P HILIP H ENSHER Top of my list are two impressive lives
of composers, or half-lives; the second volume of Stephen Walsh’s life of Stravinsky (Cape, £30), and the first volume of John Tyrrell’s life of Janacek (Faber, £60). Tyrrell’s in particular was something of a tour de force, since very little of Janacek’s lasting music was written in that period, and it could have seemed like an overextended life of a Moravian music teacher. In practice, it proved entirely absorbing.
The novels I liked best were Claire Messud’s wonderful The Emperor’s Children, (Picador, £14.99), a real Dawn Powell spectacular, Sarah Waters’s The Night Watch (Virago, £16.99) and Will Self’s The Book of Dave (Viking, £17.99). All three showed novelists who have always been good deepening their tone and broadening their range; I thought The Book of Dave attained real architectural grandeur from what might have proved a flippant donnée. I would probably recommend Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day (Cape, £25), too, but at the moment I’m only halfway through it, so I’ll only say that it’s making my head hurt, but in quite a good way.
Overrated books? Well, having observed Mr Bill Bryson’s plain-mancan’t-be-expected-to-read-hard-stufflike-poetry routine at close quarters when judging a literary prize, I was prepared for the charmlessness of The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (Doubleday, £18.99), but not for its sheer tedium or what looks worryingly like cynicism: ‘I can’t imagine that there has ever been a more gratifying time or place to be alive than in America in the 1950s’. Not if you were black, Jewish, female or gay, but then Mr Bryson’s books never give a strong impression of wondering what it might be like to be anyone other than himself.
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