This is the third book in Byatt’s series about the Potter family, taking up shortly after Still Life leaves off. Rereading the first two books gave me much to think about, as I mentioned in blogging about them, and deepened my understanding of them, so I hoped for a similar experience with this book. I hadn’t liked it the first time around—in fact, it put me off reading anything by Byatt for a number of years—and I didn’t much like it this time either.

Set during the mid-1960s, the main story follows Frederica and her marital difficulties. This narrative is interrupted by sections of a fable about a group of people who flee the Terror following the French Revolution and set up a utopian community in a remote mountain hideaway. The story is also interrupted by Frederica’s summaries of manuscripts she is reviewing. And by sections of a fairy tale about two children on a quest. And by pages of court transcript. And by pages of text made from letters and quotations cut up and rearranged to form what looks like an essay but doesn’t actually make sense. These last are Frederica’s attempts to create something that expresses the truths she is discovering. She surrounds these chunks of text with quotations from newspapers, books, and speeches.

Yes, all very interesting in a post-modern way, and continues Byatt’s exploration of the relationship between words and the things they describe, but tedious to read. Perhaps if I hadn’t already read most of the books she quotes, if I hadn’t lived through the time period myself, I would have found great excitement in the juxtaposition of ideas that might then have been new to me. I confess I was also irritated by the fact that many of these insertions are in a tiny font that is very difficult to read. And the book is long, over 600 pages. Some of my favorite books are that long, The Discovery of Heaven for one, but this one drags.

However messy and sprawling, the structure is not inappropriate for a book set in the 1960s. Kudos to Byatt for managing to write about the period in a way that doesn’t seem silly or unrealistic. It’s not an easy time to write about. The way she accomplishes this is twofold: first, with Frederica she gives us an observer who is a bit older than most of the flower children and who has the responsibility of caring for a child; second, along with the hippies and happenings, Byatt includes the elections and sensational trials and minutiae of daily life (planting window boxes, having to go home to relieve the babysitter). Not everyone was swinging in the Sixties, not even in London.

I also have to mention how brilliant Byatt is at presenting children. All the children here are real characters, complex, true to life. It’s so hard to write about children without making them precocious brats, miniature adults, or unbearably cute manikins. Byatt’s children are children, not adults, perhaps with similarities to their parents but fiercely individual.

I love the intelligence behind the book, the way Byatt expects us to step up and stop being so lazy. There is much to like here. Another reader might find this book great fun, taking joy in seeing how all the extraneous bits are pieced together—not a melting pot but a mosaic—like the multitude of languages into which the inhabitants of the original Tower of Babel devolved.

I want to take a step back here and talk about synchronicity. In my blog about Still Life I mentioned how surprised I was when I stumbled across a long passage referencing Dawkin’s concepts as presented in The Selfish Gene which I also happened to be reading at the time. If you’ve read the last few blogs, you may have noticed that I’ve inadvertently been reading a string of books about war, why men go to war, what happens when they try to come back.

This often happens to me. Books chosen at random turn out to have a common theme or to explore related concepts. They seem—as one of my friends put it—to be conversing with each other through me. For example, I’ve also been reading a lot of Robert Frost’s poems and critical works on him to prepare for the poetry discussion I’m leading. A couple of themes resonated with another book I was reading at the same time, The Likeness which is Tana French’s second book. I blogged about her first book In the Woods a few weeks ago.

Frost was greatly influenced by Emerson. Frost’s poems about hard-working New Englanders who swing axes at alders, cut posts, mend walls, pick apples, tap maples and plough snow illustrate Emerson’s law of compensation from his essay, “Power”: “Nothing is got for Nothing.” This reminded me of where a character in French’s book quotes a Spanish proverb: “Take what you want and pay for it, says God.” He goes on to rail about our modern culture, so good at taking what we want, so bad about paying the price.

