18 saturday review Saturday April 30 2022 | the times
paperbacks
Trans: When Ideology Meets
Reality by Helen Joyce
Oneworld, £9.99
Helen Joyce, a former journalist at
The Economist, makes the case for
why biological reality matters and
why it should trump gender identity.
Take sport: the average adult man,
Joyce reminds us, has legs that are
65 per cent stronger and an upper
body that is 90 per cent stronger
than a woman’s. That’s why, as she
points out, “the fastest time ever
run by Allyson Felix, the women’s
400-metre Olympics champion, is
beaten more than 15,000 times each
year by men and boys”. This athletic
advantage will be conferred to a
post-pubertal transwoman even if
she takes testosterone suppressors.
That’s just one of the issues Joyce
tackles. David Aaronovitch wrote in
his review: “One benefit of Joyce’s
book is its intellectual clarity and itsrefusal to compromise. So she takes
apart this ideology of gender with a
cold rigour. What, after all, is the
woman or man you want to become
if there’s no such thing as a woman
or man?”A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: (In
Which Four Russians Give a Master
Class on Writing, Reading and Life)
by George Saunders
Bloomsbury, £10.99
Here’s a literary curiosity. Half of this
book consists of seven short stories.
There are three by Chekhov (In the
Cart, The Darling and Gooseberries),
two by Leo Tolstoy (Master and Man
and Alyosha the Pot) and one apiece
by Ivan Turgenev (The Singers) and
Nikolai Gogol (The Nose).
The other half is made up of the
Booker-winning George Saunders’s
commentaries on the stories, which
have grown out of the course that
he has been teaching for 20 years to
waggy-tailed creative writing pups at
Syracuse University. And the Russian
stories of this period are, Saunders
tells his students, what Bach is for ayoung composer: the foundation and
pinnacle of the form. Richard
Godwin in his review said that
“sometimes Saunders strains a little
too hard to make it ‘FUN!!’ with a Dr
Seuss-like analogy”, but “his strength
as an interpreter lies in his non-
academic approach. He reads, as
Vladimir Nabokov advised, with
his back alert to the shiver
down the spine.”Stalin’s War: A New
History of the
Second World War
by Sean
McMeekin
Penguin, £19.99
The Second World
War is usually
characterised as being
Hitler’s, but the American
historian Sean McMeekin’s
contention is that in fact it was
Stalin’s. The murderous Soviet
dictator, right, wanted there to be a
conflict between Germany and the
other capitalist powers, connived to
bring it about and succeeded. Heplanned to invade Germany before
Germany invaded him, but failing
that survived almost entirely with the
material help of the West, conspired
to create a war between Japan and
the US, then, in the pacified ruins of
the world, expanded his communist
empire to include eastern Europe.
The only true victor was Stalin,
and we poor saps furnished
the laurels, but it could
have been otherwise.
That’s the broad
brush of it. David
Aaronovitch wrote
in his review that
“McMeekin
is a superb writer.
There isn’t a
boring page in
the book. His
familiarity with the
archives of several countries
is extraordinary. His breadth of
approach is refreshing”, but his
argument “takes him to some strange
places. Which provoked in me the
greatest number of NOs I’ve ever
scribbled on the pages of a proof.”Storyland: A New Mythology of
Britain by Amy Jeffs
Riverrun, £12.99
Amy Jeffs gives British mythology a
makeover. She draws on stories from
the jumble of peoples who have lived
in these islands; there are tales from
Celtic and Anglo-Saxon traditions
here, layered with influences from
classical myths and Christianity.
We are reintroduced to Brutus,
known in medieval history as the
first king of Britain, who came here
from the hot plains of Troy. We meet
Lear, Arthur and Merlin. Joseph of
Arimathea offers Christ a tomb after
he is taken down from the cross,
and ends his days buried at Avalon.
In Scotland, Columba meets the
monster of the River Ness.
“Jeffs writes beautifully, erring just
on the right side of florid, and her
linocut prints make attractive
illustrations,” Antonia Senior said of
this “gorgeous book”. “The stories
come with explanations of sources
and legacies, and she has a lovely
knack of rooting each one in the
landscape that birthed it.”,
shiverg
rican
eekin’s
fact it wasy
and wepo
the lau
have
Tha
bru
A
in
“M
is
Th
bori
the bo
familiar
archives of
is extraordinary.HiThe writer who willed
herself into oblivion
‘Full of intellectual froth and sexy fun’ — William Boyd on the
mysterious Rosemary Tonks, the novelist who gave it all up
written out In 1977 Rosemary Tonks stopped writing and became a recluseseems more fully achieved — but her rack-
ety novels are valuable curios and very
much of their time. They read like a
strange hybrid of Muriel Spark and Beryl
Bainbridge with a dash of Joe Orton.
The Bloater is representative of her tone
of voice. The narrator is Min, a young mar-
ried woman who works in a sound studio.
