Anne Chisholm
TWO entirely different novels of contem- porary life gave me great pleasure: Martin Amis' London Fields (Cape, £12.95), probably the most unhelpfully over- promoted book this year, for its savage, comic, compassionate view of a city and its people, its moral energy and startling, inventive prose; and A Song at Twilight by Teresa Waugh (Hamish Hamilton, £11.95), a smaller, milder book about a prim retired schoolteacher, perfectly real- ised, dealing in themes as dark and painful as Amis with a light and delicate touch.
The most serious and important biogra- phy of the year for me was Martin Duber- man's gripping Paul Robeson (Bodley Head, £20), a massive, authoritative, mira- culously unbiased and ungossipy account of a talented and heroic man destroyed by the interaction of character and politics.
Ved Mehta's The Stolen Light (Collins, £17.50) is the sixth book of his beautifully written autobiographical sequence, 'Conti- nents of Exile', which tells the story of his passage from India to America, his victory over blindness and his discovery of his writing voice; but it could stand alone as a classic account of a clever, vulnerable boy becoming a man in the California of the 1950s, evoking with exceptional truthful- ness the confusion and the exhilaration of first experiments in sex, love and friendship.
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