The best books that breathe new life into old stories

Bertha, the murderous maniac in the attic, scared me out of my skin the first time I read Jane Eyre. Not the most promising subject for a sympathetic imaginary biography, you might think; but Jean Rhys draws on her own Creole youth to create a past for the madwoman, the charming but doomed child Antoinette, who grows into a beautiful young bride. Her exotic and magical island setting glows with lush abundance, but from the first there is a sense of foreboding. Her marriage fails, and the innocent, touching young woman is torn from her adored island, losing her love, her sanity, and even her real name. An extraordinary, perverse, and brilliantly original reinvention.

In real life, the Romantic German poet Novalis (1772-1801) fell in love with Sophia, a girl of 13, his exquisite  ‘blue flower’. In both prose and poetry he exalted their perfect relationship, till her early death shattered his dreams. In Fitzgerald’s chilling novel, Novalis’s idyll becomes a mad, warped obsession as the passionate lover completely loses touch with reality and retreats into his own weird world of introspection, to the dismay of those around him. The object of his adoration is an impassive, deadpan child,  soon grotesquely disfigured by illness, who dies without ever seeming truly alive. The washday scene, with billowing sheets, is a stunning piece of bravura writing. A weird small masterpiece, my favourite of Fitzgerald’s novels.

Picture Achilles, the legendary hero, immortalised in Homer’s Iliad, conqueror of the siege of Troy. Now imagine what it must feel like to be a captive girl, handed over to Achilles as a trophy of war. Through the terrified eyes of the young Trojan Queen, Briseis, Barker brings the whole Trojan War to life. Her Achilles is no longer Homer’s half-immortal superman, but a remote, neurotic and expressionless brute who subjects Briseis to degrading days as a slave girl and hateful nightly couplings, but remains cold and impassive, while inwardly seething with his own suppressed insecurities. A vivid evocation of a distant past and a chilling insight into the impact of war on both victors and vanquished, and above all on women.

As a child I loved Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays, a Victorian novel set in Rugby, the famous boys’ school. One of the best bits was when the brutal, thuggish school bully, Flashman, was unmasked on a drunken spree and expelled. His life after school was chronicled, 100 years later, in MacDonald Frazer’s 12 Flashman novels. Far from being cowed by his disgrace, and despite his abject cowardice, fate helps Flashman to progress brazenly from strength to strength, a heartless manipulator who revels in behaving outrageously and getting away with it, runs through numberless women, and ends up covered in glory, a much-decorated and titled war hero. A shameless romp and a gripping read throughout.

Moscow, 1930s. Satan comes to town with his mischief-making retinue, disrupting the smug, selfish Soviet bourgeoisie, playing wild, surreal tricks. Decapitated heads are (sometimes) put back on necks, shameful secrets exposed to public view, naked witches streak through the streets on flying pigs—chaos reigns. Meanwhile, two other independent plots emerge. First, the Master composes a brilliant but despised novel, and loves the beautiful Margarita. Secondly, the Bible story of Christ’s passion is vividly recreated, as seen by Pontius Pilate, a fallible man who realises that Christ is both innocent and exceptional, but is too weak to prevent his crucifixion: this is the Master’s text. These threads are skilfully woven into a riveting, fantastic, hilarious yet deeply moving whole. One of the greatest 20th-century novels. 

I recommend the version that is translated by Michael Glenny as it is a vivid, imaginative, inventive English translation (just like in the original Russian).