Martin Amis’s actual best novels

In the numerous pieces published about the death of Martin Amis, a number of contributors felt the understandable need to provide an assessment of his best work. Many of these lists included his essays and criticism; and in terms of his novels, there was an almost unanimous agreement that Money should be at the top, closely followed by London Fields, with third place allotted to a later – sometimes much later – work, presumably to offer an indication that the writer of the piece had kept abreast of Amis’s work during the erratic second half of his career.

They are wrong, though. While Money would probably slip into my top five, it wouldn’t make the top three. Which are:

3. Dead Babies (1975)

Everything that is present and correct in Money and London Fields is already here, in spades, a decade earlier. Grotesque characters, outlandish excesses, fears about teeth, characters called Keith – this was the template for all that came later. Ostensibly a mystery of sorts set during a country-house weekend, the plot is to most intents and purposes incidental to the stylistic flourishes in every page. But there’s enough room for a twist that is far more unsettling than those served up in the later two novels.

Best bit: It’s tempting to opt for the author’s note at the very beginning of the book, where Amis sets out his stall with typical aplomb: “Not only are all characters and scenes in this book entirely fictitious; most of the technical, medical and psychological data are, too. My working maxim here has been as follows: I may not know much about science, but I know what I like.”

For sheer comic chutzpah, however, it’s hard to look past the entire chapter about Keith’s family, the ludicrously obese Whiteheads. Here, for example, is father Frank: “As he trundles down the street school-parties are floored by his myriad stray fists of flab; bus platforms snap off should he climb on board; lifts whinny, shudder and stay where they are when he presses the UP button and plummet terrifyingly whether or not he is so foolish as to press the DOWN; chairs splinter beneath him; tables somersault at a touch from his elbow; joints crack and floorboards powder.”

2. Time’s Arrow (1991)

Make what you will of the fact that this was Amis’s only novel to be shortlisted for the Booker. But his story of the life of a German doctor told backwards – from his death in an American hospital, through the Holocaust, and back to his earliest memory in the city of Solingen, near Düsseldorf – is crammed with haunting images that stay rooted in the memory. It may not be the first life-told-backwards story, but it is surely the best.

Best bit: All of the scenes in Auschwitz are harrowing and impressive in equal measure. The prisoners being given jewellery as they are brought back to life in the shower room; the old man splashing and struggling in the latrine until he is “hoisted out by the jubilant guards”.

But nothing exemplifies the power of the approach more than the reunifications the doctor engineers on the ramp at the railway station: “As matchmakers, we didn’t know the meaning of the word failure; on the ramp, stunning successes were as cheap as spit. When the families coalesced, how their hands and eyes would plead for one another, under out indulgent gaze. We toasted them far into the night.”

1. The Rachel Papers (1973)

Nothing written after this topped it for sheer verve. Essentially a fictionalised account of the period Amis spent cramming to get into Oxford, the entire first page – “My name is Charles Highway, though you wouldn’t think it to look at me. It’s such a rangy, well-travelled, big-cocked name and, to look at, I am none of these.” – could be probably be quoted in its entirety by readers of a certain generation. No doubt much of it could be viewed as problematic when looking at it through the rear-view mirror; but really its only real flaw is that it inspired a terrible film.

Best bit: There’s much to be said for the university interview scene, and the chapter where Charles and Rachel have sex for the first time: “Two thirteens twenty-six, three thirteens thirty-nine, thirteen twenty-sixes forty-two. (As regards the physical aspect, by the way, this is all utterly intolerable.)” But back to the first page, and this: “Twenty, of course, is the real turning point. Sixteen, eighteen, twenty-one; these are arbitrary milestones, enabling you only to get arrested for HP-payment evasion, get married, buggered, executed, and so on: external things … Twenty may not be the start of maturity but, in all conscience, it’s the end of youth.”

Hits and misses of 2022

When I look back on my reading in 2022, it strikes me – a little to my surprise – that there aren’t that many books that I absolutely loved. There was plenty of stuff that was engaging, readable, admirable even; but not a huge amount of material that I would thrust into a friend’s hand and say (nicely), “Read it!” Anyhow, here are my hits, misses, and in-betweens of the year. (And, as ever, the year of publication has limited impact on the year that I actually read it – I’m happy to admit that I’m a couple of years behind the times.)

