| | Review by The Spectator

Ferdinand Mount

Andrew Brown has spent a lot of his life writing about religion, not least for The Spectator. He has never written anything remotely like Fishing in Utopia (Granta, £8.99), but then nor has anyone else. The book tells the story of how the author fell in love with Sweden and everything Swedish, including his first wife, the fishing and the socialism. And when he falls out of love, it is not a straightforward disillusionment, but rather a rueful recognition of how hard it was for a country of dirt-poor farmers to emerge as an industrial nation without losing some of the idealism in the affluence. The descriptions of fishing are as enchanting as anything since Izaak Walton, but in its light and easy style the book is as profound as it is enchanting.

You might not expect a collection of old parliamentary sketches to make a compelling account of an age, but Frank Johnson’s Best Seat in the House (JR Books, £18.99) does, slightly to the surprise even of someone who admired his elegant paradoxes as much as I do. In fact, this cabinet of miniatures, deftly selected and edited by his widow, Virginia Fraser, brings back those not-so-dear dead days more pungently than many a weighty history of the decades in question. Here they are again, the Beast of Bolsover, the Chingford Strangler and all the other characters that Frank invented for the delight of the chattering classes — and he invented them too.

D. J .Taylor

Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake would have won the 2003 Man Booker Prize if this judge had had anything to do with it: unfortunately everyone else for some reason plumped unhesitatingly for D.B.C. Pierre’s Vernon God Little. Though perfectly coherent on its own terms, The Year of the Flood (Bloomsbury, £18.99) is a companion piece — set once again in the aftermath of planetary meltdown with a few vagrant survivors struggling watchfully amid the ruins. Dystopian novels, as well as being notoriously difficult to do, are usually grim affairs, but Atwood’s rheumy eye for post- apocalyptic detail is balanced by some genuine humour. I also liked Allan Massie’s thoroughly neurotic Survivors (Vagabond Voices, £10), which features the alcoholically challenged inhabitants of an expats’ bar in Rome, moves on into the realms of violent death and corpse disposal without in any way losing plausibility, and, in the edgy dialogue exchanged between people who don’t really like each other, is wonderfully reminiscent of Francis King’s early novels.

Verse collection of the year was the late Ian Hamilton’s Collected Poems (Faber, £14.99) edited and with a bracing introduction by Alan Jenkins, a poet who, for all his originality, can in some sense claim to be Hamilton’s disciple. Hamilton’s minimalism, his chronic restraint and puritan truncations can sometimes be faintly over- (or under-) whelming, and there are times when the reader cries out for a bit of adjectival luxuriance. At the same time, the thoughtfulness, and the essential warm-heartedness that lies behind them, is always engaging. Rather than drifting vaguely from stanza to stanza, I found myself taking immense care to try and understand exactly what was going on, and of how many modern poetry collections can that be said?