Another Country

Regular readers will note that the range of fiction I’m reading is expanding all the time - Bulgarian, for instance. I’m reading new stuff, re-reading old favourites, and also digging up books that have sat on my shelves for years but somehow never got read. I can tell this when I pick up a 1973 copy of Another Country, and the blurb says “The greatest Negro Writer “ (The Spectator). They’re talking about James Baldwin, famous as the distinctive, angry voice of “I am Not your Negro”. But in this novel he’s more like George Eliot. It’s a panorama, that moves across a group of characters who are male and female, black and white, straight and gay, like some 1960s Middlemarch. And for each of them Baldwin presumes to enter their heads and hearts, convey the mixture and development of how they think and feel. And within that he’s quite capable of throwing in a lyrical paragraph describing how it feels to be walking though New York. It’s hugely ambitious and at moments it goes over the top or doesn’t quite convince, but that’s a small price to pay for ambition and adventure. I’ve never read anything quite like this, and I’m so glad I got round to it.