Hits

Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe

There’s probably not much left to be said about this history of the Sackler family – including Valium, Librium, OxyContin etc. – that hasn’t already been said. But it’s worth opening the book, choosing a single page at random, and then assessing that page in terms of just how much research (and legal input) was required just to get that one page written and published. (And then multiply that by 450 pages.)

The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams

Quirky and original, a novel that entwines the story of the first Oxford English Dictionary with that of the Suffragettes and the First World War (and that’s also the order in which I enjoyed these topics the most, too). Slightly slower-paced than some would like, perhaps, but a love of words shines through and it’s entirely unlike anything else I read last year.

In-betweens

The Dead Line by Holly Watt

There’s nothing essentially wrong with this, but it was a bit of a letdown after Holly Watt’s first book, To The Lions. The setup is excellent – a plea for help from Bangladesh, found hidden in clothes made for the British high street – but the pace doesn’t quite match that of the author’s debut. And there’s an interminable chase through a derelict ship that seems like it goes on for chapter after chapter (although checking back it’s only 30 pages or so).

Girl A by Abigail Dean

Again, this is a perfectly decent; in fact it’s mostly very well done, offering an insightful glimpse into the lives of a group of siblings who escape their abusive home. But the twist, dear me…I obviously won’t give anything away here, but if you didn’t see it coming (and you will have), then you will have seen it a dozen times before.

Misses

The Power of Geography by Tim Marshall

Tim Marshall’s previous book, Prisoners Of Geography, was a deserved bestseller, looking at how the quirks of physical geography – Russia’s lack of access to a warm-water port, for example – had played their part in shaping the political landscape. This follows a similar format (ten maps, ten chapters) but, crucially, it forgets to add a hook. There are no ‘prisoners’ of geography here; just potted histories of ten countries or areas. Nothing wrong with that in itself, but it’s not a patch on the previous book, and has ‘rushed follow-up’ written all over it.

The Sanatorium by Sarah Pearse

Sometimes a thriller comes out of nowhere, and fully justifies the hype surrounding it – Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train, say. This one had all the hype, but is just a bit … meh. The set-up is unconvincing, the characters unengaging, and I’d pretty much forgotten it a day or two after finishing it. (It has ratings of 3.4 on Goodreads and 3.8 on Amazon, which are definitely on the low side for such a successful book.)

My best and worst books of 2020

Like many people, I imagine, my reading habits changed in 2020. I read more; and I read different types of books. It’s been a year of comfort reading, no doubt, and as the year went on I found myself increasingly drawn to either 19th century staples – Austen, Hardy – or to ‘boy’s own’ thrillers from the 60s and 70s by the likes of Desmond Bagley, Hammond Innes and Victor Canning.

Still, amongst all that retro reading there was still time for some relatively new material, although by no means all of it was published during the year itself. Here’s my best and worst of the year, selected from all of the above.

Best

1. The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

Although dealing with another harrowing subject – the abuse of boys in a Florida reform school in the 1960s – this relatively slim volume is a significant departure stylistically from Whitehead’s slavery era The Underground Railroad. It feels pared back, restrained, and entirely rooted in a grim reality. All of which means that, when the inevitable rushes of violence do arrive, they become all the more powerful.

2. To The Lions by Holly Watt

Some reviewers felt that this first novel by investigative journalist Watt failed to live up to her reporting work, and didn’t quite work. They are wrong. It’s a gripping and entirely believable account of two journalist trying to uncover a gruesome secret being played out in the Libyan desert. And it’s wonderful to see a real, functioning newsroom portrayed properly in a novel, rather than the dismissive and one-dimensional version seen in most books and TV dramas.

3. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

Here’s a hot tip for you – keep an eye on this up-and-coming author, he could have a bright future. I’d read plenty of Dickens before last year – Great Expectations, Hard Times, A Tale Of Two Cites etc. – but for some inexplicable reason had never got around to what the author called his “favourite child”. Clearly there will be nothing I can write here that hasn’t been written before, but it was a joy to find that the twin evils found elsewhere in his novels – caricature instead of character, and overbearing moralising – were entirely absent. A pleasure from start to finish.

