Latest news with #AnotherEngland
The Guardian
23-02-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Caroline Lucas: ‘I can't imagine my parents ever voted Green, but they became less antagonistic'
It's tempting to think of Caroline Lucas as a kind of spirit of place in Brighton. She has arrived first at Food for Friends, the oldest vegetarian restaurant in the city, and there is something almost mythical in seeing the pioneering Green MP in its window seat, facing the Lanes, framed by trailing foliage. She has been coming here for as long as she can remember, she says – the restaurant opened in 1981 and used to have folk queuing around the block. She recommends the blueberry and ginger 'nojito', orders the Thai noodle salad and crispy tofu, and half apologises for still being 'a vegetarian on the road to veganism' without quite yet arriving at that destination. It's nine months since Lucas stepped down after 14 years in parliament as her party's first and, in that time, only MP. I sense that she is still getting used to this kind of thing – leisurely lunches on a weekday, without somewhere to dash off to. She is, rightly, adamant that she has not retired. Far from it: she remains a tireless activist on the issues she cares about – the environment and the climate crisis, and Britain's return to Europe (among several other patron and ambassador roles she is co-president of the European Movement with the former attorney general Dominic Grieve). She is writing a children's book, and has an acclaimed adult one already out – called Another England, and one reason for our lunch. It's about the idea of England, and 'how to reclaim our national story'. She talks animatedly about the joys of her new home near the Seven Sisters cliffs, along the coast at Seaford, where she walks her labrador puppy on the beach – but she resists my suggestion that relief must be her overriding emotion after leaving parliament. 'I'm finding it much harder to adapt than I thought I would,' she says. 'On the one hand, it is liberating not to have to haul yourself up to Westminster and spend hours and hours in the chamber trying to get speaking time, and then not getting seen by the speaker. But I suppose inevitably you miss the platform, which is an enormous privilege.' One of her reasons for standing down was that for all that time she was the Greens' one-woman spokesperson on everything from health to education to the economy to defence. It is a measure of her effectiveness between them that she has been replaced in the current parliament by an unexpected four new Green MPs, who can divvy up those briefs between them between them. 'When I heard how they were able to split up all the different portfolios, I burst into tears thinking back on it,' Lucas says. 'On that responsibility of feeling that if there was going to be a green angle in any debate, then the only person who was going to give it was me.' Some of her conclusions about the frustrations and challenges of those feverish years – through the coalition government, austerity, Brexit and Covid – are expressed in her book. Like everything that Lucas articulates, it is a mix of nuanced hope and sharply informed anger about the state of the nation. The new paperback edition comes with an afterword that is damning about the early Starmer government's lack of conviction, its weak compromises on environmental commitments (this is even before news of the third runway at Heathrow) and its avoidance of the issues that Reform UK so cynically exploits, including the vexed question of English identity. Lucas believes passionately that the idea of England must be reclaimed from the far right, and that it can be progressive and pluralist and comfortable in its own skin (of whatever colour). 'Patriotism isn't boasting that your country is 'world beating' at this or that,' she says. 'I like Billy Bragg's definition, which is, basically, just giving a shit about your country. Wanting it to be as good and fair as it can be.' One of the themes of her book is that Labour has no vision of what this might look like, no story to tell: 'They are much less ambitious than their voters.' She thinks it 'bloody scandalous' that with their 170-seat majority they are talking so much about cuts, rather than a wealth tax or land reform. Before Lucas became a politician, she gained a PhD in English literature (her dissertation was on writing for women in Elizabethan times) and her polemic is deeply informed by the tradition of dissenting English writers engaging with the social and environmental issues of their time – John Clare's impassioned poetic manifestos against the Enclosure Acts, for example, the fencing off of the English imagination's right to roam. 'I think if more of our politicians knew fiction and poetry, we'd have better politics,' she says. 