DECONSTRUCTING DAHL

Having failed to enjoy a run of tormented, gloomy, deeply-meaningful novels - many of them by people barely out of the cradle - I started making a list of the books I've most enjoyed that are by, and about, older people.

It starts with one of my all-time favourites - Penelope Lively's Moon Tiger. Claudia, sometime war correspondent and popular historian - a law unto herself even while dying in a hospital bed in Cairo - is reviewing her turbulent life and times. Funnily enough, Penelope Lively's name, and this particular novel, came up in a Slightly Foxed literary group discussion the other day. The group, like Moon Tiger's heroine (and Slightly Foxed itself) are curious, independent-minded, and thoroughly engaging. And Lively is a wonderful writer who richly deserves to be revisited. 

Next is Embers, by Sándor Márai. This is the story of a single night in a castle at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains, where, from dusk to dawn, an ageing aristocrat and the friend he hasn't seen for over forty years 'fight a duel of words, of stories, of accusations and evasions' as they rehash their own past. An extraordinary book.

My third, thought by many to be Jane Gardam's masterpiece, is Old Filth. 'Filth' - which stands for Failed In London, Try Hong Kong - is an international lawyer whose story covers the period from the days of Empire, through World War 11, to the present. The first in a trilogy; beguiling, moving - and very funny.

There are so many others, from that Gentleman in Moscow to Patrick Leigh Fermor's two-volume account of his epic walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople/Istanbul, recalled some forty and fifty years later...but at this point I got sidetracked by the latest literary kerfuffle: Puffin's sanitising of Roald Dahl. 

Perhaps I should say how deeply remorseful I myself feel for using terms like fat, or bald as an egg, in my own writing, now that I understand how hurtful this must be for enormous human beings who suffer from hair loss? (Enormous? Really? Yes, really. Apparently enormous is better than fat.) But actually, the whole thing is such arrant nonsense that I can't be bothered. I am sorry, though, for younger writers who find themselves having to negotiate today's obstacle course of sensitivity-readers, lived experience, own voices, etc. It's no wonder so many new books are tormented. 

I have a large library of original children's books to read to my grandchildren, some of which would undoubtedly fall foul of today's sensitivity censors, but I very much doubt that reading any one of my books would harm a child a fraction as much as the violence that they are permitted to see on screen any day of the week, or the vicious intolerance of so many adults towards those with whose views they disagree. How sad that civilised discussion, and agreeing to disagree, seems so difficult these days. For my money, there are worse things than hurt feelings to worry about in this world - the dire state of the planet, poverty, war - so maybe what we should be teaching our children is to think less of their own feelings and more about others, and to learn from the past, rather than waste time trying to erase it. 

I see that Puffin has now promised to re-release the unexpurgated works of Dahl, so obviously I'm not alone in thinking they're idiots. And yes, I know Dahl had some deeply offensive views, but a great many unpleasant people have produced extraordinary art, and I've always thought this cult of the personality rather than the work was a mistake. In fact, the less we know about the writer, the better. The thing about Dahl is that his writing has introduced the joy of reading to countless children, and given pleasure to millions.

Children aren't interested in our adult obsessions - or ordinary, boring adults for that matter. They prefer wizards, witches and nasty, incompetent criminals they can easily outwit. And I make no apology for posting, once again, this picture of one of my own favourite older characters in children's literature (and my personal role model) - Quentin Blake's glorious illustration of 'a wicked old woman' propped up in bed and laughing, with a bottle of champagne beside her. John Masefield's Miss Piney Trigger of Trigger Hall. I don't think she'd have been too worried about hurting your feelings. She'd have told you to get a grip and then booted you down the stairs.

DAYS OF WINE AND CORONA

Strange times. Nearly four weeks of isolation and inactivity - apart from a daily walk - but lots of time for other things: for playing card games and doing jigsaws; for sitting in the garden and watching old episodes of Star Wars in the middle of the afternoon; for listening to music and to podcasts. (And if you only listen to one, Elizabeth Day's 'How to Fail' episode with Alain de Botton is the best dose of clarity and consolation I've heard all week.)

Childhood favourites

The first few days of captivity I spent (inexpertly) recording Moon's Travelling Circus, the middle grade novel that didn't ever find a publisher, and which I now plan to make available to any child who might enjoy the adventures of a magical circus travelling through African time and space. It made me feel vaguely useful - one of the harder things about being classed as vulnerable is that you feel so useless. Anyway, I enjoyed doing it so much that I've gone back to writing the sequel.

The daily conversations and online interaction with distant family and friends is hugely cheering - as was a SCWBI meet-up with writer friends, and an online wine tasting with my son. (We may have found ourselves short of paracetamol and disinfectant, but we were never going to get caught out with an empty wine rack...) So, what with all the FaceTimes, Skypes and Zooms, it's more a question of fitting everything in than trying to fill the hours.                                                                               

And then, of course, there are the books. There's the pile of most-recently-bought adult novels, the dozens of others books I've always meant to re-read, and - greatest comfort of all -  the children's classics. Who could be unhappy in the company of William, Pippi, the Moomins and the Borrowers? Nesbit, Farjeon, Lofting, Lynch - I could go on and on - and most of them lovely old illustrated copies I've been collecting all my life.

There are some writers you can read at any age, and some you can't. Sorry, Sally Rooney (she's a good writer, the fault is mine, not hers) but I couldn't really connect with the characters in 'Normal People', so I moved on to Benjamin Black's 'The Silver Swan'. I'm a fan of Black (and his alter ego, John Banville - 'Mrs Osmond' is in the waiting pile) and I have a particularly soft spot for his weary pathologist, Quirke. And having suggested to Gloom that he might enjoy Anthony Powell's wonderfully dense and civilised 12-volume 'Dance to the Music of Time' - he is onto the second already - I'm now planning to re-read them all myself.

But first off the shelves was Patrick Leigh Fermor and 'The Violins of St Jacques'. He is my all-time favourite travel writer and this was his only novel, I think, but it's written in his usual glorious prose and deals, strangely enough, with a great natural disaster. Now I'm reading Maggie O'Farrell's  'The Distance Between Us' and from the first page her characters have grabbed me by the throat. Intriguing, complex, and hard to put down.

A Beardsley Venus

Hilary Mantel's final volume in her Cromwell trilogy, 'The Mirror and the Light', has just been beautifully read on Radio 4 by Anton Lesser, and there was a fascinating TV programme on the deeply peculiar and talented Aubrey Beardsley, which reminded me that somewhere I had a copy of 'Under the Hill', published by the Olympia Press back in the 60s. It was, when I finally located it, a genuine curiosity and every bit as bizarre as I'd remembered - but perhaps not the sort of thing you'd want to read aloud to Aunt Edna.

A long time ago, in another country, I lived through times of great upheaval and fear. Then, my greatest worry was that I would die and leave my children without their mother. Now that I'm old, and have no fear of death, I still worry about my children and my grandchildren. But one of the benefits of this enforced isolation (apart from the random acts of kindness by friends and neighbours: the unexpected present, the newspaper or plate of scones left on the doorstep) has been the chance to catch my breath, to go through books and papers, and rediscover things - like a commonplace book that I kept in that earlier, uncertain time. Quite a few entries deal with death, but I find them as apt, and as comforting, now as I did then. This from Kahlil Gibran:

For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and melt into the sun....
....And when the earth shall claim my limbs, then shall I truly dance.

Either way, when this is all over, I intend to dance.