What are you reading? – August 2021

Peter J. Smith, reader in Renaissance literature at Nottingham Trent University, is reading Clive James’ The River in the Sky (Picador, 2018). “An epic poem of more than 120 pages, James’ final creative project crystallises around a staggering range of apparently unrelated topics: jazz, film, travel, Olympic divers, opera, ancient Egypt, painting (the Renaissance masters’ as well as his daughter’s), cities, poetry and animals. He tells the story of his childhood in evocative flashbacks of 1940s Sydney and the uncontainable excitement of Luna Park. But through all this multiplicity of experience and intrigued deliberating runs death – his father’s following his wartime internment, his cousin Kenny’s from ‘creeping paralysis’ and that of Yale academic Tom Weiskel, attempting to rescue his daughter who had fallen through thin ice. Death, James knows, will soon take the poet himself ‘Out past the journey’s edge’. It’s a striking and lasting monument to a cultural omnivore: idiosyncratic, pensive and alert.”

Nigel Rodenhurst, study skills tutor at Aberystwyth University, is reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (Faber and Faber, 2021). “Ishiguro’s recent novel presents a futuristic world in which parents buy artificial friends (AFs) for their children who are home-schooled and shielding from a polluted America. At its heart is Josie, a sick child, and her relationship with AF Klara. It is hardly original and perhaps even ‘old hat’, questioning how human traits such as faith, loyalty and love can exist in an android mind. This takes me back to some readers questioning how Ishiguro could add anything trenchant about the British class system in The Remains of the Day. By his own admission, he writes ‘the same book over and over’. Detail and context mean very little – character and emotion are everything. This does not appeal to all readers, but perhaps because it suits my own tastes, I found this to be another beautiful exploration of love and beauty in art and life.”

John Anchor, professor of international strategy at the University of Huddersfield, is reading Stephen Tomkins’ The Journey to the Mayflower: God’s Outlaws and the Invention of Freedom (Hodder and Stoughton, 2020). “The Protestant Reformation in England led to the emergence of a large Puritan movement. During the Elizabethan period, Puritans were divided between those who wanted to reform the Church of England from within and those who advocated separatism. The latter group was initially dominated by Presbyterians – already strong in Scotland – who rejected the authority of bishops. Subsequently Congregationalism, which also rejected Presbyterian elders and stressed the primacy of church congregations in decision-making, grew. Persecution led many separatists to flee to the Netherlands, where religious toleration was legal. Here some joined up with Anabaptists and Mennonites to create the Baptist movement. Meanwhile, the separatists in England continued to grow in number and religious dissent was no longer a capital offence. Indeed, the separatists themselves came to believe in religious toleration in society as well as religious purity in the church. These beliefs underpinned their settlements in the New World and their subsequent opposition to Charles I.”