Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Lucy Hugheshallett

Sons and discoveries

Listing page content here ‘Who are we? Where are we going? Has public provision been a success?’ These are the kind of ‘weighty, unanswerable’ questions, Jeremy Harding asks himself as he mooches around west London housing estates in search of the mother who gave him up for adoption 50-odd years ago. The questions in Jonathan Maitland’s head are more personal, and considerably more promising as opening lines for a narrative. Was his mother genuinely mistaken when she announced, via the local paper and without preparing her family, that she had inoperable cancer? Or was she brazenly faking to win public sympathy prior to opening England’s first all-gay hotel? Why had

Carole Angier

Grand Guignol grotesquery

Listing page content here Alan Warner’s first novel, Morvern Callar, was macabre, bizarre and brilliant. This, his fifth, is equally macabre and bizarre, but less brilliant. So I first thought. Then I realised that it doesn’t lack heart, but only hides it. That in itself, I suppose, is rather brilliant. The first pages hook us in a simple way: Manolo (Lolo) Follana, aged 40, is told by his doctor and best friend that he is HIV positive. For the next fortnight we follow him while his life replays before him, as for a drowning man. After the opening, however, nothing is simple. Mercifully, Lolo and his friends have names. But

Andrew Barrow

Under the shadow of the Minster

Listing page content here This heavy, clanking, finely wrought adventure story is set mainly on or around York station in the winter of 1906 and washed down with handfuls of soot, clinker, ‘bacon and eggs and related matters’ and, I would estimate,  some 90 pints of Smith’s ale. The Lost Luggage Porter is Andrew Martin’s third novel about a train-spotterish railwayman called Jim Stringer, whom we first met in The Necropolis Railway and then saw struggling on the footplate in The Blackpool Flyer. Stringer, complete with false spectacles, has now become a railway detective and been sent out to penetrate York’s underworld and throw in his lot with the pickpockets,

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Why didn’t we give peace a chance?

Listing page content here Now comes a war and shows that we still haven’t crawled out on all fours from the barbaric stage of our history. We have learned to wear suspenders, to write clever editorials and to make chocolate milk, but when we have to decide seriously a question of the coexistence of a few tribes on the rich peninsula of Europe, we are helpless to find a way other than mutual mass slaughter. If you had to guess the author, what would you say? George Orwell? Isaiah Berlin? Malcolm Muggeridge? Nope. Those words were written by, of all people, Leon Trotsky, which adds a particularly sour irony to

Monday

Ferdinand Mount

Looking back in judgment

Listing page content here The heart starts to sink on the very first page, p. xiii to be precise, because this is still the Preface: ‘When I began work on Osborne’s biography, hoping for the best, I asked his wife Helen, “What does no one know about your husband?” ’Already you can see the gleam in the biographer’s eye, the headline on the review front: Angry Playwright’s Other Life, Secret Shame of John Osborne. By p. xiv we have sunk lower: ‘What caused his depressions would send me in time on an obsessive search for the one explanation of Osborne’s torment and fury that might account for everything — “the

Cressida Connolly

Wives and wallpaper

Listing page content here Anyone baffled by the conundrum of what to read on the beach this summer need look no further than A Much Married Man. This thoroughly good-natured comedy of manners is perfectly pitched so as to provide something for everyone: witty social observation, convincing glimpses into the worlds of high finance and fashion and plenty of lavish weddings. There is some sex, but not enough to offend the more squeamish reader. Like Trollope, Coleridge understands that money is as fascinating as love. The story concerns a banker, Anthony Anscombe, son and soon-to-be squire of a pleasingly ample Oxfordshire estate, which includes the ravishing Elizabethan Winchford Priory. The

Interconnect

Genesis

Listing page content here Sitting at the window shelling peasinto a battered colander between my knees(sweet, pod-swollen peas of early May)till suddenly I find I’ve slipped awaysixty years and vividly recallrough stone on bare legs astride a wallswinging sandalled feet, a summer tanon knees, arms, face and summer in my hair;a cat sprawled in the mint-bed asleep there;and tiny fruit which bud the apple tree.How genes shuck off the pod of memory:battered colander between her knees,the woman sitting shelling May- sweet peaswhere my Mendelian legacy began.

