CHRIS CLEAVE: What Book...?
...ARE YOU READING NOW?
I’m reading ‘Randolph’, Brian Roberts’ biography of Churchill’s only son. In Malta during the war my grandfather was briefly assigned to assist Randolph Churchill on some business he had there.
My grandfather’s account of that period sparked my current interest in the intriguing, brave and flawed son of the great Prime Minister. It must have been awfully hard to live in the shadow of a father whose status then, as now, was almost godlike.
Despite being quite brilliant and giving it his best shot, by the time of his declining years, as Lady Diana Cooper put it, ‘I fear that the dear boy was a bitter disappointment to himself.’
...WOULD YOU TAKE TO A DESERT ISLAND?
I will nail my colours to the mast and admit that I’d love to be marooned on a desert island. Ideally one would be stranded with a dozen eccentric and intriguing fellow survivors of some catastrophe, one of whom would be carrying a wind-up gramophone and a stack of bakelite ‘78s.
I’d take a book entitled ‘Where There Is No Doctor’ by David Werner. Intended for isolated rural communities and first published in the seventies, it’s a kind of lo-fi medical course for the layperson, complete with gruesome illustrations and instructions on everything from removing a splinter through to killing and burying all animals and birds in the vicinity of a rabies outbreak.
Every single page of it makes you itch to write the screenplay for a survival movie.
...FIRST GAVE YOU THE READING BUG?
‘Trollvinter’, a children’s novel by Tove Jansson, translated into English as ‘Moominland Midwinter’. It’s a thoroughly ambiguous and haunting read and I remember the grateful sense of relief as a nine-year-old on discovering that not all books came with jolly characters and neatly-packaged morals.
I recently read Jansson’s more adult ‘The Winter Book’ and would highly recommend it - and for much the same reason.
...LEFT YOU COLD?
Literally cold.... ‘Wild Swimming: 150 Hidden Dips in the Rivers, Lakes and Waterfalls of Britain’ by Daniel Start. It’s a lovely book: an invitation to a certain kind of quiet adventure, and a celebration of this secretive island we live on.
With family or friends we’ve done around a dozen of the swims so far, and usually finished warm in spirit if not in body.
Chris Cleave’s latest novel, Gold, is published by Sceptre, £7.99
