To mark World Book Day 2016 we asked Karen Buck MP, Mary Creagh MP, Lisa Nandy MP, Angela Smith and Nick Thomas-Symonds MP to write about their favourite book:
Memoirs of a Survivor by Doris Lessing
Karen Buck MP
God, the impossibility of choosing only one book! Bleak House is usually my ‘go to’, for searing social comment, great wit, plot and characters with an unparalleled description of 19th century London. Then I thought about cheating with the Margaret Atwood dystopia trilogy – Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam –given that these brilliant books tell different versions of the same story.
But I wind up elsewhere in dystopia territory with my ultimate choice of Memoirs of a Survivor by Doris Lessing. As civilisation disintegrates in the face of an unnamed peril (nuclear war, plague, environmental catastrophe) the novel’s central character, a middle-aged, childless woman faces a reality of new responsibility to a young evacuee girl and her strange animal, a hybrid of cat and dog, and is drawn into the lives of a group of feral children. As this reality becomes stranger, a dream world seems to open in parallel – but is it the past, an alternative consciousness, or a disintegration of the person that matches the disintegration of society? We do not know.
The city the narrator inhabits gradually empties, becoming increasingly savage, but in ways we only dimly understand, as if seen out of the corner of our eye. Gradually, the strangeness of the ‘real world’ as it collapses seems no more plausible as a way of living than the interior, imaginary world ‘behind the wall’. The politics are subtle, even though Doris Lessing was a deeply political writer. But as the New York Times review had it, ‘Lessing’s message is close to that of WH Auden’s: “We must love one another or die.”’
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Karen Buck MP is member of parliament for Westminster North
What is the What by Dave Eggers
Mary Creagh MP
The book that has impressed me the most over the last decade is the 2006 novel What is the What by American author Dave Eggers. Eggers made his name with his debut novel A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and his novel about Hurricane Katrina, Zeitoun, is a real eye opener about racism in the United States.
What is the What is based on the powerful, moving real-life story of Valentino Achak Deng, one of the thousands of lost boys of the Sudan whose family was burned out of their home and who walked, along with other lost boys, from refugee camp to refugee camp, and war torn country to war torn country, in search of their families and a better life.
There are passages of unbearable hardship and suffering including how the young children slept in a circle at night to avoid being eaten by lions, or how they discarded their clothes walking across deserts only for some of them to freeze to death at night. It follows Valentino to the US where the Clinton administration generously offered them and thousands of lost boys asylum. The novel opens with the protagonist being robbed in his apartment and is clear eyed about what is lost and what is gained when one leaves one’s country.
It is also a reminder of what the most powerful nations on earth can do when politicians urge citizens to open their hearts to refugees.
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Mary Creagh MP is chair of the House of Commons environmental audit select committee
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Lisa Nandy MP
I don’t think I have ever read a better book than One Hundred Years of Solitude by the Columbian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It is inexplicable in the telling but immediately understandable in the reading and I love it because it’s beautifully, brilliantly written. It is the story of a family over many generations whose history and fate has already been written but is yet to be told. It is larger than life characters and stories of love, war and revolution tell the story of a people overcome by a plague of insomnia, struggling to remember and struggling to forget.
Only magical realism could help us to understand a reality that, in Latin America, had produced five wars and 17 military coups, with more children dead by the age of one than had been born in Europe in a decade. It’s a world where impossible things happen and truth does not exist. Accepting the Nobel Prize Garcia Marquez said, ‘we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude’.
Many people, like the Ghanaian writer Nii Parkes, love this book because ‘it helped the West to read a reality alternative to their own’. Since I have been in parliament the book has meant more to me because, with all of us shaped so deeply by our own experiences, the ability to conceive of and understand an alien perspective marks out the great politicians from the good.
Even in the United Kingdom, where nothing comparable to that Latin American experience exists, it still reminds me that possibilities are endless, that we should never accept the limitations set for us and we should ask not just why, but also why not? Because of that, as for the millions of people who love this book, it gives me both courage and hope.
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Lisa Nandy MP is shadow secretary of state for energy and climate change
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
Angela Smith
The first time I picked up the Diary of Anne Frank, I was the same age as the girl writing those powerful words. It captured my heart and mind like no other book. Her words transported me to a place where I was far removed from my own reality growing up in Basildon. Anne’s diary made the horror of war and the holocaust cut through the often over-dramatic thoughts of a 14 year old girl and importantly, it made me care more than any history lesson ever could.
After a school trip to Anne Frank’s house, I bought my now battered but much loved 70’s penguin paperback edition. The sheer scale of the injustice that ultimately cost Anne her life and the lives of 6 million other Jews, was not something I could fully comprehend as a child. I just knew that what happened was not right.
The diaries which I was then inspired to write for many years after were a world apart from Anne’s, and even if it was not a sentiment often shown in my teenage years, I was grateful – grateful that our lives were so vastly different.
I remember getting to the end of the book and feeling a huge sense of loss, realising that as the book ended, so did Anne. My battered old book may have been replaced with a shiny hardback, but the feelings it brings are still the same – with one exception, that sense of loss is being overtaken with a real fear that we have not fully learnt the lesson of this violent history. In a world where some are looking to take us back to a place of hatred, division and violence, the memory and inspiration of Anne Frank is as important today as it was then.
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Angela Smith is Labour’s leader in the House of Lords
Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life by Mary Ann Evans
Nick Thomas-Symonds MP
Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life, is precisely what its title suggests. First published in eight volumes between December 1871 and December 1872, it follows a variety of characters in the town of Middlemarch in the period from 1829 to 1832. Yet its examination of day-to-day existence – our great human potential as much as our human frailties – is relevant to any time-period.
Its author, Mary Ann Evans, wrote under the pen name George Eliot, as she did not think her works would be given a fair hearing by the critics of the Victorian era if she wrote under a female name.
The novel is principally a study of change. For its heroine, Dorothea Brooke, that change is in her married life, and the way marriages evolve over time is one of the key themes of the plot. The characters in the novel have to deal with dramatic change, whether in their personal lives, or politically. Middlemarch shows how the decisions of politicians affect people’s everyday lives: from Catholic emancipation in 1829 to the Great Reform Act of 1832 which represented the first small steps Britain took on the road to becoming a mass democracy.
In the book’s final chapter, Evans tells the reader what has happened to each of the characters: ‘Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending. Who can quit young lives after being long in company with them, and not desire to know what befell them in their after-years?’ She then captures the essence of Middlemarch in one sentence: ‘For the fragment of a life, however typical, is not the sample of an even web: promises may not be kept, and an ardent outset may be followed by declension; latent powers may find their long-waited opportunity; a past error may urge a grand retrieval.’ For we just never know what life holds in store for us.
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Nick Thomas-Symonds MP is shadow minister for work and pensions