Review

The Bible is not a book. Its title comes from the Greek biblia, books; it is a collection, or library. That the Bible has become a single book, or even the book for some, is a remarkable and sometimes problematic accident, and the premise for this engaging tour through one part of its history.

As Israel began its assault on Gaza last year, the Israeli defence minister, Ehud Barak, launched the offensive by declaring: ‘There is a time for calm and a time for fighting.’ His declaration alluded to Ecclesiastes, but overturned the order of the verse. Not so long ago, however, in an era that has since been largely misrepresented by its detractors, there was a time for peace; a time when, at a deal-signing ceremony between Israel and the Palestinians in Washington in 1993, the Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, used the same phrase from Ecclesiastes but was able to leave it intact.

A popular myth holds that all librarians are inspired by a love of books. As with all such stereotypes, it doesn’t take long working in the profession to realise that it is only partly true, only slightly more so than the cardigan, bun and glasses with which we are usually endowed in the popular imagination. Librarians, in fact, whatever their initial sentiments about books, commonly become blasé about the volumes they are responsible for and can be pitiless in weeding out the less attractive, useful and popular books from their collections. David Pearson’s new book sets out to make librarians and others who have books in their care think again about their value as cultural artefacts and pieces of historical evidence, especially at this moment in history when they are beginning to lose their primary role as repositories of the world’s knowledge.

If you felt there was a touch of hubris in Baz Luhrmann’s naming his movie Australia, you may think the opening sentence of Christopher Bigsby’s biography of Arthur Miller even more startling in its pretensions: ‘This is the story of a writer, but it is also the story of America.’ Not, observe, ‘a story’, but ‘the story’. This grandiose proposition helps to account for nearly 700 dense, uncompromising pages – and they only take in the first half of Miller’s long life (1915–2005).

Young children often use the word ‘sad’ to describe negative or confusing emotions. ‘What you did made me sad,’ they will say. But children, as they get older, learn to offer richer explanations of interior states: grief, exasperation, shock, bewilderment, hurt, ecstasy and joy. It is language that gives us this flexibility of response. The best books offer us language that matches and sometimes even exceeds the richness of our experiences.

Rarely does an image on a novel’s cover appear exactly as you, the reader, imagine the character to look. But Mae Ruth Perkins, on the elegant scarlet cover of Linda Jaivin’s new novel, definitely does. Bordello eyes, boudoir lips and all: the face in an early 1900s photograph is Mae’s own. The jewellery, faintly visible, is hers too, just as Jaivin describes it: ‘He helped her tie a black ribbon with a silver horseshoe charm around her neck, the open part facing upwards … She asked him to fasten a delicate platinum chain with a vertical triplet of gold hearts around her neck as well.’

I am old enough to remember when we called it ‘the Levant’. The eastern Mediterranean, a land where the sun rose, where camels lazed in the shade of palm trees, strewn here and there with baked mud huts and their shadows on the sand. A sleepy land, no trouble to anyone, least of all the Ottoman Sultan, its faraway and hands-off ruler – the sick man of Europe, they called him. I once had in my possession an early twentieth-century photograph that came to my family from Palestine with just such a scene: the square adobe hut, the palm tree, the camel. It has long disappeared, along with any misguided notions I had of the place. ‘Middle East’ conjures up altogether different images: bombed cities, crowded refugee camps, unimaginable suffering and bloodshed – above all, hatred. A hatred that runs so deep, over so many generations, that it is a test of the imagination to envisage its ever abating.

Writing as Eva Sallis, Eva Hornung earned enough prizes and shortlistings to send a reviewer sprinting shame-faced to the nearest library. Fortunately, Joyce Carol Oates, with her inordinately prodigious output, sees no grounds for guilt: ‘Each book is a world unto itself, and must stand alone and it should not matter whether a book is a writer’s first, or tenth, or fiftieth.’ Thus, while a predilection for wild life might be deduced from some of Sallis-Hornung’s previous titles (The City of Sea-lions, 2002, The Marshbirds, 2005) and an Arabic orientation from others (Hiam, 1998, Sheherazade through the Looking Glass, 1999), Dogboy, which is set in Moscow, begs to stand on its own hind legs.

The last thing Marion May Campbell is, is laid back. From the beginning she has been a writer high on etymology, delirious with the possibilities of form and narrative, peculiarly subject to what Genet described as the ‘horizontal vertigo’ of writing. In her novels Lines of Flight (1985), Not Being Miriam (1988), Prowler (1999) and the most recent, Shadow Thief (2006), she has displayed a constitutional aversion to the more sociological approaches to literary art. Realism, in other words, is not for her. More than anything, it is language itself that has been Campbell’s subject.

One morning in late June 2008 I was seated at the breakfast table in Oriel College, Oxford, with a small group of delegates at a conference devoted to Frederick Austerlitz, when a man approached, with a bulging briefcase slung from his shoulder, and asked if he might sit down. It emerged that he had walked from Oxford Railway Station (no mean trek) in order to get to the college in time for the conference’s first session, which he was hoping to attend. Directed to one of the conference organisers, he repeated his tale, was informed he’d be welcome, and was then asked his name. ‘Carmichael,’ he said casually. ‘Hoagy Carmichael ... Junior.’