D J Taylor
Up At The Villa
A Book of Secrets: Illegitimate Daughters, Absent Fathers
By Michael Holroyd
Chatto & Windus 254pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
One might define the current relationship between the novelist and the biographer as a rather complicated game of dressing-up, in which each player’s aim is to put on most of the clothes that his opposite number has taken off. While a certain kind of novel has grown denser and more self-consciously tethered to the world it affects to describe (and thus gets commended for the diligence of its ‘research’), so ‘life writing’ has turned more eclectic, less constrained by chronological decencies and sometimes regarding even facts as a hindrance to its schemes. There have been ‘hybrid’ biographies, and downright ‘experimental’ ones (see, for example, Andrew Motion’s Wainewright the Poisoner). There have been biographies of places, and snapshot studies that attempt to prove some dramatic truth about their subject by focusing on a particular incident or an isolated stretch of time. The general effect, it might be argued, has been to enhance one form’s attractions at the other’s expense. Which is to say that a good deal of modern biography looks unexpectedly creative, while a good deal of contemporary fiction seems downright staid and too obviously plundered from the textbooks.
It would be overdoing things to call Michael Holroyd the godfather of this change of tack, but he has certainly been one of its great cheerleaders. A Book of Secrets is, self-advertisingly, an exercise in the kind of meditative, time-travelling enquiry pioneered in Mosaic, a book about Holroyd’s
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'The eight years he has spent in solitary confinement have had a devastating impact on his mental health ... human rights organisations believe his detention is punishment for his critical views.'
@lucyjpop on the Egyptian activist and poet Ahmed Douma.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/ahmed-douma
'We nipped down Mount Pleasant ... me marvelling at London all over again because the back of a Vespa gives you the everyday world like nothing else can.'
Ali Smith writes this month's diary.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/temple-of-vespa
We were saddened to hear of the recent passing of the novelist Elspeth Barker, a valued contributor to Literary Review over the years. (1/2)