D. J. T AYLOR Two novels which went inexplicably missing from
the prize short-lists were Will Self’s The Book of Dave (Viking, £17.99) and Peter Vansittart’s Secret Protocols (Peter Owen, £18.50). Never having liked Self’s fiction in the past, put off by the author’s habit of rushing on stage to play all the parts himself, I was transfixed by this London dystopia — a kind of Martin Amis meets Richard Jefferies — projected from the argot of the taxi-cab. Vansittart, now in his 87th year, continues to write immensely sophisticated and morally charged novels about an old prewar Europe moving uncertainly into the modern age. Peter Davison’s The Lost Orwell (Timewell Press, £18.99) assembled the surprisingly large amount of new material discovered since the magisterial 20-volume edition of 1998 with his usual zealous scholarship. As one who has banged on for years about the merits of Mary E. Mann, a Norfolk farmer’s wife who wrote some of the greatest short fiction of the Victorian age, I’d also like to recommend a new edition of her novel The Patten Experiment (Larks Press, £7.50 + £1 for postage), orig inally published in 1899, in which a group of well-meaning bourgeoisie try a subsistence-level week in a labourer’s cottage. A paperback selection of the ‘Dulditch’ short stories, Mann’s name for the village of Shropham in south-west Norfolk where her husband farmed, is long overdue.
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