Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Wednesday

Simon Baker

Getting the maximum pleasure

The premise of John Sutherland’s new book is that many people wrongly think of reading as an all-or-nothing ability, like, say, tying one’s shoes: either you can do it or you can’t. Such people would no doubt consider a book about how to read a novel as irrelevant as one titled How to Eat Crisps — and yet, Sutherland maintains, reading a novel well is almost as difficult as writing one well. Perhaps the word ‘reading’ itself is the problem. Strictly speaking, reading is something you can either do or not do, and it’s not terribly difficult. We say that novels by Proust or Pynchon are ‘difficult reads’, but in

Kieron Winn

Unforgetting

The arc and light and breadth and nothing kempt,Flat shining fields of sand, the shallow-carvingTigris and Euphrates of the beach streamsWhere individual flying grains are seen,The wet compactions out of which grew keepsI slopped moat water on at the end of the day,Playing decay and knowing I was loved,Coves where my face would drop past the waterlineInto the wallowing playfully-deadly force,Blue-black rock, its surface softened by water,Broad outcrops, models of a savage planet,Clammy caves whose ground no man had trod—A language I absorbed, forgot I knew,Restarting after a sleepy train’s long snaking.

Christopher Woodward

The master left without masterpieces

Sir John Soane is London’s lost architect. You can visit his museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and the picture gallery he designed at Dulwich. But since his death in 1837 his greatest masterpieces have gone. The Victorians demolished the law courts at Westminster, and the glittering royal entrance to the House of Lords. The RAC club-house stands on the site of the Marquis of Buckingham’s palace on Pall Mall. His Bank of England was demolished in the 1920s —– to Nikolaus Pevsner the city’s greatest loss of the 20th century. Happily, this book by the architect Ptolemy Dean brings into the balance a multiplicity of new discoveries. It is the

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 16 August 2006

Cry Shame (1950) by Katherine Everard Cry Shame! is the torrid tale of a 13-year- old girl who leaves home to become a dancer: in her brief career she learns things she is too young to know, runs off with a man four times her age, assiduously breaks the seventh commandment, has an affair with an ‘ambisextrous’ Hollywood screen idol and ends her harlot’s progress in a seedy hotel room with sleeping pills and bourbon. ‘Definitely adult reading!’ bawled the Cincinnati Enquirer. ‘Frank and revealing!’ ululated the Dayton Daily News. What no one knew at the time was that Katherine Everard was a fresh-faced young man called Gore Vidal. Short

Wednesday

Philip Mansel

The Prince and the F

Anyone interested in the history of Germany, of nationalism or of dynasties will be gripped by this book. Born at the start of the 20th century, heirs of an ancient German dynasty, Princes Philipp and Christopher of Hesse-Kassel were good-looking, modern young men. English was their second language, Queen Victoria’s liberal daughter the Empress Frederick their grandmother. No other German princes, however, rose so high in the Nazi party. Prince Philipp became a member of the Nazi party and the SA in 1930. Prince Christopher joined the SS in 1932. The timing of their adhesion, before Hitler came to power, proves its sincerity. Their mother ‘Mossy’ invited Hitler to tea

Paul Binding

A member of the awkward squad

On an autumn Saturday in 1944 Private Robert Prentice, an 18-year-old rifleman trainee, makes a long journey from his camp in Virginia to New York City, to see his mother. He is soon to be sent abroad, France most likely, and there he’ll see action, which will at least be a change from tedious, thankless camp duties. ‘Oh, Bobby!’ exclaims his ageing mother as she greets him. ‘My soldier! My big, wonderful soldier!’ A touching tableau, one would think, except that it’s riddled with falsity. Alice Prentice is a self-centred, self-indulgent, attitudinising spendthrift, who will occupy herself during Bobby’s long and endangered absence with plans for him to rescue her

