Old books

Restoration, O Caledonia

When you think about it, the likelihood of a newly-published book being any good is quite small. It’s just the law of averages. Out of every ten new books, you will probably enjoy one if you’re lucky, unless you have a very low threshold for pulp thrillers and general mawkish crap featuring children, animals and pasts that aren’t nearly as traumatic as suggested in the first two thirds of the book.

So I am increasingly turning to older books, but by that I don’t mean classics. I know I sound like a total philistine when I say this but e.g. Dickens puts me to sleep and if I never read another line by Thomas Hardy it will be 10,000 years too soon. I mean 20th Century and onwards books. Actual bookshops are a good place to stalk these, that’s how I found the Poisonwood Bible and also my most recent read, Restoration by Rose Tremain. This is a brilliant book. I bought it for Giles for Christmas but he was for some reason very disdainful of it. “Wasn’t there a film adaptation of this?” he said, holding it gingerly, as if it was a very ugly, modern pair of shoes.

So I read it instead and nnnnnn gawwwd it was so amazing. I wish I was still reading it. Our hero is Robert Merivel, an ugly-looking good time fellow who falls in favour with the newly restored monarch Charles II. Chaos ensues! It was so funny and ripped along with tonnes of plot and lots of excellent descriptions of country houses, silk trousers and wild dinner parties. I forced my husband to stop being so weird and to read it and now he can’t put it down.

The thing about the nervous breakdown that publishing is having at the moment - about sales and Amazon and bookshops and Twitter and sensitivity readers and lived experience - is that it must create an impossible environment for fiction writers to work with a clear head. I don’t want to read books that are cruel or crude or insensitive, (Restoration would, I’m sure, pass any sensitivity read with flying colours), and most fiction writers I’m sure don’t want to write books that are cruel, crude or insensitive but in this current atmosphere, would Rose Tremain have even attempted that book now? Maybe, maybe not.

I’m sure Elspeth Barker wouldn’t have written O Caledonia, which is a dark coming-of-age novel set in a crumbling castle in Scotland. It’s one of those short and quirky books, a bit like The Girls of Slender Means, that can leave a massive impression on you for its magnificent simplicity and atmosphere. O Caledonia has recently been reprinted and was randomly sent to me by a press office, which is a thing that happens occasionally. Again, I’m sure it would do fine with those sensitivity readers, but from reading the book I just don’t get the feeling that Barker would have been up for the fight of it all. Or she would have thought it was ridiculous and left O Caledonia in a bottom drawer and gone off to do something else. I mean I don’t know and I don’t want to cast aspersions but writers are touchy and headshy at the best of times even the ones who seem outwardly bullish.

What would Hemingway have made of all this? Or Joan Didion or Donna Tartt or George Eliot?

How about you? Please share with us the books of a certain age that you think we might enjoy - and would they have been written now?