Lexie, another character in French’s book, moves through life like a shark, always on the go. She is incapable of thinking about the past, never looking back at the wake she leaves behind. Lexie reminded me of a story Wolf once told me of seeing a man, who from his mismatched layers of clothing was apparently living rough, buy a used paperback and walk off down the street reading it. As he finished the first page, he tore it out and threw it over his shoulder. As he finished the next page, he tore it out and again tossed it over his shoulder. And so on down the street, leaving a trail of abandoned story behind him.

This attitude toward the past reminded me of a quote from Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” that greatly influenced Frost: “Life only avails, not the having lived.” Power is to be found in movement, in transition. In “The Wood-Pile” the speaker comes across a cord of maple wood that had been cut and stacked and then abandoned, left to rot and be covered in weeds “To warm the frozen swamp as best it could/With the slow smokeless burning of decay.” You could say that even in repose the wood-pile is changing, but its burning is smokeless. It has lost the power it once possessed. This power is similar to Bergson’s concept of élan vitale which Frost, who had read Bergson’s work, used often in his prose to describe the force that animates life and poetry. By yet another odd coincidence, we had just been studying Bergson in the Philosophy Book Club I attend.

We’ve also been studying various philosophers who have addressed the problem of what we can actually know of the things of this world, whether our senses are reliable, whether things actually exist independently of our perceptions of them, whether somewhere outside of our knowledge things exist in their ideal form. Again, Frost reminded me of these discussions. One of his early poems is “The Demiurge’s Laugh” where the narrator is checked in his joyful flight through the woods in pursuit of what was “no true god.” In Gnosticism, the Demiurge is a god of limited ability who has created this flawed world of ours that is only a shadow of a higher reality. In Frost’s “After Apple-Picking”, the narrator speaks of seeing the world through the thin sheet of ice he has lifted from the surface of the water trough, a wonderful metaphor of our flawed perception of the things of this world.

It’s also a metaphor of the vast gap between things themselves and our words for them, Foucault’s Les mots et les choses, the theme powering the series of books by A.S. Byatt that I’ve been reading and blogging about, particularly Still Life. Perhaps these coincidences are not so significant. Perhaps it is simply that these are concepts that many writers are concerned with. Still, I like the idea of books conversing through my reading of them.

I have long been a fan of Pérez-Reverte’s books. His The Fencing Master remains one of my favorites; it brought me to a whole new understanding of the grip that the past may have upon our lives. It also made me rethink what I value and why. This book, however, is neither a mystery nor an adventure story like Pérez-Reverte’s other novels. It is something much more profound.

Set in the present day, it is the story of Andrés Faulques, an award-winning photographer who has retired from the world and from his career covering wars. Faulques has taken up residence in an old tower on the coast of Spain where he is painting the interior, creating a 360-degree mural that depicts battles ancient and modern. And the fallout from those battles: the executions, the rapes, the ethnic cleansing. There is very little of the heroic here. He has too many memories for that.

Calling his painting an attempt to come to terms with the horrors he’s seen would be much too simplistic. Rather, he is trying to find the structure, the equations and architecture, that will explain war and the cruel punishments that men inflict on each other. And on women. Collateral damage.

There is much about painting here, the effects of certain colors to portray a misty dawn or to highlight a knife’s edge. There is much about photography, the shutter speeds and so on that Faulques used for the photographs he remembers as he paints. There is much about war, details of atrocities that counteract the distance and depersonalisation of names of colors and f-stop settings. Pérez-Reverte himself was a war photographer, so he speaks from a position of authority about the role of the photographer versus the painter, the degree of immersion experienced by a war photographer, the responsibility he has or doesn’t have towards his subjects.

The story is set in motion when a stranger arrives at the tower. He turns out to be a soldier whom Faulques once snapped as the man rested, weary and dejected, by the side of a dusty road. The conversation between the two men weaves in and out of Faulques’s memories and his work on the painting. Some reviewers have felt that the philosophical bent of their conversation bogged down the book, but I found the whole thing fascinating. In fact as soon as I finished it, I started it over again, something I rarely do. If I found the ending a little too neatly wrapped up, that is the only flaw in this astonishing book.

