Perhaps the test of a book’s quality should be its power to make you oblivious to everything else. I’d often thought this in a nebulous sort of way, but I realised its full impact when I decided to while away my daily four hour commute by reading The Other Hand. I missed my tube stop (twice) on the way there and sniffed through many a tissue on the way back. And I even managed to break through the commuter wall of silence as the woman next to me actually spoke to me to ask what I was reading (yes, it was an embarrassing commute). Chris Cleave’s The Other Hand tells the story of two women whose lives, on the surface, couldn’t really be more different. One (Little Bee) is a teenager from a tiny Nigerian village. The other (Sarah) is a successful magazine editor from London with a toddler son. One chance encounter on a beach in Africa collides their two worlds. And when Little Bee turns up as a refugee on Sarah’s doorstep in cosy Southern England, Sarah is forced to realise that she shares more than she thinks with Little Bee and to accept that their lives are irrevocably linked from now on.

What is really remarkable about Chris Cleave’s writing is his ability entirely to take on the voices of the two women, bringing each to life more vividly and with more skill than any first person narrative I’ve ever come across. As the characters grow closer to each other in the narrative, they become closer to us too, and shed a light on the choices we make, as individuals and as a nation. For in The Other Hand no (wo)man is an island, and every choice has a consequence. As personal as it is political, Chris Cleave’s astounding novel entertains, shocks and above all makes you think.

In the first Cult Books column this term, Hattie Soper referenced The Telegraph’s definition of a cult book as being something that people carry around with them as a totem. If not this yet, then this is what The Other Hand should become: a totem, representative of the power of a book to transport you into someone’s alien universe. And representative of the humanity of writing, the compassion of reading, and the necessity of imagining.

It’s not every day that you can enter the hallowed portals of a national museum and find yourself confronted with a slow, syrupy porn-jazz soundtrack over video footage of two bonobos resolutely humping. But then, not every exhibition is Sexual Nature, which finished earlier this month at London’s iconic Natural History Museum. I don’t want to be premature, but I think it might just be the best thing I’ll see all year.

Animals, it seems, are all at it. The revelations begin with two in a series of surprising ‘Facts of Life’: I learn that bedbugs have a high rate of female mortality owing to a violent process known as ‘traumatic insemination’ and that sea hares (a species which apparently exists) mate in a massive circular submarine daisy chain.

Following the sequence of spacious, uncluttered rooms, each decorated with classy black-and-white photographs of a different species in the heat of carnal embrace, it becomes clear it’s not just the invertebrates. Of course, when you happen to have an unparalleled taxidermy collection, mounting two foxes tail to tail, with a note about the vixen’s troublesome tendency to hold her partner in an hour long, inextricable vaginal clamp, is clearly the most sensible use of your resources. Although I can’t help thinking the curators missed out on a chance to switch the music to Smokey Robinson’s You Really Got A Hold On Me.

The exhibition is mostly textual: the explanatory material takes up more space than much of the actual visible collection, which consists mainly of tiny insects and the skeleton of a walrus cock. The highlight is a series of films made by art house actress and probable maniac Isabella Rossellini, entitled Green Porno, in which the Blue Velvet star dresses up as a salmon, a spider and a praying mantis, while describing, in the first person, the mating rituals of each in surrealistic detail. 

It’s probably apparent that this is one of the funniest hours I have ever spent in any museum or gallery, and I’m sure in some ways that was a deliberate decision on the part of the curators. With its ‘not for the faint-hearted’ warnings and matter of fact presentation, the NHM is having a sidelong prod at the ridiculous nexus of repression and embarrassment that has coalesced around human sexual desire, presenting sexuality as inescapably comic and then asking why we find it so.

The final room features an interactive feature (not that interactive) where visitors vote on a series of questions relating to human sexual behaviour (what some would call morality) and attraction. This wouldn’t have been a great exhibition to bring a date to, containing as it does the coded message, ‘I wanna fuck you like an animal’, but it was a fascinating attempt to elicit recognition of the uncanny closeness of the animal world to our own. And if you didn’t see the ‘fornicating slipper limpet’ you missed out.

Fulham, and in his improbably well appointed house Antony Beevor is talking about Nazis. Beevor is a stocky, brockish man with a rich melliflous voice. He is intensely relaxed. His manner when describing history is identical to the style of his books. I.e., fabulous detachment creepily conveying some seriously horrible things. ‘Horrors. I’d find it would hit me two or three days later, usually in the middle of the night or something like that.’ He and his researcher were trawling through archives, ‘and we suddenly came across this report, which was about the mass rape of the young Russian women and girls who’d been taken back to Germany as slave labour. They thought they were about to be liberated by the Red Army – and then found themselves liberated by the Red Army. And that shook Luba more than anything, she had to spend that night with her mother.’

If you have read this far and don’t know who Antony Beevor is, then well done. I pity you, but well done all the same. He is IMO probably the best military historian of his generation. His books on Stalingrad, D-Day and the conquest of Berlin have shifted millions. They have also inspired millions – of young chaps like myself, avidly guzzling the latest ‘one’ from the comfort of our militaria bedecked boudoirs. Despite this the whole military history thing was complete luck.

‘Careers are very very strange things. I joined the army for a rather curious reason, it was partly because when I was very small I had something called Perthes disease which meant I was on crutches. Obviously got a sort of terrible inferiority complex and a chip on my shoulder, and wanted to prove myself. The military history came later, because I started off writing novels, which needless to say, there was no way that one could actually survive on it. After a number of years with novels, one publisher said “listen, why don’t you use your military experience, why don’t you write military history”. And they pushed me into my first book on the Spanish Civil War. The point was that that pushed me into military history. And needless to say, publishers will always pay rather a lot more for their own ideas than for your ideas. It was rather a question of survival. And then of course I started getting a taste for it, and that was sort of how it developed. Certainly you couldn’t describe that as a structured career.’

