Toby Clements's Reading List

"I thought I’d choose this instead of Heller’s earlier and better known Catch-22, if only because I read it quite young, and my mother picked the book up to find what I was reading, and read the opening lines of chapter four, I think it is, in which the narrator—the biblical king David of Israel—describes shepherding as being like cunnilingus: ‘dark and lonely work’. I did not know what it meant, but the book was confiscated, and I only finished it much later, and laughed, not just at that, but at many of the salty, sly observations on life and death that David, or Heller, makes. I think it is more personal, in a way. The first-person narrator allows Heller more freedom to indulge himself, often criticising Solomon for stealing his best material and that sort of thing. Lots of biblical references, but brought up to the date—or at least the 20th Century. It’s like listening to Mel Brooks, really."

"Golden Hill is very quietly witty, with none of Heller’s knockabout humour, but it’s impossible not to read it and smile knowingly at Spufford’s description of human nature at work. It’s a very civilised novel, set in New York in the 1740s, in which a man named Smith arrives like a stone thrown in a pond to upset the merchants’ lives. There are some terrific set pieces—a duel, a trial, a terrible betrayal —and more than one startling surprise. That is a very good point. It is a restrained, quite civilised novel, and Spufford seems more interested in giving an account than striving for effect. Perhaps that might make it feel a little bloodless, or too tightly controlled, but in fact it is very touching, as well as being witty and knowing."

"The New Confessions was the first hard-backed book I bought with my own money, and it showed me that serious-looking books could actually be fun and entertaining. “I never ‘tell’ a joke, but I’m always alert for ironies; unexpected outcomes; unmet expectations” Boyd’s humour is quite like my own, particularly on show in the scene in which a young man travels to London to declare his love for an older woman, only when he rings her doorbell in order to propose, he finds she’s with her husband, whereupon he panics, and tells her he is come to London to enlist. Cue four years in the army, and the battle of the Somme."

"I just loved its ironies, which are of the sort that people often describe as ‘delicious’. Again I suppose it is the gap between perception and reality, and not just the narrator’s misunderstandings, but the readers’ expectations that are being constantly upended. I thought the ending was just perfect, too, although lots of people felt short-changed. It could be her tone of voice perhaps. It is narrated in the first person, like God Knows , and I can’t help thinking that Rose Tremain is probably exactly like that to talk to. Scatty, perhaps, but very honest and absolutely hilarious."

"Set in Jamaica during the shockingly turbulent 1970s, Marlon James’s Booker Prize-winning book is about the aftermath of the attempted assassination of Bob Marley. In many ways this is too recent a time to even think about finding it a matter for wit or humour, and there is not a single joke in it, but the language is so inventive, and so unrepeatably bad that you can’t help laugh. I should say that I listened to the audio version of this, brilliantly read by an ensemble cast, and doing so will change your own way of thinking about everything for a couple of weeks thereafter. Yes, that’s it exactly. I think they’d all be fun and interesting to talk to. They all know whereof they speak, but there’d be no lectures; no pontificating."