Tower and Town, December 2023

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A Good Read

I’m sure I’m not the only person who’d like ten minutes alone in a room with the Grim Reaper to let him/her know my feelings about the apparently indiscriminate Scything Policy. My current strong feelings about his over-enthusiastic ‘Gathering’ are nothing to do with personal losses, but stem from reading A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing, a collection of the late Hilary Mantel’s essays, reviews and Reith Lectures. I confess to being a touch agnostic about ‘that’ trilogy. I mean, I can see it’s a masterly work of near-genius, but I read Wolf Hall and rather felt I was done. After all, I knew the plot (History A-Level, and Keith Michell as Henry VIII on TV in the 70s), and Mantel’s (wonderful) writing was going to carry on in parts 2&3, so I perhaps philistine-ly thought …meh.

This posthumous volume is an absolute treat though, ranging through the recurring themes in her writing and her life, the personal and political. She writes about writing itself, about history and power. She is clever, subtle, intellectual and very funny. Her work in progress when she died a year ago was a take on Jane Austen, a novel from the point of view of Mary Bennett, Mr Darcy’s unimpressed sister-in-law. The knowledge that it will never be completed has me seething with resentment that she’s gone so very much too soon.

Lindsey Davis’s stories of Ancient Rome’s villainy, tragedy, crime and political shenanigans are favourites of mine, so Voices of Rome is on my Christmas list. It’s four novellas, perfect for the time of year, when even if you aren’t ‘cooking for a crowd’ as the women’s magazines always put it, you might be busy, distracted or just too damn tired to concentrate on anything too long! (Or is that just me?) Three more that should hit the spot are the new Sharpe novel from Bernard Cornwell, Sharpe’s Command, just the thing for Boxing Day afternoon. Angus is enthusiastic about Rick Stein’s Simple Suppers, apparently genuinely simple and delicious, so one for the ‘busy cook’ (apologies for the cliché, it’s the season!) in your life. Or of course, buy it and cook for yourself! The second collection of Lunch with the FT columns, interviews with well-known people is an entertaining, occasionally infuriating, sometimes enlightening compendium, the kind of book I’d buy as a present, then keep for myself.

And finally, the one we’ve all been waiting for –  The Day of the Locust  by Terry ‘I am Pilgrim’ Hayes. I’m off now to hang up my ‘Don’t Disturb’ notice. Merry Christmas, one and all.

Debby Guest