In the contest between plot and character, it’s the novel with the plot that gets packed when people need to rest their brains on a summer holiday.  You can’t go wrong with The Ghost (Arrow Book, 2008) by Robert Harris, a political thriller which essentially photocopies Tony and Cherie Blair and reproduces them in a conspiracy over the practice of rendition against the atmospheric backdrop of a deserted Martha’s Vineyard in winter where British Prime Minister Blair (sorry, Lang) is completing his memoirs with the help of a ghost writer.  Harris was once a favoured friend of New Labour, proving there is no vengeance quite so nasty and calculating as one perpetrated by an ex.

The character based novel, by contrast, is both more demanding and more rewarding.  I haven’t read a better story in years than The Lay of the Land by Richard Ford (Bloomsbury, 2006).  Parsing the interior life of an ageing American in real estate with an ex-wife and a prostate problem sounds acutely unpromising but as a discourse on human nature it cannot be beaten.  There were passages I read and re-read for their wisdom and insight.

As it happens, my summer reads are all about China.  Novelists can get you inside the soul of a nation in a way a policy wonk cannot and so I am taking Typhoon (Penguin, 2008) by Charles Cumming and Beijing Coma by Ma Jian (Chatto and Windus, 2008).  Cumming is rapidly establishing himself as a new master of the intelligent spy genre and I expect to be entertained as before.  Ma Jian’s book, debated and resisted in Chinese circles, tells the story of modern China through the prism of Tiananmen Square.  Shortly after the massacre in 1989 it felt that China had missed its destiny to be joined with Eastern Europe on the tide of democratic reform sweeping across the communist world.  Less than twenty years on, surveying the astounding rise of state capitalism in the far east, Tiananmen Square looks less like the futile resistance of ageing politburo revolutionaries and more like a turning point in the balance of world power.  Time will tell.  As Chou En-Lai famously observed when asked about the legacy of the French Revolution, it is too early to say.

The best stories marry character and plot in seamless development which is why the Bible simply cannot be beaten.  The plot is a story of fall and redemption where the development of every human character is of deepest concern to its author.  I’d better not forget to pack it then (not that I’d tell you if I had).