Tower and Town, March 2022

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A Good Read

This time of year always finds me with a shifty Sunday evening awareness of looming piles of undone prep. It's Richard Jefferies Prize shortlist time again, so I have six books to read and am responding with my annual whiny adolescent 'Don't want to...' I do want to really, and I will, but until I recover my grown-up equilibrium I'm procrastinating with all sorts of other reading. I've finally got around to a book that I've had my eye on for a while, Starlings of Bucharest by Sarah Armstrong. It's not 'a thriller' in the sense of tense stake outs, count-downs or explosions. A 'creeper' maybe? Set in the 1970s, our protagonist, Ted, is a gauche young pawn, an aspiring cinema critic sent to cover film productions and festivals behind the Iron Curtain. Interspersed with his story are the reports from the surveillance teams in Bucharest, London and Moscow, interpreting and misinterpreting his moves, wondering if and how to recruit him to their various causes. Halfway through reading I discovered it's a sequel to The Wolves of Leninsky Prospekt, so I plan to read that next.

I loved Francis Spufford's first novel Golden Hill, and have been waiting for his second Light Perpetual to come out in paperback. It's an exercise in what-iffery, a kind of narrative that can be irritating and contrived, but Spufford is masterly. His story of the unlived lives of five children killed by a bomb in 1944 is warm and poignant, without sentimentality. Full of rigorously described, though not over-done, period detail he draws the reader into lives which not only are completely made up – it's a novel, we know this – but which we are aware are made up within the novel. It's very clever, while being completely accessible. Do read it.

Reading Charlotte Mendelson's The Exhibitionist is rather like picking at a scab, or compulsively pressing on an aching tooth. It describes a grimly, hypnotically dysfunctional family with horrid, wincing realism. Ray, an artist, is a tyrannical bully, his family creeps around him, enabling his appalling behaviour through love or fear or weakness, while the reader (this one at least) watches the unfurling horribleness with appalled fascination. I'm not making it sound appealing, I realise, but trust me, it's rather brilliant.

Debby Guest