David Prycejones

Captain of a dreadful crew

Listing page content here To meet Oswald Mosley was a most unpleasant experience. You knew at once that you were in the presence of someone who had lost touch with everything except his own ego. So he bullied, so he lied, denying that he had been a willing agent of Hitler, that he would have proved a Quisling in the event of a German invasion in 1940, or that he had ever been an anti-Semite. On a television programme with him once, I read out some of the foul things he had said on platforms in the Thirties; his eyes turned red with rage, and I saw that he would have done

Noble Frankland

No reason to pull down the statue

Listing page content here The title of Gordon Corrigan’s book tells us it is not going to be a Churchillian panegyric, so it comes as almost a disappointment to find no new revelations needful for the dethroning of the former national hero. All we are given is an emphasised reminder that Churchill’s history, The Second World War, was biased, that he was prone to indulge in disastrous expeditions, notably, in the first war, Gallipoli and, in the second, Norway and that he unreasonably pestered his generals to mount offensives before they were ready to do so. But none of this, of course, is news and it certainly gives no ground

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

A philosopher rescued from politicians

Listing page content here In February 2005 the then chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, travelled to Kirkcaldy on the windy shores of the Firth of Forth in the company of our very own Chancellor of the Exchequer, so that both could pay tribute to the town’s most famous son, Adam Smith, in their own distinctive way. For Greenspan, the stability and growth of free-market capitalism as seen in ‘today’s awesome array of international transactions’ could be attributed to a modern version of ‘Smith’s invisible hand’. To Gordon Brown by contrast, Smith was, in James Buchan’s encapsulation, ‘a precocious Leftist’ and the founding patron of the brand of

John Laughland

Giants in petty strife

Listing page content here ‘In London, if a man have the misfortune to attach himself to letters, I know not with whom he is to live, nor how he is to pass his time in suitable society.’ David Hume was notorious for preferring Edinburgh’s intellectual life to London’s, but the city where the philosopher was most successful, at least socially, was Paris. He was sent there in 1763 as secretary to the ambassador, the Earl of Hertford, and was feted as ‘le bon David’. ‘In Paris,’ Hume wrote, ‘a man that distinguishes himself in letters meets immediately with regard and attention.’ Hume’s remark about the anti-intellectualism of the English remains

Digby Durrant

Ghosts from the past

Listing page content here Andrew Taylor has written on a wide range of subjects, but it is for his crime thrillers that he has become famous and won so many awards. By my estimate he’s written 26, which is just under half of the 59 books he’s credited with by Amazon. Until now I have only read one of these and it was excellent. The American Boy is a long, gripping mystery novel of the kind that Wilkie Collins invented to delight the Victorians, and so I looked forward to Taylor’s new one, A Stain on the Silence. When James’s phone rings and he hears a tiny voice say ‘Jamie’

Alistair Irwin

Fighting a war in all but name

Listing page content here There is much in common between a Richard Holmes book and a bottle of the finest Speyside malt. Both look and feel good, full of promise. Extract the stopper from one, open the other and the anticipation quickens. After that it is a question of taste or habit as to whether you gulp them down for maximum intoxication or extend the life of the contents by savouring them gradually. For this latest Holmes volume I recommend a preliminary dram or two as the author sets the scene. Then take a breath of fresh air to absorb the implications of what you have read. Next, swallow the

Friday

Interconnect

Serious but not solemn

Towards the end of the Seventies I was asked to write a short, critical study of Muriel Spark’s novels. I accepted, with some trepidation and misgivings. At least I hope there were misgivings. There should have been, first because nothing equipped me for the task apart from my admiration for her novels and, perhaps, the fact that I had, at long last and after many false starts, written a novel myself and had it published. The second reason to hesitate was more cogent. I had enjoyed her novels from the start. Memento Mori and The Bachelors were as clever and witty and as much fun as pre-Brideshead Waugh; they delighted

