Bloomsbury

In a mountain area of south-eastern France that I know well, the locals will often respond to a comment on the beauty of the valleys by remarking glumly that they are not what they were: the forest is expanding, they say. We might see reforestation as a good thing, restoring hillsides devegetated and exposed to erosion by goats and sheep, but to them it marks the loss of a beloved familiar landscape. This bears out a point that Peter McPhee makes throughout his engaging new book, An Environmental History of France: that people have an idealised image of French landscapes, perceiving them as beautiful and timeless. In fact, he shows, they are the product of human activity, most markedly over the past 150 years. In that time, the bay around Mont-Saint-Michel has been largely reclaimed for farming, the hedgerows of Normandy have been destroyed, and freeways and fast train lines have sliced through the countryside.

On 22 January 1840, the Mettray Penal Colony officially opened. Mettray was a French prison farm for juvenile criminals that was imitated by other incarceration programs throughout Europe as a disciplinary model. For Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punish (1975), its creation was a turning point in human power relations, as its structure reconfigured punishment as discipline and surveillance; it transformed society into a carceral culture. As Foucault claims, power and knowledge are one and the same.

Connections made across time and space have long been a focal point of Irish writer Colum McCann’s oeuvre. From the construction of the first railway tunnels under New York (This Side of Brightness, 1998) to his singular portrayal of the history and emotional toll of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Apeirogon (2020), McCann has weighed what it means to tether oneself to another person, another place, another moment in history. Even his recent foray into non-fiction – American Mother (2024), written with Diane Foley, whose journalist son James was brutally murdered by ISIS – concerns itself with Foley’s attempt to find some sort of bridge between herself and her son’s killers.

What’s in a novel’s epigraph – this one for example: ‘In a general way it’s very difficult for one to become remarkable’? We might read these words as an elliptical suggestion that the narrative we are about to encounter will raise the question of character. Perhaps we will witness one or more characters struggling to achieve something out of the ordinary – or struggling in entirely unremarkable ways, remaining unremarkable. Such is the stuff of much of the best fiction, after all, as well as the course of most lives.

William Dalrymple’s tour de force avoids all the pit-falls of superpower competition, identity politics, and over-simplification, but nonetheless places Indian cultural and economic achievements at the centre of the changing worlds of the West and Asia from c.250 bce to 1200 ce. The Golden Road: How Ancient India transformed the world explains how and why Indian influence in China reached a high-water mark ‘never to be reached again’ during the reign of Empress Wu Zetian (the Fifth Concubine), who died at the age of eighty-one in 705 ce, having ruled China for some fifty years.

Tell me your crow name. Tell me the name you will wear to the bottom of the sea,’ begins the narrating voice of Francesca de Tores’s new novel, Saltblood. These opening words, spoken by the central character at what we come to realise is the end of her life, highlight the novel’s key themes and imagery: the play of names and identities, sometimes given and sometimes taken, but always something to be worn or cast off; the call of the sea and its persistent presence of sparkle and depth throughout this chronicle of an unusual life; and the blue-black image of the crow itself, the speaker’s constant familiar, an intimate figure who lurks, ominous and comforting, in the sway of rigging. Unfolding her story in the shadow of imminent death, the reflective, determined voice of de Tores’s narrator is as deep and unpredictable as the ocean itself, thereby setting the stage for a story of introspection and observation, resilience and desire, swashbuckling action, and quotidian seaboard life.

Decolonising has reached the classics. Complexity, diversity, and entanglement are in. Greece and Rome are, well, out. The movement to ‘reclaim’ Antiquity began with noble aims: to emancipate the ancients from the prism of politics and war through which we like to see them, to emphasise the role of technology and trade in their lives, and to make women and people of colour visible among them again. Alas, decolonisation all too often seems to have descended into ugly arguments over restitution of artefacts (Elgin marbles, anyone?) or the skin shade of this or that Roman notable (Septimius Severus or St Hadrian of Canterbury, for example). Books such as Josephine Quinn’s are the sensible, balancing side of the equation, an antidote to so much virtue signalling and grievance mongering. Quinn’s is an ancient world decentred – provincialised, to invoke Dipesh Chakrabarty’s celebrated term. Greece and Rome remain, but must jostle with others for attention, space, and significance. The argument is simple. Antiquity was far more multipolar, dynamic, and integrated in reality than in the civilisational – and, indeed, civilising – narratives that Europeans since Petrarch have been telling themselves about it.

The title and subtitle give it away. This edited collection considers two related subjects: the British practice of internment in World War II, and Britons’ experience of internment at the hands of enemy powers in that conflict. The editors define internment as ‘the state of civilian confinement caused by citizenship of a belligerent country’. Thus, the histories this book tells are those of civilian men, women, and children betrayed by nationality and circumstance, as opposed to those of military men captured in conflict. Each of the histories included here is worthy, and some are riveting. There is much in this volume that will be unfamiliar to students of internment and World War II generally.

In 2015, the Nobel Prize-winning author J.M. Coetzee released a volume of reflections on ‘truth, fiction and psychotherapy’ under the title The Good Story. The volume, co-written with Arabella Kurtz, a psychotherapist, preserves the distinctiveness of the viewpoints of the two interlocutors throughout. As we read these exchanges between the writer and the psychotherapist, we are in the realm not of ‘autrebiography’, where the self is endlessly reflected as if in a hall of mirrors, but of autobiography, where the self is transparent to itself and its own viewpoint. What we hear on Coetzee’s side is the plain voice of the author – an author not undone by an army of caveats about truth in the vein of the postmodern, an author who has not departed and been replaced by her readers. This is a voice that engages with Plato’s injunction against the poets in The Republic, a voice that finds value in the artifice of the ‘good story’ even as it acknowledges the failure to tell the story of the good, a voice that ruminates on whether truth as an ethical enterprise might even have disappeared from the psychotherapist’s consulting rooms. In the only mention of this work in the capacious Bloomsbury Handbook to J.M. Coetzee – it occurs in Nick Mulgrew’s chapter ‘Later Criticism and Correspondence’ – this statement is recorded:

Robyn Davidson is still best known as the ‘camel lady’, the young writer whose account of her desert trek from Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean with four camels and a dog made her internationally famous. Tracks, published in 1980, has never been out of print. Since then Davidson has led a nomadic life – sometimes living in London, sometimes New York, and often exploring the world’s remote places and writing about them and her encounters with desert dwellers. Now, in her early seventies she has returned to her roots, spurred – like many writers at the same stage of their lives – by the need to examine her own past.