Content area
Full Text
Santa: A life
By Jeremy Seal
PICADOR [pound]7.99
Almost every parent of young children knows what it is like to struggle each year with the narrative impossibility that is the Santa (or Father Christmas, or Saint Nicholas) story.
For starters, we're talking about a fat guy who can fit down chimneys; someone who spends one day a year travelling around the world faster than the speed of light; a paranormal figure who ultimately gets the credit for all the presents you have bought until your child is old enough to realise that yes, the narrative impossibilities were just that, and (under your breath now) there is no such thing as Santa Claus.
Or is there? Jeremy Seal knows as well as anyone how painful it is trying to keep the Santa myth going. Driving up the M5 with his daughter Anna to the NEC to visit Santa's Kingdom, Seal observes, "The forces of commerce, adept as kidnappers in the exploitation of parental love, had ticketed objects of childhood adoration accordingly. I had not troubled Anna with the fact that it cost a lot of money to enter Santa's Kingdom. I was more concerned with the Kingdom situation that was developing; the Kingdom that I anticipated and the one that Anna in her innocence imagined were unequal." Instead of accepting this plastic, commercial charade, Seal sets out to find the real story of Saint Nicholas, from the almost-forgotten image of a man at a Byzantine window coming to save three young women from hardship, to the Santa we know now. Part travelogue, part memoir and part history, this thoughtful book does for Santa what Iain Sinclair did for the M25.
But Nobody Lives in Bloomsbury
By Gillian Freeman
ARCADIA BOOKS [pound]11.99
Gillian Freeman has a very interesting past.
Author of the gay classic The Leather Boys (under the pseudonym Eliot George), she's won acclaim in recent years for her portrait of Jewish life in the novel His Mistress's Voice. Now she has turned her mind to recreating the world of the Bloomsbury group, and the result makes for compelling reading.
The group's principal members, from Lytton Stratchey to Bertrand Russell, are carefully introduced; but the narrative hinges on the lives of Vanessa Bell and Virginia...