The vivid descriptions made me feel as though I had fallen into Faulques’s life: the tourist boat that comes by at the same time every day, swimming in the sea below the tower, 150 strokes out every day, 150 strokes in. And into Faulques’s memories, such as what it is like to sit on a terrace with a fancy dinner before you and hear captured soldiers being dragged off by alligators, a particularly gruesome and sadistic form of execution. Faulques recounts all these and discusses them with his visitor using an unemotional tone that is more deeply moving than the strongest hysteria or hand-wringing. This is the way it is. This is the way we are.

Faulques circles back to a handful of incidents, such as the day he met Olvido Ferrara in a museum. She abandoned her life as a fashion model to go with him and take pictures of wars, of small things: a pair of shoes, a notebook, an empty road. He remembers her learning to break down and reassemble an assault rifle blindfolded, and the way she could analyse a painting and make him see things he had never seen before. He remembers the people in his photographs, the teacher leading a cadre of his young students, the prisoner who refused to beg for his life. Old now, older even than his years, Faulques is taking the measure of his life. Not dismissing his previous occupation, but sure that what he’s doing—painting these battles—is the most important thing he can do.

I know. It sounds awful and ugly. But it isn’t. It’s true, and it’s beautiful.

Sándor Petöfi is Hungary’s most famous poet, yet I had not heard of him until my friend Jacob recommended him to me. It is unfortunate that the literary culture in the U.S. is so narrowly focused. I try to compensate by reading review periodicals from England and by attending Toronto’s International Festival of Authors as often as possible. Even though not being able to read the poems in the original language limits me to hearing them through the sensibility of the translator, I found this collection both interesting and moving.

Petöfi was born in 1823 in Kiskoros, a community on the Hungarian plains. His early life—his mother was a peasant and his father an innkeeper and butcher—gave him an identification with the common people that he never lost. His early lyrics and epic poems included elements of folklore, and many later became folk songs. He read widely in several languages (English, French and German) and translated Shakespeare's Coriolanus into Hungarian.

In 1847, he married Julia Szendry against the wishes of her father, a member of the landed gentry. Expressions of his love for her fill many of the poems in this collection:

You praise me, dearest one, for being good!

Perhaps I am, who knows, it may be true,

But thank me not . . . the source of every good

That’s in me rises from your heart and you.

. . . . . from "You Praise Me"

While some of his poems seem sentimental, I think they need to be read in the context of both his youth and the Romantic Movement which swept Europe from about 1770 through Petofi’s lifetime. Another common theme in Petöfi’s work is nature, not an Emersonian all-encompassing Nature, but specifically the plains where he grew up. His love for his homeland is tied up with his love for his mother—several of the poems here are addressed to her—and his concern for the common people.

How long will you sleep, my land?

Till your house is burning?

Even till the tocsin rings,

Are you never turning?

How long will you sleep, my land,

Lovely Magyar homeland?

Maybe in another world

You may wake, my own land!

. . . . . from "How Long Will You Sleep, My Land?"

Caught up in the revolutionary fervor of 1848, he became one of the leaders of the youth movement to free Hungary from Austria’s rule. He co-authored the Twelve Pont, which were the demands presented to the Hapsburg Governor-General, and wrote the Nemzeti Dal, the National Song. Anyone who has heard Les Miz will recognise the echoes of Petöfi’s song:

On your feet, Magyar, the homeland calls!

The time is here, now or never!

Shall we be slaves or free?

This is the question, choose your answer!

. . . . . from "The National Song"

In 1849, he joined General Bem’s army in Transylvania: "I drop my lute to take a sword in hand,/The poet is a warrior today;" (from "Farewell"). While the army had some successes against the Hapsburg troops, they were unable to match the strength of the Russian troops sent by the Tsar in support of Austria. Petöfi died in July of 1849. His body was never found, and rumors persisted, as with so many folk heroes, that he would return in Hungary’s hour of need. But he himself knew the likelihood that he would not survive and left several poems about how fleeting life may be.

So near the dawn and now the night has come.

So near the spring and wintertime is here.

So near the day, my Julia, when we met.

You are my wife . . . as long ago you were.