Philip Hensher

How writers behave and misbehave

Oxford publishes, or has published, a number of anthologies of anecdotes relating to various professions. There is a very enjoyable one of military anecdotes, edited by Max Hastings, Elizabeth Longford’s of royal anecdotes (competing in a crowded field), and Paul Johnson’s of political anecdotes. Some professions more readily generate anecdotes than others. I could imagine an anthology of anecdotes about philosophers or doctors, but no one is going to buy The Oxford Book of Banking Anecdotes. A lot of serious-minded people probably disapprove greatly of the idea of an anthology of literary anecdotes. After all, full-dress scholarly biographies of writers are, in some circles, not regarded as particularly worthy enterprises.

Andrew Taylor

Infant identity crisis

Listing page content here Women in peril flit through the pages of traditional Gothic fiction, murmuring ‘Had I but known!’ as they fall for the wrong man, open the wrong door or apply for the wrong job. The poet Sophie Hannah takes the trusty formula in both hands, gives it a vigorous shake and uses it to produce something fascinating and original in her first novel. In this case the woman in question is Alice. Still reeling from the death of her parents in a car crash, she has married the dashing David and acquired a new family in the shape of his welcoming (and wealthy) mother Vivienne and his

A.N. Wilson

The man who loved one island

The poet and storyteller George Mackay Brown was the son of the postman at Stromness, Orkney. His father John had also been an apprentice tailor before becoming the postman. George, in one of his poems, speaks of how ‘not wisdom or wealth can redeem/The green coat, childhood’. In his knowledge of every cranny of the Orkneys, but in particular in his feel for the town of Stromness, George retained some of the postman’s instinctual topographical grasp for the one dear perpetual place in which his genius was rooted. In the exactitude of his meta- phors, the flair of his tragic impulse, there is something of Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, the pessimistic

William Feaver

A free spirit in Philadelphia

‘Eakins errs just a little — a little — in the direction of the flesh,’ Walt Whitman observed in the late 1880s. Ideally he would have had the Frenchman Millet do his portrait, but the painter of humble peasants was already dead. Eakins made him a flushed old soul in jovial mood. Sidney Kirkpatrick’s account of Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) errs a little in the direction of voiceover-speak. His Eakins is ‘a neglected and tortured genius’ for whom Philadelphia, city of love, was no fleshpot and who, though somewhat prim himself, was rated outrageous by the leading figures of that God-fearing hell-hole. This Eakins is one of those posthumously vindicated figures

Jane Ridley

The thrill of the illicit

Listing page content here Hunting is cool. Ten years ago no one in her right mind would have dreamed of writing a novel about hunting, but now Candida Clark has done exactly that. Just as George Bush’s ‘war of terror’ gave a huge boost to al-Q’aeda, so Labour’s attempt to impose a ban has actually invigorated hunting. Today it’s more popular than ever, given an extra shot of adrenalin by the thrill of dodging the law. Parliament spent 700 hours debating hunting, and the result was a botched and unworkable law which makes things worse, not better, for the fox. The reason for this fiasco is simple. As Charlie Pye-Smith

Tom Holland

Never simply a soldier

There was nothing that a Roman general relished more than the chance to raise an earthwork. ‘Dig for victory’ was an injunction that legionaries often followed with a literal cussedness. Advancing into enemy territory, they carried shovels as well as spears. The camp that a legion would build after every day’s march, always identical to the one that it had built the evening before, was the expression of something almost obsessive in the Romans’ military psychology. The blend of caution and remorselessness that this addiction to entrenchment reflected was, in strategic terms, stupendously successful. Who better, then, than a specialist on the Roman army to absorb its implications? Whereas prominent