Former Booker judge Louise Doughty says hooray! for
the bravest Booker longlist ever compiled.
* Julian Barnes The Sense of an Ending
* Sebastian Barry On Canaan’s Side
* Carol Birch Jamrach’s Menagerie
* Patrick deWitt The Sisters Brothers
* Esi Edugyan Half Blood Blues
* Yvvette Edwards A Cupboard Full of Coats
* Alan Hollinghurst The Stranger’s Child
* Stephen Kelman Pigeon English
* Patrick McGuinness The Last Hundred Days
* A D Miller Snowdrops
* Alison Pick Far to Go
* Jane Rogers The Testament of Jessie Lamb
* D J Taylor Derby Day
John Banville gets to grips with Ann Wroe’s inventive biography of Orpheus.
In Orpheus Ann Wroe has written the biography of a mythic figure – the book is dedicated “to everyone who protested, ‘But Orpheus isn’t real'” – and a meditation on the melody art plays at the deepest levels of life. Her immediate inspiration is the extraordinary sequence of sonnets that Rilke wrote, or transcribed at Orpheus’s dictation, as he thought it, in a space of weeks at the beginning of 1922. Indeed, Wroe’s Orpheus might be seen as an attempt to emulate in glowing, rhapsodic prose the arc of Rilke’s transcendent poetic achievement.
A caveat. Anyone expecting from Wroe’s book a straightforward historyof the Orpheus legend will be disappointed. Certainly it is a work of scholarship, but scholarship as practised by
a rhapsode. In tackling her subject the author seemingly has traced and read every available source, ancient and modern, including those works attributed to Orpheus himself, such as “The
Argonautica”, the Book of Orphic hymns, and the Lithica, a treatise on the magical properties of stones. She has travelled to Orpheus’s supposed birthplace, Gela in Bulgaria, the Thrace of
old, where at a musical evening in a local hotel she spots a reincarnation of her hero in a “small, tow-headed boy of five or six” who “moves with extraordinary grace, on tiptoe,
twirling around each obstacle . . . singing”. There are other sightings, in unlikely places: a London Underground station; the beach at Atlantic City; Jean Cocteau’s 1950 film Orphée in
which the god-like singer travels by taxi and enters Hades through a mirror; Jean Anouilh’s play Eurydice, set in a railway café in the middle of the second world war.’
Simon Schama gives a quick-fire interview to the Guardian.
‘I was struck by the description of yourself as the “short-trousered, snake-belted yid kid from Golders Green”. Do you still feel like that character?’
‘I do. It may be just because for the book I am now working on – a history of the Jewish people – I have been looking back at some of that time, a sort of downmarket version of Proust.
But Jewish history and heritage has run deep in my psyche for ever, really, in a slightly tortured way. I remember in an exam at Cambridge we were asked to write this three-hour essay on one of
three titles. I chose “The Manor” and wrote not on feudalism but on how I remembered my Uncle Harry describing Golders Green as his manor. My childhood sort of stained me in a good way.
That sense of being both part of British culture and an outsider in it.’
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