Worst

There were a few candidates here. Despite previously enjoying Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and No Country For Old Men, the ultra-sparse style of The Crossing was a step too far for me. I thought Sally Rooney’s Normal People was overrated, being extraordinarily simplistic in places. And I started Lisa Jewell’s bestseller The Family Upstairs but really didn’t have the inclination to finish it. But this novel, first published in 1998, took the overall prize:

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano

I really wanted to love this. Billed as the Latin American novel which blew away all the old giants of the scene (Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes), the Chilean writer Bolano forget everything that made all of those other authors so successful. Plot. Imagination. Characters to care about. This is part road movie, part Bildungsroman, part treatise on poetry, and the sum of its middling parts never once threatens to become a coherent whole.

‘Lockdown’ by Peter May: What it got right and what it got wrong

Back in 2005 Peter May was not an unknown author, having published most of his China thriller series as well as several standalone novels, but he was certainly without the necessary clout for publishers to put into print whatever came their way from him.

And so it was that his thriller ‘Lockdown’, set in London during a pandemic, failed to make it into print and instead stayed hidden away in a bottom drawer. But this year, when the coronavirus hit, it was hastily pulled out of that drawer and has become a deserved hit 15 years on.

The book certainly shows a remarkable prescience in predicting the impact of a pandemic. But just how much did it get right – and what did it get wrong? (‘Wrong’, of course, is a slightly unfair term, given that Lockdown is a work of fiction and not necessarily intended to predict the future. But we’ll stick with it for now.) Here’s the verdict.

What it got right

(1) The general setup.

It’s a novel about an infectious respiratory virus pandemic. The virus causes “sneezing and coughing and groaning and retching”. Places are locked down, normal life is suspended, and the creation of a vaccine is key. Sound familiar?

(2) New hospitals are created.

Not Nightingale hospitals in this case, but the Dome (a.k.a. the Millennium Done and O2 Arena), which is turned into a mega-hospital with thousands of beds and no facilities for visitors. It is described as a “billion pound millennium folly for which, beyond its short life as a concert venue, they had finally found a use.”

(3) The Prime Minister gets the virus.

And just like in real life, he is treated at St Thomas’s Hospital in London. It’s not giving too much away to say that the outcome is different in the book – we find out what happened as early as page 18, and that it leads to a “power struggle between the Deputy Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer”. There’s no Deputy Prime Minister in the current Boris Johnson government, of course. But substitute ‘Deputy Prime Minister’ for ‘Minister for the Cabinet Office’ in the excerpt above, and you’ve definitely got something there.

(4) Checkpoints are in place.

In the novel, the Army sets up checkpoint across London. In the real world, Gloucestershire Police set up checkpoints along the Welsh-English border ahead of the ‘firebreak lockdown’ in Wales. Different, yes, but also the same.

(5) It’s all about the vaccine.

There’s no ‘cure’ for the virus, either in the 2005 book or in the 2020 reality, so the only way of stopping the pandemic is to find a vaccine that works. Yes, the vaccine in the book is made by a French company, and the government buys 15m doses; whereas in real life there are a number of vaccines being developed and the government has access to 335m doses (at the time of writing). But the principle is there.

What it got wrong

(1) The origins and nature of the virus.

Saying too much about the origins of the virus in ‘Lockdown’ would require a huge spoiler alert. But it’s basically a mutant version of bird flu, specifically H5N1, and has a mortality rate of 80%. In reality, coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, which causes Covid-19, has – as the name suggests – more in common with the SARS outbreak of 2003/04 than it does with the H5N1 outbreak of 2008. Coronavirus also only has a mortality rate of 0.5% to 1.%.

(2) The spread of the virus.

As we know, coronavirus is believed to have originated in a seafood market in Wuhan, China, and then spread around the globe. In the book, the virus started in London, and the battle is still on to keep it contained as much as possible. But it’s not easy when, “In this modern age of air travel, we really do live in a global village.” Which leads us to……

(3) Public transport.

In ‘Lockdown’ there is no public transport – no flights, no Tube – and cars are few and far between, with our protagonist DI Jack MacNeil frequently driving around deserted streets. While transport has obviously been limited in recent months – and some air corridors between different countries have still not reopened – it’s still been largely possible to get around within the UK. Although many would suggest that the Tube should have stopped.

