Keen readers of this blog might remember that in September 2021 I wrote about Lady Chatterley’s Lover which I had just reread after many years away from it.  Unbeknown to me, Alison Macleod’s novel Tenderness – a magnificently ambitious response to Lawrence, his novel and its long term impact –  was published in the same month. It was well reviewed but somehow it didn’t cross my bows and I missed it.

Then came a bit of serendipity. Alison Macleod lives in Brighton where my son Felix did a job in her house last autumn. They got chatting about her work and my interest in Lawrence. Perhaps she was surprised that a jobbing plumber could discuss such things but hey – look who brought him up!  Anyway the upshot was a signed copy of this impressive book under the Christmas tree for me in Felix’s house last month. And what a welcome surprise it was.

It’s a historical novel which unfolds in three sections but she plays with chronology and the strands intercut each other. First we meet Lawrence in the 1920s (and before) when the tuberculosis which killed him in 1930 is beginning to bite as he moves, usually impoverished from place to place at the behest of friends. For one summer he and his difficult wife Frieda lived in Sussex as guests of the Mynell family. This is one of the novel’s many “Oh yes, moments” I read Alice Meynell’s poetry when I was doing my MA in 19^th century poetry and I knew of her son-in-law Perceval Lucas because he was a collector friend of Cecil Sharp and my parents were keen members of the English Folk Dance and Song Society when I was growing up – the novel is stuffed with such names and connections. Eventually when Lawrence was living in Florence his last novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover was published privately in 1928 – regarded as so obscene in some quarters that it was risky to send it through the post.

The second strand of the novel takes us to the USA where Macleod develops an engaging subplot having discovered that the 1960 obscenity trial was closely followed by J Edward Hoover as head of the FBI. Her fictional interpretation is that he planned to use Jacqueline Kennedy’s “unhealthy” interest in “a dirty book” as a means of scuppering her husband’s election as president that same year. Undercurrents abound as we are led to speculate on the Kennedy marriage, Hoover’s sexuality and much more. It’s fiction but the research is immaculate.

Finally comes a warm and exciting account of the London trial itself – attended, in a sense, by Lawrence’s ghost.  Like Macleod, before she began researching Tenderness, I had assumed that Penguin Books went into the trial certain that they’d win, perhaps using it as a way of finally establishing freedom of expression for future books. Not a bit of it. It was, apparently, a nail bitingly close thing with Mervyn Griffith-Jones, for the prosecution, throwing in a sodomy trump card at the eleventh hour. There was even a real fear that Sir Allen Lane, founder and owner of Penguin Books, could be deemed personally responsible and sent to prison. In the event, of course, the jury ignored the summing up and returned a not-guilty verdict thereby changing the course of publishing history.

I enjoyed every word of this 600 page brick of a book. “Tenderness” was Lawrence’s original title for Lady Chatterley’s Lover and of course there’s a great deal of exactly that in both Lawrence’s most famous book and in Macleod’s take on it. Sex between committed adults is a pure expression of feeling and why not use straightforward vocabulary to describe it? Marriage, on the other hand, is often anything but pure as Macleod  makes us see again and again whether it’s the strained relationship Lawrence has with Frieda, Connie Chatterley’s marriage to the impotent Sir Clifford or the Kennedy situation in which he is mostly out on the campaign trail and she is elsewhere, pregnant and wondering.

I also fell in love with Macleod’s version of Lawrence himself – gentle, kind and witty despite being misunderstood and ill. This is one of those rare books which made me feel sad and bereft at the end because I’d finished it and would have to move on.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.

AS Byatt writes in colour. There’s a vibrant pre-Raphelite quality about her prose in these stories which instantly reminded me of her wonderful 1990, Booker prize-winning novel Possession which features the life and work of a Victorian poet modelled on Christina Rossetti. In ‘A Stone Woman’, for example, we read of “the first glacial tongues pouring down into the plains, white and shining above the green marshes and under the blue sky.” Byatt is, among things, an art historian and that knowledge shines through on every page. And ‘Precipice-Encurled’ is a fictional study of a specific painting.