Her complacent husband, George, doesn’t
seem to object to her flirtations with vari-
ous men, among whom is the eponymous
“Bloater”, who is named Carlos and is an
overweight opera singer on the younger
Pavarotti model. Min can’t decide whether
she’s attracted to the Bloater or repelled by
him and, besides, she’s also dallying with a
young musicologist called Billy.
“Billy will listen, smiling at me. His
regard from those hazel eyes of his is
always steady and interested, and his step
is light and quick, just like my own, with the
India-rubber spring in it suppressed for the
sake of decency. The only thing about him
which unsettles me is the delicate finish of
his fingers. I once said to him: ‘I’m afraid
your fingers... are cruel.’ ”
This gives a good idea of The Bloater’s
tone — zany, eccentric and free-
associating. The novel is dialogue-heavy,much of the conversation between Min
and her women friends being about sex and
men and how awful men are. It may be the
benefit of hindsight, but the novel seems
very much of its time, the Swinging Sixties.
One could imagine it being filmed by Rich-
ard Lester, starring Suzy Kendall as Min
and Oliver Reed as the Bloater with a great
soundtrack by the Spencer Davis Group.
Yet the sly intellectual froth and sexy fun
of the novel is counterposed by the know-
ledge of what happened to its author —
her chronic health problems, profound
spiritual anguish and rejection of every-
thing she had achieved as a young writer.
Paradoxically the story of Tonks’s
astounding efforts in seeking oblivion,
ensuring the non-existence of her literary
self, and being so successful in achieving it,
has brought her a degree of posthumous
fame that her shade would deeply resent.
Despite everything she did there will
now be a small corner of the 20th-century
English novel reserved for her unique
example. Stewart Lee’s introduction to this
new edition, it should be noted, is typically
astute and funny.
William Boyd’s new novel, The
Romantic, is published in OctoberW
riters deliberately don’t
seek oblivion — for very
obvious reasons — it’s
oblivion that seeks them
out. The case of Rose-
mary Tonks (1928-2014) is a different
matter, however; unique in English litera-
ture, I believe. A successful poet and
novelist, at some time in the late 1970s she
wilfully ran into the arms of oblivion and
effectively disappeared.
Tonks had published two collections of
poetry and six novels between 1963 and
1972, when she made the decision to quit
her life as an increasingly acclaimed writer
and leave it behind. Round about 1977 she
had some kind of a breakdown — a combi-
nation of ill health coinciding with a
profound crisis of faith. She abandoned
her nom de plume, her maiden name,
and became a religious recluse, living out
the decades that remained to her in
Bournemouth under her married name,
Lightband, although she and her husband
were divorced. She turned her back irrevo-
cably on her former self and the literary
life she had been leading.
We know the details of her disappear-
ance thanks to the expert sleuthing of the
poet and publisher Neil Astley, who
recounts his rediscovery of Tonks in his
long introduction to a reissued edition of
her poetry, Bedouin of the London Evening,
published by Bloodaxe in 2014. For anyone
curious about the fascinating details of
Tonks’s self-erasure, or self-obliteration,
as Astley describes it, that is the place to go.
I read Astley’s account of Tonks’s life
when I bought Bedouin of the London
Evening and, highly intrigued, sought out
her novels. They were very rare. I could
only track down — and afford — three of
the six, one of them being The Bloater.
Tonks is, I suppose, a kind of English
version of Arthur Rimbaud, perhaps the
only other writer who determinedly jun-
ked his literary career; in the 1870s he
stopped writing and eventually set himself
up as a merchant in what is now Ethiopia.
There is nothing quite so exotic and
romantic in Tonks’s example, but there is
still definitely something Rimbaldian and
strangely heroic, in a very English way,
about how she lived out her years of dog-
ged seclusion in a provincial seaside town.
Tonks resisted every attempt, when
encouraged, to tell her story and step back
into the literary limelight. There was no
chance of her being, for example, a new
Barbara Pym, who did manage to emerge,
later in her life, from the oblivion to which
she had unwillingly been consigned and
took great pleasure in her rediscovery.
Tonks, who was clearly suffering from a
form of mental derangement — her cult-
ish obsessions were extreme — categori-
cally refused to listen to any siren voices.
As far as Mrs Lightband was concerned
“Rosemary Tonks” didn’t exist.
Yet the work does exist and Vintage
Classics is to be congratulated in reissuing
The Bloater, a novel Tonks published in- Let’s hope some others may follow —
The Way Out of Berkeley Square and The
Halt During the Chase would be my sugges-
tions. It is clear from these three novels she
wrote before her disappearance that she
was hitting a distinctive comic stride. No
one will know what direction Tonks would
have taken as a novelist — the poetry
Her novels
are like a
hybrid of
Muriel Spark
and Beryl
Bainbridge
with a dash
of Joe Orton
The Bloater
by Rosemary TonksVintage Classics,
142pp; £8.99books