(4) Curfew.

“Since the curfew, nothing stirred, and if it did it would probably be shot.” That’s according to the book, and we haven’t quite reached that stage yet. (Obviously pubs have been told to close early when they’ve been allowed to open, however, and there have been restrictions placed on travel in a more general sense.)

(5) There’s no hope.

FluKill, the vaccine developed in the book, is in short supply. London is a grim place with vandalism, no-go areas, and bodies burned by the hundreds. There’s really no indication that there’s a way out of the pandemic. Whereas in the real world…..

The worst dialogue in books I’ve read this year

It’s a tricky old thing, dialogue, and has an effect which is much like that of background music in television programmes. Done well, it can lift something out of the ordinary. Done adequately, you barely notice it’s there. But done badly and it can jar in the most horrible of ways.

I recently read a Times review of The Seduction by Joanna Briscoe, which described it as having some of the worst dialogue the reviewer had ever heard. That’s throwing down the gauntlet if ever I heard it.

So, this is my choice of the most teeth-clenching dialogue from books I’ve read so far this year.

 

Patricia Cornwell, Unnatural Exposure

Or, indeed, any other book by Patricia Cornwell. Aside from being the fictional investigator you’d least like to go for a drink with, Cornwell’s medical examiner Dr Kay Scarpetta has the knack of making anything she says sound like it’s being read from an instruction manual for a washer dryer.

“I think there is always a sense of urgency when someone like this is on the loose,” is, for example, her sparkling appraisal of the situation when a serial killer is dismembering the bodies of his victims.

About to embark on an external examination, Scarpetta lets her colleague know that: “I will spend a very long time on that.”

She’s not above the odd aphorism, either, such as: “When violence occurs anywhere, it is everybody’s problem,” from another novel, ‘From Potters Field’.

Humourless and charmless, Scarpetta has the uncanny ability of making the reader switch allegiances and start rooting for the serial killer she’s plodding her way towards apprehending.

She also says things like, “That is none of your business.” Try saying this out loud, and it’s clear how unnatural it is to actually speak this sentence. Anyone in normal life would start the sentence with that’s or it’s.

The hollowness of the dialogue itself, meanwhile is often compounded by the po-faced comments which follow. I said in a friendly but ominous way. I cryptically asked. I said with iron calm.

If you said it in a ‘friendly but ominous way’, Kay, then show us in the dialogue; don’t tell us afterwards.

 

Debbie Howells, The Death of Her

Howells made her name with her Richard and Judy Book Club choice ‘The Bones of You, and this is her third novel.

There’s an extraordinary section of dialogue in it where our protagonist, Evie/Jen, is recalling her first visit to a house she is thinking of buying.

“I listened, hearing nothing, not a voice, nor a single car,” she says. She continues: “I remember being in one of the bedrooms, pausing, leaning on the windowsill, looking down at the parched lawn, at the flowers bravely holding up in the heat.”

Nobody actually talks like this. No-one says “nor”, or talks about flowers “bravely holding up”.   Later, remembering her daughter, the same character says: “We’d been planting bulbs last autumn, her little hands in the crumbling earth next to mine.”

That last line doesn’t belong in speech marks. It’s the ultimate example of an author writing in one way, in one descriptive style, and simply putting speech marks around the parts where the characters are speaking.

 

Joanna Cannon, The Trouble With Goats and Sheep

I’m slightly loath to put this one in, as the book it’s a book I enjoyed in general. It’s atmospheric and recalls with not inconsiderable skill the long hot summer of 1976.

The problem is Tilly, the best friend of our narrator Grace. We should be suspicious of Tilly, because we are told that she thinks the weather makes everyone happy; “it was the warmth of the sun on people’s faces, and the whispery breeze that came through the leaves of the alder trees”.

Tilly is ten.

Yet when she speaks, she says things like: “I always imagined that when I met Jesus, he’d be quite cheerful. I thought he’d wear a long smock and look people in the eye”; and “Mrs Forbes has been a little unusual lately.”

She also asks questions such as: “Do we need God to keep us safe? Are we not safe just as we are?”

I like Tilly. I just don’t believe there has ever been a ten-year-old in the history of the world who has spoken like this.

