Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Saturday

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 14 October 2006

A Time Before Genesis (1986) by Les Dawson The rare book shown above (try getting hold of a copy) is Les Dawson’s only serious work of fiction. It provides a disturbing insight into the mind of the late comedian. Its thesis is that the earth has, for millennia, been controlled by alien forces who have had a hand in everything from the Maya to the Miners’ Strike; in its magisterial sweep the book takes in the Spanish Inquisition, the rise of Hitler, the Kennedy assassination, Glastonbury, the Second Coming, cigarettes stubbed out on the eyeballs (twice), various scenes of sexual mutilation, the projected collapse of the EEC in 1989 and

Saturday

Grey Gowrie

Drive

Medley of horses by the motorwayuntethered; the field surplus to transportor agriculture. At this speed the horses looklike Travellers’ horses beside a leftover woodwhere smoke rising sketches a caravan.As we flash by our road draws its own wake,a joyful anarchy of second growth — beechy and larchy shoots, scrub, militant bindweedwhose canker lilies, malign and beautiful,have everything to play and nothing to pay for.Two magpies land for luck, a third joins themto squabble across the brains of a struck fox.Unscrupulous nature reclaims the scar tissueof the M54; soon we shall see Walestake charge of the twilight, a swatch of sunset redfilter the cloudburst over Wolverhamptonas our windscreen wipers, moody with

Clive James

Dreams before sleeping

The idea is to set the mind adriftAnd sleep comes. Mozart, exquisitely dressed,Walks carefully to work between soft pilesOf fresh horse-dung. Nice work. Why was my gift Hidden behind the tree? I cried for miles.No one could find it. Find the tiger’s face.It’s in the tree: i.e. the strangest place. But gifts were presents then. In fact, for short,We called them pressies, which was just as long,But sounded better. Mallarmé thought night A stronger word than nuit. Nice word. The fortDefied the tide but faded like a songWhen the wave’s edge embraced it at last light.Which song? Time, time, it is the strangest thing.The Waves. The Sea, the Sea. Awake

Allan Massie

The last time he saw Paris

One good reason to read Simenon is to recover Paris. It is now 75 years since Maigret made his first appearance, and, if his Paris is not yet utterly lost, you have to walk distances and search diligently to find it. The Brasserie Dauphine, for instance, rue de Harlay, which in real life was the Restaurant aux Trois Marches, is now the restaurant-salon of the Paris Bar (La Maison du Barreau). Maigret’s favourite blanquette de veau may still be simmering there, but consumption will be reserved to lawyers. Though fond of the district Maubert-Mouffetard, in his day a poor quarter, Maigret is essentially a man of the Right Bank: of

Charles Glass

Death of a billionaire PM

Rafik Hariri was Lebanon’s bulldozer. A buccaneer. A bruiser. Built like a heavyweight boxer, he looked more butcher than billionaire. His father was a dirt-poor, Sunni Muslim tenant farmer, who worked land near the south Lebanese port of Sidon. The French architects of the Maronite Catholic-led Grand Liban had reluctantly granted Lebanon its independence in 1943, a year before Rafik Hariri was born. The formula under which the Maronites agreed to relinquish their French protection and the Sunni Muslims to refuse union with Syria would succumb repeatedly during Hariri’s life to strains from outside. In 1948, Israel expelled over 100,000 Palestinians, most of them Sunni Muslims, to Lebanon. If granted

Pd James

It was a dark and stormy night . . .

It is hardly surprising if from time to time a contemporary novelist should attempt to write a pastiche of Agatha Christie, if only in the hope of solving the mystery of her egregious popular success and its longevity. Year after year this gentlyreared Edwardian lady produced stories of sometimes fiendish ingenuity which were seized on eagerly by a world readership with the avidity of druggies awaiting their annual fix; murder without disturbing horror, loss without pain and class-consciousness without guilt. While prestigious prize-winning novels drop out of print, Christie’s paperbacks are still ranged on bookstore shelves. Gilbert Adair sets out his intention clearly, to pay homage both to the Golden

