Last in my reviews of the year comes books (I saw many films but time has run out for making a constructive narrative out of them). I read a lot in 2024, though it never feels like I have read enough, always with a book at my side to the point that I practically panic if I find myself without one. What else is the time for except to lose oneself outside time? As in previous years I am simplifying the annual reading report by picking one book per month. They are not necessarily the best books I read each month – and I read more in some months than I did in others – and only a few were published in 2024. But together they make an interesting picture, or at least I hope so.
January. The year started with a door-stopper of a volume, Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine. It’s the first publication from the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which houses the archive of Dylan’s papers and such like which was bought by the George Kaiser Family Foundation and the University of Tulsa in 2016 and opened in 2022. Dylan was smarter than the pack from the very start of his career and kept everything – tickets, posters, manuscripts, draft lyrics, photographs, films, and of course recordings. The book tells the story of Dylan’s life through such images, many of them not previously seen by the fans and scholars. The story is intercut with some adulatory essays, and indeed the whole thing is adulatory. Throughout its 608 pages nothing ever goes wrong for the man. It’s so sanitised you end up wondering from where the inspiration for all those songs can have come. But it’s also an exceptional tribute to a unique genius, who somehow is just the one person but who also contains multitudes.
February. I am slowly making my way through the novels of Beryl Bainbridge, which vary in quality but are each of them witty, acidic, sharply observed and always so readable. I read two this year. Young Adolf is the better-known, but it disappointed me. It has the prefect premise (for the Liverpool-born Bainbridge) – the dubious possibility that around 1912-13 the near-destitute Hitler stayed in Liverpool with his half-brother Alois. It’s a theme ripe for a satirical alternative history, but I thought that after a sprightly start it descended intro triviality. But Winter Garden, published two year later (1980) is something else. It tells of a moderate, suburban man, who tells his wife he going going on a fishing holiday in Scotland but instead join a group going on an artists’ visit to the Soviet Union, one of whom is his sculptor mistress. What starts off as a moderately interesting tale with comic encounters based on cultural misunderstandings eventually reveals itself to be something more subtle, as a secret world progressively closes itself around her hapless hero. Its very elusiveness becomes the theme and makes the novel so satisfying. I now put it among the best of the books of hers that I have read. Next up, Sweet William.
March. I had never heard of Jim Crace until I came across a copy of his 1986 debut novel, Continent, in an Oxfam shop in Keswick. It looked intriguing, and at £2 why not give it a try? If it failed it could always go back to another Oxfam shop. From the start I was so astonished. It’s a set of inter-connected short stories about the different parts of an imaginary continent, that is part-Europe, part-Africa, and which could be from centuries past or just a few years ago. The stories are half fables, half travel pieces, about societies as mysterious as they are familiar. I found it to be such a satisfying, surprising read, from someone wholly in control of words. The only blemish for me was one middle chapter about a forest tribe whose women conceive only once a year, which seemed not to belong to the continent as I had come to understand it. The allegory was different. My thought on finishing the novel (if that is what it is) was that here was the best book I had read in ages, that I must read more from the author, but not now. Or was it a work in itself and I had no need to read anything else of him? I have yet to decide.
April. A while ago I was approached by a publisher who asked if I might be interested in submitting a proposal for a book about the 1911 Sidney Street siege, in which British police and troops battled with Latvian-born anarchists in London’s East End. The reason for asking was a blog post I had written to mark the centenary of the event, focussed on how it was filmed by the emerging newsreel companies. I was tempted for a while, then turned it down, deciding that I knew too little of the sources (outside of the film and media ones) to come up with something worthwhile. But the publisher remained keen on the idea, as they approached another researcher, Andrew Whitehead, who came up with A Devilish Kind of Courage, a fine retelling of the history, which was published this year. While one might think that no one could find anything new to say about such events after the outstanding work done by Donald Rumbelow for his 1973 The Houndsditch Murders and the Siege of Sidney Street, Whitehead has new angles and new insights to entice anyone interested in this extraordinary history. In particular, he is very good on how the events were reported by the media, including the newsreels, acknowledging my work then bringing colour and feeling to it. I would never have done so well.
