Book description
Between walking by the river and imbibing tasteless liquor at Dr
Feelgood’s, a mice-infested emporium presided over by the dubious
Mousookseem, David Castell is compiling his Notebooks. Though thwarted
by Caro, who runs the house, buys the ink, and sullenly disapproves of
his master’s activities, David perseveres, believing the past to be ‘an
infinitely more agreeable subject for speculation than the future’.
David’s notebooks glide between past and present, juxtaposing a number
of settings: Oxford, where drunken eccentrics try to steer clear of
sinister dons; East Anglia, where myth and legend are flourishing
between the wide expanse of sky and field; and another, distant Eastern
Land where oranges rot in the sun and the generator hums when Caro, idle
or vengeful by turns, chooses to turn it on.
All this is comic grist to the author’s mill. Through the musings of
its erudite and pig-headed narrator, the novel becomes a cunning debate
about the various ways - duped by our own imaginations - we take
liberties with history, throwing artful, sidelong glances at the
metaphysics of fiction, but not so as you would notice. As past and
present collide - in unexpected ways - so the debate continues, as
elusive as it is entertaining. D. J. Taylor was born in 1960, went to
Norwich School and St John's College, Oxford, and is the author of two
acclaimed biographies, Thackery
(1999), and Orwell: The Life
, which won the Whitbread Biography Prize in 2003. He has written nine
novels, the most recent being Derby Day
(2011, longisted for the Man Booker Prize), At the Chime of a City Clock
(2010), Ask Alice
(2009) and Kept: A Victorian Mystery
(2006).
David is also well known as a critic and reviewer, and his other books
include A Vain Conceit: British Fiction in the 1980s
(1989) and After the War: the Novel and England since 1945
(1993). His journalism appears in the Independent
and the Independent on Sunday
, the Guardian
, the Tablet
, the Spectator
, the New Statesman
and, anonymously, in Private Eye
. He is married to the novelist Rachel Hore. They have three sons and
live in Norwich, UK.
