Baltic: The Future of Europe
by Oliver Moody (John Murray, £25)
“The ancient struggle with Russia for the mastery of the Baltic” has returned, proclaims Oliver Moody in the opening pages of Baltic: The Future of Europe. This new book is a compelling but, at times, overzealous account of this “ancient struggle” and what the west should do to win it.
To get an edge in this civilisational battle, the Times reporter argues, the west must learn from the nations of the Baltic Sea region. To this end, we are brought to Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Denmark, Poland, Germany and Lithuania for lessons in resisting and enduring Russian aggression.
Each of these states gets its own chapter. Alongside the lessons are rigorously researched modern histories of the countries and appraisals of their current political circumstances. At points, however, the author’s eagerness to persuade the reader that there is much to learn from the region leads him to overemphasise the successes of its states. Large parts of the chapter on Estonia read as though they were written by the head of its tourism board.
That said, the book is strongest in these chapters—and they leave us much wiser about the region.
In the closing quarter, Moody offers an incredibly knowledgeable assessment of Russia’s military might and its aims, as well as of Nato’s tentative preparations for war. However, it is also in these passages that the book loses its way, spending far too much time speculating on what conflict between the powers might look like. With the supersonic speed history is moving at now, attempts to predict the future seem rather ill-fated.
Although a highly informative work, Baltic is fundamentally weakened by a Manichean viewpoint. Obviously, Russia is the malignant aggressor in the region, but the book leans too heavily into a good-versus-evil narrative, overexaggerating the virtues of Nato and the Baltic states, and belabouring the Russian state’s wickedness. In the end, we get the sense that the full nuance of truth is sacrificed to fit this moral framework.
Cormac Kehoe
The Life, Old Age and Death of a Working-Class Woman
by Didier Eribon (Allen Lane, £22)
When French sociologist Didier Eribon checked his 87-year-old mother into a nursing home, he was warned that she might die within two months. She managed seven weeks. Separated from her three sons and her lover, she refused to eat, drink or talk. “I wonder what was going through her mind in her moments of lucidity, between two periods of delusional dementia, as she made the decision and then waited to die,” Eribon writes.
This book is Eribon’s attempt to reckon with his feelings towards his mother—his grief, his guilt at leaving her in the home and at the distance that grew between them. He remembers being embarrassed of helping her with an odd job, distributing publicity flyers near his school: when she wasn’t looking, he stuffed them in a bin. “I was truly ashamed: of myself, of her... of what we were obliged to do.” Later, he despaired of her racism and support for the National Front.
As well as a memoir, the book is an analysis—at times a little long-winded—of society’s treatment of the elderly and of the poor service offered by many care homes. It can be hard to focus on these issues, he writes. When you’re young, they seem too far away, and when you get older, they are too depressing to acknowledge.
But we mustn’t ignore the voices of some of the most vulnerable people in society. “Any social theory, any political theory that wishes to think of itself as critical and as emancipatory needs to ask itself: Can old people speak? Then, if that is not the case: What can be done, what needs to be done, so that they can be heard even if they do not speak?”
Emily Lawford
Pink: The History of a Colour
by Michel Pastoureau (Princeton UP, £35)
When French historian Michel Pastoureau describes pink as a “half-colour”, he is not being dismissive. In his new book, as if championing an underdog, he meticulously traces its maturation over the centuries into a colour with its own name and symbolism distinct from red.
Pastoureau begins in antiquity where shades similar to today’s “peach” were associated with and used to depict nude bodies. He takes the opportunity to debunk narratives: there was no Latin word for pink. The oft-cited “roseus” referred to a vermillion red.
In the late Middle Ages, discussions of colour expanded beyond scientific texts to etiquette, sermons and literature, where it had moral and social implications. In addition to linking pink to health and nobility, a 15th-century treatise on heraldry notably praises it as “very beautiful and gay”, marking a shift toward aesthetic appreciation.