A well-known books website describes this volume as “gothic fiction” but that’s inaptly reductive. As David Mitchell points out in his excellent introduction, you cannot pigeon-hole these eighteen stories. AS Byatt simply doesn’t do genre. The longest story in this collection, for instance – almost a novella – is ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye’. It nips through fairy tale, travel writing and explores the very nature of story telling because its central character is a professional narratologist – who meets a Djinn in a hotel bathroom. So does ‘Raw Material’ which is about a teacher of creative writing who, at last discovers talent, in his group in an unlikely format. Then he visits the writer’s home and suddenly we’re in a shocking Henry Jamesian world.

‘The July Ghost’ is a story about a dead  child who haunts a garden. “There is no boy” declares his mother fiercely at one point. I once heard Byatt talking about this on the radio and of course it’s a fictional exploration of grief with an autobiographical undertow. Byatt’s own son died in a road accident when he was 11. ‘Racine and the Tablecloth’ is rooted in Byatt’s unhappy boarding school past and ‘Sugar’ clearly owes a lot to Byatt’s own parents. Daughter of QC and a Browning scholar, Byatt has written and talked quite a lot about her difficult mother – as has her sister, novelist Margaret Drabble.

I have read many of these stories before in the distant past when they were published in various collections but some are new to me because they were written more recently and first appeared in various publications. ‘The Narrow Jet’, for instance, was first published in Paris Review 173 Spring 2005 and ‘Sea Story’ in the Guardian 15 March, 2013. Medusa’s Ankles is a new collection published in 2021.

AS Byatt – surely one of our most accomplished authors – is now 85 and it is possible that her best lies behind her. But what a best that is! Later this year I shall re-read Possession a book I adored when I first read it (more than once) in the 1990s.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Tenderness by Alison Macleod.

Paula Hawkins really is quite something isn’t she? First there was The Girl on The Train (although not her first novel) which got right under people’s skin and now this taut 2021 title which also hits you between the eyes but in a different way. No wonder it was a Sunday Times bestseller last year.

We’re on the canal in the Islington/Clerkenwell area where some houseboats are moored near some houses. A young man, an artist, who lives alone on one of them is brutally stabbed to death early one morning. Four people seem to know something about this: Miriam who lives on the next door boat, Laura who has apparently spent the night with him, Theo a novelist who lives nearby and Theo’s ex wife Carla.

Hawkins’s great strength is the way she drip feeds information as she gradually reveals the complex network of connections between the four main characters. It’s a long way from standard crime fiction and it’s writing for grown ups. You have to pay attention to pick up the subtleties. She sometimes reminds me of Ruth Rendell.

At the heart of the drama are two subplots – how did Theo and Carla’s infant son die when he was in the charge of her late sister, Angela? And did Theo steal the plot of a manuscript shown him by Miriam which is predicated on a dreadful incident in her youth? It’s all immaculately woven together and I didn’t spot the end-twist coming – not the one relating to the opening murder but the one concerning Theo’s novel. You read the last page with a triumphant sense of justice having been done.

The characterisation is delightful too. Laura’s elderly friend Irene is one of the best fictional folk I met in the whole of 2021. And one really feels for poor tortured, anguished Angela whom we encounter only through the memories of others. The sense of canal side life is warmly evoked as well – I’d quite like to live on a houseboat if I could make it as attractive and well organised as Miriam’s.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Medusa’s Ankles by AS Byatt

This is a substantial short story first published in mini book form in 1999. Over the years Bennett has developed a pretty creative relationship with London Review of Books and this story is an example of that – and one of several such tiny, Beatrix Potter-size books on my bookshelves with Bennett’s name on.

Bennett’s characterisic laconic lugubriousness  colours  the story of Denis Midgley’s experience of his father’s death. It’s both funny and poignant –  a Bennett tradmark.

Midgley is called out of the secondary school at which he teaches English to go to the hospital where his plumber father is lying, dying after a stroke. Once he’s there we get a lot of well observed staff comments and behaviour and there’s Aunt Kitty who has set herself up at the hospital and specialises in non seqiturs, often racist. Other family members eventually turn up and Bennett’s depiction of them is a dead pan treat. The dialogue – as you’d expect – is wonderful. This could just as easily be a short play as a short story.

At home Midgley has an unsypathic wife, devoted to caring for her own resident mother, with whom rapport is strained. His relationship with his children is not great either. Midgley is, in short, a bemused man who finds any sort of real contentment elusive. Even Valery Lightfoot, one of the nurses looking after Midgley senior isn’t likely to change that.

It’s an entertaining one hour’s read for a dark evening when you need something intelligent but unpretentious.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: A Slow Fire Burning by Paula Hawkins