Toby Young Toby Young

Having your cake, eating it and selling it

When Boris Johnson was selected as the Conservative candidate for Henley in 2000, a year after being made editor of The Spectator, he called up Charles Moore and asked for his advice on how to handle Conrad Black, the magazine’s proprietor. The problem was that Boris had given him his word that he would not try to become an MP. After listening to Boris ramble on for a bit, Moore grew impatient and asked him what it was that he wanted.‘I want to have my cake and eat it,’ he said. What is remarkable about Boris Johnson, and the reason this biography is so fascinating, is that he has more

Michael Gove

Anglo- German attitudes

One of the most dangerous tastes any British politician can admit to is a tendresse for the Teutonic. During the first world war the Liberal cabinet minister Haldane was compelled to resign because of his pro-German sympathies. It was not that Haldane harboured any political affection for Wilhelmine militarism, or had exhibited any slackness in his war work. He had been one of the most pro-war of Asquith’s divided ministry and as war minister had vigorously prepared British forces for confrontation with Germany. But Haldane was also a sensitive and open-minded intellectual with a deep interest in German culture and philosophy. For that he earned the scorn of contemporary polemicists,

Hugh Cecil

Public servant, private saint

Leonard Woolf had a passion for animals, not unconnected with an appetite for control. Dogs (with the occasional mongoose or monkey) were his companions to the end of his life. Discussing human nature, he put them on an equal plane: ‘There are some people, usually dogs or old women, extremely simple and unintellectual, who instinctively know how to deal with life and with persons, and who display an extraordinary and admirable resistance to the cruelties of man, the malevolence of providence, and the miseries of existence.’ Woolf himself would never have included himself in this category; he could not be described as unintellectual; and far from being simple, though he

Nicholas Haslam

Essex girl goes West

This highly entertaining and self-deprecating autobiography should dispel the myth, however craftily put about by the boy himself, that its author could ever have been a successful rent boy. Promotion of that role-play may rack up millions on the tabloid stage, but Everett is demonstrably far too original, headstrong and downright funny to ever have had the inevitable passivity requisite in a few quids’ quick shag. Judging by his prowess as a raconteur, you’d want Rupert to stay around for a good long time, but, though teenage, leather-clad nights at the Coleherne may have drilled him in the arts of being tied up, about the one thing he can’t deal

Selina Hastings

The battle of the books

B y now Heywood Hill’s bookshop in Curzon Street must be almost as famous as 84 Charing Cross Road. Opened in 1936, the shop first became familiar through the lively accounts of Nancy Mitford, who worked there from 1942-45. Then came A Bookseller’s War, the correspondence between Heywood Hill, away in the army, and his wife, Anne, left in charge of the shop; and most recently, in 2004, The Bookshop at 10 Curzon Street, the letters written to each other by Nancy and Heywood. Now, published in the same attractive format, comes A Spy in the Bookshop, which might be described as reports from the front line in an ongoing

Saturday

D J-Taylor

Laughing to some purpose

As a late Seventies teenager, I was exposed to two distinct brands of American humour — or ‘yomour’ as it tended to be pronounced — each diametrically opposed to the other. One was the Bob Hope school of urbane wisecrackery that drifted over the Radio Two airwaves on Saturday mornings while my father sat approvingly by. The other was the opening salvo of NBC’s Saturday Night Live, then featuring Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase and the late John Belushi and Gilda Radner; never broadcast on this side of the Atlantic, alas, but periodically written up in that hip young person’s bible, the New Musical Express. One of the advantages of Revel

Zenga Longmore

Happy days in Middle America

According to Bill Bryson, 99.9 per cent of the world’s ills originated in America during the 1950s. Well, he doesn’t actually say that, as such, but in the course of his book he reveals some pretty grisly statistics concerning his homeland. Apparently, chemicals in food, endless nuclear-bomb testing, teenagers, intensive television- watching, American world domination, overeating and, most gruesome of all, Disney World, were all invented in the USA between 1950 and 1959. The Frightful Fifties was the age when it was every American’s God-given right not only to own a car but also to live in one.  ‘They dined at drive-in restaurants, passed their evenings at drive-in movies, did

