Louis de Bernières — Notwithstanding

Random House Uk Ltd 2009 Paperback, 275pp. A Frenchman once pointed out to Louis de Berni res that Britain was the most exotic country in Europe, adding that it was 'an immense lunatic asylum'. Initially stunned by this proposition, de Berni res realised that the Frenchman was absoutely right, and cast his mind back to the village in southern Surrey where he grew up in the sixties and seventies. It was a place where an old lady might dress as a man in plus fours, and spend her time shooting squirrels with a twelve bore, or keep a vast menagerie in her house. A retired general might give up wearing clothes, a spiritualist might live in a cottage with her sister and the ghost of her husband, and people might think it quite natural to confide in a spider that lives in a potting shed. These stories have accumulated over the years, and have become fictions rather than memoirs, transformed by a novelist's inability to stick to the truth. The characters appear in each others' stories, giving a picture of an entire community and a beautiful landscape. The literature of that period was mainly metropolitan, but here we find the atmosphere of those times as it was in the countryside. This book is not about an idyll that never was; it is about people who are worth remembering, whose lives are worth celebrating, and would otherwise have been forgotten. (ISBN: 9781846553318). Good.