So near the hours we played at father’s knee,

So soon beside grandfathers we are lain . . .

No more is life than swiftly racing cloud’s

Shadow on the river, breath on windowpane.

. . . . . "So Near the Dawn . . ."

I wrote last week about the difficulty of coming home from war. My readings about World War I have brought home to me the futility of war. I stood once on a bridge in Belgium. At one end was a plaque marking the spot where the first shot of the war was fired. At the other end, a few yards away, was a plaque marking the spot where the last shot was fired. I cannot understand the folly of choosing to go to war, but when I read some of these poems of Petöfi’s, I catch an echo of the clarion thrill of youth when you think that it just might be possible to change the world.

Like last week’s In the Woods, this marvelous novel selected by one of my book clubs brings together past and present. At sixty-seven, Trond Sander has moved to a small cabin in the woods to create a new life for himself, a simple life of doing chores, restoring the cabin, chopping wood for the winter. Most of all, what he wants is a life alone, just him and the dog he has adopted from an animal shelter, a life where he is able to think. Since the death of his wife in a terrible car accident three years previously, Trond has felt increasingly unable to go on with his prosperous life in Oslo. He does not even tell his two daughters where he is going.

But once alone, what he finds himself thinking about is the summer of 1948, when he was fifteen, when he and his father went off to another cabin, in other woods, beside a loop of river that comes in from Sweden and returns to it. Petterson moves back and forth between the two stories, subtly mirroring events and experiences. He draws in, as well, the German occupation which ended in 1945, and the absences of Trond’s father during the war. Yet I was always certain of which time period we were in; a member of my book club pointed out that with each shift, Petterson grounds us right away with something unique to that time period, such as the dog in the present day.

The writing is just amazing: clear and simple sentences that resound with emotion. Petterson worked closely with the translator, Anne Born, so I assume the prose is close to the original. He claims not to plan his books, but just to start and see where the writing takes him. If that is true, then he is either a genius or does a thorough and excellent job of revising, because the way this book is structured is so delicate and yet completely sound. The mirroring of the two stories is reflected in other doublings: obvious ones like the two sets of twins, the two encounters with lorries on mountain roads, the two times Trond falls out of bed; and more subtle ones such as Trond’s children waiting for him to return from his business travels just as he waited for his father to return from his mysterious absences during the war. Yet it is so lightly done, or perhaps I was so caught up in the story, that I was not even aware of things clicking into place. I only saw them when I went back and reread the book, which I did immediately, something I do only with the rare book that leaves me gasping.

Rereading also helped me see the seemingly unimportant details that later coalesce around an event or image and take on layers of meaning. There is Sweden, for example, that other country where Trond is certain everything will look the same but feel entirely different. And while Petterson does paraphrase Hartley’s famous opening lines, we are there well before him. Sometimes we must examine the past before we recognise the small, almost imperceptible shifts that change everything: the moment of crossing into adulthood or the moment you know you must, as Rilke said, change your life.

I don’t want to give away the plot. This story needs to unfold in its own time. This is a story about what a son may learn from his father, about communicating in this so reticent culture, about what it means to be a man. It’s also a story about coming back, a theme that resonates with me. Trond’s father returns from the war, from the danger and excitement, where he risked everything for the greater good. He returns to his wife and two children, to their second-floor flat, just as Norway itself must find a way to return to itself after the long years of German occupation. How do you come back from war and pick up your life again? Or from a terrible loss, such as the death of Trond’s wife? Perhaps you run off to sea, or yell and sing like the boaters in Oslo on the night of liberation, or perhaps you go off to a cabin in the woods and sit by the river and think.

This debut novel has won many awards, and I can see why: it is beautifully written. The story is immediately interesting: two cases twenty years apart in the same small suburb of Knocknaree in Ireland. In the first, three children disappear while playing in the woods near their homes; only one is ever found, his shoes filled with blood and his memory gone. In the second, the found boy, now Detective Rob Ryan, investigates the murder of a young girl her body discovered by archeologists who are racing against the impending construction of a motorway to excavate a site in what was once the woods. Ryan, who has kept his past a secret, is joined by Cassie Maddox, his partner and the first woman to join the Murder squad, and Sam O’Neill, a cheerful, stocky young man whose uncle is a mid-level politician, which gives Sam an in for investigating the motorway contracts.