'We are a country of nature lovers. We're also one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world. And it's just like, how does that happen?' With our plates full of fabulous locally sourced veg, we talk a little about how one aspect of that depletion is the fact that, as a society, we are so divorced from the ethics and production of what we eat. (Last year, Lucas resigned as vice-president of the RSPCA over exposed failings in its 'RSPCA Assured' accredited abattoirs. At the time the RSPCA defended its record and said there were 'differing views on how best to address the incredibly complex and difficult issue of farmed animal welfare'.) She regrets to say that she is not much of an enthusiastic home cook – her husband Richard Savage, a recently retired English teacher and one-time professional cricketer, does most of that – but she does love making things that last: batches of marmalade and preserves – 'I love to see the jars lined up' – or a Christmas cake. One of Lucas's proudest achievements in parliament was helping to create a new GCSE in natural history. It was designed to bring young minds in closer touch with their environment, and to help them understand sustainability through applied science and literature (a course Wordsworth would have loved). Though ready to be rolled out by the Tories, Labour has, to her dismay, shelved it. Another significant parliamentary legacy, the climate and nature bill – which seeks to bring government policy in line with its international commitments, and link the renewal of nature with the climate crisis for the first time in law – was also, shamefully, scuppered by the government when it was due to be voted on last month. Equally scandalous, it seems to me, I suggest, is the fact that Lucas was not elevated to the House of Lords on leaving her seat in the main chamber. Doesn't it make a mockery of the second house if there is no room for someone of her conviction, expertise and popularity? She doesn't elaborate – 'that's not for me to say'. She is used to being the committed outsider, though she wishes it otherwise. Lucas grew up in Malvern – Elgar country, where her dad ran a small central heating company and both parents voted Tory. Though there was a sense of freedom in the hills, she was hemmed in by the narrowness of attitudes. What did her parents make of her career? 'They were bemused by most of it,' she says. 'It was like, 'When are you going to get a proper job?'' They were a little more sympathetic when she became an MP. 'I can't imagine they ever voted Green,' she says, 'but perhaps they became slightly less antagonistic.' She recalls, with a smile, the time she was arrested protesting against American cruise missiles at RAF Molesworth. Her father contacted her from his Rotary club, wondering if there was anything he could do to bail her out. She has maintained a belief in non-violent direct action – she was arrested again in an anti-fracking protest in 2013 – and has been a rallying voice against the draconian sentencing of Extinction Rebellion activists. That consistent rage against the kind of denialism that threatens the planet has found another expression for Lucas since she gave up full-time politics – she is training to become an end-of-life doula, spending time counselling people in hospices and families facing the death of a loved one. 'I'm on a mission,' she says of her training with the organisation Living Well, Dying Well. 'We are not good at talking about death. But I do love the way in which, with people towards the end of life, you can cut through the crap, you know, and get to what's important.' The tragedy, she suggests, is that more of us do not get to that realisation about what really matters so much earlier – stop and smell the roses, while there are still roses to smell. We're finishing up a fabulous shared pineapple tart while we dwell on the big questions. 'My biggest fear,' she says, before she goes, 'would be to be on your deathbed and regret that you hadn't done enough.' Another England by Caroline Lucas (Cornerstone, £10.99) is out now in paperback
The Guardian
19-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
This month's best paperbacks: Percival Everett, Judith Butler and more
Fiction Caledonian Road Andrew O'Hagan Fiction James Percival Everett Crime fiction Death at the Sign of the Rook Kate Atkinson Society Who's Afraid of Gender? Judith Butler Politics Another England Caroline Lucas Fiction in translation My Heavenly Favourite Lucas Rijneveld, translated by Michele Hutchison Society Great Britain? Torsten Bell Essays No Judgement Lauren Oyler Fiction Pity Andrew McMillan Fiction Green Dot Madeleine Gray History Revolutionary Acts Jason Okundaye Society The City of Today is a Dying Thing Des Fitzgerald Science fiction The Other Valley Scott Alexander Howard Literature The Chapter Nicholas Dames Fiction State-of-the-nation burlesque Caledonian Road Andrew O'Hagan Caledonian Road is an addictively enjoyable yarn; a state-of-the-nation social novel with the swagger and bling of an airport bestseller and an insider's grasp on the nuances of high culture. But this bustling, boisterous burlesque has the sour undertow of despair. The London that emerges from its 600-odd pages resembles a vast, rotting carcass picked over by carrion. The people live off it, not in it, and seem to be intent on stripping the place to the bone. Our tour guide of sorts is 52-year-old Campbell Flynn, a celebrity writer and academic who owns a house in Islington's Thornhill Square, maintains a second home out in Suffolk and recently completed a money-spinning self-help book called Why Men Weep in Their Cars. Life is good, he's living the dream, which is another way of saying that he's careering towards disaster, folded in with an ensemble cast of aristocrats and human traffickers, screen actors and newspaper columnists. Bounding from the penthouse to the pavements, administering to a sprawling cast of characters, Caledonian Road nods most obviously to Dickens, although it also stirs memories of Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities and Paolo Sorrentino's film The Great Beauty. It's a bold, bullish tale of hubris and corruption, a book simultaneously dazzled and disgusted by the city it depicts. Xan Brooks £8.49 (RRP £9.