Andrew Taylor

Meandering with a mazy motion

Kate Atkinson’s previous novel, Case Histories, was a successful experiment in crime fiction. One Good Turn is its sequel. In the first book, which was set in Cambridge, Brodie Jackson was a standard-issue private eye — ex-army, ex-police, with a broken marriage and a penchant for country music. Now, thanks to a £2 million inheritance from a grateful client, he’s an ex-private eye with a house in France and a swimming pool. Another legacy from Case Histories is his lover Julia, an actress in the Nell Gwyn mould, both physically and emotionally. Brodie and Julia are in Edinburgh, where Julia has a role in a doomed Fringe production, largely funded

Charlotte Moore

The past is always present

‘Nothing was over. Nothing is ever over.’ Thus muses Humphrey Clark as he travels towards the small windswept northern port of Finsterness, scene of formative childhood holidays. Humphrey, a reclusive marine biologist, is on his way to collect an honorary degree. Much more significantly, at Finsterness he will re-encounter Ailsa Kelman, his childhood companion and later — secretly, briefly — his wife. The idea that ‘nothing is ever over’ provides the momentum for this, Margaret Drabble’s 17th novel. As young adults, Humphrey and Ailsa believed that they had found a perfect, time-cheating happiness together. This failed; now, in their sixties, they try to protect themselves from emotional pain, Humphrey by

Peter Jm-Wayne

The most famous, if not the tallest

Before the fire, before the ash, before theBodies tumbling solitary through space, oneThin skin of glass and metal met another….Two man-made behemoths joined in a       fatal kiss. Although this poetic and deeply philosophical expression of the author’s love (no other word will suffice) for the Empire State Building ostensibly celebrates the 75th anniversary of the great American icon, it has been thrown into more poignant relief, indeed could never have been written at all in its present form, without the sudden and awful twin demise of another icon just a few hundred yards downtown. Tragic irony, dramatic paradox, narrative necessity, call it what you will, it is solely on account

Hugh Massingberd

On the Wight track

In one of P. G. Wodehouse’s stories the attempts made by Oliver Sipperley, editor of the Mayfair Gazette, to inject some pep into the mag are hampered by poor old Sippy’s inability to ward off unwelcome contributions from his formidable prep school headmaster on recondite classical topics. I experienced not dissimilar difficulties when editing the Telegraph’s obituaries page as I was constantly being assured by the 2nd Viscount Camrose, the paper’s erstwhile deputy chairman, that one of his old sailing chums would make ‘a jolly good obit’ (though his brother, Lord Hartwell, always maintained that obits were a waste of news space). I came to dread the phrase ‘he was

Anita Brookner

The eyes have it

Early in January 2000 the art historian T. J. Clark arrived in Los Angeles for a six-month stint at the Getty Research Institute. He was fortunate to see, in the Getty Museum, two great pictures by Poussin, the Getty’s ‘Landscape with a Calm’ and the National Gallery’s ‘Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake’, on loan from London. Over a period of weeks Clark visited the pictures almost every day and was able to register the tiny but memorable changes brought about not only by the process of intense contemplation but the traces left in memory and dream fragments which could only be clarified by more looking. Attempts to

Allan Massie

Fatal attraction

When Prince Harry stirred up a fuss by wearing Nazi uniform to a fancy-dress party he found a gallant defender in Paul Johnson who wrote that ‘in treating Nazi insignia as a party joke’ the young prince ‘reflects the instincts of his generation’. ‘The Nazis,’ he added, ‘do have an undoubted fascination for many young people’, because of their style, not their ideology. ‘Hitler still exerts some of the dread appeal he exercised in his lifetime … A lot of his appeal, I suspect, is visual. Hitler was a kind of artist’ who ‘put his  artistic and inventive instincts to work’. This is surely undeniable, and Johnson is by no

Thursday

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 3 August 2006

ZABIBA AND THE KING (2000) by Saddam Hussein The first of several novels by the world’s bestselling war criminal, Zabiba and the King is a clunking allegory in which the king represents Saddam, Zabiba (a beautiful maiden) represents the Iraqi people, and Zabiba’s abusive husband represents the USA. Most of the book is presented in the form of a dialogue on statecraft between Zabiba and the king, who loves her madly (as Saddam loves his people), though he never has relations with her (that might be going a little too far). One of Zabiba’s musings, which may refer to Russia (the bear), reads as follows: ‘Even an animal respects a

