Tower and Town, April 2020

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A Good Read

April is not the cruellest month. I reckon T S Eliot was just bitter because there were so many good books to read, and he was stuck writing The Waste Land. There’s lots to enjoy at the moment. 

To get us all in the mood for summer holidays (won’t be long now), I recommend Polly Samson’s A Theatre for Dreamers. Set in the glittering, exhausting sunshine of Hydra in 1960 it’s an evocative and immersive recreation of the circle of writers, poets and painters centring around Charmian Clift (Australian essayist and novelist)  and George Johnston (journalist and writer). The (fictional) narrator,  teenaged Erica, observes the tangled lives of the group, and in particular the triangle of Axel Jensen, Marianne, his wife, and the young poet Leonard Cohen. (Yes, that Marianne….) It’s about being young, and idealistic, and losing one’s innocence, and the terrible double-edgedness of being a ‘muse’.

On a vaguely related topic (well, it’s about musicians) I feel strongly that not enough people are reading Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid. The transcript of a fictional oral history of the stratospheric success and shattering split of an imagined rock band, it’s entertaining and convincing, with characters you can completely believe in and songs you’ll feel sure you could hum. You’ll want to watch ‘The Six’ on YouTube – but they’re not a real band.  Sorry.

Next, Peace Talks, by Tim Finch, a first-person narrative of a man coming to terms with grief (I know, yawn. Stop rolling your eyes at the back, and bear with me, it’s worth it). Edvard Behrens is a senior diplomat, arbitrating peace negotiations between governments/terrorists, dissecting barbaric acts and conflict, mediating conciliation. Through his internal monologue, addressed to his late wife, we learn about this civilised, cultured, honourable and discreet man trying to accommodate the atrocities in his own life and that of the world.

I haven’t  read Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light, and am not likely to any time soon, but I’ll be very happy to hear your opinions. So many of you came in and skipped out happily clutching all 900 pages of it – some people bought two copies. Very impressive, those Pilates classes are really paying dividends!

Debbie Guest