The Best Reading of 2012

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Ernest Hemingway, Lindsay Davies, Madeline Miller, Robert Radcliffe, Sarah Dunant, Sarah Turnball, William Boyd

One of the sites I really enjoy is Book Group Online which is exactly what it says on the label, an online book discussion group with intelligent, polite commentators and moderators who don’t have little Hitler complexes and as far as I know have only ever banned people for trolling and never for simply disagreeing with the site bosses.  They also have a very useful section for listing what books you’ve read during the year which I find embarrassingly useful – I could complain about my ageing memory but I have a nasty feeling that it’s never been that good, but of course I can’t remember exactly.  Sadly Book Group Online has disappeared during the last week, it’s even gone from Google and I’ve got a nasty feeling that might be the end of it.  I’ll miss the site, and I’m really going to miss my book lists which go back several years.

So, without the aid of notes, here are some of the best books I’ve read during the last year – as they say on Strictly, in no particular order.

Almost French by Sarah Turnball, quite simply one of the best books I’ve read about living in France.  It’s amusing too.

Mad World by Paula Byrne which I read only a few weeks ago.  I re-read Brideshead Revisited afterwards and found having all the background information fascinating.

The Song of Achilles was a wonderful romp – there’s no other word for it – through the Illiad.  It’s a deceptively easy to read book, a real page turner but one that stays with you afterwards, even the scenes which I knew well from studying Latin in at school still had the power to shock.  And at long last I know why Achilles sulked in his tent.

Sacred Hearts by Sarah Dunant sat unread on my bookshelf for three years and when I finally picked it up I couldn’t understand why I’d deprived myself of this wonderful book for so long.  Set in a convent in Ferrara in 1570, just as the council of Trent was starting to reform monastic and conventual life, it paints a picture of the life in enclosed orders, for women who hadn’t necessarily chosen to take the veil, that is completely unforgettable.  It’s also got a cracking good plot.  It’s not a faast read but that seemed to suit the leisurely pace of life in a convent.  Definitely one the the best, and most memorable books of the year.

I wrote about Under An English Heaven when I read it, and looking back after eight months I can say it still deserves its place as a thoroughly memorable book.  Everyone I’ve lent it to, male and female, young and, ahem, not that young have adored it too.

I freely admit that I loathed Hemingway, I caused a terrible storm in my book group by saying I didn’t want to read another Hemingway, For Whom The Bell Tolls had left me feeling queasy and I’d never have picked this up if Claire from Word By Word hadn’t said that in her opinion this was one of the best books about Paris she ever read.  So I took this to read in Paris.  Clare was right, I loved it.  I’m still shying away from any of his books that have killing in them, be it bulls or people.

Amongst other great books I re-read Any Human Heart by William Boyd for the book group and it’s just as good the second time round, one of his best, if not his best book, in my opinion.  English Passengers by Matthew Kneale is flawed, it’s too long especially the last part, but is still a terrific read.  It’s set in Tasmania in the early nineteenth century and can be uncomfortable, especially if like me you’re half way through it and realise that your great-great grandfather was stationed in Hobart at the time so may well have been one of those persecuting the Aborigines.  Before I Go To Sleep is riddled with plot holes and unliklihoods but I defy anyone to put it down for long enough while they’re reading it to analyse the plot and let the inconsistencies occur to them.  Michelle Paver’s Dark Matter was a spooky atmospheric page turner, no I didn’t shudder like the book blurb promised but then I’m distressingly pragmatic, it was very good.

I have a feeling that I would have had Bring Up The Bodies and The Night Circus in this list as they were earmarked for my Christmas reading but I had to read  a truly dire book for the book group so I could pass it on to someone else who needs it.  All I can say is that I bitterly resent wasting two days of reading time on sentimental, badly written drivel and I’m not going to be able to say what I feel as the person who chose it is very nice and might well be hurt at an honest appraisal.  I’d ploughed my way to the last page (reading one word in three), put it down with a sigh of relief and saw my daughter had left a copy of Nemesis by Lindsay Davies on the table.  It was exactly what the book doctor ordered.  She’s sharp, she’s funny, her characters are great, she can plot and it doesn’t matter in the slightest that my inner pedant is noting that senators’ sons in ancient Rome were hardly likely to say, ‘We’re stuffed,’; the world she’s created is so vibrant that my inner pedant doesn’t give a toss. What a good way to finish off 2012.