Alan Judd

The sage at the wheel

The late Leonard Setright was a rightly admired, genuinely idio- syncratic, provocatively pedantic and engagingly discursive motoring writer who loved any excuse to show off his Latin or to get Milton, Mozart or Ecclesiastes into a car column. He relished his reputation for having been quoted more often than anyone else in Private Eye’s Pseuds’ Corner, was obsessive about tyres, drove very fast, wrote the best book there will ever be on the Bristol (Palawan Press) and one of the best books there will ever be on the social history of motoring (Drive on!, Granta). This, his last, is an unfinished memoir, ranging from his first bicycle, through the legal

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

A crash to remember

One of the lessons taught in these pages over many years by Christopher Fildes was that, because financial markets are human nature in action, anything that goes wrong in them is almost certain to have happened before and highly likely to happen again. Technology may advance, the language and methods of business may evolve, the objects of speculative desire may transmute from tulip bulbs in one era to dotcom shares in another, but the propensity to err remains constant. As Geoffrey Elliott puts it at the beginning of this entertaining account of the greatest upset of the Victorian City: ‘Money muddles always start the same way, when judgment is fuddled

John Laughland

Public places and private faces

‘Kings, who are the sovereign arbiters of the fortune and the conduct of men, are always themselves the most severely judged and the most curiously observed.’ Louis XIV complained in his memoirs (addressed to his son) about the public gaze in which monarchs lived, and the malicious gossip to which they were always therefore subject: The slightest suspicion conceived of them passes immediately from one ear to another as a piece of news which it is fun to gabble about: the one who talks always wants to show that he knows more than everyone else, and he therefore exaggerates matters instead of playing them down, while the one who listens,

Miranda France

The full gothic treatment

Over the coming weeks you are sure to hear a good deal about The Thirteenth Tale. The author of this novel, a teacher of French literature living in Harrogate, has already netted 1.5 million pounds in advance royalties from British and US publishers alone. Foreign deals and film rights will surely garner much more. Comparisons have been drawn with Daphne du Maurier and some classics of the gothic genre. Diane Setterfield herself says that she turned to writing after ten years of reading French literature made her hanker for the English novels of the 19th century. If a literary estate agent were to show you around a classic gothic mansion,

Ben Wilson

A fox with a bit of hedgehog

Replace the commas in the subtitle of this book, ‘Thomas Young, the Anonymous Polymath who Proved Newton Wrong, Explained How We See, and Deciphered the Rosetta Stone Among Other Feats of Genius’, with exclamation marks, and it reads like the title of a Gillray cartoon or the patter of a circus huckster. The problem we have with polymaths, as Andrew Robinson points out in his introduction, is that they do seem too good to be true. When it comes to Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction between thinkers — hedgehogs, who know one big thing, and foxes, who know many things — we are generally more comfortable with the hedgehogs. Or rather,

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 30 September 2006

My Love Affair with Miami Beach (1991) by Isaac Bashevis Singer Isaac Bashevis Singer, the 1978 Nobel laureate, wrote mainly on the Jewish experience in pre-war Poland, the Holocaust, Israel, and the diaspora to the USA, particularly New York, not an awful lot about Miami Beach. But Miami Beach nevertheless held a special place in his heart: it was his home for much of the latter part of his life, and was the hub of a unique population of elderly Jews in flight from the rigours of the northern US climate. My Love Affair with Miami Beach, for which Singer provided the text, is a photographic tribute to this suburb,

Saturday

Ian Sansom

Spycams in Seattle

Five years on, and the 9/11 books begin to mount up: we’ve had Philip Roth doing it as historical allegory in The Plot Against America; John Updike doing it as a thriller in Terrorist; Jonathan Safran Foer doing whatever it is that Jonathan Safran Foer does in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; Ian McEwan’s Saturday; and now, Jonathan Raban’s Surveillance. You can already hear the sound of university critics drawing up the reading lists for their ‘Post- 9/11 Fiction’ courses: undergraduates, pay attention to what follows. Raban’s book should certainly be required reading rather than a secondary source. Among American novelists (he was born in England but emigrated to the