The Night Climbers Ivo Stourton Black Swan Dh52
The title of this confident first novel refers to a pursuit grounded in reality - though grounded is perhaps the wrong word for a hobby that involves scaling hazardously high buildings in the dead of night. Roof climbing at Cambridge University has a long and bizarre history. The Roof Climber's Guide to Trinity, the first manual for anyone reckless enough to chase an aerial view of the college, was published back in 1898. In the 1960s, students clambered to the pinnacles of King's College Chapel - the city's loftiest points even today - and strung up a banner calling for an end to the Vietnam War. A generation earlier, climbers had installed Ethiopian flags in support of Haile Selassie's war against Mussolini.
Thanks to alarm systems, surveillance cameras and a diminishing window of opportunity between closing time for revellers and dawn's break, night climbing is not what it once was. But Ivo Stourton's novel is set almost a decade ago, when rooftop expeditions were more possible. Socially ambitious James hasn't begun his Cambridge career quite as he'd hoped. He is desperate to become one of the talked-about collegiate stars. But a misguided policy of freshers' week aloofness has left him friendless, skulking alone in his room, watching the drunken comings and goings of his contemporaries. His luck changes when Michael, a roof-climber on the run, demands sanctuary. Michael, a plump, pompous older student, was picked upon at school but is tolerated by the university fast set because of his father's fortune. Thus, dinner and an invitation to one of the university's snobbiest members-only clubs follow, and James soon wins admittance to a glamorous clique known as the "Tudor Night Climbers".
Together, they take death-defying leaps from rooftop to rooftop, vaulting skylights and dodging the beams of police torches. "The first time I looked down from my perch between two fluted columns and discovered that the distance between myself and the ground would generate a fatal fall, I felt a sweet ordering process sweep through my cluttered mind like the perfect secretary, banishing all but the immediately relevant," James explains.
The danger and illegality of their antics binds the group ever tighter. James becomes trapped in a love triangle when he falls for Jessica, the tall, graceful blonde girlfriend of Francis, their doomed leader and reckless offspring of a titled politician and an African model. Despite gestures to Cambridge's changing dining scene and the advent of new bars, the clubby, hedonistic world that the novel evokes is timeless, echoing everything from Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited to Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty. As such, it will either fascinate or nauseate.
Fortunately, Stourton is a solid plotter, and the action shifts up a gear when Francis proposes an art heist. As he says by way of selling all his craziest schemes: imagination is life's only limiting factor. Four million pounds is at stake and prison the only possible outcome if things go wrong. A dozen years later, the consequences of their deeds will return to haunt the Tudor Night Climbers - those who've survived.
In milieu and ambience, Stourton appears to be reaching after Donna Tartt's The Secret History, a comparison that does not flatter The Night Climbers. Despite its fluency, his prose lacks character, unless you count the occasional mean snarl that cuts through its studied cool. In a way, it's a style that is oddly suited to his cast, none of whom is especially sympathetic, though it seems we're supposed to feel for James, at least. A closing author's note explains the novel's title, but by that point, it's hard not to wish that Stourton hadn't wrung a little more originality from such richly eccentric beginnings.
Footpaths in the Painted City Sadia Shepard Atlantic Dh86
The documentary filmmaker Sadia Shepard grew up in Boston, the daughter of a Muslim mother from Pakistan and a white Protestant father from Colorado. Though her dad converted to marry her mum, the family forged its own rich identity, celebrating Christmas along with Ramadan and Eid. But when she was 13, a chance discovery revealed her cultural heritage to be even more complex. Her beloved grandmother, who was forced to leave her hometown of Mumbai for Karachi during the Partition, had herself converted in order to marry. When she became third wife to Sadia's grandfather, she embraced Islam and left behind another faith and another identity: Rachel Jacobs, a member of a tiny Jewish community called the Bene Israel, who believe themselves to be descended from one of the Lost Tribes of Israel. In September 2001, shortly after the attacks on the World Trade Center, Sadia fulfilled a pledge made to her dying grandmother: to travel to India and learn about her ancestors. "What I have are fragments," she writes as she arrives in Mumbai. "I am here to weave them together, to create a new story, a story uniquely my own". That poignant tale of self-discovery reads like a novel and takes in exile, forbidden love and partition's legacy.
The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad John Stape Arrow Dh60
Novelists are not the easiest of biographical subjects. Their days away from their desks either seem ultra mundane, or else they apply those same creative gifts with which they make their names to the chronicling of their lives, leaving behind a knotty tangle of fact and fancy. Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski falls into that latter category, romanticising his exploits in letters that intertwined reminiscences and fibbing. After his death in 1924, matters were further confused by the competing testimony of friends, family and fans. Aided by full archival access, John Stape sets out to depict the man in full. Joseph Conrad, as the author became known, spoke of himself as having led three lives: as a Pole, a seaman and a writer. As Stape sees it, the reality was still more complex, encompassing further "lives" as spouse, father and friend. This is the first new biography of Conrad in over a decade, and it shows him to have been a writer whose mystery and modernity matched his novels and stories. Conrad wrote in his third language, was motivated by a profound sense of otherness and fretted about his royalties. Agonised by his art, depressive and hopeless with money, he is compelling company all the same.
The Fallout: How a Guilty Liberal Lost His Innocence Andrew Anthony Vintage Dh60
By 2001, Andrew Anthony, a first-generation member of the middle classes who was nearing middle age, had become a successful lifestyle journalist and committed dad. It almost goes without saying that politically, he positioned himself on the left, deeming all social ills to the product of inequality and racism, crime a function of poverty and America the global bad guy. He'd even spent time supporting the Sandinistas in Nicaragua back in the 1980s. Then came September 11. Anthony's wife was in New York. For a stricken few minutes after the first television images started flooding in, he was unable to make contact with her. She was fine, it turned out, but the event changed Anthony. "If I had been wrong about the relative danger of America, could I be wrong about all the other things I previously held to be true?" Though he resists it for as long as he can, the question eventually insists on an answer, triggering a searing reassessment of his political education. This polemical, highly readable memoir targets the prejudices that Anthony sees as having shaped the left's progressive sensibilities. Along the way, he ruminates on liberty, violence and Britishness, and offers cameos to the likes of Yusuf Islam, Michael Moore and Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
