Simon Gaul: Books That Changed My Life

I’ve always been easy prey for a savage opening sentence. (Disclosure: I was a bookseller for over 20 years.) From Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities, via Anthony Burgess’ Earthly Powers, to James Crumley’s The Last Good Kiss, which bears quoting: "When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California drinking the heart out of a fine spring afternoon."

However, a final sentence is something else altogether. Back in the mists of time, trapped in a New York dinner from which there was no escaping, I asked an elegant young lady out to lunch. “If you can quote the last line of Gatsby, that’ll be a solid yes,” she replied. The following day, Elaine gave us a window table at her storied Upper East Side eatery.

As a young teenager The Great Gatsby had been set by a perspicacious Egyptian gentleman who taught me English lit. The book’s economy struck home immediately. How could Fitzgerald have crammed so much into a mere 47,094 words? There’s new treasure unearthed in each bi-annual re-reading. And the last sentence, is, of course: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard was published posthumously after the Sicilian nobleman died in 1957. I was fortunate to discover this book young, while in the west of Sicily where it's set. My father gave it to me.

Every page evokes thought, pathos, love, sadness, action, wisdom, moral savagery, humour and history. This opus has it all, and for the hawk-eyed foodie, there is the most opulent recipe for timpano (a lasagne) ever to be found: "a burnished gold crust, a fragrance of sugar and cinnamon, with a mist laden with aromas, then chicken livers, hard boiled eggs, sliced ham, chicken and truffles, in masses of glistening macaroni, to which the meat juice gave the exquisite hue of suede…"

Sicily in 1860 was a country where eating—anything—separated life from death. The Leopard’s beloved nephew, Tancredi, enigmatically states: "If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change."

Redemption is a core plot since parietal lobes inked stencils on cave walls, but it doesn’t feature in The Great Gatsby or The Leopard. However, it’s front and centre in A J Quinnell’s 1980 thriller Man on Fire.

I knew Philip Nicholson (A J Quinnell) well, and like his hero, Creasy, he too had lived hard, in and out of the shadows. Philip was a natural born raconteur, and this was his first book. Its arc should be taught in every creative writing course: burnt out alcoholic Legionnaire finds redemption as a bodyguard in Italy until his young charge is kidnapped and murdered; subliminally, she’d showed him that it was OK to "live" and not die. No one survives this Ronin’s quest for absolute revenge. Except, of course, Creasy. 

The book is a classic, and I defy anyone not to tear through its 280 pages. Its pace comes from his agent Christopher Little’s mantra of: character, character, character. I pay tribute to my late friend who helped me forge the character Joshua Padden in White Suicide.

White Suicide by Simon Gaul (Whitefox Publishing Ltd, £20) is available to buy now