Pastoureau takes us from Renaissance Humanism to the animated big cat from the Pink Panther films, which he audaciously suggests is more responsible for pop culture’s “pinkathon” than are years of marketing for girls’ toys. He also makes an intriguing foray into pink’s association with lechery via the pig; a calumny against the “archetypal pink animal” which Pastoureau finds most unfair.
It is clear Pastoureau struggled with this book. It feels more disjointed than his previous works, his frustration over scant historical information often palpable. He acknowledges this with admirable candour.
For him, colour is far more the purview of social historians than physicists, and he has spent 25 years adeptly expressing what colours reveal about our collective values. As he signals a new journey writing about the remaining “half-colours”—brown, orange, purple, and grey—you can’t help but be swept up by the sense of discovery and adventure. I say with utmost sincerity, bon voyage!
Aida Amoako
Mary Shelley in Bath
by Mary Shelley (Manderley Press, £19.99)
Mary Shelley in Bath takes a well-known writer and her work but homes in on the five-month period—between September 1816 and January 1817—that she spent in the English city. It collects the journals, letters and a key chapter of Frankenstein (eventually published in 1818) that Mary wrote during her stay, alongside four later short stories inspired by it.
As the writer and critic Fiona Sampson begins her excellent introduction, technically it was Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin who arrived in Bath: the 19-year-old lover of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Accompanying her was her and Percy’s then-still-surviving second born, nine-month-old “Wilmouse”, and Mary’s step-sister, Claire Clairmont, whose own circumstances—pregnant and abandoned by the infamous Lord Byron—had forced the women to seek refuge somewhere other than “gossipy” London, as Sampson puts it. Here—according to Mary’s rather sparse and placid journals—she reads books, takes walks and writes.
Much was happening in the background, though. In early October, Mary’s half-sister Fanny Imlay killed herself. Two months later, news of another suicide arrived: that of Percy’s wife Harriet. On 30th December, Mary and Percy were married. And two weeks later, Claire delivered a daughter.
The influence of these life-altering happenings can be seen on the page. Mary’s stories deal in loss and transformation—from more simple shifts in the circumstances of her characters to an eerie early tale of body-swap horror. And it’s in Bath that she writes the chapter of her novel in which the monster is successfully animated for the first time. As this elegant, inspired volume highlights, although little of this grief and turmoil manifests in her correspondence or her diaries, her fiction is steeped in it.
Lucy Scholes
Stories of Ireland
by Brian Friel (Penguin, £12.99)
Brian Friel is best known as a playwright. His Dancing at Lugnasa was revived a couple of years ago at the National Theatre and is a fine testament to his art. Set on the edges of Ballybeg—a fictional town in County Donegal, Ireland, where Friel situated most of his plays—here is a tale of five sisters struggling to get by in a country where there are older influences than even Christianity. It is a masterpiece of place and character and the mixing of the two.
However, Friel also wrote short stories, a number of which were published by the New Yorker in the 1960s. This collection, a reprint of one published under a different title some four decades before his death in 2015, demonstrates that this was no mere sideshow for the writer. These are stories that feature all of the playwright’s talents—a depth of characterisation, an ear for dialogue—but also something more. Like all the best short story writers—and Friel surely ranks among them—he seems to pack the world into a handful of pages; the past, the present and even a touch of the hereafter.
The first story, “The Diviner”, is, in many ways, typical. It focuses on “working” characters, tragicomically set apart from the “chief executives” of the town, confronting loss, or at least the possibility of loss. In this case, the eponymous mystic manages to reunite the cleaner Nelly with her second husband, but not before he’s drowned and her aspirations for a respectable union are gone with him.
But “typical” is a terrible word to apply to a collection that also features sunken treasure, tape recordings from faraway nuns and (in its finest story, “The Widowhood System”) an inept racing pigeon who brings two lovers together. If I read anything more rewarding this year, I’ll be Ballybeggared.
Peter Hoskin