May. It was while sauntering through Paris (see December below for the reason I pick that verb) I spotted an immaculate copy of the American essayist and novelist James Baldwin’s 1976 book-length essay on film, The Devil Finds Work, in the marvellous antiquarian section of the Shakespeare & Co. bookshop on the Left Bank in Paris. It was promptly bought and given to me as a birthday present. I knew some of it already, but had not been prepared for the overall excellence, the sustained insightfulness into black lives interwoven with the experience of cinema, both personal and collective. His choice of films to wrote about is particularly piquant: The Defiant Ones, Lady Sings the Blues (a film “related to the black American experience in about the same way, and to the same extent that Princess Grace Kelly is related to the Irish potato famine”), The Exorcist, his own failure to write an acceptable screenplay (in Hollywood terms) based on The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Though I find Baldwin’s style a little over-heated at times, in terms of observation, personal history, understanding and language, I have read few better works on film. It is sharp in purpose, sharp in style. It demonstrates time and again the value of seeing more.
June. I came across Belgian historian David Van Reybrouck at the Hay literary festival, where his wit and sharpness immediately impressed. The book he was promoting, Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World, looked like it would be a tough sell for an English-speaking audience which would probably struggle to tell you anything about Indonesia’s history or why it might have importance for all of us. This has been Van Reybrouck’s mission, which he achieves triumphantly. It’s not just that his huge history (656 pages) tell you in eye-opening detail about decolonisation and the emergence of an independent society (the fourth largest country in the world, in case you didn’t know), but that he does so with such novelistic style. He uses literary devices, from the management of characters (the book makes distinctive use of oral histories from people affected by the events, conducted by the author himself), to allegorical devices (in particular the sinking of a passenger boat whose different levels reflected the different levels of society in Dutch-governed Indonesia), to his use of imagery and colour (his admission in an afterword that he used a colour scheme made me want to read it all over again to see how). It is orchestrated history of the finest kind.
July. Alberto Manguel’s 2018 Packing My Library is a stimulating, melancholy short study on the meaning of reading which turns, unexpectedly, in its latter stages into a powerful disquisition on the function of national libraries. It begins with the cultural historian and essayist for unclear reasons having to empty his French village home of its 35,000 books, and move to a small flat in New York. He has volunteers to help his catalogue the collection (not every book owner enjoys such a luxury) and contemplates what books, reading and the creation of a personal library means. It is filled with entertaining, apposite digressions, of which the most instructive was learning that Jorge Luis Borges (who Manguel knew well) had only a hundred or so books at home, since he could remember all that he read and could therefore dispose of much of its physicality. Is book collecting then a selfish act, or a fearful response to the loss of memory? So far, so engrossing, as Manguel has yet to write an unilluminating sentence, but then his life changes when out of the blue he is offered the directorship of the national library of Argentina, a post at one time held by Borges (again, this is not the sort of thing that happens for we ordinary book owners with some space problems). Manguel moves from disquisitions inspired by his own book collecting to considering what a national library means, in a manner both theoretical and practical (Argentina’s seems to have been in need of a major rethink). This is exhilarating stuff, especially if you have worked in such a library and have dimly perceived the tectonics at play. All in all, a remarkable book.
August. The best new film that I saw all year was the Irish feature That They May Face the Rising Sun, directed by Pat Collins. It was a quiet film that said more than most. I had to turn to the 2022 novel by John McGahern on which it was based. This tells of a small lake-side community in Co. Leitrim, Ireland in the 1990s. It is a closely-knit place of old animosities and lifelong sorrows, in which some difficult people are managed by the kindly literary couple Joe and Kate Ruttledge, part-native, part outsiders. It is a haunting, unsentimental work that leaves you puzzling over the ruin that some bring to their own lives and the ruin that others bring upon their fellow humans. Mostly gentle in tone, attuned to lives that are tied to the seasons, it has shock moments that almost make you want to assault the guilty parties involved. It also has one of the finest closing sentences to a novel that I have read (opening sentences have long had their connoisseurs, closing ones less so).
At the porch, before entering the house, they both turned to look back across the lake, even though they knew that both Jaimsie and Mary had long since disappeared from the sky.
Of course, to understand the sentence’s immaculate construction and placing, you have to read the novel first.
