Emma Healey: Elizabeth Is Missing I actually read this (and Little Egypt, below) in April, but squeezed it in at the very end during a weekend in which I had to see a man about a dog (no, really) so they’ve been extruded into May. I don’t know why I am telling you this. After all, why would you care? But I Digress. There are many stories with a first-person protagonist in which it is quite clear that the narrator isn’t really aware of what is really going on. (My favourite is The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro). Elizabeth Is Missing takes this a step further. Not only does the protagonist not really know what is going on, but her confusion gets worse, as she is suffering from dementia which starts off moderate and gets worse and worse towards the book’s end. Maud (that’s the protagonist) is a widow in a small seaside town where she has lived all her life. She is obsessed by the apparent disappearance of her friend Elizabeth – but her distress really covers a deeper, older mystery, that of the disappearance of her elder sister Sukey when Maud was a girl, just after the end of the Second World War. Unlike the vague, dreamlike present day, Maud recalls the events of the late nineteen-forties with crystal clarity, even though she’s not always aware what’s going on then, either, as she’s a child from whom the grown-ups are variously trying to hide their own grown-up matters.
Lesley Glaister: Little Egypt Many years ago when the world was young I enjoyed bidding in a charity silent auction in aid of our local high school. Among the lots were a keg of beer (which attracted many bids); and a bundle of books from Salt Publishing, Cromer’s very own literary publishing house (which attracted just one bid – mine). I read one of the books, The Lighthouse by Alison Moore, but it was so depressing that the thought of any mo(o)re in that vein put me off for years. Little Egypt, though, was a tonic. I was attracted because it is based around one of my favourite settings — a large country pile in an advanced state of decay, with secrets piled on secrets. Indeed, the house is the title character. Little Egypt is a grand house in the north of England. Like many grand houses, the First World War pretty much did for it, and the spendthrift owners progressively sold off more of the land until it is a small island completely cut off from the rest of the world by a railway line, a dual carriageway and a superstore. Although dilapidated, it is still inhabited by nonagenarian twins Isis and Osiris, whose childhoods had been scarred by their abandonment in the house, during the 1920s, by their Egyptologist parents who were forever in Egypt squandering their wealth on a search for the fabled Tomb of Herihor. As the story opens, Osiris has long ago descended from eccentricity into madness, but Isis is still as sharp as a tack. For years she has been courted by a developer who wants to buy Little Egypt so it can be levelled to make way for yet another superstore. Isis is sorely tempted … until she remembers the awful secrets that the house conceals. In many ways the book is like Elizabeth is Missing in that it alternates between the girlhood and old age of the central character. The only flaw for me was a section in the middle in which the young twins actually travel to Egypt to see their awful parents. This seemed to go on longer than necessary. Mainly, I think, because those scenes didn’t feature the slowly decaying mansion, against which the tombs and temples of ancient Egypt seemed fresh and new.
Robert Harris: Conclave Were you to pick up and read the kind of thriller customarily sold at airports, and then say to yourself ‘that’s easy, any fool can write a book like that’ — think again. It isn’t. The careful charting of plot; the creation of characters that are believable enough for you to care about them (but no more); the display of vast amounts of research in such a way as it enhances the story rather than detracts from it; all require consummate craft and skill as a writer. Few have more craft or skill than Robert Harris. Probably best known for Fatherland (an alternative history set in the 1960s after Hitler won the war), I first discovered Harris with Pompeii, an adventure set just before the eruption of Vesuvius in 79CE. Although Harris tends to write a lot about the Romans and the Second World War, he has branched out into black humour (Ghost, in which a writer is tasked with ghosting the memoirs of a Prime Minister who looks a lot like Tony Blair); SF (The Fear Index, in which a computer on the stock market goes rogue) , and much else (my favourite is An Officer and a Spy, about the Dreyfus Affair). Clearly, Harris likes to set himself a challenge. To make a thriller out of the election of a new Pope would seem a tall order, given that almost all the characters are elderly men in frocks. Despite an almost total lack of sex or violence, and no car chases (but oh! the costumes!) Harris weaves a truly unputdownable tale about the election of a (fictional) Pope. The incumbent Pope has died after a long illness during which he has left several loose ends and made several seemingly unusual decisions. It falls to Cardinal Jacopo Lomeli, the Dean of the College of Cardinals, to organise the conclave of 118 of his fractious fellows in which a successor will be elected. Cue a great deal of intrigue, politicking, quotations from the Bible and some jaw-dropping plot twists. It might seem odd to write a novel about the Catholic Church these days that is in any way sympathetic. This one is — sympathetic, that is — because despite nods to the ongoing scandals involving sex abuse by the clergy, and the financial chicanery with which the Pontifical bank accounts have been associated, the protagonist is a fundamentally good man. Lomeli has spent a life in the Church, and despite his own repeated bouts of Imposter Syndrome he is clearly devout, well-liked, tactful and skilled in untangling the various problems that the task of running the conclave throws up. And if after reading this book you don’t know everything there is to know about running a Papal conclave, you’ve been reading a completely different book.
