The Written World - February 2012
King of the Badgers
by Philip Hensher
(4th Estate £18.99)
Every generation (if we are lucky) brings forth a writer who is the true, strong voice of his time, who captures the Zeitgeist of the era with clarity and integrity. His characters have enduring validity because of his ability to put forward situations which successfully portray the inner truth and values of his protagonists.
In King of the Badgers, Philip Hensher uses the backdrop of the pleasant English seaside town of Hanmouth to explore the nature of deceit. Hairdresser Heidi arranges the fake kidnap of her little girl for publicity and for material gain: the kidnapper exercises his deceit option by selling the child to a paedophile—who completes the circle by killing the kidnapper in lieu of payment. Grist for the moral mill indeed.
Then there is the sad, gay slob David who eats himself to death. His pretend boyfriend Mauro meanly steals an ornament while on a visit to David’s very straight parents, Mauro is depicted as a cocaine-hungry ‘scene’ gay whose petty greed is part of that persona.
Add to this the local ‘book-club’ set interacting with the officious Neighborhood Watch – Hanmouth has a full and varied life, all the denizens hanging in there, clinging to their version of normalcy despite disturbing events and dysfunctional behaviour
Hensher’s depiction of the sadness of contemporary life is full of conviction. But redemption is at hand. Honesty prevails in the form of settled gay couple Sam and Harry who use sexual orgies to keep each other content. They are a popular couple – their occasional transgressions when their coke-snorting, cross-dressing parties spill into the town are easily forgiven.
Equally, the nasty Mauro redeems himself by refusing money offered by David’s stricken parents
The accuracy and depth of Hensher’s observations on the influence of the sociological environment on the individual - and vice versa - see him emerging as one of the most significant novelists in modern British literature. He joins William Boyd, Nick Hornby, Graham Swift and Paul Torday among other equally distinguished novelists who set the standards for the best in contemporary writing.
Johnson’s Life of London
by Boris Johnson
(Harper Press £20.00)
Boris Johnson, politician, writer and scholar, veritably brings London to life in his new book through the portrayal of the doings of illustrious Londoners from Roman times to today His gallery of London notables include some great eccentrics and scandalous personages – not unlike himself – whose achievements and accomplishments are part of the fabric of the city itself. The meaty minutiae of the lives of Dick Whittington, Geoffrey Chaucer, Samuel Johnson, John Wilkes and JMW Turner are laid bare to be judged, admired or reviled as merited. There are other less titillating portraits among Johnson’s eighteen mini biographies including some utter unknowns like the seventeenth century inventor Robert Hooke and a modern musician called Keith Richards.
The biographies are interspersed with descriptions of ‘sundry interesting London inventions.’
It is no longer fashionable - or even possible - to underestimate the scholarship and intellectual agility of Boris Johnson. His eccentricities and bumbling manner belie the erudition and analytical power evident in his TV documentaries, his books, his role as editor of the Spectator–and pre-eminently in his present persona as a politician of great energy and irrepressibility.
Apricot Jam and Other Stories.
By Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
(Nobel Prize for Literature 1970) (Canongate £16.99)
Nobel Laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is best known for his chilling indictment of the Stalinist regime in his novelsThe Gulag Archipelago, Cancer Ward and the novella A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
Many of the stories in Apricot Jamwere written during Solzhenitsyn’s exile in the USA and some after his repatriation to a ‘free’ Russia in 1994. We must thank Scottish publishers Canongate for making this collection of the English translations available to UK readers.
I have never read Solzhenitsyn as a novelist –as one would the work of the other great Stalinist critic Mikhail Bulgakov. I found myself mesmerized by the sheer horror of his narrative revealing shocking crimes against humanity in the forced labour camps (Gulags) of the era –more of a documentary than a novel. Cancer Ward was equally shocking—in the mid-1970s these books were our first inkling of the iniquities of the brutal Stalinist regime.
The stories in Apricot Jam are much more revealing of Solzhenitsyn’s merits as a writer. They span the Stalinist era, the Second World War and modern Russia and are full of a nostalgic regret for the lives wasted, the careers ruined and the betrayal of a generation by the all-powerful Stalin and his successors.
The later stories portray a wounded civilisation trying desperately to cope with ‘freedom’. World renowned luminaries like Marshal Zhukov find the lunatic uncertainties created by the mad masters of the post-Stalin era, Khruschev, Beria and Brezhnev impossible to cope with.
And along came Glasnost and Gorbachev confusing the populace even further
Of particular interest to the modern reader is ‘Fracture Point’ the story of a Soviet industrialist who feverishly adapts his management style to the demands of pre and post Glasnost industrial dictats, moving from running colossal factories to overseeing their rapid decentralizing and downsizing.
This collection is a remarkable document of the arbitrary changes forced on the lives of a hapless people by autocratic regimes.
COSTA AWARDS WINNERS 2012
Costa Novel Award
- Pure by Andrew Miller (Sceptre)
Costa First Novel Award
- Tiny Sunbirds Far Away by Christie Watson (Quercus)
Costa Poetry Award
- The Bees by Carol Ann Duffy (Picador)