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Fiction Huckleberry Finn reimagined James Percival Everett James is the Booker prize-shortlisted retelling of Mark Twain's 1884 classic, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, from the point of view of Jim, the runaway slave who joins Huck on his journey down the Mississippi river. While it would be possible to enjoy James without knowing the original, its power derives from its engagement with Twain's book. The most vexed aspect of Huckleberry Finn is the portrayal of Jim, for decades the most prominent black character in the American literary canon. While 14-year-old Huck memorably struggles to reconcile his learned prejudice with his growing love for his enslaved companion, Jim – an adult with a wife and children – has no such arc. Jim in fact becomes progressively more one-dimensional as the book flops towards its clumsy denouement. Loyal, superstitious, childishly simple, Jim's main purpose in the novel is to give Huck an opportunity to exhibit his moral growth. Enter Percival Everett, no stranger to debates about the representation of race. His 2001 novel, Erasure, adapted for the screen as the Oscar-winning American Fiction, told the story of a highbrow African American novelist despairing at the reception of his work and winning unexpected acclaim with a bogus account of black urban despair. With James, Everett goes back to Twain's novel on a rescue mission to restore Jim's humanity. He reconceives the novel and its world, trying to reconcile the characters and the plot with what now seems obvious to us about the institution of slavery. The result is funny, entertaining and deeply thought-provoking – part critique and part celebration of the original. Marcel Theroux £8.49 (RRP £9.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Crime fiction Jackson Brodie returns Death at the Sign of the Rook Kate Atkinson Atkinson's private investigator Jackson Brodie is back, having 'climbed to the wrong side of 60', and it is a real joy to see him again. Death at the Sign of the Rook throws Brodie into the middle of an Agatha Christie-esque mystery when he is hired by elderly siblings to find a painting that has gone missing from their late mother's wall. Brodie discovers parallels with the theft of a Turner painting from a nearby stately home. As he is wont to say, 'a coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen', and he's delighted to discover that old friend Reggie Chase, the orphan who saved his life back in When Will There Be Good News?, was in charge of that investigation. Reggie is less pleased – 'we're not a partnership, we're not 'Brodie and Chase, Detectives',' she tells him – but they are soon back in harness when a handy snowstorm means they're trapped in the stately home, along with a cast of vicars, butlers, majors, aged dowagers, etc, of whom Christie would be proud. An axe murderer stalks the moors, there's a body in the pantry and a cast of actors on the loose. This stands alone as a crime novel, but it is better enjoyed having read the previous books in the Brodie series. And why wouldn't you, anyway – they are all a delight. I defy you not to snort with laughter as the novel progresses to its farcical denouement. Atkinson is just brilliant. Alison Flood £8.49 (RRP £9.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Society The gender theorist goes mainstream Who's Afraid of Gender? Judith Butler It's not quite a joke to say the US philosopher's latest book could have been called Who's Afraid of Judith Butler, because many people are; all the fears and fantasies poured into the idea of 'gender', which this new work explores, are also poured into its author. Butler's work has been defined as diabolical, and the professor as some sort of she-devil – or rather they-devil – a convenient vessel for current anxieties about the stability of sex. More than 30 years after their best-known book Gender Trouble was published, Butler is still having to explain that they never said sex doesn't matter. I can tell they are frustrated and angry, because this is the most accessible of their books so far, an intervention meant for a wide audience. Butler explains that 'gender' has become a phantasm, representing multiple human fears and anxieties about sexuality, bodily attributes, sex and relationships. These anxieties have been stoked and manipulated by rightwingers in positions of religious and secular power to more effectively project the harms they are complicit in on to women and minorities. The only answer, Butler says, is to form an axis of resistance; to 'gather the targeted movements more effectively than we are targeted'. People who may not be friends, who disagree, need to work together, because they're all in line for the same persecution, sooner or later – all women, all minorities, all those minoritised. Solidarity is not home, Butler reminds us, using a well-known phrase coined by feminist Bernice Johnson Reagon. It doesn't have to be cosy. Because Butler is a human rights activist, as well as a theorist, the urgent point conveyed by this book is the same as it is in all their work: why are so many people seemingly happy to give away their power to increasingly authoritarian forces? And why are they so confident that this power will never be used against them? Finn Mackay £9.34 (RRP £10.