Christmas Books II | 21 November 2009

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.