Sebastian Smee

One kiss too many

Something is eating away at Father David Anderton, the narrator of Be Near Me, a novel as beautiful and perfectly pitched as its title. An English priest working in the Scottish parish of Dalgarnock, he is afflicted by ‘a large private sense of wanting to depart from the person I had always been’. Not his faith but his willingness to evangelise has vanished, and all that remains is his propensity to favour the workings of private taste over public rallying cries. He hates bigotry and small-mindedness and believes in improving the mind; he despises the atmosphere at the local school where ‘education is a matter of bitter entrenchment as opposed

Dot Wordsworth

Shedding light in dark places

Scholars who want to accuse others of ignorant obscurantism have long taunted them with the phrase lucus a non lucendo. This is supposed to exemplify the stupidest kind of concocted etymology, and here it is in Book XVII of Isidore’s stout old compilation: ‘A “sacred grove” (lucus) is a dense thicket of trees that lets no light come to the ground, named by way of antiphrasis because it “sheds no light” (non lucere).’ So, if Isidore was so dim, why should anyone be interested, after 1,400 years, in an English translation of his magnum opus, The Etymologies? First because we have missed something big. The Etymologies was one of the

Rupert Christiansen

Not all Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)

Born in 1965, Howard Sounes was scarcely out of short trousers by the time that Margaret Thatcher took power and kicked us out of the mire of complacent consensus and began to crush the tyranny of the unions. Perhaps his vivacious and enjoyable new book about the culture of the Seventies does romanticise ‘a low dishonest decade’ that he did not fully experience, but there is something to be said for his refusal to follow the common view that it was an era merely ‘amusingly stupid and vulgar… all about flared trousers, Starsky and Hutch, Chopper bikes and Showaddywaddy’. Of course, there is a danger that thinking decennially presupposes that

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Touching the hem of a lost world

First and most importantly, Hugh Thomson is a good thing. It takes a rare combination of scholarly focus and Boys’ Own derring-do to write books about adventuring in Peru (this is his third) which consistently rise above the level of backpackers’ companions, and convey not only Thomson’s great knowledge of the ancient civilisations of the Andes, but also the thrill of the chase for such knowledge. To a lay audience, academic archeologists are often dreadful communicators either of the excitement of discovery or of the human stories of the discoverers. Indeed to the general public they regularly fail to communicate even the meaning of their discoveries. That we have recently

Ian Sansom

A never-ending story

You know the famous story about Freud and Einstein? Freud writes to Einstein, sending him one of his books and asking for his opinion of it. Einstein writes back, saying he enjoyed the book very much, that he thought it was outstanding, exemplary even, but that, alas, he was in no position to judge its scientific merits. To which Freud replied, if Einstein couldn’t judge its scientific merits, then the book could hardly be judged exemplary. About this, Freud, as in a number of other things, was gloriously and absolutely wrong. Greil Marcus is no scientist, but we shouldn’t hold that against him. Books like Mystery Train (1975), Lipstick Traces

Thursday

Digby Anderson

Taking it lying down

Europe thinks ‘that to achieve peace no price is too high: not appeasement, not massacres on its own soil, not even surrender to terrorists… Europe is impotent. A foul wind is blowing through [it]… the idea that we can afford to be lenient even with people who threaten us… This same wind blew through Munich in 1938… It could turn out to be the death rattle of a continent that no longer understands what principles to believe.’ This is not Michael Gove but Marcello Pera, President of the Italian Senate. But in fact the views of the three authors fit remarkably well. Celsius 7/7 is centrally about the political response

Justin Marozzi

Plain speaking and hard drinking

Craig Murray, formerly Our Man in Tashkent, was not your average ambassador. He put the wind up the Uzbeks with his uncompromising position on President Islam Karimov’s unspeakably grisly human rights record. This is the country that infamously boiled a dissident to death and then sentenced his mother to six years of hard labour when she had the temerity to complain about it. It is thanks to Murray’s efforts that the case was publicly aired in the first place and that the unfortunate mother’s sentence was subsequently commuted to a fine. Upsetting Uzbekistan is one thing. The problem was that all this business was going on from 2002-4, when Washington,