Untold Stories – Alan Bennett

This collection of writings contains a variety of offerings from a master storyteller.

The title piece, Untold Stories, gives an account of Bennett’s early life and in particular his relationships with his parents. It is followed by Written on the Body, which takes the story forward to his time at university and into the Army to do his National Service. Both these pieces are surprisingly revealing and are coloured by the realisation of his sexual orientation.

The middle of the book is devoted to diary extracts covering 1996 to 2004, commenting variously on items in the national news and events in his professional life (with impressive name-dropping), supplemented by random observations on places visited, sights seen, and conversations overheard.

The rest of the writings include essays on the theatre and plays, radio and TV work, art and architecture, finishing off with accounts of some personal tribulations.

Irrespective of the subject matter, the prose is always spot on, the perspective is invariably off-centre, and the opinions given are subtle and understated to devastating effect.

The Siege of Krishnapur – JG Farrell

It is the start of 1857 and at Krishnapur, a two day ride from Calcutta, the English Raj are preserving their societal customs as best they can under foreign skies and a punishing climate. The poetry society is in session. Mr Hopkins, the top man, who bears the title of Collector, is reviewing his eclectic collection of items of art, science, and technology, some recently brought back from his visit to the Great Exhibition in London.

In Calcutta, the bright young things - epitomised by Lieutenant Harry Dunstable, his sister Louise, and newly arrived from Britain, George Fleury and his sister Miriam, who is already a widow – are at play with dances, outings, and picnics. But soon they decamp to Krishnapur where Harry and Louise’s father is resident doctor. On arrival they meet the pretty but disgraced and deserted Lucy Hughes, whom they befriend despite her tainted reputation.

It is not the best time to be in Krishnapur. There is unrest in the Indian army, mutiny is threatened. The Collector decides to strengthen the residency’s defences. Just in time, as the sepoys attack in force. The defences hold for now, but the siege begins.

Under the growing pressure what will happen? Will standards of civilised behaviour hold up? Will the Collector and his minimal forces be up to the task of defending the residency? Will the two doctors, Dunstable and McNab resolve their professional differences and work together to patch wounds and combat dysentery? Will the spiritual leads, Reverend Hampton and Father O’Hara keep the faith, despite their God’s seeming indifference to their plight and the atheistic jibes from magistrate Tom Willoughby? Will George’s and Harry’s romantic interests, and indeed the charms of the young ladies, survive the rigours of the siege? All is eventually revealed.

The pace of the novel and style of prose neatly mirror that of events, beginning rather stiff and formal, becoming languid during the siege, and then frenetic during the chaotic (and surprisingly funny) climax.

Despite its 1973 Booker prizewinning credentials (rarely a good sign), a really good read that, though slow to grip, increasingly entertains as it progresses.

 

Offshore – Penelope Fitzgerald

This offshore community is only a gangplank from dry land, on Thames barges permanently moored on the tidal reaches of that river in the heart of London. It is the sixties but these folk are neither swinging nor fashionable, though some may stretch to Bohemian.

There is an artist, Sam Willis, aboard Dreadnought, a vessel he needs to sell while it still floats. There is Maurice, aboard the conveniently renamed Maurice, who makes a living from picking up men from the shoreline pubs and from providing a repository for dodgy, probably stolen, goods. Aboard Grace is Nenna James, estranged from her husband and so effectively a single parent of her two daughters. Respectability is represented by retired company director Woodie Woodrow who takes pride in keeping his Rochester shipshape, and by Richard and Laura Blake, on Lord Jim, default leaders of the mooring.

Over the course of a few days, we share the small dramas of their lives as they fret about not only their own problems but also that of their neighbours, whom they are quick to help or at least comfort. The slowly sinking Dreadnought, the vulnerability of Maurice, the marital problems of Nenna, are all symptoms of the social decline of the floating community.

Immune from the general gloom, Nenna’s daughters, 11-year-old Martha and 6-year-old Tilda, have known little else and are as at home on the river as the rats that are kept at bay by the greased mooring ropes. They radiate freshness and hope.

At under two hundred pages, the book gives a taste of life on the river, a glimpse into a community rarely featured but here portrayed in realistic, if affectionate, style.

Katalin Street – Magda Szabo

The book-packing journey reaches Eastern Europe in the shape of Hungary.

Specifically at Katalin Street, Budapest, to follow the lives of three families who live in adjacent houses there. The properties are substantial with views out onto the Danube, and the residents are solidly middle class.

Mr Elekes is a headteacher with a wife and two daughters, Iren and Blanka. Next door but one are widower Major Biro, live-in housekeeper Mrs Temes, and the major’s son Balent, who is a little older than the girls. In the middle house, newly arrived, are Mr Held, a dentist, with his wife and daughter, Henriette, the youngest of the children. The Helds are Jewish, and this is 1934 …

After an extended preface that meanders enigmatically through time and space, the narrative unfolds in half a dozen chronological snapshots from 1934 to 1968. Some are told in the first person by Iren. The others are narrated in the third person from Henriette’s point of view that unnervingly persists beyond her early death in the upheavals of 1944.

For Budapest, the upheavals continue into the post war communist state and the false dawn of 1956. Such events form an unintrusive context to the story, the emphasis being on how they affect the residents of Katalin Street.

The spare prose quickly draws the reader into (mainly) the children’s lives – as children initially then as they grow older into adulthood. Throughout, the relationships among them – based on love, rivalry, jealousy, loyalty, and guilt – are particularly well drawn. There is enough forward shadowing to intrigue, and plenty of dramatic incidents to excite, before an end that is not so much a resolution as a coming to rest.

Once into the narrative, the book becomes an engrossing read.