Review: Vivien Horler
Two Women in Rome, by Elizabeth Buchan (Corvus)
Lottie Archer is a London archivist who meets Tom at a wedding and falls in love. He lives in Rome, where he works for the British Council.
He hears of a job for an archivist in a private Rome archive, one that collects the papers of hundreds of British and American ex-pats who have lived and died in the city.
Lottie gets the job, and melts when Tom asks her to share his home. She was abandoned as an infant and has never really had a home. Within nine months of their meeting, they are married.
Much of the material in the archive is damaged and musty, and needs to be sorted. Among the first files Lottie starts work on are those of an Englishwoman, Nina Lawrence, who died in Rome in 1978 aged just 38. A note on the file says Nina had “no known contacts. No known issue. No claimants”. Continue reading
The trouble with fake history – like fake news – is you end up not knowing what to believe.
Remember the great comeback from Winston Churchill when British Labour MP Bessie Braddock him: “You’re drunk!” To which he replied: “And you’re ugly, but in the morning I’ll be sober.” Apparently Boris Johnson, Britain’s current prime minister and a great Churchill fan, has identified the very spot in Westminster where the exchange took place. But journalist Otto English says it probably never happened. It was first related by English writer Augustus Hare in his diary about an encounter between two unnamed British MPs in 1882, when Churchill was eight years old and Braddock not yet born. This is just one of English’s fake-history put-downs in this fascinating book that exposes myths of World War II, the adventures of Christopher Columbus (who never set foot on the continents of north or south America), the belief that Britain’s royal family is German, that Abraham Lincoln believed all men were created equal and that ancient people thought the Earth was flat (they knew it wasn’t).
Veteran novelist Douglas Kennedy, who has been described as the “maestro of family noir”, has written about one of big divisive issues of our time: abortion. An Uber driver has to drop off a retired professor at the abortion clinic where she volunteers, and is caught up in a violent vortex of protest. Afraid of the Light is described as “a novel of high suspense and considerable moral complexity”.
Lottie is an archivist at Britain’s National Archives at Kew when she meets Tom at a wedding. He lives in Rome, and within nine months persuades her to marry him. A whole new life beckons for Lottie when she secures a job as an archivist in the eternal city. She discovers a valuable 15th century painting, and decides to explore the life of Nina Lawrence, the woman who left it behind. Nina had gone to Rome after World War II to restore gardens that had been devastated by war. But when she died in 1978 no one attended her funeral and Lottie is puzzled by this. She uncovers a complicated love story set in the turmoil of post-war Italy, and what she finds will come to affect her own future. Elizabeth Buchan is a best-selling prize-winning British novelist and Two Women in Rome looks like a wonderful read.
Twenty-six-year-old Nella works as an editorial assistant at a New York publishing company. But the job isn’t great in that she’s the only black employee, and she becomes tired of loneliness and what she sees as her colleagues’ micro-aggression. And then Hazel, another black woman, joins the staff, and Nella is delighted. They hit it off, but a series of events follow which leave Nella under a cloud of opprobrium while Hazel is seen as the office darling. Shortly after this, nasty notes appear on Nella’s desk saying she should resign. Is Hazel writing them? What is going on? Soon Nella realises there is more than her career at stake. This novel has been described as “dark, funny and furiously entertaining”.
Comrade Editor – on life, journalism and the birth of Namibia, by Gwen Lister (Tafelberg)
I am not a nervous air passenger. I have every faith that the pilots know what they’re doing, and ditto for air traffic control and the maintenance staff.
In her acknowledgements at the end of this marvellous novel, author Maggie Shipstead thanks her editor for “paring down an unwieldy thousand-page manuscript into this slender wisp of a thing”.
The wholesale looting that has made up the State Capture project is so overwhelming that among many media consumers, including me, there is a tendency, when coming across some new malfeasance, to roll one’s eyes and move on.