sequence of radically unchangeable gestures. Fictions are for finding things out, and they change as the needs of sense-making change. Myths are the agents of stability, fictions the agents of change. Myths call for absolute, fictions for conditional assent. Myths make sense in terms of a lost order of time, illud tempus as Eliade calls it; fictions, if successful, make sense of the here and now, hoc tempus. It may be that treating literary fictions as myths sounds good just now, but as Marianne Moore so rightly said of poems, ‘these things are important not because a / high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are / useful.’

It is that sense of myths as radically unchanging, as doing something that fiction is not designed to do, that I was reaching towards in my review of Gregory Feeley’s Kentauros at Requited. But I wrote that before I had read the Kermode. I might have found the task slightly easier if I’d come to the review now.

I’m going to tell you a story. It’s about spies. And if it’s true … you people are going to need a whole new organisation.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John Le Carre was published in 1974. It was adapted for television by Arthur Hopcraft, directed by John Irvin and first shown on the BBC in 1979 with Alec Guinness in the role of George Smiley. It has now been made into a film written by Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan, directed by Tomas Alfredson, with Gary Oldman taking on the role of Smiley. I’ve now had a chance to see the film, and I’ve watched the TV adaptation again (for the umpteenth time); both adaptations are good, both are faithful to the novel, I enjoyed both. Actually, I went to the film expecting to be disappointed in comparison to the BBC adaptation, and came out having enjoyed it more than I expected. But comparisons are inevitable, so I just want to talk about a few of the ways in which they echoed each other, and a few in which they differed. One thing to be said is that both are supposed to be adaptations of the novel; the film, we are told, is emphatically not a remake of the television drama, but the one echoes the other in far too many ways for this to be entirely coincidental.

And yes, the BBC adaptation consisted of seven 45-minute episodes, 315 minutes in total, giving time for the slowness and complexity of the story to develop. The film is 127 minutes, less than half the length of the television drama; inevitably this leads to cuts, elisions and abbreviations. This doesn’t necessarily make the film worse, but I noticed several points during the film when it relied on our prior knowledge of the story to understand what was happening and why. I cannot see the film from the perspective of someone totally unfamiliar with the story, so I have no way of knowing whether this might affect our appreciation of the film.

But, to the comparisons:

Glasses: It’s a story about sight, about perception, so it is hardly a surprise that both Guinness and Oldman wear heavily framed glasses for the character, and both of them use the glasses to point up aspects of the characterisation. Guinness is forever taking his glasses off and cleaning them. It might seem that this is signalling clarity of vision, but I don’t think that is entirely the case. Whenever Guinness removes his glasses the camera swoops in on his face and we see him peering from a suddenly naked face, and there is a sense that he is actually seeing more, seeing more deeply at that moment.

Oldman, on the other hand, never takes his glasses off. Even when we see him swimming in the Hampstead Ponds (he is a much more physical, more active Smiley than Guinness), he is still wearing the glasses. It is significant that one of the first things he does during his enforced retirement is go to an optician and get new glasses. And though nothing is said about them, when we see his face in close-up we realise that his glasses are bifocals: he is looking at things near and far at the same time, seeing different perspectives.

Ricki Tarr: In many ways, the key character in the story, because it is through him that Karla’s whole scheme begins to come unravelled. On the surface, this is one instance where the film echoes the television. Hywel Bennett’s Ricki Tarr on TV was bearded during his questioning by Smiley and clean shaven in the flashback in Lisbon; Tom Hardy’s Ricki Tarr on film was bearded during his questioning by Smiley and clean shaven in the flashback in Istanbul. Hardy even adopts some of the manner and costume of Bennett.

But I found Hardy far less satisfactory in this role. On TV, Ricki is a fallen angel, the son of a preacher gone to the bad, slightly seedy, more than a little amoral, and surprised by his own sense of guilt over Irina. All the time he is courting her, in that Lisbon cemetery, you can see his calculation, see the experienced spy guiding everything he does and says. Hardy is rather too pretty for the role, there is no sense of the amoral about him. Moreover, Hardy’s Ricki Tarr is far more straightforwardly in love with Irina, and his subsequent actions are guided far more by his desire for her than by his guilt over the way he behaved.

