Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Cressida Connolly

Double trouble and strife

Is there anyone, hearing a story about bigamy, who does not feel a tiny jolt of admiration, even envy, for the wrongdoer? How many of us can say that, if we could suffer no ill consequences, we wouldn’t rather like to have a second household, with different plants in the garden, different curtains, a different — perhaps more exotic or sympathetic — spouse? Like walking a circus tightrope, bigamy requires daring, agility and a certain amount of dash: the onlooker cannot help but gasp at the feat. This is one of the reasons why stories about it hold such fascination. Another is that secret lives are always exciting, whether it’s

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Dropping himself in the soup

One of Richard Nixon’s salient characteristics was his clumsiness. No one ever called him a man of the Left politically, but in the other figurative sense he was quite unusually gauche or linkisch. By the last grim days of his presidency that might have been explained by the martinis he was downing as if they were mineral water, but even sober he was always accident-prone. He bloodily cracked his forehead getting into a motor-car, he stopped serving soup at White House dinners after spilling it down his shirtfront, and, when asked to look in on a Cabinet meeting by Harold Wilson, President Nixon upset an inkwell on the hallowed table

Wednesday

The Spectator

The author’s Faulks, Sebastian Faulks

The news that Sebastian Faulks has written a Bond novel says a lot about the status 007 has achieved in the culture. On the big screen and through a ruthless process of reinvention, Bond remains a player at the multiplex. Poor Pierce Brosnan thought he was doing just fine, being tortured in Korea to the strains of Madonna in Die Another Day….and then along came Daniel Craig to make Pierce look about as modern as a Robin Reliant. In the new Spectator which hits the newsstand tomorrow, Tim Walker has a terrific interview with Rupert Everett who speculates that a gay actor could never play Bond. But who knows? The

Monday

The Spectator

Reading the Campbell diaries, Part II

January 24th, 2001 on Peter Mandelson’s second resignation, over the Hinduja passports-for-favours affair: “I went back up and TB looked absolutely wretched. Peter looked becalmed. TB said he had made clear to PM he had to go and that though he wasn’t sure, over time he would see why it had been necessary. TB seemed much more emotional about the whole thing than Peter….Peter was far less emotional than first time, much more matter of fact. I said he was a good thing, and he didn’t deserve this happening to him again.” Comment: Reports at the time insisted that it was Campbell who in effect forced Mandelson’s on the spot

The Spectator

Reading the Campbell diaries

Anthony Browne, director of the think-tank Policy Exchange and prior to that the chief political correspondent of The Times, is plucking out the most interesting passages from the just published Alastair Campbell diaries for Coffee House. June 30th 2003 on going for BBC over Andrew Gilligan’s report that he sexed up the “dodgy dossier”: “I went up to see TB, who said he didn’t want it going beyond next week. He lacked the killer instinct. His rationale was that he didn’t want every single media organisation against him.  I said we had to get it absolutely proven that we were right and use that to force a rethink of the

The Spectator

More Mole than Machiavelli

Well, Alan Clark he aint. The publication today of Alastair Campbell’s diaries looks set to be a colossal damp squib. I haven’t read the 794-page book, but judging from the extracts he’s posted on his website Campbell’s observations are almost comically uninteresting. Here he is, for example, on meeting the Princess of Wales in 1995: “She’s standing there absolutely, spellbindingly, drop-dead gorgeous, in a way that the millions of photos didn’t quite get. “She said ‘Hello’, held out her hand and said she was really pleased to meet me, so I mumbled something back about being more pleased. “‘It would make a very funny picture if there were any paparazzi

Saturday

Allan Massie

Interest still accruing

Galsworthy is one of those writers who obstinately survives. Critical opinion wrote him off long ago. His plays are rarely staged. Most of his novels have sunk below the horizon. Yet the three which make up The Forsyte Saga have rarely, if ever, been out of print, and continue to be read — not only on account of the famous TV dramatisation — and A Modern Comedy, the trilogy he wrote as a sequel, perhaps also, even if his grasp of the world after 1918 was uncertain, sketchy, journalistic. The Saga itself was not conceived as such. The Man of Property was published in 1906, In Chancery not till 1920,

Anthony Daniels

The commonsense approach

Medical advance has been startling in the past half-century. To give only one example, more or less at random: if the techniques of resuscitation and trauma surgery that were available in 1960 were still in use today, our homicide rate would be three to five times higher than it is (and it is two or three times higher than it was in 1960 nonetheless). Atul Gawande is a surgeon at one of the world’s greatest surgical centres, the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. As such, he is committed to medicine’s noblest ideal, the dedication of science to the cure of disease. It seems almost unfair that he should also

Edward Harrison

The price of defeat

This substantial and fascinating book looks at the aftermath of the Third Reich in the German-speaking regions of Europe. The Allies ‘came in hate’, their memories of Nazi atrocities refreshed by the liberation of concentration camps like Auschwitz, where the Soviets found more than a million items of clothing, and Buchenwald, where the piles of corpses made the ferocious General Patton physically sick. The Archbishop of Cologne protested in 1945 that ‘the whole nation is not guilty, and that many thousand children, old people and mothers are wholly innocent and it is they who now bear the brunt.’ Women in particular suffered at the hands of the victors. When the

Harriet Waugh

A beastly upbringing

Minotaur in Love is Fraser Harrison’s second novel. His first, High on the Hog, published in 1991, set around a family Christmas in the country, was funny and moving. Minotaur in Love is altogether odder. Written in epistolary form, the Minotaur of the title is Bruno, a publisher, who tries to explain his strangeness to a female former colleague. He does this in a journal, starting with his birth shortly after the accidental death of his five-year-old sister. He has the distinct feeling that his father dislikes him, and he attributes this to his father’s unassuageable grief. Their estrangement becomes obvious when the ten-year-old Bruno, on his brand- new birthday

