BOOKS: PAPERBACKS

Lord Berners: The Last Eccentric by Mark Amory Pimlico pounds 12.50 Collected Tales and Fantasies by Lord Berners Turtle Point pounds 11.99

Gerald Tyrwhitt-Wilson, Lord Berners, has any number of claims to fame: composer, novelist, painter, notorious aesthete and ornament of society, friendly with Stravinsky and Isaiah Berlin, intimate with the Sitwells, the Betjemans and several of the Mitfords (Nancy put him in The Pursuit of Love as Lord Merlin). He died in 1950, and for a long time was all but forgotten. In recent years there has been a minor revival of his reputation as a composer - much of his music is now available on CD, and you can pick and choose which version you would like of his most celebrated piece, the ballet The Triumph of Neptune, written for Diaghilev. And until recently, you could get from OUP a one-volume paperback edition containing his memoir First Childhood and the odd novel (though all his novels are odd) Far from the Madding War.

Now there has been a minor explosion of Berners-related material, with Turtle Point, a New York independent, putting out a handsome and very reasonably priced edition of his bizarre, enjoyable stories, and Amory producing this excellent biography. It's worth reading both, since Berners's life and his fiction were deliberately and confusingly entangled: the novels are full of real people and places, while his accounts of the past are full of artistic embellishments and elisions. Amory does a thorough job of straightening out the tangle and presenting, as far as it is possible, the definitive version of events.

The two books also complement each other stylistically. Berners's tales are characterised by restrained freakishness: Far from the Madding War tells how an Oxford don's daughter, in the early part of the Second World War, decides that her contribution to the war effort will be unpicking, thread by thread, a large and valuable piece of German embroidery; The Camel is a morbid tale about a vicar and his wife - based on the Betjemans, apparently - who find a camel on their doorstep; Count Omega is about a composer (Walton took it as a libel on himself) inspired by a phenomenal woman trombonist. Amory, though he drifts into censoriousness, has a matching dryness of wit: noting Berners's conviction that his first headmaster was exceptionally sadistic, he remarks "He may have been right, but standards in these things are high."

I Married a Communist

by Philip Roth

Vintage pounds 6.99

The extraordinary revival in Roth's critical reputation continues with this study of passion in history. Roth's alter ego Nathan Zuckerman bumps into his old high-school English teacher, who recounts the downfall of his brother, Nathan's former hero - Ira Ringold, aka Iron Rinn, a radio star and inflexible Communist brought down by the McCarthy witch-hunts and by his own vehemently simplistic view of life. This is fairly gentle stuff compared with American Pastoral; but it's still boiling with indignant energy, with rage at the indignities and betrayals life expects us to put up with. Invigorating.

Jem (and Sam)

by Ferdinand Mount

Vintage pounds 6.99

Jem is Jeremiah Mount, Ferdinand's putative ancestor - a pornographer, lecher, cheat and, in time, clerk to the Admiralty, first under Cromwell and then under the restored Charles II, who lives through the Plague, the Great Fire of London and Monmouth's rebellion. Sam is his colleague, Samuel Pepys, who apparently left behind some teasing mentions of this earlier Mount. The modern Mount has done his research: his version of life in London has plenty of telling details and casually thrown-off texture, and the lingo is convincing; as a piece of story-telling, it lacks adhesive power - a book from which it's easy to be distracted.

Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century

by Mark Mazower

Penguin pounds 8.99

Mazower isn't the first person to point out, in the aftermath of Yugoslavia's meltdown, that Europe isn't the enlightened, civilised place we like to think; and the Europe/Africa inversion implied in his title isn't entirely new. But nobody else has been through our crude, brutal, undemocratic antecedents with such thoroughness and conviction. The last century, as Mazower paints it, has been a garish canvas of wars, crises and competing ideologies - and the fact that liberal democracy won out, rather than Communism or Fascism, is a matter of sheer good luck rather than the fruition of an inevitable trend. He isn't always persuasive, but the sweep and punch of the book make it exhilarating and sobering at the same time.

Anti-Gay

ed Mark Simpson

Cassell pounds 7.99

A semi- scholarly - at times pseudo-scholarly - collection of polemical essays designed to cheer up all those people who want to reclaim the word "gay" as a synonym for "lively; bright, colourful; playful, merry ..." (Chambers Dictionary). Simpson and his contributors argue, among other things, that "gay" has become a sterile, meaningless label, that gay culture is self-obsessed and insular, that a preference for sleeping with people of the same sex shouldn't have to condemn you to a life of Shirley Bassey records and expensive underwear. Some of it is witty, some of it is forceful, some of it is neither, and if you aren't too clear on the difference between being gay and being queer, it can seem a tad recherche. More to the point, what are we supposed to say now? "Homosexual"?

The Tesseract

by Alex Garland

Penguin pounds 6.99

A tesseract, according to the definition Garland uses, is an unravelled version of a hypercube (which is a four-dimensional version of cube); and the follow-up to The Beach is an exercise in what you might call hyper- cubism. Just as Picasso tried to display an object from several viewpoints in a single image, Garland lays out all the views of a single event: a disastrous, blundering confrontation between an English sailor and Filipino gangsters in a Manila slum seen through the eyes of the Englishman, the gangsters and an assortment of innocent bystanders. Nothing especially original going on, and the raves that greeted it in hardback are puzzling, but Garland has a knack for noirish moods and exotic locations, and it's well constructed

RH