Are best-sellers best avoided?

Last year I read, for the first time, two of the most popular books of all time; Catcher in the Rye and To Kill A Mockingbird.

It’s hard to say why I had left it so long to get around to reading them. But it has something to do with the mathematical formula Number of books sold + Length of time published ∝ Reluctance to read them.

It’s straightforward snobbery, of course, to say ‘if everyone else is reading them, then I won’t’, but that’s at the heart of it.

However, take a look at the list of the all-time 20 bestselling fiction books in the UK.

The Da Vinci Code is top with just over 5m copies sold.

There are then seven Harry Potters in the top ten (no argument with that), with the Deathly Hallows coming in second place overall with 4.5m.

But elsewhere there are two more Dan Browns (Angels and Demons and The Lost Symbol), the three Fifty Shades books, and three of the Twilight books. (Girl on the Train would now be in there somewhere, no doubt, but it was published too late for this particular list.)

Otherwise, probably the only books in the top 20 you might want to spend some time with The Lovely Bones, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Slim pickings if you’re not a fan of vampires, wizards, mummy porn or symbology.

And yet. Sometimes there are books which are on the bestseller lists for a very good reason, and one which doesn’t involve being the latest product in a money-spinning franchise.

Often this will be a standalone thriller like the aforementioned Girl on the Train, or Gone Girl, or The Couple Next Door (which was number three on the bestselling list for 2017).

But there will also be the occasional literary sensation which takes off due to a Booker or Costa win, a television adaptation, or the sheer vagaries of the market. I avoided Life of Pi for a very long time on the basis that it was far too popular, only to realise the error of my ways when I finally got around to reading it.

It’s not something which is unique to books. Take music, for example. A look at the all-time 20 bestselling albums will reveal entries by Shania Twain, Whitney Houston, Adele, and two by Celine (none of which would win any awards for boundary-pushing); but also genuinely groundbreaking efforts like Jagged Little Pill and Dark Side of the Moon.

But with music at least you will normally have had a chance to hear a little of what is on offer. Being faced with The Lovely Bones for the first time, for example, it might be more difficult to decide whether it’s worth picking up.

Perhaps you just need to go back to the failsafe method of checking the book cover. If the book’s title is bigger than the author’s name, buy; if it’s the other way around, avoid.

My books of 2017

These are my books of the year, but none of them have been published this year. Obviously. I haven’t gone out and bought all the latest fiction hardbacks as soon as they hit the shelves.

These just happen to have been the best books I have read this calendar year, whether they were published one, ten, or 100 years ago.

 

1. Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

In some ways this is a slight book in which, for the majority of its pages, very little happens. Eileen Dunlop lives with her alcoholic father, goes to work at the local prison, and makes a new friend. Eventually, something major does happen. But it’s not this incident which lingers. Rather, it’s the all-pervasive atmosphere of gloom and claustrophobia which lingers long after the book is back on the shelf. Probably the least-Christmassy book ever which set during the festive season, but none the worse for that.

 

2. The Muse by Jessie Burton

Sales of The Miniaturist are rocketing right now after the BBC adaptation over Christmas. But in many ways the author’s second novel is even more impressive than her debut. The sureness of touch remains in the writing, but the plot moves along with more pace, the scope is significantly grander, and the characters more engaging. Who would bet against another festive adaptation next year?

 

3. The Dust That Falls From Dreams by Louis de Bernieres

It must be extraordinarily hard for a writer to make the trenches of the First World War come alive in a way that hasn’t been done before. Sebastian Faulks and Pat Barker are just two of the authors to have mined that particular seam in recent years, and there surely can’t be much more to be written about the mud, the lice, the trench foot and the snipers,

And yet Louis de Bernieres (who also wrote about the war, specifically the Gallipolli campaign, in ‘Birds Without Wings’) manages to find more. Lots more. Partly it’s because his hero is a flying ace who sees the war from (literally) a very different perspective; partly it’s because the research is so rigorous; and partly it’s because he sets up the whole ‘perfect-family-about-to-be-torn-apart-by-war‘ thing so successfully.

 

4. This Must Be The Place by Maggie O’Farrell

Get ready to suspend your disbelief. A major film star manages to escape her life and start again, by the extremely simple method of moving to a cottage in Ireland. With kids in tow.