Places: On TV, Tarr meets Irina in Lisbon, and she is flown back to Moscow; on film, he meets her in Istanbul, and she is taken back to Russia by boat. On TV, Jim Prideaux is sent to Czechoslovakia and is shot at night in a remote forest; on film, he is sent to Budapest and is shot in broad daylight in the middle of the city. The first change of location seems sensible; the second less so.

The Circus: The headquarters of British Intelligence is known as the Circus because it occupies an anonymous office block just off Cambridge Circus. This is acknowledged on TV where we keep getting long shots of the Circus, and the interior of the building suits that location. There’s a rickety lift that needs oiling and never gets it; and on his first visit to the building Peter Guillam comments on a new photocopier.

On film, the Circus is a very different place, a vast complex of very different interiors (vast, warehouse-like rooms and narrow staircases), and on the outside we see it surrounded by barbed wire. It could not be anywhere close to Cambridge Circus, or indeed any other popular part of central London, it would attract too much attention.  The set is huge and unlikely, and I have the sense that it is there simply because that is the kind of set that film makers can afford to build.

Connie Sachs: For me, the film’s major failing was in the characterisation of Connie Sachs. It is not that Kathy Burke is a worse actress than Beryl Reid, it is that she gets the part completely wrong. We aren’t told an awful lot of back story about Connie, but we don’t need to be told. We know, without having to be told, that she was probably one of the young girls brought in to Bletchley Park during the war, and has stayed in the service ever since. She hasn’t married, not because she is a lesbian (though this is hinted at in Reid’s characterisation) but because the Service takes up her whole emotional life. Her constant talk of ‘my lovely, lovely boys’ tells us all of this and more. She is old, now, her hands are crippled by arthritis, she is an alcoholic, and she should probably have been removed from the service long before, but she was just too good at the job; her mind contains as much as any computer might do. When she is forced out by the new regime (because what she knows is actually a threat to Gerald the mole), her life is ended. There is an immense tragedy to Connie that is one of the underlying themes of the whole work. And every scrap of this is in Beryl Reid’s performance, and not a jot of it is in Kathy Burke’s. Kathy Burke loves her job and is good at it, but it is not her entire reason for living; there is no sense of the tragedy and the damage of the character. On TV, Connie asks Smiley to kiss her, and that kiss speaks volumes; on film, Smiley and Connie sit silently side by side on a settee without touching and watch two young students kissing in the next room. That emptiness is the failure of the portrayal of Connie in the film.

Peter Guillam: On the other hand, I think the character of Peter Guillam is one of the strengths of the film, and it is not just because I have admired Benedict Cumberbach  in everything I’ve seen him in; nor is it because there is anything wrong with Michael Jayston’s performance on TV because there isn’t. Jayston’s performance was one of the great strengths of the TV adaptation, every bit a match for Guinness, as he needed to be. Jayston’s Guillam is an old hand, damaged as most of the Circus old hands are, resourceful, rather stolid, and primarily there as a foil for Smiley, a partner for talking over the issues. Cumberbatch plays a rather different Guillam, slightly lower down the pecking order, perhaps less damaged (though he is damaged in the course of the film, having to dismiss his homosexual partner, an incident that plays no part in the TV adaptation).  But he is as good a foil to Oldman’s Smiley as Jayston was to Guinness’s, and the scene where the two get drunk and Oldman/Smiley recounts his meeting with Karla is a tour de force, a scene as electric as anything in the TV series.

Incidentally, the scene in which Percy Alleline accuses Guillam of fraternising with the traitor Ricki Tarr is almost word-for-word the same in both versions.

Colour: The TV series came just five years after the book and didn’t have to make a big thing about when it was set. The film, coming not far short of 40 years after the book, is a different enterprise altogether. The TV adaptation was more or less contemporary with the events of the story; or, at least, viewers would not have to make too much effort to appreciate the references and the background to what is going on. But now it is a different world, so we need to make it clear that this is in the past. We see a document dated 1973; we see people in the clothes and haircuts of that hangover from the 60s that was the early 70s. Above all, we get a rather washed-out, grey-toned palette of colours. This is not because those were the colours of the time, colours were as various, as bright and if anything more garish than they are now. But those are the colours that we see when we look back now on the television of the day, and indeed putting on the DVD of the television version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy you see exactly the same palette of colours.