So there’s an interesting story, a variety of characters, and enough suspense to keep me reading late into the night. But what I loved about this book right from the start was the writing. In scraps of memory that come to Ryan, flashbacks, and conversation among the team, French brilliantly evokes childhood itself, what it is like to be ten years old, vaulting over the stone wall and running down the almost invisible paths that your feet know without your even thinking about it because you and your friends have been playing Indians and explorers and all kinds of other games in it all summer long. She reminds me of how foreign the world of adults seems, and of what those first unthinking friendships are like, deeper than blood. Most of all, she makes me feel again that sense of the magic of the world, that a tent of leaves could hide anything, a troll or unicorn. Things seem open-ended when you’re young, before you know how things work and what lies beyond the hill. Maybe beans can grow into the clouds; maybe a fish can grant three wishes; maybe the stories can actually come true.

These shreds of memory, while tantalising, are only a small part of the book, which is a police procedural, recounting the investigation of the girl’s murder. Here, too, French’s matter-of-fact story-telling is enriched by her description of the friendship between Ryan and Cassie, partners and pals, joking, teasing, taking the piss out of each other, backing each other up. During the investigation, their friendship expands to include (to a certain extent) Sam, but he is not part of the late-night swing dance classes on the roof or the desperate, early-morning calls for a ride home. French captures their easy camaraderie beautifully.

She also captures the give and take of the squad room. Like any office, the Murder squad has an efficient grapevine. There are alignments and alliances, mysterious shifts of power between Ryan and Superintendent O’Neill, as well as among the detectives themselves. There are the peculiar roles that some people take on in the culture of a particular office, like Quigley whose nose for weakness makes him hang like an albatross on new recruits, burnt-outs, and failures. There’s humor here, too, in the banter between Ryan and Cassie for example, to relieve, however briefly, the tension and boredom and frustration of the investigation.

Fundamentally, this is a book about telling the truth. Any investigation has to be about determining who is being open, who is hiding something, who is lying. Here, it is not only the suspects but the detectives themselves who wrestle with truth-telling and compromise: Cassie with her refusal to lie even in the interview room, Ryan with his lost childhood. Woods have long been a powerful metaphor for what is hidden, what is kept secret, what challenges and changes us. Think of the folktales documented by Grimm brothers, Robin Hood, John Fennimore Cooper’s stories, even 1986’s musical Into the Woods. In a smart move, French touches only lightly on these allusions, concentrating on this specific section of woods in Knocknaree and what they mean to one person, Rob Ryan, who lost his childhood there.

My problems with the book are minor. You always want the characters to grow and change in the course of a story, but some of Ryan’s transformations struck me as overly abrupt. Also, in a mystery, I want closure at the end, with all the puzzles unwound and the solutions laid bare. I don’t need retribution, necessarily, nor the kind of ending where every minor storyline ties neatly together. The answers don’t have to be spelled out for me, but I expect them to be there somewhere. Yet here some questions remain once the book is done.

However, in spite of this small frustration and Ryan’s sometimes incomprehensible behavior, this is an excellent mystery. I highly recommend it and have already gotten my hands on French’s next book.

Although always scrupulously clean, Sir Edward Feathers, a retired judge, is called Filth by his colleagues (an acronym for “failed in London; try Hong Kong”) in tribute to his successful career as an advocate in the Far East. Old Filth is so colorless as to seem invisible, literally so in some scenes. Since the death of his wife, he has the chilliest of connections to the people around him, not even knowing the name of his housekeeper. Events conspire to make him reflect upon his life and reconnect with people from his past. Filth is a Raj Orphan, not a term I'd heard before though I knew that those who worked for the Raj, the British Empire in the Far East, usually sent their children back to England by the time they were five, both for schooling and to avoid disease.