Marcus Berkmann

The birth of structuralism

Of all the sciences and pseudo-sciences that clamour for our attention, none is a tougher sell than pure mathematics. The British have never been noticeably keen on abstraction, but there’s something about algebra, analysis and, indeed, topological vector spaces that sends even the calmest and cleverest of us reaching for the gin. I think this is because each of us, bar the truly gifted, reaches a point with maths when we simply don’t get it. It may be the seven times table, it may be differential equations or differential calculus, and for me it was classical mechanics in my first year at university, but there it goes — whoosh! —

Edward Norman

Protesting too much

Christopher Hitchins writes with exuberance and a sense of the great emancipation which he supposes modern knowledge offers humanity. ‘Scepticism and discovery have freed them from the burden of having to defend their god as a footling, clumsy, straws-in-the-hair mad scientist,’ he says of religious believers, whom he invites to abandon their faith and to embrace ‘reason’ — though should they choose not to do so, he insists, they are at liberty to believe whatever they like, ‘as long as they make no further attempt to inculcate religion by any form of coercion’. This book is a lengthy denial of religious belief, and an advocacy of atheism rendered in the

Charlotte Moore

The good ended happily

The most difficult task for a novelist is to engage the reader in an account of happiness. In Consequences, Penelope Lively manages to pull this off. She examines happiness as ‘a state of being that lifts you above ordinary existence, that pervades every moment, that confers immunity’. This ‘sublime content’ is achieved by Lorna, the first of three generations of women; the consequences of Lorna’s idyll shape the lives of her daughter Molly and grand-daughter Ruth.There is another set of consequences, however; Lorna’s beloved husband Matt is killed in Crete in 1941; the consequences of loss are intertwined with those of fulfilled love for these succeeding generations. The damage sends

Sam Leith Sam Leith

The biography of a soul

This is a book that really ought not to work. Being Shelley is not quite a biography and not quite a critical reader and not quite anything most people will have seen before. If you want to know, in order, what happened in the life of Percy Bysshe Shelley — where he went, who he met, what he did — you’d be best off looking elsewhere. If you’re an undergraduate looking for a line-by-line interpretive guide to his canon, likewise this is not your book.Yet I think Being Shelley will grow to be indispensible to anyone writing or thinking about the poet from now on — a vital companion to

Wednesday

The Spectator

Two views on the Fourth

The late David Halberstam—author of The Best and the Brightest—has a posthumously published essay in Vanity Fair on Bush’s misuse of history. He charges that the Bush administration lives in “a world where other nations admire America or damned well ought to, and America is always right, always on the side of good, in a world of evil, and it’s just a matter of getting the rest of the world to understand this.” Ironically, I don’t think the Bush administration would actually dissent this much from that analysis. Just consider this op-ed in today’s Washington Post by Michael Gerson, the man responsible for Bush’s most memorable speeches but who has

Saturday

Sarah Standing

Familiar but fascinating

Princess Diana was two years my junior and eight years younger than her most recent biographer Tina Brown. Our collective generation was one in search of someone or something to provide the soundtrack to our lives. We hadn’t lived through the second world war, we were too young to have connected with Vietnam or fallen for Kennedy, Sinatra was already old and our own royal family appeared atrophied, boringly embalmed in pomp and circumstance. We were Thatcher’s kids, who may well have been raised on a gentle diet of Mallory Towers and Jackie magazine but we were also seduced by punk and possibilities and ready for a seismic change. It was

Ray Monk

Not a people person

‘Einstein’s personality, for no clear reason, triggers outbursts of a kind of mass hysteria,’ wrote a puzzled German consul to his superiors in Berlin during Einstein’s visit to America in 1930. Wherever Einstein appeared, the consul observed ruefully, he attracted huge audiences who were not just enthusiastic but positively worshipful. Overwrought admirers crowded round him, wanting to kiss his hand, touch his clothes, or just gaze into his eyes. The hysteria continued after his death, his relics preserved and treasured as if he were a medieval saint. His eyes, for example, are kept in a safe-deposit box in New Jersey. His brain was chopped into pieces and preserved in two

Anthony Sattin

In the steps of Stanley

Of all the world’s under- developed and misruled countries few can compete with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The former Belgian Congo, more recently known as Zaire, has lived for so long with lawlessness, brute violence and neglect, with Belgian colonial and Mobutu’s post-colonial exploitation, that it seems to have justified Joseph Conrad’s selection of this particular slice of land to serve as the continent’s heart of darkness. Recently it has seemed as if someone had switched the lights off altogether: it comes as a surprise, in our Google-mapped age, to discover that somewhere has disappeared from sight. The DRC has managed this. So why, then, would a sane,

Simon Baker

A boy lost in Africa

What is the What cuts through the strata of criticism, and gets straight to a fundamental question, one which echoes the title: What is a novel? The plot is the journey to Ethiopia, Kenya and finally America of a Sudanese refugee, Valentino Achak Deng, but what makes this ‘novel’ unusual is that Valentino is a real person, who told his story to Dave Eggers over a number of years. Eggers now presents it in a voice pitched to approximate that of his subject. The reason this is not called a memoir, however, is that some passages are fictional, although the real Valentino himself states in the preface that they are

Jonathan Sumption

Boos and hurrahs

The problem about contemporary history is that we know both too little about it and too much. The archives of the state are closed to the public for 30 years, leaving us dependent on those famous sources of myth and misinformation, political diarists, memoir writers and journalists. At the bottom end, a history of our own age can so easily turn out to be nothing more than a million newspaper cuttings placed end to end. But would we be better off if we knew everything? I doubt it. It is difficult for an author to think dispassionately about times which he has lived through, and no easier for his readers.