Other Characters: The television series, largely because of the involvement of Alec Guinness in his first major television role, was able to attract an incredibly strong cast. I don’t think the film has been quite as fortunate, though there are some really good performances. On the plus side, I think Mark Strong is rather better as Jim Prideaux than Ian Bannen, even though Strong doesn’t quite get across that Prideaux was always too old for the Operation Testify assignment. And Ciaran Hinds makes rather more of Roy Bland than Terence Rigby was able to do.

John Hurt is excellent as Control, though I think Alexander Knox is rather better at getting across that this is a very sick man.

I was less happy with some of the other roles. Toby Jones really doesn’t convey the blinkered, public school hauteur of Percy Alleline the way that Michael Aldridge does; and Simon McBurney is just wrong as Lacon and certainly no match for Anthony Bate at conveying the fact that he is out of his depth and terrified of the repercussions of what is about to happen. (As we came out of the film, I did rather wonder whether Jones and McBurney ought not has swapped roles, though I am less convinced of that now.) And the hapless David Dencik really is no match for the wonderful Bernard Hepton as Toby Esterhase.

And finally there’s Mendel, played on TV by George Sewell who had the marvellous ability to draw your eye even when he is not doing very much. He was an under-appreciated actor, but I think here he found the right role. On film he is played by Roger Lloyd Pack, another example of exactly the right actor making the most of a relatively small role. He is also central to two of the best comic moments in the film (the TV adaptation doesn’t go in much for comic moments): when there is a bee loose in the car; and when he makes the call to Guillam at the Circus that provides cover for Guillam to swap files. Mendel is calling from a garage where George Formby is playing on the radio ­ ‘if you could see what I can see’ ­ we see the girl who is monitoring phone calls tapping her feet, and then as Guillam leaves the Circus Roy Bland passes him humming the same tune.

Bill Hayden: Which brings us to the last major character, played on television by Ian Richardson, and on film by Colin Firth. And again I think the film fails in this instance. Firth is a good actor, but he only gets part of Hayden’s character. There’s the easy charm, which he does rather too well, but not the veneer of world-weariness that turns out to run much deeper than anyone, even Hayden, had realised. There’s a scene where Smiley first learns about Witchcraft. As originally written, apparently, Hayden said nothing in this scene, but Firth thought he really should say something so he and Le Carre improvised a line in which he says something to the effect that ‘it looks fake, so it might just be real’. That line is wrong, it interrupts the flow of the scene, and it really does not fit with Firth’s character. In contrast, I could imagine Richardson’s Bill Hayden saying that line and it would make perfect sense. And therein lies the difference between the two performances. Firth is all charm, who is made to seem slightly endearing when Smiley gets home earlier than anticipated and finds him desperately and awkwardly trying to squirm his feet into his shoes. Richardson didn’t have to try to be charming and he certainly didn’t try to be endearing, so you could sense beneath the surface the contrasts of honour and loyalty and ennui that make up both his complex character and the entire theme of the work.

This morning, as I was reading some more of Consuming Passions by Judith Flanders, I came upon an advertisement for Hearn’s Lamps dating from the very end of the 19th century. It is clearly advertising electric lights to be strung outside the house at Christmas.

This afternoon, re-reading The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle (serialised 1901-1902) I came upon the following passage, as Watson, Mortimer and Sir Henry Baskerville approach the gloomy Baskerville Hall for the first time. Sir Henry declares:

‘I’ll have a row of electric lamps up here inside of six months, and you won’t know it again, with a thousand candle-power Swan and Edison right here in front of the hall door.’

Read in the context of that advertisement, you suddenly get a sense of how that must have struck a reader at the very dawn of the 20th century. So far as I can recall, every other light mentioned throughout the Holmes canon is a gas light. Now, suddenly, there is the brilliance of electric light. And outside the house, not in. The reader might well have seen such a thing in that very same advertisement that Flanders displays, but it would have been a thing of aspiration, something shockingly new.

And, if you’ll pardon the pun, it casts The Hound of the Baskervilles, and indeed the entire Holmes canon, in a new light.