The story moves back and forth across the events of Old Filth's life, with the occasional foray into the point of view of another character. While I am easily irritated by this kind of non-linear structure in the hands of less adept writers, with Gardam I was never in doubt as to the who, when and where. Writers hoping to accomplish such seamless transitions would do well to study how Gardam manages her jumps in person, time and space. Like Old Filth himself, the prose is deceptively simple, concealing gems of lovely description, sparks of satire, and deep emotions. Of his wife Betty, Gardam says, “Her passion for jewelery was Chinese and her strong Scottish fingers rattled the trays of jade in the street markets of Kowloon, stirring the stones like pebbles on a beach. ‘When you do that,' Old Filth would say—when they were young and he was still aware of her all the time—‘your eyes are almond-shaped.'”

I very much enjoyed this book, a selection for one of my book clubs, despite a couple of quibbles. I didn't much like the interpolation of a few scenes of dialogue formatted like a script. The first one in particular does not tell us anything that the prose scene afterwards does not cover. However, some members of my book club liked these scenes, pointing out that they reinforce the way Old Filth lives his life as though playing a part on the stage. I also thought the climactic revelation was unnecessary and not worth the build-up. Most of my book club agreed, though some thought we needed the revelation to truly understand him. Perhaps. But I wonder if the whole of the life, presented so brilliantly throughout the book, doesn't give us all the understanding we need.

What with the recent deaths of Ted Kennedy, Trevor Stone and Mike Seegar, as well as others in my more immediate circle, I have been thinking a lot lately about the shape of a life, the whole of a life, which we cannot see until it is finished. I recently finished a biography of Dylan Thomas by Andrew Lycett, an excellent book, well-researched and very readable. I like to read biographies, but sometimes find them depressing because of the way they condense a life. There is too short a time between the dreams and aspirations at the beginning to the disappointments and compromises at the end. In our own lives, in real time, we have the breathing room to come to terms with our limitations (self-imposed or not) or perhaps to forget our early visions, Wordsworth's splendour in the grass. Reading a biography, however long one lingers over it, one moves too quickly over the ground for such comfort, flips through the photographs too rapidly. And, of course, particularly so with Thomas's life, with its squandered promise and early death.

Making allowances for the difference between a real person and a fictional character, I had a different response to this account of Old Filth's life. Initially I found this cold, reticent man unattractive and even uninteresting. However, discovering the circumstances of his birth, the joys and trials he encounters during his life, and the way he responds to them made me understand and appreciate the man he becomes and reminds me to look more often for the complexity behind the sometimes simple masks of those around me.

Back when I started this blog, I wrote about The Diamond in the Window that it had permeated my thoughts so thoroughly that its ideas and images had become part of my personal mythology. So too with Still Life.

This is the book that I said woke me from my long intellectual slumber. And no wonder! Not only is it challenging, with its allusions and complex counterpoint of themes, but it starts out with just that situation: pregnant Stephanie trying (and failing) to read Wordsworth while waiting in a queue at the ante-natal clinic. Baby-brain, we used to call it, when your head is stuffed with nursery rhymes and to-do lists, not to mention fuzzed from lack of sleep, so that you look at a book and can remember only that you used to be able to read and understand it.

I say that this is a challenging book, but it doesn't have to be. The story itself is absorbing and plenty to be going on with. You can read the book simply as the lives of two sisters who make different choices for their lives and how those choices play out. You may delight in the continuation from The Virgin in the Garden of their seemingly incompatible choices—scholar and wife, mind and body—and the echoes of that conflict in the juxtaposition of activity and stillness, chaos and order, experience and ritual, madness and sanity.

You may look at the other themes here, related to how we perceive the world and how we represent it. Van Gogh's voice comes and goes throughout the story, talking about shapes and colors, about domesticity and chaos. Alexander, whom we met in the previous book, is writing a play about Van Gogh and Gauguin. As motifs, he uses pairs of paintings: one yellow chair and one a brownish red, The Sower coming towards you and The Reaper going away. On my first reading, this book sent me off to read Vincent's letters to Theo, excerpts of which are quoted here, thus introducing me to another side of Van Gogh.