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Politics Seeing green Another England Caroline Lucas On leaving Westminster politics, Britain's first Green MP Caroline Lucas, left us with a parting shot: a book that sketches out an alternative vision of England to the jingoistic and aggressive one conjured up by culture war squabbles. Though the idea that there are other ways to be English than getting misty-eyed about the white cliffs of Dover or nostalgic for the days of empire is obviously not a new one, in the current climate of increasingly belligerent nationalism it certainly bears repeating. What marks out Lucas's contribution to what is fast becoming a whole new genre of books is that it's not really a history or piece of contemporary reportage. Instead, it's more of an armchair journey through England's literary canon, from Chaucer to Shakespeare, the Romantic poets and Jane Austen. The lesson she takes from this diverse literary heritage is that 'we do not need a single national story' but a whole range of them; and that for every nation-building myth co-opted by the conservative right, there are equally deep-rooted and authentic traditions the left could draw on to talk about what Englishness means to them. The most compelling parts of the book deal with the relationship between Englishness, nature and the land. Lucas astutely points out that visions conjured up by prime ministers from Stanley Baldwin to John Major tend to be weirdly divorced from how most people actually live, evoking idyllic rural landscapes full of birdsong and blacksmiths toiling at their anvils, rather than the four-fifths of the population who actually live in cities and towns. Yet the reality under successive governments, she says, has been the widespread despoiling of the countryside politicians claim to revere. Why shouldn't Englishness mean protecting the places that supposedly make us who we are? And there are much-needed crumbs of hope for the future in the chapter covering the politics of immigration, where Lucas argues that younger generations 'just do not see a multi-ethnic, multicultural society as something to fear' and may in time shift public debate accordingly. Another England is possible? Well, let's hope she's right. Gaby Hinsliff £9.89 (RRP £10.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Fiction in translation A transgressive tour de force My Heavenly Favourite Lucas Rijneveld, translated by Michele Hutchison My Heavenly Favourite, the second novel from acclaimed Dutch author Lucas Rijneveld, belongs to a tiny, controversial subgenre: novels about child sex abuse rendered in exquisite prose. It is all the more transgressive in that it's narrated by the abuser, who addresses his victim in an incantatory, unflinchingly graphic second-person rant about his eternal love. Such a book has to clear a very high bar not to seem like a cynical exercise. Rijneveld's novel leaps effortlessly over, with room to spare. The narrator is a 49-year-old vet serving a small farming community in the Netherlands, and his 'heavenly favourite' is the troubled 14-year-old daughter of a dairy farmer. Neither is given a name: he calls her 'Little Bird' or 'Putto'; she calls him 'Kurt' for Kurt Cobain. Little Bird is an outsider for her intellectual precocity, for what may be a budding psychosis, and for her secret, obsessive desire to have a penis. She is also sexually naive for her age, having been raised in a strict religious family, in which communication was short-circuited by the tragic death of her older sibling and the desertion of her mother. This echoes Rijneveld's first novel, the International Booker-winning The Discomfort of Evening; both books draw on the author's background. My Heavenly Favourite squares up deliberately to Lolita, citing it throughout, and Rijneveld compares well with Nabokov in the richness of his invention and the delicacy of his prose, while taking a much more serious approach to their shared subject. Indeed, Rijneveld conveys the squalor and despair of sexual violence with more fidelity than any other author I have read. But this novel is not only a surprisingly successful treatment of a difficult subject. It's a unique creation and a tour de force of transgressive imagination – a dazzling addition to the oeuvre of an author of prodigious gifts. Sandra Newman £8.49 (RRP £9.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Society A roadmap to the new normal Great Britain? Torsten Bell As proposed national rallying cries go, perhaps this one lacks swagger. But its modesty is deliberate, as the economist and Observer columnist Torsten Bell's surprisingly hopeful new guide to halting this country's crumbling decline explains. Chest-beating political promises to put the Great back into Great Britain are, he writes, really just distracting from the real issue, which is that the British are exceptional all right – only not in a good way. We stand out from our pack of medium-sized, richer-than-average countries for our low productivity, chronic wage stagnation and American-style high inequality (but sadly without the higher growth of the US). We have truly world-beating housing costs, higher than any other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) country but Finland, but magically still deliver less living space per capita in return than famously cramped New York; we boast, if that's the word, fewer hospital beds than all bar one other OECD nation. Yet while Brits have somehow been conditioned over the past 14 years to accept creeping impoverishment as some kind of gloomily inevitable new norm, our neighbours show it needn't be. A middle-income German household is now a startling 20% richer than their British counterpart and the equivalent French household 9% ahead. 