Sure, this seems highly unlikely to anyone who has ever seen ‘Hunted’, or indeed lived in the 21^st century. No matter. Maggie O’Farrell makes you want the characters to pull everything back into place so much that you won’t care how they got there in the first place.

 

5. Roger’s Version by John Updike

To be honest, I think this might have been a re-read rather than a first read. I certainly didn’t remember the pages and pages of theological discussion, but it’s entirely possible I may have skipped them. To be fair, Updike does overplay the religious dialogue a tad. But it’s always rewarding to slip back into his world of academia, in this case in the 1980s, as theology professor Roger Lambert decides whether or not to have sex with his lascivious neice.

The worst uses of music in film and TV adaptations of books

Just as the right choice of music can lift a film adaptation out of the ordinary (Pulp Fiction, Jaws, Trainspotting and The Exorcist are obvious examples), so can a bad choice of song bring a movie to a juddering halt like nothing else.

If it stays in your mind for all the wrong reasons, then something has gone badly awry. Here’s my pick of the worst.

‘Feeling Good’ and ‘American Girl’, The Handmaid’s Tale (2017)

This (largely excellent) TV series veers so wildly away from the book that it could almost be considered a new story rather than an adaptation of an existing one. Still, it works.

What’s not forgivable is the relatively upbeat ending, with the handmaids marching along the streets to the sound of ‘Feeling Good’, before Offred is carted off in a van to the bizarre backing of Tom Petty’s finest moment.

‘When I’m 64’, The World According to Garp (1982)

I’m guessing we’re going for the comedy in this blackest of tragi-comedies, then.

The Beatles’ song is used over the opening credits of the film adaptation of  John Irving’s classic.

‘Imagine’, The Killing Fields (1984)

Strictly speaking this is from a story (in The New York Times Magazine) rather than a book, but it’s so jarring it just has to be included.

The reunion of Sydney Schanberg and Dith Pran would be perfectly judged if it wasn’t for John Lennon ‘You-hoo-ooh-ooh’-ing all over the background.

‘Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick’, Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

Great song. Great film. But when Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) visits a strip club and is pawed over to the sounds of Essex boy Ian Dury singing ‘Hit me, hit me, hit me!’ it’s all a bit too obvious.

‘California Girls’, View To a Kill (1985)

It’s hard to know what would have annoyed Ian Fleming more: The title of his story being used as nothing more than peg to hang the 14^th (and second worst) James Bond film on, Roger Moore going through the motions in his final outing as 007, or the ludicrous use of this Beach Boys song during a ski chase.

‘Fidelity Fiduciary Bank’, Mary Poppins (1964)

Which one to choose? This film has three decent songs, and too many duff ones to mention, but this is probably the worst of the lot.

I like writing about books, so why do I find it so hard to remember them?

I’m often asked (by my wife, roughly once a week) why I need to keep books that I have already read, and why the bookshelves can’t be cleared to make way for more useful items such as knick-knacks, assorted pens, and random scraps of paper.

My stock answer is that books are not a single use item, but are intended – in the same way as a favourite CD or film – to be taken out and enjoyed time after time, depending on one’s mood and what suits it.

While this is the truth, it is not the whole truth. It’s not so much that I re-read books to enjoy specific passages once again, or to discover different nuances and perspectives. It’s that I can’t really remember them from the first time around.

In fact, sometimes I can’t remember if I’ve read it at all, despite a hasty skim down the blurb at the back of the book. ‘I don’t know!’ should never really be an acceptable answer as to whether you have read a particular book, but unfortunately it has to be.

Why is this? I don’t have any difficulty remembering the lyrics to an album last listened to a decade ago, and I’m sure I could recall whether I had seen a particular film or not, so why the trouble with books?

It’s not just me. Here’s Alan Hollinghurst’s Daphne Sawle in The Stranger’s Child, who has been musing on the difficulties of remembering details of incidents, meetings and conversations:

“She felt something similar, but worse in a way, about hundreds and hundreds of books she’d read, novels, biographies, occasional books, about music and art—she could remember nothing about them at all, so that it seemed rather pointless even to say that she had read them; such claims were things people set great store by but she hardly supposed they recalled any more than she did.”