Many of the characters muse in their different ways about shapes and colors. Byatt explores her themes through the symphony of storylines. I think it is a perfect balance. The scientific, philosophic, and analytic bits are always presented in relation to the melody of the story, their lines playing off each other, resonating here, clashing there. I'm having to invoke a different set of metaphors, those of music, because Byatt has so thoroughly explored the metaphors of writing, painting, colors, biology, religion, even domesticity, that I cannot begin to use them in talking about the book.

The only aspect that seemed even slightly jarring to me on my first read is the occasional intrusion of the author. Rarely, but significantly, the author speaks up in the first person, telling us what image sparked the idea of this book, how she planned (and failed) to write it without any figurative language, even—hilariously—breaking into first person right after a character criticises Van Gogh for being unable to keep himself out of his work. Now I appreciate how her intrusions wake me up and make me consider not just the books the characters are discussing but this book itself, this thing I hold in my hands.

The book is about how to live in this world, with its things. Not just what lifestyle or work we choose, but how we experience the things of this world and recreate them in pictures and words. And how that experience and those re-creations have changed over the centuries.

It's also about how to die, how to live with the prospect of death, of loved ones, of ourselves. I said last week that in some ways this book is a response to the biological imperatives described by Richard Dawkins. Byatt writes about grief, so powerfully that it is hard for me to read those chapters. What do these little lives mean, the sparrow flying in at one window and out the other? That is the question. Not the adolescent search for an abstract meaning of life, but the purely practical question of what we are to do if, as Byatt echoes, the dead rise not. It is the question for those of us who have reached what Jane Smiley calls the Age of Grief, as everyone does eventually, losing someone too dear, a loss from which we never recover.

No wonder Byatt gives us Wordsworth and his Ode on immortality. Dawkins talks about the immortal gene, but also the way that memes, units of culture, may live on and on. So Byatt’s book is also about cultural artifacts: Van Gogh's paintings, Milton's poems, Shakespeare's, Mallarme's. And about how we may use words and images not only to distance ourselves from life (as I have done with this paragraph), but also to recreate the direct sensual experience of the world. And about those moments when words fall silent and we have only our senses.

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that when I first read A.S. Byatt’s Still Life, there seemed to be levels to the story that I wasn’t getting. I wonder now, as I reread it, if it doesn’t presume background knowledge that I didn’t have then. Coincidentally, as I was alternating between reading it and Dawkins’s book last week, I stumbled across a long passage referencing Dawkin’s concepts as presented in The Selfish Gene and I realised that much of Byatt’s book was a response to those concepts.

Dawkins looks at evolution from the point of view of the gene, proposing that organisms (such as humans) are “survival machines” for the genes, containers that carry them in our chromosomes, protecting and replicating the genes. Therefore, natural selection favors organisms that most successfully replicate their genes. Characteristics that promote replication (e.g., fertility, attractiveness, ability to protect oneself) are preferred and so spread more widely through the population.

The title is a metaphor, since genes themselves do not have feelings. It is meant to indicate that in their drive to replicate (since that is their function), genes may even act against the best interests of the organism containing them or against the best interests of the community of organisms. From the gene’s viewpoint, what matters is the number of copies of the genes, not of the organism. Hence, organisms have evolved to protect those who have copies of some of the same genes (kin).

Dawkins first defines his terms. I always appreciate starting this way, since words are so often misused, and in this case I needed his comprehensive and comprehensible explanation of the difference between genes, alleles, chromosomes, nucleotides, etc. He presents the idea of “replicator molecules” in the “primordial soup” succeeding over other molecules to became cells and, eventually, organisms. He describes how DNA replicates, both in the normal growth of the organism and in the formation of units of reproduction (sperm and egg, for humans).

I particularly enjoyed his concept of an evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) and the examples of such strategies that he and others have studied and/or modeled. In an encounter, the two participants have the choice to protect or defect. I was reminded of all those police dramas where they’ve separated two criminals and are telling each to rat on your partner before he rats on you; the one who defects first gets the best deal. Dawkins discusses many strategy models, while cautioning that the environment must also be a factor in their success.