I am very glad I picked the book up.

*

The Civil War period is jammed full of ironies, just read any history. But one that has always particularly intrigued me occurred on Friday 25^th November 1864. On that evening, in the Winter Garden Theater in New York there was a benefit performance of Julius Caesar staring Junius Brutus Booth as Caesar, with his brothers Edwin Booth and John Wilkes Booth.

Edwin Booth

It was the only occasion on which the three Booth brothers appeared on stage together.

Friday 25^th November was also the day upon which a gang of Confederate agents attempted to set fire to New York. It was a bungled attempt. The agents set their fire bombs in various hotel rooms around the city, but to avoid detection they made sure that all windows and doors were firmly closed, so most of the fires were starved of oxygen before they even got started.

Nevertheless, many fires did take hold, and one of the places threatened was the Winter Garden Theater. It was Edwin Booth, far and away the greatest actor of the three, who stepped out of character and calmed the audience so the performance could proceed.

By all accounts the theatre was full, and the performance was superb. But what might have happened? And how close might Confederate agents have come to preventing the tragedy that occurred only five months later?

John Wilkes Booth

Stacton mentions the benefit performance early in the novel, but doesn’t really draw out the ironies. There are plenty of other ironies to come through the novel though. Not least the fact that Wilkes (as he was known to his family), an actor more acclaimed for the athleticism of his performances than the depth of this characterisations, stumbled in his leap from the box at Ford’s Theater, catching his spur in the bunting and hence breaking his leg. An unusual stumble that also caused him to mumble his exit line. Stacton is in no doubt that his line was, indeed, ‘sic semper tyrannis’; but in truth no-one in the theatre heard it clearly, even those who hadn’t paid much attention to the muffled shot in the Presidential Box, and there have been arguments ever since about what Booth really said. His greatest performance, and he fluffed it. Much of Stacton’s book revolves around these twin issues of performance and failure.

*

Lincoln is shot on page 49. Booth dies on page 173. The novel itself is 255 pages long. So although Booth’s flight occupies a good proportion of the novel, its concerns are much wider.

(Curiously, although Stacton sticks very closely to the facts, as far as I am able to tell, he makes two small but significant changes at the point of Booth’s death. History has it that Sergeant Boston Corbett, a religious fanatic who had been castrated for reasons that remain unclear, fired the fatal shot. Stacton has Booth shoot himself, with Corbett claiming the kill because the soldiers were under orders not to let Booth commit suicide. And at the moment of death, Booth is reported to have held his hands before his face and murmured, ‘Useless, useless’. Stacton has Booth examine his hands in the blazing barn before any shots are fired. The hands are liver spotted, a symbol of the loss of his matinee-idol good looks (and therefore of his poise, his standing, his career). The murmur of ‘Useless, useless,’ at the point of death, therefore, acquires a broader, more existential significance.)

Booth himself occupies probably 50% of the novel, though even here he is not always centre stage. Stacton shifts viewpoint several times per chapter, sometimes several times per paragraph. The effect is prismatic: we look at events from a variety of perspectives, dip into a variety of moral consciousnesses. Several pages, for instance, are devoted to Lincoln’s long, slow death scene (how easily we slip into theatrical metaphors when discussing this) in the run-down little house across the street from Ford’s Theater, slipping from the mind of a doctor, to Mary Lincoln, to an actress who accompanies her, to Stanton (the out and out villain of the novel), to Vice President Johnson paying a fleeting visit. Quite a bit of the novel is devoted to Booth’s family: Edwin, who is never arrested but hides himself away from the public gaze; Junius, who is arrested then released but who seems sublimely unaffected by the whole thing; their sister, Asia, who is pregnant and married to a man who believes the assassination was a plot to ruin his own social standing; and their mother, who doted on Wilkes. In many ways this is the least dramatic but the most interesting part of the book. And there is Stanton’s hunt for anyone who might possibly be a part of a conspiracy that is mostly in his own imagination.
But time and again the novel returns to Booth and his agonisingly slow flight through the swamps of southern Maryland in the company of poor, innocent, childlike David Herold.

