The Godfather: Peter Corris on his best books of 2015
To date this year I’ve read 16 books and listened to 28 audio books. Because I keep a record with a note on each book and assign each a mark out of 10 to assist me in this exercise, I’m easily able to list the five I ranked most highly. They appear here in the order I accessed them rather than in order of merit.
1 Selling Hitler: The story of the Hitler diaries by Robert Harris (Faber, 1986). Robert Harris provides a fascinating account of the fraud perpetrated on media executives, including Rupert Murdoch, by a forger and his accomplices. The forgeries were crude but such was the greed and credulity of people who should have known better and exercised a professional scepticism that large sums of money were paid, although the final coup – publication and a vast payout – was averted. Most remarkable was the authenticity given, although later retraced, by historian Hugh Trevor-Roper (Lord Dacre), an establishment figure whose reputation was severely dented.
2 A Death in Brazil by Peter Robb (Bloomsbury, 2005). The violent, corruption-ridden, hideously economically and socially unequal culture of Brazil is laid bare by Robb’s searing account. Up close and personally he probes murders and scandals, sex and slavery. Brilliantly written, tragic and comic, the book is history viewed as a kind of technicolour nightmare.
3 Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy (1874, Penguin Classic 2003). I wrote about this book in a column to do with reading Victorian novelists, of whom I think Hardy was the best. This story has vibrant characters, dramatic reversals, and sociological depth. Interest in the stories of Bathsheba Everdene, Gabriel Oak, Sergeant Troy, Squire Boldwood and the country folk (who are never patronised) never falters. The landscape, traditions and seasons of ‘Hardy’s Wessex’ come vividly alive.
4 Can You Forgive Her? by Anthony Trollope (1864, Penguin Classic 1974). This book was parodied by a reviewer in the satirical magazine Punch under the heading ‘Can you stand her?’ I agree that the central character, Alice Vavasor, is a pain in the arse (like, initially at least, Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch), but it remains a classic of popular Victorian fiction. The first of the Palliser novels, it tells the story of mismatched people struggling to make a go of things in and outside of marriage. Some of the many comic episodes fall flat to modern ears, but as a portrait of life in the period, with all its constraints, it has a horrid fascination.
5 Dictator by Robert Harris (Hutchinson, 2015). Robert Harris again, showing his versatility in the last volume of his trilogy about the life of Cicero and the descent of Rome from an admittedly flawed republic to what would be a shameful and disastrous dictatorship under Julius Caesar and his successors.
Like all first-person narratives (this is told by Cicero’s slave and friend, Tiro), everything depends on the voice. Tiro is the perfect chronicler – wise, experienced, canny, loving but critical, and his account propels the famous statesman and orator, as it were, onto a large and well-lit stage.
I learned new things about Roman history – ‘ethnic cleansing’ by Julius Caesar in Gaul and Germany and, against that, the freedom with which men, and certain women, spoke their minds. I felt my republicanism recharged. Dictator provides two of the characteristics of the best historical novels – seduction and information.