Under An English Heaven

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Bombers, Phoenix Book Sale, Robert Radcliffe, World War II

Books that have World War II bombers on the cover really aren’t my sort of thing, so when my husband handed me Under An English Heaven by Robert Radcliffe, one of the books I’d bought for him at the Phoenix Book Sale *,  and said I must read it, I made polite noises and put it to one side.  I might well have continued making weak excuses every time he asked me if I’d got around to reading it yet if I hadn’t been tidying the piles of books in our bedroom and picked it up.  Among the quotes from reviews at the bottom of the cover was ‘Enthralling – Kate Atkinson’.  She’s one of my favourite authors, someone whose books I buy without even bothering to see what they’re about or read the reviews, so on the basis that if she’d enjoyed it I ought to at least give it a go, I did.  The husband then sat around for the next two days as I buried myself in the book, looking smug and saying, ‘I knew you’d enjoy it…’

The basic plot isn’t so very different from many other war books.  The time is the summer of 1943, the place Bedenham in Suffolk where a base has been built for an American squadron of the huge Flying Fortress B17 bombers that go deep into Germany on bombing raids.  John Hooper, a pilot who can’t bring himself to face up to why he survived a crash and all his crew didn’t, is assigned to a new crew whose pilot was killed on their first mission.  His official mission is to meld his new crew into an efficient fighting machine, his personal mission is to make sure they survive their tour of duty – a statistical improbability.  There’s a street-wise evacuee with secrets of his own who can’t stay away from the base, the family he lodges with – the husband, the local blacksmith, still can’t come to terms with his own war 25 years before, the village schoolmistress who made a wartime marriage and has had no news of a husband she barely knew for over 18 months, her parents in law who live in ‘the Big House’ in the village and don’t really think she’s good enough for their son…

Most books set in wartime have the war as the focus, they’re about missions, battles, being bombed and the characters often act as a means of telling the war story; what makes Under An English Heaven so different is that this book is all about people, the war is almost reduced to a background for the characters – it’s there of course, it brings them together, it puts them in acute danger at times but there’s no grand overview, we see events through their eyes – usually how it affects them and not in terms of the big picture.  The bomber crew fly the missions they’re told to, they don’t speculate about what they’re bombing; one of them is caught in London during an air raid and he wonders if their bombs fall on civilians, but that’s it, he, and the rest of the crew are far more concerned about the next mission and if they’re going to survive it.  The villagers get on with life, try to make do, a teenage girl dreams of beiing old enough to join the ATS so that she can get away from the boredom of rural life.

Robert Radcliffe is obviously knowlegeable about his subject but he wears it very lightly, there aren’t pages of technical descriptions of machinery – there’s a diagram of the bomber on one of the first pages so you can check the details for yourself if you feel like it, instead he concentrates on what it felt like to fly in one of those bombers.  (Not comfortable, freezing cold and frequently terrifying.)  His writing is so vivid that you can feel the dread of the crew as they’re woken at 5 am and told to attend a briefing for their next mission, mortality rates were horrifyingly high so you can understand the constant fear they lived under, likewise you feel the lift to the spirits when the word goes round that the chippy in the village is opening for one night only.  The owner has been saving fat and potatoes for weeks so everyone, villages and staff at the base, can have a treat.   The letter from one of the crew to his parents about his first taste of fish and chips was wonderful.

It’s a marvellously uplifting book and as Kate Atkinson so rightly said, enthralling.  In fact the only quibble I’ve got with it is that the final chapter, set in the 1980’s, is just too pat.  But never mind, this is a book which can easily overcome one fault.  The last major scene of the book in which the crew fly their final mission is almost unbearably tense.  Good books paint a picture that you can see in your mind’s eye, better ones make you enter into their worlds, and with very few you feel that you can remember everything that happened because you lived it, you were there.

This is one of those books.

*  The next Pheonix Book Sale, for any of you who are within reach of Bergerac, is on Saturday May 5th, 10 am – 3 pm in  the Salle Municipale in Campsegret, on the RN21 between Bergerac and Perigaux.   15,000 second hand books in English for 1€ each.