28 August 2024

From Robert Bartlett to Donal Ryan: new books reviewed in short

Also featuring Sing Like Fish by Amorina Kingdon and Tracks on the Ocean by Sara Caputo.

By Michael Prodger, Pippa Bailey and George Monaghan

History in Flames by Robert Bartlett

In 48BC, when Julius Caesar inadvertently burned down the great Library of Alexandria, the flames took with them an irreplaceable store of knowledge about the ancient world. We will never know just what it is we will never know. Since our understanding of the past is almost exclusively reliant on paper, says the historian Robert Bartlett, it is a wonder so much has survived. In this book he examines instances when irreplaceable tranches of medieval documents were destroyed by human agency, the irony being that gathering them in one place, in libraries and archives, made them less safe rather than more so.

In a series of case studies he highlights just a few of the losses. When Strasbourg was pulverised in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War, among the manuscripts destroyed was The Garden of Delights, a 12th-century illustrated encyclopedia; when the Public Record Office in Dublin was burned in 1922, so was the archive that chronicled centuries of the history of colonial Ireland; when the state archive in Naples was fired by German troops in 1943, great swathes of detail about Norman Sicily were lost. As Bartlett heart-wringingly shows, history has too often proved to be as fragile as the paper it was recorded on.
By Michael Prodger
Cambridge University Press, 220pp, £20

Sing Like Fish by Amorina Kingdon

The submarine soundscape is a party that we weren’t invited to. “Each little clam here know how to jam here under the sea,” exalts Sebastian, the gregarious crustacean of Little Mermaid fame. He’s right: underwater, sound vibrations travel four and a half times faster than in air. Six million years of landlubbery ear-volution, however, has ruined our ability to hear sub-aqua. Amorina Kingdon’s new book, Sing Like Fish, wants to show us what we’ve missed.

Sadly, it’s a you-had-to-be-there sort of party. The book’s two major themes – underwater sound exists, and underwater animals hear it – struggle to fill its pages. Do we need to know who argued with Francis Bacon’s theory of animal ears? Or to see the ancient goddess Echo when echolocation comes up? It’s interesting that Cold War interests suppressed public knowledge of the topic, there’s a funny moment with a condom, and the dolphins are reliably fascinating, but however strong the research, not much brings the noise alive as we’d hope: if we missed the party, the book leaves our fomo intact.
By George Monaghan
Scribe, 337pp, £16.99

Tracks on the Ocean by Sara Caputo

The earliest known maps date back to the ancient world, but the earliest known track map – one illustrating a journey completed – is thought to be the 13th-century Hereford Mappa Mundi, which charts the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt. Tracks on the Ocean, by the maritime historian Sara Caputo, is an erudite and accomplished account of such human wayfaring. Tracks are not just useful tools for the gathering of knowledge, but for making claims and for telling stories. All the usual hero-explorers are here – Francis Drake, James Cook, John Franklin. Often their journeys left physical tracks on the landscape: Commodore John Byron was, in 1764, so dissatisfied with the “overgrown” grass and “barren” soil of the Patagonian coastline that he set it on fire.

Caputo engages critically with the ways “discovery” was an act of empire-building and tells non-Western stories where she can, such as that ofthe 15th-century Chinese admiral Zheng He, who made seven voyages across the world, and whose maps have “nothing to do with Western notions of distance and scale”. After all, Caputo writes, “the ocean isn’t, and never was, pathless. Some Europeans just wiped it blank so that they could pretend to build their own stories on it.”
By Pippa Bailey
Profile, 320pp, £30

Heart, Be at Peace by Donal Ryan

Donal Ryan’s career as a serial prize-winner started in 2012 with the publication of his first novel, The Spinning Heart, which garnered, among other gongs, a Man Booker nomination and won the Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards. In 21 voices, it told the stories of the inhabitants of a small town in County Tipperary as the Celtic Tiger era turned its claws on them. That book left many of the characters in flux because, as Ryan has said, real lives don’t have “pat conclusions”. In Heart, Be at Peace he returns to the earlier cast to see what a decade has done to them.

Builder Bobby, tormented by local drug dealers and a photograph taken on a friend’s stag do in Amsterdam; Lily, “a witch by training and a whore by inclination”, who finds flawed redemption though her granddaughter; Kate, whose husband killed a man; and others – the living and the dead – whose lives touch and rebound. Ryan gives each a distinct voice and a rhythm to their thoughts. “You can’t be going around acting too happy,” says one character, and with reason: menace, resentments, and strangeness fill the air.
By Michael Prodger
Doubleday, 208pp, £16.99