At an age when many hesitate to buy green bananas, Diana Athill has published another book.

The English writer and literary editor Diana Athill has published another volume of memoirs. A Guardian reviewer writes of it:

“There is one writer whose words on writing are always with me,” writes Diana Athill in her latest memoir. It is Jean Rhys’s two phrases – “I have to try to get it like it really was” and “You can’t cut too much” – that have stuck with Athill. “Those words have done a lot to keep me in order, but I can’t say that they inspired me.” 

They may not have “inspired” her, but they have certainly given rise to some inspired writing. Athill’s signature is precise, crisp phrasing of the kind that has the reader scrabbling for something with which to underline it. The clean delicacy of a woodland in May is keenly felt in a description in which the “little new leaves on the branches above them were that first green, which looks as though made by light, and which will be gone in a day or two”. Leaves in Trinidad and Tobago are “like open hands, like elephants’ ears”, butterflies are a “zigzag drift”, a conch sounds like “a sea cow lowing mournfully for its lost calf”. So when she exclaims: “Oh, how hopeless it is to try to put paintings into words”, while the reader might be charmed by her frank acknowledgment of the limitations of her medium, they are also aware that if anyone can paint with words, it is Athill.

Alive, Alive Oh! represents something of a departure from Athill’s previous works, which have, on the whole, been structured around a fairly traditional narrative arc. This feels more like a collection of short stories: fragments of a life, rather than detailed memoir, which has given her the freedom to revel in the more minor details. In her chapter on the aftermath of the second world war, she writes about escaping, while on a £21 Club Med holiday, to a “tiny hidden beach”. As she was lying with her book in what she imagined was isolation, “crunch, crunch: slow – furtive? – footsteps approached”. Sitting up in dismay, she looked around, only to see nothing. She lay back down. “Crunch, crunch. This time I stood up. Still no one. Till another crunch drew my eyes down, and there was a large tortoise labouring his way through the grass towards the water.”

Athill’s dedication to getting it “like it really was” extends beyond vivid pictures of what she has seen into what she has felt and thought. As with her previous writings, we are treated to some of the frankness for which her works are rightly celebrated: she gives us her reflections on issues from colonialism (and her inescapable complicity in its continuance) to women’s shouldering of the care burden, to increasing social inequality (all the more “horrifying” to someone who has lived through the optimism of the postwar period).

But she wears her politics lightly. Athill’s moments of self-castigation (such as in her unflinching chapter on colonialism) do not grate as they might with a less skilled and honest writer. They merely serve to demonstrate that she does not exclude her own motivations and character when applying Rhys’s dictum. In this regard she rather emulates another writer she admires: “What is irresistible about Boswell,” she writes, “is his always wanting with passionate intensity to be a good man and making stern resolutions, and then recording this process with fascinated honesty, as though he were a naturalist recording the behaviour of some strange creature.”

Excellent writing this: and all the more so for a woman who will turn 98 on December 17.