'Talk of being 'world beating' is a distraction from what we really need to be: more normal,' concludes Bell. Helpfully, the latter is actually within our grasp. Overall this is an incisive, upbeat vision of how a Labour government could turn things around even in difficult times. The one good thing about Britain digging itself into a hole, Bell notes, is that we could deliver a surprising amount of growth just by catching up to where we should be. Or in other words, the advantage of doing this badly is that things can – to misquote D:Ream – surprisingly swiftly get better. Gaby Hinsliff £9.34 (RRP £10.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Essays Pointed views No Judgement Lauren Oyler Lauren Oyler, an American literary critic who writes for Harper's Magazine and the New Yorker, believes her metier is under threat. 'I am a professional, and I am in danger,' she declares in My Perfect Opinions, one of eight previously unpublished essays gathered in her first nonfiction book. She wonders if popular digital platforms such as Goodreads, where users can upload book reviews with minimal editorial filtering, will have long-term ramifications for the more considered, rigorous literary criticism that she gets paid to write. What these online communities lack in intellectual acumen, they make up for in sheer weight of numbers. Are they reshaping literary culture in their own image? The answer seems to be yes. Oyler believes a facile populism has crept into arts and culture commentary in recent years, premised on the notion that, since all taste is ultimately subjective, anything can be as good as anything else – evidenced, for example, in some critics' insistence that Marvel comics deserve to be treated as serious art. 'To reduce appeal to a matter of taste and temperament is the most boring way to be irrefutably correct,' Oyler notes. This tendency, a kind of philistinism dressed up as anti-elitism, lies at the heart of what she calls 'today's crisis in culture criticism'. The essays in No Judgement demonstrate an agile and discerning mind. Oyler's intellectual earnestness is offset by a disarmingly chatty prose style – her voice is by turns anecdotal, playful, ironically self-deprecating. She is stimulating company on the page, and rarely dull. However, one or two of the talking points here feel ever so slightly old hat: a widely shared 2010 Ted Talk on the importance of vulnerability; the demise of the gossip website Gawker, following a 2013 lawsuit; the online media landscape around 2016; Berlin being a thing. A quibble, perhaps, but cultural discourse moves frighteningly fast these days. In stark contrast, the pace of book publishing is notoriously glacial. This presents something of a challenge for literary agents and editors, who have to try to bottle the good stuff before the fizz goes out. What's taking them so long? Houman Barekat £9.89 (RRP £10.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Fiction Men and memories in a Yorkshire pit town Pity Andrew McMillan Andrew McMillan's debut poetry collection physical, an explicit yet tender study of masculinity in the post-industrial north of England, was a thrilling paean to young queer male experience in the noughties. In 2015 it became the first poetry collection to win the Guardian first book award; its successor, playtime, took the inaugural Polari prize for LGBTQ+ literature and was followed in 2021 by pandemonium. McMillan has now harnessed his considerable talent to writing a novel. Pity, appearing 40 years after the 1984-85 miners' strike, which convulsed parts of the UK and divided working-class communities, draws on three generations of men from the same family whose lives have been dominated by the local pit – closed since the end of the strike – near Barnsley in South Yorkshire, McMillan's home town. This is not a novel specifically about the strike and its outcome, although its embittered legacy is skilfully threaded through its pages. Pity is a book about male identity and sexuality – whether anxiously concealed or proudly open – and about the ravages of history and politics, most significantly on the working-class towns and cities of South Yorkshire such as Barnsley and Sheffield. Comprising multiple viewpoints, the narrative is impressively ambitious for a book of fewer than 200 pages. Pity is a novel of huge compassion, especially for its older characters, former pit workers Alex and Brian, persistently trapped underground in spirit, if not in actuality. 'Pits close: we still sink into them,' Brian writes, but the words themselves are a form of release. And underneath it all is history, viscous and tarry, its forces ticking away like a timebomb. Catherine Taylor £8.99 (RRP £9.