Penelope Fitzgerald

It would be quite possible to read about Edward Thomas and wonder how it was that so many people made such allowances for him. A man who had a house built for himself and then refused to live in it, he tormented his wife and children with his restlessness – he calculated he was never happy for more than a quarter of an hour in the day. Two women, his wife Helen and the good-hearted but overwhelming Eleanor Farjeon, spoiled him as much as they dared. He couldn’t get on with his son and was sometimes ruthless with his friends – ‘people soon bore him’ said Walter de la Mare sadly – although most of them were called on to help him in his struggle with depression. But Edward Thomas was, and is, greatly loved. His scholarly biographer, George Thomas, irritated as he is by what he calls the ‘dithering’ of Edward Thomas’s early life, treats him not only with respect but with love.’

This is Heinrich Böll’s apprentice novel, written between 1949 and 1951. Since Friedrich Middelhauve, who published his stories, was unwilling to bring out the novel, Böll put it by and with professional economy used passages from it in later books. For that reason it wasn’t published in his lifetime but has come out now, to mark what would have been his 75th birthday.

At the age of 48, after thirty years of lecturing on German literature and writing radio plays, Gert Hofmann began to produce disconcerting novels. Michael Hofmann, his son, the poet, confronted him head-on in his collection, Acrimony, and in 1987 wrote in the LRB (25 June) about the second of the novels to be translated into English, Our Conquest. This covers the first two days of peace in a small town in Germany, and follows an ambiguous group of children, free at last to get out of the cellars and poke round the secrets of their own streets. ‘The point is not character revealing itself in action, it is not even … the abrupt revelation of one particular horror, it is the process – as elsewhere in my father’s work – of the curious, obsessive and mechanical mind digging round in a soft and disordered world.’ The Film Explainer, which takes place in the same hometown of Limbach, in Saxony, seems at first sight to be a more innocent and comic story and a gentler one, but after reading it you feel the same chill.’…

Shena Mackay’s outstanding anthology, Such Devoted Sisters, consists of 21 sisterly stories, all written by women, much more thoughtfully than the title suggests. Since this is a relationship which doesn’t change, the book isn’t chronologically arranged, and the earliest piece, Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’, comes last of all. Placed there, it seems like a magical explanation of all that goes before.

John Bayley’s new novel is largely about those who are had on, or taken in, and this may well include his readers, who need to keep their wits about them. To begin with, he conjures up a couple of innocents. There was an innocent, too, as hero in his last novel, In Another Country, published in 1955. But Oliver, a young officer with the British army of occupation, was a worrier and a sensitive, risking trouble for the sake of his German girlfriend, and contrasted with his hideously successful rival. In Alice the two innocents are uncompromisingly green, in the sense that the Vicar of Wakefield, or Daisy Miller, or Crocodile Dundee, are green, their misfortunes illustrating the world’s vanities.