September. Ian Buruma is one of those authors whose every work I read as soon as they come up, which they tend to do with satisfying frequency. This year he published Spinoza: Freedom’s Messiah. Written as part of Yale University Press’s ‘Jewish Lives’ series, the book tells the story and explains the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza at a time (mid-17th century Dutch Republic) when freedom of thought was a heresy, and the risks of so doing perilous. Buruma weaves into this his own upbringing in the Netherlands and his wider knowledge of liberal ethics, managing to make it clear how Spinoza’s thoughts and words were specific to their time, yet with application for any time. What Buruma is careful not to do, however, is to touch directly upon his own clash with the moralised forces of today, when in 2018 he was driven from the editorship of the New York Review of Books after defending the right to publish an author with a controversial past. The shock of this hangs over all of his recent writings, but he has yet to address it directly. Instead, we see that particular collision through Spinoza’s motivations, and may wonder.
October. I finish most of the books that I start reading, but early in the year had to give up on James Belich’s The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe. There was just too much detail, too little space left in which to breathe. It is probably the definitive history, for historians, of the Black Death, but a simple soul like me needs a it of narrative to sugar the pill – otherwise, I might just as well be reading a scientific treatise. And so I turned , later in the year to Justinian’s Flea by William Rosen, published in 2007. This tells of an earlier plague, that which struck the Byzantine empire and beyond in the sixth century. This is narrative history of the reassuring kind, with plenty of juicy characters, plot twists and massacres, mixed up with some remarkable passages in which Rosen goes into the biological detail of how plague spreads. It’s a book that started with an introduction that wove together all of the issues in brilliant style, and then progressively sagged, becoming ragged and a times irritating, with some writing quirks that you would have thought someone with Rosen’s publishing background would never have allowed himself. I learned a lot, but it was less than I had hoped. Belich would probably tell me I told you so.
November. It looked dubious to me. A novel about the writing of a classic novel. When does that sort of literary presumption ever work? But I was intrigued, and so picked up a copy from Canterbury’s excellent Chaucer Bookshop, where every one of its second-hand books looks so cared for. Steven Price’s 2019 novel Lampedusa swiftly turned into my book of the year. It tells the story of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the Italian prince who, after a lifetime of thinking about literature, history and nation, wrote one novel, The Leopard, published posthumously in 1958. It was immediately recognised as a masterpiece and has cemented its position as one of the greatest of Italian literature, aided to a degree by Luchino Visconti’s equally classic film version, made in 1963. Price’s device is to show how the author’s life mirrored that of his great-grandfather Don Giulio Fabrizio Tomasi, whose life inspired The Leopard. Each man is disillusioned by a changing world, each mourns the passing of an aristocracy that once had meaning, each finds some hope in the young who no longer have need of them. A number of incidents in Price’s novel echo those in The Leopard (such as a visit to a convent where men are not normally allowed), and both novels have chapters entitled ‘The Death of Prince’, following in detail the passing from this world of their subject. Price was bold in seeking to emulate the ambition, tone and sublimity of The Leopard – and entirely successful in doing so. Indeed, having finished reading it, I re-read The Leopard and found it filled with brilliances but with some passages (mostly discussions of political points) that do not convince as they could. Has Price written the greater novel? It could be.
December. I am ending the year reading my new book of the year. Revolusi is an epic achievement, but in the end I am most drawn to modest things. Eric Hazan’s Balzac’s Paris: The City as Human Comedy is a guide to Paris through the works of the great nineteenth-century French novelist, and a guide to Balzac through the places of Paris. It is so simply done. There are visits to the quarters and streets of Paris in which Balzac set it novels and accommodated his characters. There are chapters on Balzac’s Parisian homes, his experiences with the press and publishers, his friends and associates. Hazan notes how Balzac’s Paris is inspired by the Paris and the times that he knew yet is a wholly fictional creation, leaving out significant factors (major historical events that he lived through; the arrival of newfangleness such as trains, which he frequently used but rarely included in his fiction; working class characters). Hazan is prodigiously knowledgeable yet expresses such knowledge so economically. Though it helps to know something of Balzac’s ‘Human Comedy’ series of novels, the book should be no less enjoyable without this, so piquant are the characters and the locations that Hazan reproduces. But it should be impossible for anyone to have read the book and not want automatically to turn to a Balzac novel, and probably to visit Paris while doing so. Having loved Balzac when young I have had some difficulty returning to his novels, but will try again, with new enthusiasm and a keener eye. I think Lost Illusions would be the best place to start again.
To wander over Paris! What an adorable and delightful existence! To saunter is a science; it is the gastronomy of the eye. To take a walk is to vegetate; to saunter is to live.
Balzac, as quoted by Eric Hazan
