Lead book review

Lady Chatterley’s Lover was written in a villa outside Florence during the winter of 1927-28, two years after D.H. Lawrence was diagnosed with TB. Described by him as “a phallic novel, but good and sun-wards, truly sun-wards,” the tale is set in his native Nottinghamshire, which he left in 1912 when he eloped with his aristocratic wife Frieda von Richthofen, who was then married to his tutor. Frieda, who valued her freedom, was enjoying an affair with the Italian officer Angelo Ravagli, who became her third husband after Lawrence’s death in 1930. It is believed that Lawrence was impotent for the last years of his life. In the evenings he would read aloud his finished pages, in which the Lawrentian philosophy is expressed by Oliver Mellors, gamekeeper to Sir Clifford Chatterley.

This story is little more than a brutal anecdote, which Patrick Radden Keefe has chosen to tell at excessive length. It has the kind of fact-checked gravity that indicates a star American journalist bent on perpetrating an entire book. (“Built in 1923 and originally known as the Empire Stadium, Wembley was the most iconic sporting ground in Britain.”) But it occurred to me more than once as I read it that it has the hallmarks of a particularly black London comedy by Charles Dickens or Ben Jonson or Joe Orton. A violent knave, his activities previously limited to cheating the police, murdering his equally appalling criminal rivals, doing underhand deals and ripping off the rich, acquires an associate.

At the Nuremberg trial of the main Nazi war criminals, one man stood out: Adolf Hitler’s favorite architect and later armaments minister, Albert Speer. He cut a gentlemanly figure in a gallery of rogues. The strutting, smirking Hermann Goering reminded Rebecca West, who attended the trial, of “a tout in a Paris café offering some tourists a chance to see a black mass.” Julius Streicher, the Jew-baiting brute, was like “a dirty old man of the sort who gives trouble in parks.” On the same bench, all declaring their innocence in the face of overwhelming evidence of monstrous crimes, were the lantern-jawed SS leader Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the sour-faced ex-Champagne salesman Joachim von Ribbentrop, Fritz Sauckel, the thuggish slave-labor chief, and the rest of the sorry gang.

As a metal, gold never corrodes. As a possession, the reverse is too often true. It has the power to warp morality, destroy decency and tarnish humanity. This duality – entrancing beauty alongside corrupting potency – lies at the heart of this magnificent book that engagingly blends African history with a current relevance that reaches far beyond the continent. The history is laid out with clarity and conviction. The Asante nation (Barnaby Phillips wisely settles on this spelling over a variety of homophones including Ashante, Ashanti and Achantis) is a component part of the modern west African nation of Ghana. Much like the Zulus in South Africa, their foundational history dates back only a few hundred years and is underscored by military prowess bordering on barbarism.