David Herold

It’s a story of disintegration, the gangrenous leg, hurriedly and inadequately set by Dr Mudd, acting as a metaphor for Booth’s sense of self. Everything is a performance, even death is a glorious act that lasts only until the curtain falls. Less and less does he understand what he has done, why he is not already being acclaimed as the greatest star of the age. Even Lincoln was just playing a walk-on part in the eternal fame of John Wilkes Booth: though Stacton doesn’t say this, you get a sense that his Booth never quite grasps the fact that Lincoln doesn’t get up again and walk away after the hero has leapt from the box to the stage. Appearance is more important, more real, than reality; and he only, and rather resentfully, recognises that reality might intrude upon appearance, when he stands alone in the blazing barn and knows that he must die.

Mary Surratt

Once he does die, the novel turns to another performance, the dreadful show trial of the conspirators, focussing in particular upon Mrs Surratt. It is again presented as appearance, a play in which reality has no part, all is orchestrated by Stanton to achieve some apotheosis of his own power regardless of sense or justice or right. There is rich irony in the verdict, when Spengler is found innocent of all charges and so will only have to serve six years hard labour. Mrs Surratt will die, of course, because that is Stanton’s will. She is hanged alongside Payne (probably the only truly guilty one among them, who attempted to murder Secretary of State Seward); Herold, who probably had the mentality of a child and no conception of what he was caught up in; and Atzerodt, who was a drunk and did nothing except try to get more drink. Years later, of course, when Mrs Surratt’s son, John, who possibly was part of the conspiracy, is finally captured and put on trial, it all comes out: how Stanton manipulated the evidence, used perjured witnesses, and stage-managed the execution of an innocent woman. It leads to his downfall, practically the last thing that President Johnson did in office. But, of course, by then it is far too late for Mrs Surratt.

And even this isn’t the end of the story. Because the novel begins and ends with Edwin Booth; tracing at the end how he rebuilt his theatrical career, attracting ever greater fame, although he was changed by the experience. It is not the conspirators who are punished, but those around them.

*

In my post about Barry Unsworth, I noted that he is the type of historical novelist who does not use real historical figures. David Stacton is clearly the opposite.

In his introduction, John Crowley divides historical fiction into three broad types:

[T]he ones that tell stories of fictitious characters against a general historical background …; those that follow the adventures of invented characters who become involved with actual historical characters and events; and those that fictionalize real people of the past, or use the techniques of fiction to reveal or exhibit more of their insides.

I don’t entirely agree with Crowley on this. It is a slick and superficially convincing division, but it doesn’t come close to telling the whole story. Crowley’s exemplar of the first type is Gone With The Wind, though the characters are very much caught up in real historical events, and real historical characters do appear, which would seem to put it into the second category.

I think a better division might be to say that there are historical romances and historical novels. The historical romance is an adventure story whose colour is provided by the setting. Real events and real characters may well occur in these, as, for instance, in Gone With The Wind, or The Three Musketeers or The Prince and the Pauper, but the story is about the adventure, the romance, the colour, it is not about the real characters or the real events. Indeed, real figures may well be made to behave contrary to what is known about them, or put into situations that simply would not or could not occur, because the story takes precedence over the history. The historical novel, in contrast, is concerned with trying to figure out the past, maybe to reconfigure it in modern terms to help us understand it, or maybe to emphasise its difference so we can see where we do not understand it.

The historical novel might itself be further subdivided, along lines analogous to the distinction between social and political history. The social history novel is concerned with how people lived, what it was like to experience that particular time. Examples might include Barry Unsworth’s The Quality of Mercy or E.L. Doctorow’s The March: real events feature, real characters may appear, but the focus is on the lived experience. The political history novel, in contrast, is concerned with the people who shape the events, with the how and why of the past. Examples might include Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall or David Stacton’s The Judges of the Secret Court: the focus is all on the real people caught up in the real events in an attempt to capture something of what it was that drove them. The two types are not mutually exclusive. There’s a nice little social aside in Stacton’s novel, for instance, about a character carefully wearing trousers that did not have a crease, because the crease would indicate mass-production and so mark him as lower social status. Similarly there are telling glimpses of Sherman in Doctorow’s novel. Indeed, there are cross-overs between what I have termed the historical romance and the historical novel. For instance, The Horse Soldiers by Doug Stanton is a historical novel that recounts in factual detail a real incident from the Civil War, and uses real characters (though sometimes given other names), and yet it is also a story told with the dash and adventure of a historical romance. No such divisions are ever hermetic: there is always movement between the categories, and most works can be read in ways that might put them in several different categories. Still, I think my reading of the role of real characters in historical fiction provides a better account of what is actually going on than Crowley does.

