Holiday Reading

America’s favourite non-hero’s swansong, an odd new tale from Ben Okri, a fashion diva’s gorgeous biography and the last of Follett’s Century trilogy

For anyone who followed RICHARD FORD’S all-American trilogy—The Sportswriter (1986), Independence Day (1995) and The Lay of the Land (2006)—the belated release of LET ME BE FRANK WITH YOU (Bloomsbury, 248 pages) is an unexpected treat. We thought he was done with Frank Bascombe, that wry, lovable novelist turned sportswriter we first meet after he has lost his son. But there was more Frank to be had, and these four linked novellas deliver in time for Christmas. Only, don’t expect tinsel and eggnog. ‘Flowery wreaths on an ominous sea stir expectancy in the unwary,’ we are told, early on, before a wave of pre-fab and re-hab house repair washes over us. For, the ‘Kremlin-like’ Home Depot is our backdrop, and our narrator is paring down his lexicon for utility and transparency—though ‘fuck’ is still, of course, ‘pretty serviceable’. Sixty-eight- year-old Frank lives his ‘end of days life’ out on the Jersey Shore as ‘a member of the clean-desk demographic’, in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, which has devastated his last home. This kind of apocalyptic landscape is this hero’s forte, of course; he is a survivor. “Everything could be much worse,” as he tells us. A middle-aged Black woman who used to live in his house asks, “‘Do you ever dream about yourself when you were young, Mr Bascombe?”, and in one sense this is what this book is: a dream in intervals of what was and what is, an affirmation of good old, politically incorrect Frank. He is sad and funny and profound, even as he is increasingly profane, as unsparing of Pakistanis and Black people (even using the ‘N’ word) as you might have anticipated. Ford’s latest is more spare than the early books, calmer and less stricken, in some ways. It might not be as big as the ones that came before it, but there is grace and courage in picking up at the tale’s end. Pitch perfect, it takes our hero to his natural end in Ford’s eleventh book. All some of us want for Christmas in these times, after all, is the truth.

If you’re a fan of KEN FOLLETT, author of Fall of Giants and Winter of the World, chances are you’ll want the conclusion to his Century trilogy, EDGE OF ETERNITY (Penguin Books India, 1,098 pages), in your stocking. This huge paperback is not nearly as daunting as it looks; picking it up, the initiate will want to return to the first two. Continuing the multi- generational story of families living through significant historical events such as the Cuban Missile Crisis and Watergate, this tale takes up the story of Carla and her daughter, Rebecca Hoffman, an East German teacher in East Berlin, who discovers her husband is with the Stasi. Alongside, we have Rebecca’s step-brother Walli Franck, a young musician who flees to West Germany in search of fame, George Jakes, a lawyer in Robert Kennedy’s Attorney General office; Dmitri Dvorkin, a young apparatchik in the USSR; his sister Tanya, a journalist campaigning for the truth, and many others. The narrative is commercial fiction at its most efficient and readable best, if a bit bald at times: ‘The school was desperately short of teachers because half the staff had emigrated to West Germany.’ Of course this is no place for nuance, and you will enjoy reading this part of the saga for the usual ‘up close’ quality and readerly fulfillment. Also for the large cast of amusing characters; take Vasili, satisfyingly typical with ‘a dignity he had not possessed fifteen years earlier’, eyes that ‘twinkled with mischief’ and ‘an irresistible urge to seduce’. A nice long read.

“My clothes… have a story. They have an identity. They have a character and a purpose. That’s why they become classics. Because they keep on telling a story.” The pioneering designer, activist and global brand is vivid and reflective in a detailed new as told- to, Vivienne Westwood (Picador, 464 pages). This memoir of this queen of fashion icons, written by Dame VIVIENNE WESTWOOD herself with award-winning biographer IAN KELLY, crowns a living legend and tells us the story of fashion and all its large, culture-defining shifts. And so we learn of the young girl born during times of rations, who hadn’t had a banana till she was seven; who grew up in Millbrook Cottages and went on to fall in love with a boy in Manchester and finally end up in London, enrolled at Harrow Art School at seventeen. Here, she began to learn how to draw designs and create clothes, married Derek and later met Malcolm McLaren. Of their partnership, Kelly says: “It shaped punk: its look, its most notorious band and its philosophy, so far as it had one. It is this relationship that links Vivienne to The Sex Pistols and to the jubilee summer of ‘God Save the Queen’: the record, the image, the debacle.” She began to make clothes for his boutique, and opened four shops of her own in London, expanding through the world, and soon her merchandise found a life of its own, linked to political causes such as the move for nuclear disarmament and climate change awareness. What emerges from this intensive account is more biography than memoir, with Kelly acting as the primary narrator. Yet, the richness of detail and up close view of the catwalk, many of our contemporary supermodels and the knowledge that this 73-year-old maintains that Pinocchio is her guru is as fun as it is valuable, particularly to anyone with an interest in fashion.

Booker prize-winner BEN OKRI is back after a long time (seven years since Starbook; ten novels, three volumes of short stories, two books of essays and three collections of poems into his career) with THE AGE OF MAGIC (Head of Zeus, 288 pages), his strange tale of eight film- makers at a hotel in Basel. The device is perhaps too easy for someone who wrote The Famished Road, that dramatic tale of a spirit child in Nigeria— and indeed Okri seems to have taken the easy way out with this more adventurous form. Small chapters, almost like verses of a poem, describe the journey of a group of people shooting a television documentary about a journey to Arcadia, Greece. Stuck at a small Swiss hotel, they battle luggage, tell stories and fall in love, but mostly they say things like, “Make this moment my eternity.” Okri won the Bad Sex in Fiction award for this one, beating other eminent failures—Richard Flanagan and Haruki Murakami—and there is certainly a strong element of self-indulgence in this narrative. Towards the very end, we are told: ‘She made the mountain into a cake. She ate of the cake, and declared it good with a smile.’ This could very well describe what the author is doing, in this gorgeously designed—the cover bears a beautiful pastel palette—puzzle of a book.

(A monthly roundup of the best of international publishing)

About The Author

Rajni George

•