Books of the month: From You Are Here by David Nicholls to James by Percival Everett
After taking a stroll near Lewes in Sussex in 1932, Virginia Woolf wrote a striking phrase in her diary: “I want to walk, alone, and come to terms with my own head.” The quote appears as the epigraph to Harriet Baker’s Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner & Rosamond Lehmann (Allen Lane). It is a delightful read, enhanced by quirky photographs – including several of these visionary writers with their goats.
When Boris Johnson praised the “vaccine success” he attributed it to “greed, my friends”. His quotation is used by Angus Hanton in the chapter “The NHS Cash Cow” in Vassal State: How America Runs Britain (Swift), a depressing read about how US companies have siphoned profits from Britain. Hanton, a public policy expert, details how a £500m pandemic stockpile of PPE, bought from American companies, was poorly maintained and in a shoddy condition. Hanton’s conclusion is that, when it comes to expensive US private providers, “greed did not deliver success for Britain. It cost us dearly.”
Social historian Sarah Wise has written an important, shocking book in The Undesirables: The Law That Locked Away a Generation (Oneworld). It is estimated that 50,000 Britons were incarcerated as “defectives” under the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act. Wise’s “Appendix 2: Anecdotes of Women Detained for Having a Child Out of Wedlock” is one of the bleakest I’ve read for a long time. It includes numerous accounts of women being locked up for decades in asylums and heavily sedated, just for giving birth. Wise throws light on a shameful national scandal.
Two quick fiction (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), in which playwright Sophia deals with her novelist father’s shortcomings via a brutal play about a holiday she took with him as a teenager, is caustically funny and includes a sharp line about the overpriced “bad-wedding kind of wine” you get at London theatres. Meanwhile, Catherine Chidgey’s (Europa) offers a shrewd look at human foibles through the eyes of a talking magpie called Tama. This novel is an imaginative treat.
