His wider lens occasionally catches an interesting shot, such as Seth’s confession of his own discomfort with Palestinian dispossession.Mostly Two Lives works best as two love stories, recording both the “strong and sheltering harbour” of their decades-long marriage, and the author’s testimony to his zesty, beloved uncle and the slightly aloof, independent, houseproud woman who would answer the telephone “Hendon six double three oh”.Seth agonised over the “vexed” matter of privacy, eventually opting to use Henny’s personal papers. Most interesting, and distressing, is Henny’s eventual unearthing of her family’s tragic fate back in Germany. Her correspondence revealed postwar friendships that were directed by a rigorous assessment of which of her old circle actively resisted the Nazi atrocities, and which sought to gloss over their compliance.Possibly sensing that Henny’s and Shanti’s general ordeal, while intriguing in circumstance, is by no means unique, Seth extrapolates into more general meditations Here Two Lives flounders. His rather bland pontifications on “the effect of German history” add nothing to the narratives of Shanti and Henny, and give only a slightly broader context to his project. Both of them ended up in London and, knowing few others, their friendship became increasingly intimate.

Shanti impulsively enlisted in a British army dental unit and had his right arm blown off at Monte Cassino. Giving just two days’ notice, they finally married in 1951, as Shanti’s dental practice was starting to establish itself.A “trove” trunkful of Henny’s posthumously discovered papers helps to flesh out this skeletal history. Shanti’s affable nature soon drew out her amiability, beginning a relationship that would last more than five decades.Accumulating animosity under Hitler’s growing power encouraged Shanti to leave Berlin. Being Jewish, Henny lost her job and, through the discreet magnanimity of her former boss, was among the last Jews able to leave Germany. “Nimm den Schwarzen nicht” [don't take the black man] had been the younger daughter Hennerle’s first reaction to her mother’s lodger, a prejudice recorded with a tart irony given the imminent rise of the Third Reich.

He took lodgings with a Mrs Caro in the Charlottenburg district and quickly warmed to her Jewish family’s young circle. In 1994, when casting around for a suitable subject to follow A Suitable Boy, Seth’s mother suggested he write about Shanti Uncle. Initially he demurred, feeling too close to a man who had practically adopted Seth as the son he never had, and had provided lodgings throughout Seth’s English residency. At 85, however, Shanti was up for the project, and 11 long interviews gradually unfolded to his nephew the bones of an exciting, impulsive younger life pre-dating his smooth career in suburban dentistry.
A trained physicist, Shanti made his way to Europe in 1931 to study dentistry, ending up a penniless student in Berlin. Shanti Uncle, a dentist with a prosthetic arm, immediately afforded his nephew a vigorous and warm welcome, while his German wife, Aunty Henny, was cordial, her affection taking years to break through a naturally reserved manner. Principally it introduces the couple living in Hendon whose hospitality offered a safe haven of affection and encouragement to a 17-year-old leaving his Indian home for England and an A-level scholarship.

The first 50 pages gazettes with by-the-way modesty some of the author’s publications, his hitch-hiking around Europe and postgraduate efforts at Stanford. The book is also a timely reminder of the fragility of the little green spacecraft on which we are all passengers.. Vikram Seth is boldly unafraid of genre-hopping. He has several volumes of verse under his pen, a libretto, a Far Eastern travelogue from his student years, a novel in verse, translations and, of course, the garrulous brick that is A Suitable Boy, his dynastic saga that probably outweighs a brace of Dickenses Now Two Lives turns to biographic memoir. It is hard to imagine a better picture of the dangerous and inhospitable nature of our solar system, where the existence of any form of life, let alone one capable of travelling to other worlds, is nothing less than a miracle.

One chapter is presented as an imaginary letter from one 19th-century female astronomer to another. And then there’s a chapter narrated by a meteorite from Mars, an exercise familiar to any reader of the venerable “I am John’s testicle” column in Readers’ Digest.While the book is dense with facts, its construction is too discursive and its chapters too disparate to make it any sort of reference work Worse, there’s no index. And for the common reader, the absence of a single narrative makes this book easier to put down than to pick up again.But it is worth making the effort. It was probably worth doing just for that.Other flights of fancy seem less well advised.