That ‘pointless even to say that she had read them’ is a killer line; after all, what is the point of reading something you don’t even remember?

These are some of the books I am reasonably sure I have read, but would struggle to remember much about at all:

The Interpretation of Murder by Jeb Rubenfeld. I know Freud is in there, but that’s about it.

Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami. Nothing.

The Information by Martin Amis. Which is an odd one, because everything else by him is as clear as daylight to me.

The Trumpet-Major by Thomas Hardy. See Martin Amis, above.

The Accident by CL Taylor. This is one where even reading the blurb didn’t bring anything back.

But I don’t necessarily think reading these books was pointless. And I don’t think it means they are poor books. In fact I’m sure it doesn’t.

Reading books is different to listening to music or watching a film; it’s not an experience that is particularly rooted in a time or place. I can remember where I was living and how I listened to The Queen Is Dead when it came out (on cassette tape, in a grotty top floor flat in Forest Fields, Nottingham); I can remember where and who I saw Schindler’s List with (Chris, at the old ABC in Nottingham); but I’ve no idea when or where I read any of the books above.

Without these reference points to cling to, books risk floating around as vague entities, doomed to an unloved and unremembered life until, one day perhaps, they are plucked out of obscurity and opened once more.

And that’s why I can’t clear the shelves.

Describing the indescribable: The most notable books about the Holocaust

Not the lightest of topics, maybe, but Remembrance Weekend seems as good a time as any to consider the books which most effectively portray the reality of the Holocaust.

How do you describe the indescribable, or imagine the unimaginable? Many writers have tried and failed, but these below are the books which, for sometimes different reasons, deserve a space on any bookshelf.

If This Is A Man by Primo Levi

No other book goes into the detail of life in Auschwitz in such forensic detail, whilst at the same time managing to look at the wider moral and philosophical questions raised by the author’s experiences. If one page is filled with vivid descriptions of the latrines and washrooms, the next will look at the soul-destroying solitude of life in the camp and the inability of men to support each other in the most desperate of circumstances.

 

Sophie’s Choice by William Styron

At first glance not a Holocaust novel, this of course turns out to be all about the long-term impact of the concentration camp on Sophie Zawistowska. Self-destructive, broken, and unable to live with her guilt over the choice she was forced to make, this is the best book about the reality of life after liberation.

 

Memoirs Of A Holocaust Survivor by Icek Kuperberg

This is the virtual opposite of Primo Levi’s book; simple, sparse and written in an anecdotal, almost diary-like form. “It was beyond anyone’s imagination to feel the pain and agony that we went through. It was horrible,” is about as expressive as it gets.

But it is this very simplicity that gives this book its power. The fact that the most unspeakable events are narrated in such a banal way is itself evidence of extremities of behaviour can become normalised.

 

Schindler’s Ark by Thomas Keneally

It probably shouldn’t work; the Holocaust told from the point of view of a womanising, profiteering industrialist German. That it does is due to the efforts of two people – Poldek Pfefferberg, a survivor with a story to tell, and Keneally himself, who took the project on and succeeded in making Schindler believable and, ultimately, heroic.

(The film version, largely successful even though some railed against some of Spielberg’s touches – girl in a red dress, anyone? – makes one huge improvement over the book. Keneally ends his novel with a simple description of Schindler’s death and funeral. The film joins together the actual survivors with the actors who played then as they place stones on Schindler’s grave, in a genuinely emotional postscript.)

 

A Lucky Child by Thomas Buergenthal

While many who survived Auschwitz were fully-grown men with the strength, sharpness and determination to do what they had to do in order to survive, Thomas Buergenthal was ten when he entered the camp. If his descent into his worst nightmares is heart-breaking, his survival, liberation and ultimate journey to become a judge at the International Court in Hague is equally uplifting.

 

Babi Yar by Anatoli Kuznetsov

Away from the camps of Poland, Anatoli Kuznetsov’s book – part memoir, part novel, part historical record – tells the story of the massacre of vast sections of Ukraine’s population; not just Jews but anyone considered an enemy of the Nazis.

It probably shows better than any other book the devastating impact of hunger and famine over almost an entire nation. Who can forget the sausage-maker who kills people so he can use their flesh in his products?