Instead, he opts for a novel of confession, with Cook drawn to reveal more as he adopts ever more dubious techniques to win his battle against Peary.The paradox is that Cook is driven to a form of moral suicide in order to protect Devlin, and make up for the foolish mistake of his youth; only when this happens – when Devlin loses the last of his family – is he free to live himself. His mere existence tears down the forbidding Dr Cook in the same way that everyday life is perpetually tearing down New York, in which much of the drama takes place, then rebuilding something new.Between Cook and Devlin there is a Freudian undercurrent of struggle, which results in the older man destroying himself by repeating earlier betrayals on an ever-greater scale. While it lacks the delightful humour that percolated through Johnston’s last novel, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, it makes up for it by a much more disciplined style which – particularly in the Arctic scenes – often encases tremendous descriptive passages which never tip into unnecessary wordage. Each paragraph is there for a good reason, not to awe the reader. The Navigator of New York reinforces Johnston’s right to be considered one of the major figures in Canadian fiction.Iain Pears’s latest novel is ‘The Dream of Scipio’. Interesting Times: A Twentieth-century Life

Interesting times is that curious hybrid, an impersonal autobiography.

One learns from it rather more about the society and politics of the 20th century than about the inner life of Eric Hobsbawm. He largely writes as the analytical historian, pointing out how the relatively insignificant details of his life have been shaped by the great forces of modern history, rather than as the suffering subject, dwelling on the texture of intimate experiences.
Still, the bare biographical facts are interesting in themselves. Born in Alexandria in 1917, the son of an English-Jewish father and an Austrian-Jewish mother, he grew up in Vienna. He spent two politically formative years in Berlin in his mid-teens, followed by three years at school in London, before going to Cambridge.

There he carried off the trophies of intellectual success: a starred first, editor of Granta, elected to the Apostles, and so on.After a dull war, he became a lecturer and professor at Birkbeck College, London, while launching out into his extra-mural career of intellectual jet-setting, becoming what the French call “un turbo-prof”. For some years he moonlighted as jazz critic of the New Statesman, publishing a book on jazz under the pseudonym of “Francis Newton”. He went on to publish a dozen works of history, including his massive trilogy on the period from 1789 to 1914.But Eric Hobsbawm is also a failed revolutionary. He became a Communist in Berlin in 1932, on the eve of Hitler’s seizure of power. He joined the British Communist Party when he went to Cambridge, and remained a member until its dissolution in 1991. In retrospect, he describes his earlier self as “a man whose life would lose its nature and its significance without the political project” of world revolution.

Everything, from love affairs to career choices, was subordinate to party discipline. “The Party was what our life was about.”A brief flirtation with Communism was not unusual among the concerned young of his generation: in the Thirties, especially in central Europe, it could seem like the only serious option. But the intensity and longevity of Hobsbawm’s commitment has been extremely unusual, at least in Britain; nearly all his peers left the Party after the earthquakes of 1956. In so far as this book is any kind of apologia pro vita sua – and in its quiet, rueful way it is – it returns with revealing frequency to trying to justify this unfashionable attachment.The difficulty of “breaking with” old comrades played a part, and Hobsbawm is clearly a man of admirably strong loyalties. But he also touches on a more intriguing, if less flattering, explanation: a perverse pride in success in conventional society despite being known as a card-carrying Red. Such self-analytic honesty is one of the appealing qualities of Interesting Times, though one wonders how this explanation would have been received by those friends who argued for the indefensibility of Party membership after Soviet tanks had rolled into Hungary.Fortunately, Hobsbawm never gave up his day job. He seems to have had as precocious a sense of his intellectual as his political vocation: the point was not merely to change the world, but also to interpret it.