Happily married life tends to get overlooked by literature, writes Hephzibah Anderson, but Dannie Abse's elegiac memoir shows it can be just as much of a muse.
The Presence
Dannie Abse
Vintage
Dh58
Dannie Abse is one of Britain's best-loved poets, applauded by his peers and adored by a modestly sized but fiercely loyal readership. He is also a member of that curious subsection of author-slash-physicians - an eclectic, somewhat illustrious club that includes Chekhov, Celine and William Carlos Williams. For many years, Abse worked as a chest specialist in a London clinic, and in his verse it is the human heart in all its riddling complexity that fascinates him the most.
Abse's own heart has been blessed by a long and happy marriage, but three years ago, that came to an abrupt end when his car was rammed by another vehicle as he journeyed home from a poetry reading. Joan, his wife of over 50 years, was riding in the passenger seat beside him. She was killed immediately, but 81-year-old Abse lived to crawl from the wreckage. Abse chronicles his spiritual convalescence in this elegiac memoir, a meditation on mourning that also stands as a monument to his life with Joan. It may sound gloomy material, but the result is lit with frequent moments of joy and truth as well as wit.
Beginning as a diary some three months after the accident, it finds the author's life newly circumscribed. All readings have been cancelled, and he is reluctant to roam more than a mile or so from his home in London's leafy suburbs. A trip to Wales to watch his football team, the Cardiff Bluebirds, seems unthinkable. Time does strange things, passing in "Slow days, fast weeks". Meanwhile, letters of consolation continue to trigger tears. "I cry, therefore I am" is the sole entry for September 24.
"At times of stress, clichés, family sayings, proverbs, are drawn to the mind like a magnet," he observes early on, yet despite this, he reaches not for the trite but for the arrestingly smart. Dr Johnson, for instance, who declared that "Grief is a species of idleness." Or Goethe, who once snapped back, "Know myself? If I knew myself I'd run away." And then there are the poets - constant, well thumbed companions ranging from Hardy to Cavafy. Their words are the morsels from which Abse ekes comfort. He adds snatches of his own poetry, too - a gesture that feels the very opposite of vanity. It is as if he is testing the power of language to capture this new existence of his. Chess, Bach and randomly overheard comments at the supermarket also play their part in luring him back into the world of the living over the course of the year.
Interspersed with these candid and immediate diary entries are more writerly sections titled "then", sanctuaries in which Abse loops back in time to chronicle scenes from his and Joan's courtship and marriage, alongside telling vignettes from literary London. There is a trip to Paris in the late 1940s, for instance, where they sit in Sartre's favourite cafe and are urged by an American to run away and join a commune. In an Arab bazaar in Jerusalem, Ted Hughes' wife helps Abse haggle over a decorated garment - a gift for Joan.
Fittingly, the volume ends with one of Abse's poems, in which he addresses Joan, the absence who is nevertheless a presence throughout. "I remembered how, pensioners both, / before sleep, winter come, / your warm foot suddenly / would console my cold one," he writes, displaying the quiet tenderness that defines this valedictory. Happily married life tends to get overlooked by literature, it lacks the dramatic highs and lows of love that is star-crossed or somehow illicit. Abse shows that it can be just as much of a muse, and far more ennobling.
The Accordionist's Son
Bernardo Atxaga
Translated by Margaret Jull Costa
Vintage
Dh58
This stark tale of friendship and exile has been elegantly translated into English not from Spanish but from Basque.
Its narrator, David Imaz, is a Basque country native who has spent many years living on a ranch in California. With his health failing, he begins to set down on paper the story of his youth in the tradition-steeped Basque village of Obaba, and the resulting manuscript constitutes the bulk of this novel.
In Obaba, the 1950s and 1960s pass without much impact, but the Spanish Civil War remains a forcible presence, a rupture still vivid for many locals.
It isn't until David uncovers a cache of letters and a silver pistol that he learns the extent to which the conflict affected his own family, driving a wedge between his father, who supported Franco, and his horse-breeding uncle, who helped to hide a wanted republican.
Inspired by his uncle, David embraces the Basque separatist cause, and falls in with an overtly political crowd at university.
Then, one summer night, he is called upon to make a momentous choice of his own, and to decide just how far he will go to pursue the dream of Basque independence. His response will determine the rest of his life.
Mudbound
Hillary Jordan
Windmill
Dh52
The mud of this debut novel's title oozes across its pages, coating boots, knees and fingernails. Its heroine even dreams in brown.
Mudbound opens in Memphis, Tennessee, at the outbreak of the Second World War. Laura Chappell, an English teacher still unwed at 30, is settling into life as a spinster when along comes an eligible bachelor. Henry McAllan is an engineer, but once the pair weds, he buys a farm in rural Mississippi, transporting Laura to a life ruled by mud. Whenever it rains, the floods cut them off from the world of light bulbs and paved roads. Worse yet, the whole family is at the beck and call of Henry's tyrannous "Pappy".
Things look up for Laura when Henry's younger brother, Jamie, returns from the war. Also home from the front is Ronsel Jackson, the son of black sharecroppers who live on the farm. A hero on the battlefields, Ronsel finds that bigotry still reigns among his own countrymen - even if he's forgotten how to deal with it.
In this land of mud, Laura, Henry and Ronsel's fates are locked together. Murder is the outcome, but plenty happens along the way, illustrating themes of prejudice and betrayal. It isn't subtle, but a bold streak of melodrama lends character to some highly competent storytelling.
The Septembers of Shiraz
Dalia Sofer
Picador
Dh52
Dalia Sofer weaves her own family history into this novel of faith and identity. Told from seamlessly shifting perspectives, it is set in Tehran in the wake of the 1979 Iranian revolution. The city is governed by a topsy-turvy reality in which local thugs now brandish the might of Revolutionary Guards, once trusted neighbours have become informers, and members of the intelligentsia vanish into thin air.
In this tense atmosphere, Isaac Amin, a Jewish gem dealer, is falsely accused of being an Israeli spy. Held without trial in the city's most notorious prison, he is routinely tortured and incarcerated in a squalid cell alongside a celebrated pianist, an ailing professor and an orphan. One by one, his inmates are led away to their executions.
Beyond the prison gates, Isaac's family struggles to maintain hope that he will be released. The voice of his nine-year-old daughter is especially poignant, without being in the least bit sentimental. Her older brother, off studying architecture in New York, is kept largely in the dark about Isaac's plight, but his letters home reveal another set of problems - those of a lonely young man, an immigrant in a strange land.
Though rooted in a precise time and place, this tender and suspenseful narrative has enough universal resonance to make it memorable.
