John Bayley
New novels can be like love affairs. If it happens one can hardly say why, and the most apparently eligible may make no impression. All the Booker shortlist left me cold in various ways, but I feel for Charles Palliser's lengthy and splendid quasi-Victorian mystery and quest tale, The Quincunx (Canongate, £16.99) which was considered for the Hawthornden Prize. The winner was the year's most engaging book of verse, Kit Wright's Short Afternoons (Random Century, £7.50), a worthy successor to his immortally named previous collection, Bump-starting the Hearse. The most enjoyable biography has been Claire Tomalin's The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens (Viking, £16.99). Unlike Peter Ackroyd, Claire Tomalin sensibly assumes they did go to bed, but the most fascinating part is her research into the actress's life after the death of Dickens, when she infatuated an Oxford under- graduate a dozen years her junior; finally consented to marry him; had a son and daughter in her middle forties, and sur- vived her spouse to die a merry old lady in 1914. Her son became an army major, and was less proud of a mother who had been Dickens's mistress than the Italian husband who introduced his wife as l'antienne maitresse de Lord Byron — in fact the secret was kept until the 1930s.
Favourite novel: Anita Brooker's Brief Lives (Cape, £12.95), which seems to me her best so far. Its heroine and Lewis Percy, the hero of the last one, are my characters of the moment: I only wish they could have met and got married, or at least had a love affair.
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