*

And before I forget: the title.

The Judges of the Secret Court turns out to be the title of a hopelessly amateur play sent to Edwin Booth late in his life. But it serves as the trigger for his memories, so that within the context of the novel the judges are all the people who have been the playthings of history, and the court is memory itself.

It is a very fine book, do yourself a favour and read it.

On finding himself thus accidentally free, Sullivan’s only thought was to get as far as he could from Newgate Prison while it was still dark.

These are the opening words of Barry Unsworth’s new novel, The Quality of Mercy. I love them for their sheer audacity. How is Sullivan ‘accidentally’ free? We certainly are not told in the first chapter, which is as far as I have got. I suspect we may not be told elsewhere: Unsworth has never betrayed much of a liking for the flashback. Besides, do we need to know? Is it not enough that Sullivan is out on the streets of London on a bitterly cold March day in 1767, wearing only the flimsiest of clothes and ready for whatever happenstance may bring?

The Quality of Mercy is a direct sequel to Sacred Hunger, which won the Booker Prize in 1992 (a prize he had to share with Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient; I am not alone in thinking this a travesty), which in some obscure way probably makes the new novel ‘long awaited’. Of course, Sacred Hunger didn’t need a sequel, I don’t think Unsworth planned one at the time, and I suspect he has only written a sequel now because he has happened to work out a plot that takes the story, and more particularly the characters, onwards. So no-one has actually been awaiting this sequel, but it is welcome nevertheless, because any new novel by Unsworth is welcome.

I have a suspicion that Unsworth is the most garlanded unknown in English Literature. As well as winning the Booker Prize (a victory that was instantly overshadowed by the far more glitzy, media-friendly Ondaatje), he has been shortlisted also for Pascali’s Island and Morality Play, and yet he is unlikely to feature on anyone’s list of top contemporary writers. When there was a minor feeding frenzy in the literary journals about the historical novel a little while back, Unsworth’s name was never mentioned. And yet I feel he is probably the finest historical novelist we have (and that includes Hilary Mantel). He just seems to have that quiet brilliance that does the job superbly without ever attracting attention to itself.

I first discovered Unsworth when I happened upon a copy of Stone Virgin in the mid-80s, a story about art and Venice that did not bother with the safe romanticism that such a combination might normally attract. I quickly picked up a copy of his earlier novel, Pascali’s Island set on a Turkish island around the beginning of the century (and far better than the film version). From this I learned two things, first that his interest in the past was restless and he was liable to shift to widely different eras from novel to novel; and second, that despite this restlessness there was no superficiality about his view of the past, he was always very good at evoking what it felt like to live at the period he chose. There was a third thing: that he is the sort of historical novelist who does not employ famous real figures as characters (The Songs of Kings is a rare and perhaps necessary exception), but rather deals with ordinary people in their intense and daily experience of the past, but this is brewing up to be another post I’ve got planned for Big Other.

Since then I’ve been quick to catch Unsworth’s work as soon as it appears. Sacred Hunger is, of course, the big one, a fat book about the slave trade in the 18^th century, but it is not, I think, the best of his novels. His masterpiece, so far as I am concerned, is The Ruby in Her Navel, a stunning novel of medieval Sicily just at the point when the cautious experiment of Christians and Moslems living together was starting to break down. But I was also struck by Losing Nelson, a rare contemporary novel about a collector of Nelson memorabilia, The Songs of Kings about the sacrifice of Iphigeneia, Morality Play about medieval players of Mystery Plays, and Land of Marvels about archaeology and espionage in the Middle East on the eve of the First World War.

And now we have a return to the 18^th century, but the focus has shifted from the slave ships to the anti-slavery campaigners in England and the state of the working poor, which sounds meaty and interesting.