SUMMER READING
Help!  Am I about to make the wrong choice in novels for a holiday I have invested so much in? 
 

I know people who plan their summer holiday reading with the nervous energy and attention to detail of a national football manager picking his team for a World Cup.  How am I to know if the book I am packing is the literary equivalent of choosing Emile Heskey for South Africa?  Should I simply take an old trusted novel, a safe option for the shimmering seaside?  Then again, isn’t there all this talk about the ‘death of the novel’ and the emergence of non-fiction as the genre of choice?  Maybe I should enclose that weighty biography of John Maynard Keynes to impress the Parisian left bank café I frequent, merely to look the part?

If you’re asking my advice - which in a way you may be since you’ve opened this posting and are still reading - just go for what you fancy.  We wait a long time for the summer holiday and its fleeting charms are adorned by a little self-indulgence.  I guess I’m at that fraught last moment when the choices must be made.  We are going to France, I speak (very) limited French, and so there is no going back on this by visiting a French bookshop.   So these are the choices in front of me:

Ordinary Thunderstorms by William Boyd
Lustrum by Robert Harris
The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas
A Week in December by Sebastian Faulks
The Ghost Rider by Ismail Kadare
Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby

‘A Week in December’ is acclaimed as one of those State of the Nation novel the like of which are allegedly disappearing.  I love Faulks’ novels – from the unbearable poignancy of Birdsong to the deviously creepy Engleby which was, incidentally, clearly set in my old college.

summer reading
Blackpool with beer goggles on
 

I can’t vouch for any of these novels yet, sadly, so how about One Day by David Nicholls and Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada.  The latter is a newly discovered story emerging from the ruins of a ravaged Germany and poses the question over what qualifies as legitimate resistance to a totalitarian regime and whether one would be prepared to cross that threshold.  The older I grow the less sure I am of that answer, in spite of my idle claims.  One Day has been the surprise find of the year, telling the story of two students who get together briefly after graduating but keep in touch with repressed intimacy for twenty more years.  Perhaps it is easy for me to identify with students who graduated in the 1980s, drifted into adulthood and had their casual assumptions about strength of conviction shaken by the evaporation of youth and the urgent compromises of early middle age.  The end of novel return to the scene of that graduation week nearly brought me to tears, which is rare for me with the printed word, and still haunts me with an unnamed longing.

In this post-heroic world I inhabit the landscape of One Day, not Alone in Berlin yet the sense that belonging to Jesus demands more from you than smart and self-referential one-liners about post-modern culture makes me study the latter with more than just an abstract interest.

   
 
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