I’m not sure why I hadn’t heard of this book until now, when it turned up as a selection for one of my book clubs. Perhaps because when it came out in 1976, I was enmeshed (as one of Byatt’s characters is) in caring for babies and certainly out of touch with popular culture. Over the years, I have absorbed many of the concepts of the book without knowing the primary source, thus perhaps unwittingly proving his thesis about memes, units of human culture that replicate and evolve in ways similar to those of genes, even at the expense of their vehicles (Dawkins’s book in this case).

The Selfish Gene is aimed at the layperson and is quite readable. I sometimes found his tone a bit petulant, as he rebutted objections to his work by reviewers and other scientists, but others in my book club found these rebuttals humorous. And certainly Dawkins is quick to admit when he is wrong and to give credit to others for their work—always a charming quality.

The book does raise moral questions, although Dawkins cautions that he is just describing how things work biologically, not how they ought to work. And he reminds us that, as thinking organisms, we sometimes have the power to override our genetic blueprint. For example, we can choose not to reproduce. We can choose altruism. We can choose peace.

Nemirovsky is the author of Suite Francaise which everyone was reading a few years ago, an insider’s account of the German invasion and the flight from Paris in June 1940 and life in a rural village under German occupation. What made it so special was not just that Nemirovsky herself was swept up in those events but also that she so memorably depicted the places and people and the way life was lived in Paris and in the village where they took refuge (Issy-l'Eveque in Burgundy). She captured nuances of behavior and inflection, unraveling webs of motivation and psychology, giving us fully realised characters.

Nemirovsky brings those same writerly gifts to bear in this brief novel about Sylvestre, called Silvio, who lives alone in a run-down farmhouse. He is old, he says, wanting only to sit by his fire in “blessed solitude” with his pipe and a bottle of red wine, shaking his head over the follies of his youth, when his lust for adventure took him to foreign lands and caused him to run through his inheritance. Now he sits in the village’s cafe on Sundays, nursing a glass of wine, surrounded by the neighbors who bought his lands and childhood home, listening to them make gentle fun of him. Nemirovsky captures the fine gradations of these relationships and uses marvelous details to describe these provincial characters, such as noting precisely how a young man turns his wineglass before lifting it, making clear what that action says about his place in that company. She also portrays the charm of rural France prior to World War II, with its agricultural rhythms and long memories.

Silvio often visits his cousin Helene who leads a charmed life with her beloved husband Francois, about-to-be-married daughter Colette, and three sons. The events following Colette’s marriage (which affect Helene, Francois and Silvio himself) move briskly, so that the narrative flows as smoothly as the river by Moulin Neuf where Colette and Jean live and run the mill that has been in his family for generations.

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that one reason I enjoyed Josephine Tey’s The Franchise Affair was that it was such an adult book. How much more so this story! Silvio’s nostalgia over his bittersweet memories mixes with the deep satisfaction he takes in the details of daily life: filling his glass with wine, walking the paths he’s known all his life, watching—amused and bemused—the antics of his neighbors. As in the other book, one of the greatest joys of this story is how vividly Nemirovsky conjures daily life in this small village.

This is a story of contrasts: family versus solitude, travel versus home, the lusty greed of youth to take what you want versus the peace of age when you’ve “given up trying to make the world adjust to your desires”. But it is also a story of secrets. Helene says to Colette, now a young mother, that the best thing a parent can do is to keep her experiences a secret from her children. Similarly Silvio ponders a group of strangers passing through and imagines them driving through the night, past darkened farmhouses, never guessing at the secrets hidden within.

So it is with this simple tale. It hides great richness, depth of experience and emotion. I enjoyed the book so much that I immediately read it again and, on the second reading, found myself marveling at the way it was structured. The accelerating chain of events, the secrets revealed: all were foreshadowed in details that I had not consciously noted in my first reading, though even then they lodged somewhere in my memory making the ending thoroughly satisfying. The structure, the details, the immersion in a different way of life, and fascinating Silvio himself combine to make this a perfect read.