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Fiction Witty tale of obsessive love Green Dot Madeleine Gray Why do smart women expect their lovers to leave their wives, despite overwhelming evidence that the contrary is more likely? Australian critic Madeleine Gray is the latest writer to explore this question, in an acutely witty debut that charts, in painful detail, the inexorable arc of an affair between a disaffected millennial and her older, married boss. The story is not original. That's the point. Yet Green Dot's potency lies in its narrator's distinctive voice, ruthless self-scrutiny and droll observations on the absurdities of young adult life. That narrator is Hera: 24, world-weary, hyperaware of every cliche attached to her situation, and its likely outcome. But when you really want someone, you go for it, she tells us, consequences be damned. We follow Hera from instant-messenger flirtation to after-work drinks, from the untimely discovery that fortysomething Arthur is married to the decision to continue nonetheless. No one is more surprised by the force of her feelings than Hera, who identified as a lesbian before meeting Arthur and derives an illicit thrill from playing the role of a heterosexual girlfriend. Her vision tunnels until she can see only him – or the green dot that shows he's online. It becomes increasingly uncomfortable to read about the sacrifices she makes for crumbs of his time and affection, as she clutches at the mirage of stability he represents. The book is peppered with pop cultural allusions, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Black Books and Hera Lindsay Bird. This is literature of the digital era, honed on Twitter. Some sentences, freighted with subordinate clauses, feel effortful, but Gray has a parodist's ear for the cadences, platitudes and jargon of modern speech, and a gift for bathos: 'We have a job to do, after all, which is to colour-code profiles on a screen until we die.' Although ironic and flippant, Green Dot avoids nihilism, and is ultimately about the search for meaning through love. It vividly illustrates how someone can lose their perspective, principles and dignity in its name, ignoring overwhelming evidence of the probable conclusion. 'I understand why people blow up their lives,' declares Hera. 'If the choice is this or not this, I will destroy everything else every time.' Madeleine Feeny £8.99 (RRP £9.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop History Bringing Black gay history to life Revolutionary Acts Jason Okundaye For much of the 1980s and 90s, every corner of Brixton seemed to be a visible site of resistance and radicalism – from the disturbances of April 1981 to the emergence of the Voice newspaper, the Brixton Black Women's Group and the Race Today collective. At the same time, though, the south London neighbourhood was home to another mostly hidden struggle for recognition, fought by the first generation of out Black gay men. Writer and Guardian assistant newsletter editor Jason Okundaye's groundbreaking debut focuses on those pioneers, using six mini-biographies to craft a lucid account of a story that's long been obscured. At its best, Okundaye's research and interviews completely recast key moments in Black British history. The book can become too intricate at times, though: details that would have worked as footnotes flood certain sections, dulling the sharpness of the accounts. But when the stories are given room to breathe it's as though a new layer of Black history is being revealed. Some of the men, such as Alex Owolade – a relentless, divisive Trotskyite activist – feel familiar. Others, such as Ajamu X – the artist and host of fetish parties from Huddersfield – represent a complete departure from stereotypes of Black Britishness. Revolutionary Acts offers beautiful rendered storytelling that never veers into sentimentality. At the beginning of the book, Okundaye tells us that recording Black British history can often feel like 'a rescue effort, a race against time' as subjects die, taking with them their stories and insights into under-researched episodes. We should be grateful that he has managed to capture a vital moment that – at so many points – could have been lost for ever. Lanre Bakare £9.34 (RRP £10.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Society What has become of the messy, unpredictable city? The City of Today is a Dying Thing Des Fitzgerald Leafy suburbs and garden cities emerged at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, the result of fears that the frenetic environment of overcrowded cities induced 'nervous feebleness' in people and could actually make them ill. According to Des Fitzgerald, 'this idea has never fully gone away' and indeed has re-emerged in the age of climate change, with many urban planners seeing trees, parks and biomimetic architecture as solutions to the city's problems. But Fitzgerald is sceptical about such fashionable ideas, suspecting that all they do is inflate house prices and subvert what he regards as the unique dynamism of urban life – the 'lively, messy, unpredictable city'. Fitzgerald's book explores the relationship between architecture, cities and nature, and argues that 'the science and politics of green urbanism is a great deal more complex than we want to admit'. He takes us back to the leafy origins of the garden city movement, visiting Welwyn Garden City for the hundredth anniversary of its founding in 1920, talking