Charles Dickens: Martin Chuzzlewit Some wag said of Wagner’s music that it has wonderful moments and dreadful quarters-of-an-hour. One can say much the same of this lesser-known Dickens novel (serialised between 1843 and 1844). Although Dickens felt at the time that it was ‘immeasurably the best of my stories’, reception fell rather flat. Not that it is without its charms. To be sure, it’s no Pickwick Papers or Oliver Twist, but it would be an insensitive reader who didn’t find much to enjoy in this this humungous chungus of a doorstop (my edition runs to more than 900 pages), rather in the way that there are bound to be quite a few plums in a plum pudding, if it is big enough. The baggy plot is subservient to the moralising character. It is a study in hypocrisy and selfishness from the personal and parochial of Mr Pecksniff to the corporate and criminal of the Anglo-Bengalee Disinterested Life Assurance and Loan Company. Confusingly, there are not one but two Martin Chuzzlewits – the elder, eccentric and miserly; and the younger, his conceited and snobbish grandson. But wait, there’s more. Chuzzlewits abound, including (but not limited to) Anthony (the Elder Martin’s brother); Mr Pecksniff himself (a distant Chuzzlewit cousin); and his daughters Charity and Mercy (flinty and flighty respectively) but especially the horrible Jonas. In fact, the book is fair stuffed with Chuzzlewits, and there are times when there is so much Chuzzlewittery one can hardly move: the book really should have been called ‘The Chuzzlewit Saga’. To this concatenation of Chuzzlewits may be added a cavalcade of characters, from the virtuous Tom Pinch to the jolly Mark Tapley (who stands to young Martin as Sam Weller does to Mr Pickwick), although it’s Dickens’ female characters that really stand out. Apart from the Chuzzlewit daughters, there’s the put-upon boarding-house proprietor Mrs Todgers; the American literary celebrity Mrs Hominy; the warm-hearted publican Mrs Lupin — and especially the dipsomaniac nurse Mrs Gamp, who drops in every so often to give us a soliloquy on her imaginary friend Mrs Harris, just when the story is about to flag. In fact, I’d say Mrs Gamp transcends the novel to stand as one of Dickens’ finest comic creations. Sadly, the other female principals — Tom Pinch’s sister Ruth and the elder Martin’s confidante Ruth Graham — have traded character for near-saccharine virtue. Halfway through the novel, the young Martin and Mark Tapley sail to America to seek their fortunes, an episode that ends in disaster. Dickens had not long returned from his first visit to America. He went full of hope for the young Republic, but came home thoroughly disenchanted. The American episode in Martin Chuzzlewit is an excoriating satire on the towering self-regard of a people devoted to money at all or any cost, and who have nothing whatsoever to recommend them. Indeed, every dreadful habit, from spitting chewed tobacco to the owning of slaves to the bearing of weapons, is regarded as an Institution; the people who spit and shoot and own slaves among the ‘finest Men in the Country’. Such intellectual pursuits as there are take the form of political theorising that goes so far beyond the capacity of their own authors as to be completely unintelligible. The new nation is so deep-dyed in hypocrisy that people there seem to take an unusual interest in the aristocracy of a country – Britain – they affect to despise. It is in the American episode that Dickens’ sarcasm bites hardest. Here, a character encountered on a steamboat:
His complexion, naturally muddy, was rendered muddier still by too strict an economy of soap and water; and the same observation will apply to the washable part of his attire, which he might have changed with comfort to himself and gratification to his friends … He was not singular, to be sure, in these respects, for every gentleman on board appeared to have had a difference with his laundress, and to have left off washing himself in early youth.
The character is not some vagrant or backwoodsman, but a member of Congress, and (of course) ‘one of the finest men in the country’.
Dickens’ observations of America were so cutting that he was obliged to insert a postscript apologising for it. However, many of his observations seem (the part about personal hygiene excepted) to be as apposite today as they were when Dickens made them almost 180 years ago.