Beevor’s books have a trait. Which is, that while he does all the usual stuff about corps and divisions and generals and statesmen, he also shows how their action affected the lives of the ordinary. ‘The whole point’, he says, ‘was whether you could actually get at the material that would show what it was like for the people caught on both sides and in the middle’. How did he get that material? There was a lot in the archives. But that proved problematic. ‘What was amazing was that however much one studied Russian there was just so much material there, that unless you could speedread or decipher the squiggles in the margins you were never going to get the proper material or the right material out of there. You’d be bashing your head against a brick wall.’ Solution: interviews. The principal participants were primarily alive. ‘At that stage it was still possible to interview people who were survivors. Women were much better than others, it’s quite interesting. The real problem was that the men had been so humilitated, in the way they had no control over their own fate. They were sort of re-imposing control, retrospectively, by telling their story. With the women, it was not that at all. The women had just kept their mouths open and their eyes shut.’

But that wasn’t all. Beevor also interviewed many more senior commanders. They often lived an astonishingly long time – Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister, didn’t fall of his perch until 1986 – and as such those in close proximity to the Fuhrer were open, ish, to share their memories. Obviously the problem with that is that they would usually have been witness to evil ongoings. But, as Beevor cautions, ‘I’ve interviewed a few, for example the SS telephonist Rochus Misch, who had been in the bunker. Now he’d been in the SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler [panzer division], and the reason he was the telephonist is because he’d had fairly bad wounds and had been given that as an easy job.

‘But I wasn’t going to go into what he had been involved in on the Eastern Front, because I was trying to find out what he’d been doing in the bunker. If I’d gone into the Eastern Front business he’d have clammed up straightaway. You’ve just got to know for the core material if you like. You just want them to tell the story as if you were their grandson or something like that. There were some disturbing moments. I mean of course one or two members of the staff of Paulus at Stalingrad, for example, the way that Russian prisoners kept within the encirclement were given no food at all and reduced to cannibalism, and the degree when they said ‘I know nothing of this’, you start wondering who was responsible. I don’t think it was Paulus directly, it was more likely his Chief of Staff Schmidt giving those sorts of orders, knowing perfectly well what Hitler would say if they released those Russian prisoners because they didn’t have enough food to give them. And yet this was the most appalling of crimes.’

This inevitably creates an insuperable gulf for historians. They can read as much as they want. They can talk as much as they want. But whilst we can issue platitudes about horrors and crimes, we cannot even begin to comprehend the nature of what it would be like being, say, a German soldier trapped at Stalingrad, or a Jew at Auschwitz. Beevor acknowledges this. ‘Well I’m not suggesting the historian should sort of work yourself into the role. I think that if you have immersed yourself sufficiently in the documentation it still has its effects. I mean for months afterwards, and it still very occasionally hits me, every six months or something, I look at a plate of food and think what that would have meant to however many people in  Stalingrad. And then, you know, the horrors visited on civilians caught in the middle. And it’s not all that long ago. People are still alive!’

Still alive and, barely believably, still talking the same old crapulence. In fact Beevor shows me some stuff he’s been sent from antisemitic lunatics. This is a rather good one,  educating us in the conspiracy of VAT, Europe, sexual deviance (‘they’re often very frustrated’ twinkles Beevor) and, inevitably, Jews. Despite the weridos, however, Beevor is optimistic about future atrocities.  He thinks that it probably won’t happen again. But then again, it was not so very long ago.

The only thing I’d heard about ‘Mammals’ before going to see it was something along the lines of: ‘a six-year old fingers herself on stage.’’ You could question why I then proceeded to buy a ticket, but remember that they give away free ones to reviewers and I was quite intrigued, if not excited. Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised. Very little gratuitous masturbation, and a great deal of good acting.

Although ‘Mammals’ loosely follows the basic overused plotline of a couple tired out by domestic life looking for some kind of excitement, whether it be sex with the husband’s best friend, or falling in love with the woman at work, this production was closer to Pinter’s ‘Betrayal’ than a belligerent criticism of life with a wife and kids. The actors kept the lines punchy and funny throughout the play, whilst retaining a sense of each character’s vulnerability. The script was undoubtedly good to start with, but did contain a few gaping traps that the actors nicely avoided.

The opening scene where Jane, the harassed mother, smacks one of her daughters did not leave you wanting to call Childline, but sympathising with the horrors of motherhood. The increasing sexual curiosity of Jessie, and the tension this creates with her father, felt like genuine naivety as opposed to an uncomfortable seduction by a Freudian baby prostitute. And, despite the fact that the set up for the unravelling of the plot was a series of confessions between different character pairings, the ‘oh-my-god-this-is-a-dramatic-Fight-Club-confession-moment’ was mostly avoided.

My favourite thread that ran through these big, dramatic adult conversations was Jessie’s: ‘’Do you have a hairy fanny?’’ Her mother answers this earnestly and frankly in the same way she responds to: ‘’is there any milk left?’’, her father (although asked a slightly tailored question for realism’s sake) proceeds to do the same, and finally Lorna, the over-sexed under-worked bag designer, seeing Jessie innocently pleasuring herself on the cupboard corner, replies in a drawling Jessica Rabbit tone: ‘’No darling.’’

Because the acting is so strong, ‘Mammals’ lives up to the idea suggested by its title. This is not a play with a laboured point about modern society, but a depiction of the clash between our impulsive, instinctual nature and our very human desire for monogamy. Although the production offers a more sophisticated analysis of this conflict than Bloodhound Gang, the drama of the play stems from the same premise, ‘You and me baby ain’t nothing but mammals/So let’s do it like they do on the discovery channel.’’

4 STARS