to architects such as George Saumarez Smith, who helped design King Charles' traditionalist new town of Poundbury in Dorset ('an undeniably weird place'), and explaining how Melbourne set up a 'digital urban forest' to help its inhabitants understand the plight of the city's rich heritage of trees, and which allowed them to send messages to individual street trees. Some were apparently so poignant they made the person who came up with the idea cry. Faced with such touching testimony, Fitzgerald does grudgingly acknowledge that 'trees really do something for people in cities'. But he insists that the issue is much more complicated than it seems, and he distrusts the recent rash of reports about the 'supposedly calming effect of nature' on urbanites. Instead, he argues that we are culturally primed to view cities as stressful environments and that this is the real problem we need to address: 'perhaps, instead of trying to fix the city, we could try to fix ourselves…and the anti-urban public culture that we've allowed to flourish'. This is a provocative and entertaining guide to the history of attempts to green the city, one that raises many important issues that, as the world becomes increasingly urban, deserve to be discussed. But at the heart of his book is a passionate plea for a return to the progressive idealism of modernist architects and planners, people who genuinely believed in 'the city as a city', and not as a park or a forest. PD Smith £8.99 (RRP £9.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Science fiction An unusual approach to time travel The Other Valley Scott Alexander Howard This debut novel is set in an isolated valley caught between its own past and future. To the east is a valley 20 years ahead; to the west, the same place is 20 years in the past. To protect against catastrophic changes to the timeline, the borders are fenced and patrolled by armed guards. The governing Conseil grants a few brief supervised crossings every year, to elderly mourners desperate for a glimpse of their loved ones when they were still alive. Odile is a shy, studious girl training for a place on the Conseil when she glimpses two visiting mourners lurking outside the school. Recognising them as older versions of the parents of a funny, talented boy she likes, she faces an impossible choice. He is doomed to die, but if she tries to save him, she will destroy her own future. The experience changes her life and never stops haunting her until, years later, she must confront other ethical dilemmas. This is an unusual approach to time travel, a philosophical thought experiment and a deeply moving, ultimately thrilling story about memory, love and regret. Lisa Tuttle £8.99 (RRP £9.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Literature A history of how we break up books The Chapter Nicholas Dames Nicholas Dames admits to being 'a bookish type'. A professor of humanities at Columbia University, his study of the history of the chapter begins with one of the earliest extant examples of a chaptered text: the tabula Bembina. A bronze tablet that was originally more than two metres wide, this was made for a forum in the region of Urbino, Italy, in the late second century BCE. On it were inscribed legal statutes dating to the Gracchan land reforms of 133-121 BCE. What is unique about it is the way in which the statutes were presented: each section is prefaced by headings followed by a space. Though not yet numbered, the headings took the form of a brief Latin summary – a noun phrase introduced by the ablative 'de', meaning 'concerning' or 'in which'. This would later become the default form for signalling the start of a chapter. Surprisingly then, chaptering did not begin in a book, but in a legal inscription. Indeed, as Dames shows, the adoption of the chapter by prose fiction was 'slow and partial'. Though it remained optional well into the eighteenth century, Henry Fielding's novel Joseph Andrews (1742) delightfully compares a chapter break to 'an inn or resting-place, where he [the reader] may stop and take a glass, or any other refreshment, as it pleases him'. According to Dames, the history of the chapter is both deep and long, but 'the novel is where the creative potential of that history culminates'. Its role became that of 'segmenting time' and this sat uneasily with the aims of some novelists, for it 'breaks up what should be continuous, interrupts what should be immersive'. John Berger highlighted the limitations of chaptering in G. (1972): 'The relations which I perceive between things…tend to form in my mind a complex synchronic pattern. I see fields where others see chapters.' However, by segmenting time, the chapter has gained a metaphorical power that is quite unique: we commonly speak of starting a new chapter in our life, but no one refers to the 'paragraphs of my life'. This 'innocuous, ubiquitous device' which dates back some two millennia has, argues Dames, 'a purchase on one of the grander claims of written narrative: to be capable of representing, and even structuring, what it feels like to have an experience in time'. Dames is a wonderfully attentive reader of literature, who is alive to every subtlety and nuance of his subject. His study is a superb example of scholarly writing that is thoughtful, erudite and filled with memorable insights. PD Smith £18.99 - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop
