Bookbenchers: Patrick Mercer MP

A military flavour this week, as Patrick Mercer, the Conservative MP for Newark, tells us what’s on his shelves — and on his mind. It should come as no surprise that a former colonel in the Worcester and Sherwood Foresters would rescue the regimental history from the burning British Library. He is also a historical novelist. His latest short story, Dr Watson’s War, is about post-traumatic stress disorder in Victorian Britain. He wrote about the subject earlier this week.   

1) Which book is on your bedside table at the moment?
 
I am currently re-reading John Masters’ The Nightrunners of Bengal. I am reading not only for enjoyment, but also for the fact that Slightly Foxed has asked me to review it. I love Masters; he is lyrical without being prolix and the subject matter — the British Raj and the Indian Mutiny in particular — are both very close to my heart. The Nightrunners has the story of the Rhani of Jhansi as one of its themes and I also tried to tell this story in my novel Dust And Steel, except I didn’t do half as good a job.
 
2) Which book would you read to your children?
 
I only have one child, Rupert. He’s approaching his Finals in Classics and I imagine the only way that he is going to get his head fully around The Iliad is if I read it to him.
 
3) Which literary character would you most like to be?
 
Patrick O’Brian’s Captain Jack Aubrey — there’s no question! Aubrey has got a roving brief to clobber the nation’s enemies with nothing but HMS Surprise and her crew. Once he is on the high seas his bosses can’t get at him for there are no telephones, no texts, no Twitter and no other form of tripe. Above and beyond everything else, there are no windbag politicians attempting to give him orders.
 
4) Which book do you think best sums up ‘now’?
 
Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. I suppose it is naïve to think that the media has not always exercised a disproportionate effect upon policy and current affairs. However, Waugh, with a typical rheumy eye, boils the whole thing down with delightful simplicity. I can’t help but see the comparisons between the years leading up to the Second World War and now.
 
5) What was the last novel you read?
 
Sebastian Junger’s War. I am not even sure that it’s a novel, for Junger spent more than a year living with troops of an American Airborne division in Afghanistan and has woven their personal accounts into a story that is probably best described as ‘docufiction’. I believe that it’s got to be seen in conjunction with the DVD of the same story that is entitled Restrepo. Consumed in tandom, the two works make for an extraordinarily powerful and new type of literary experience.
 
6) Which book would you most recommend?
 
As a military fiction author myself, there is a slight conflict of interest here, but it must be George MacDonald Fraser’s Quartered Safe Out Here. Why? Well, there are several reasons. First, GMF writes magnificently and he’s never better, I believe, than when he’s talking about everyday things and everyday people. Here, he’s describing the campaign in Burma during the Second World War, and whilst that can hardly be called ‘everyday’, he concentrates not on the blood-and-guts, but on the ordinary men who surround him and their travails. His writing gives majesty to what simple men achieved and betrays a deep affection for them, their courage and their humility. I could equally well mention this book as the one that I would most like the errant Rupert to read, but I don’t think that there’s much hope of that.
 
7) Given enough time what book would you most like to study deeply?
 
I want to read Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes books in their entirety. As the reader will probably have gathered, I’m hooked on the late Victorian period and whilst I have read the majority of Doyle’s works, I still don’t feel that I know them properly. There are too many screen and literary versions and too many interpretations to know what makes up the essence of the author — and I have so much to learn from him.
 
8) Which books do you plan to read next?
 
James Holland’s Italy’s Sorrow — because I don’t know enough about the civil aspects of the campaign in Italy in the Second World War, the campaign in which my father fought and left such a deep impression on him.
 
Charles Dickens’s Hard Times because it is one of his most underrated masterpieces and focuses on a period of British history about which I’m particularly interested.
 
9) If the British Library were on fire and you could only save three books, which ones would you take?
 
The History of the Sherwood Foresters, volumes 1 and 2 and Cornelius Brown’s A History of Newark-on-Trent.