Book review

Thursday

Jack Castle

The bitterness of Bacon

When Michael Peppiatt met Francis Bacon in 1963 to interview him for a student magazine, the artist was already well-established, and perhaps even establishment. He had been the subject of retrospectives at the Tate and the Guggenheim, and the Marlborough Gallery had paid off several decades’ worth of gambling debts. No longer an authentically marginal figure, ‘mythologising his life’ was ‘at the very centre of his existence and painting’; and for 29 years Peppiatt became his scribe, drinking partner, estate agent, confidante, gatekeeper and admirer, and the recipient of lavish dinners, drinks, flats, paintings and acquaintances. Alienated from his own family, Peppiatt grew up in Bacon’s world and only belatedly

Alex Clark

Quiet desperation

Andrew Miller’s seventh novel, and the first since Pure, which won the Costa Book of the Year award, is an intensely curious affair; thick with material detail from the outset, it announces itself as a novel of closely observed and relished realism. But before too long, one begins to suspect that its specificity — much of it maritime, with excursions into other arcana such as rare guitars, or the pharmaceutical industry — is a blind, any literal reading liable to produce only bemusement. A clue comes very early on, when graduate student Maud Stamp falls 20 feet from a dry-docked boat; to her shocked companion, Tim, she briefly appears to

Harry Mount

On the way to the Forum

It’s strange that tourists rarely visit the most famous site in Roman history. The spot in Pompey’s assembly hall where Julius Caesar was murdered on the Ides of March, 44 bc, is right in the middle of Rome, in Largo di Torre Argentina. When I was there, the tourists were only interested in the feral cats that stroll across the murder scene. Jochen Bleicken shrewdly begins this long, occasionally heavygoing but unequalled biography with that murder. It’s only because Caesar appointed his great-nephew Gaius Octavius (known later as Augustus) as his adopted son and heir that the latter rose to such heights. But for that crucial adoption, Augustus wasn’t that

Andrew Taylor

Universal appeal

As a novelist, Iain Pears doesn’t repeat himself, and he gives with a generous hand. In Arcadia, he provides a dystopian vision of the 23rd century, scholarly espionage set in Cold War Oxford, and an Arts-and-Crafts pastoral called Anterwold, which involves swords and scholars and may or may not be the product of the imagination of one of the characters elsewhere. All this (and much else) is somehow connected to an 18th-century text known as The Devil’s Handwriting containing a mathematical formulation that wasn’t invented until five centuries later. Confused? It gets far more complicated. Arcadia is not so much a novel as a cornucopia of narratives. These unfold through

Lewis Jones

The history man

History for Gore Vidal was a vehicle to be ridden in triumph, perhaps as in an out-take from Ben-Hur, which he worked on during one of his stints as a Hollywood hack, camping up the script to annoy Charlton Heston. Not only did he ride the Vehicle of History, but as its amanuensis and avatar, born and raised to the purple, in his mind he somehow was History, and of his many achievements the greatest was to persuade others to share that belief. His career presents the realised fantasy of the charismatic narcissist, which is to be taken at one’s own estimation. The American writer and academic Jay Parini, who

Peter Parker

Action this day

‘July 1st 1916 was the most interesting day of my life,’ Philip Howe recalled, with characteristic English dryness, half a century after taking part in the most catastrophic 24 hours in the history of the British army. Howe had been a lieutenant in the 10th West Yorkshires, which had the grim distinction of losing more men during the first day on the Somme than any other battalion: of the 1,050 that went into battle, 710 became casualties, 60 per cent of whom were killed. At the end of the day Howe was the only officer left standing, and many other battalions had suffered almost as badly. The 1st Newfoundlanders lost

Thursday

Mario Reading

First-rate firsts

It has become something of a truism among writers’ groups and in articles offering advice on how best to secure the services of an agent or publisher that the opening of a novel is everything — the ne plus ultra of the writer’s armoury. If one can knock the reader’s socks off with the first few lines one is almost there. So I’ve decided to conduct an experiment. Before reading any of these four first novels to the end, I shall compare and mark their opening couple of pages. First in line (and chosen entirely at random) is Michela Wrong’s Borderlines. Miss Wrong (you’ll find no silly jokes from me

Rian Malan

The day of reckoning is nigh

I think this should begin with a truth-in-journalism disclosure: I know R.W. Johnson well enough to call him Bill. Since this opens me to charges of bias, let me start by acknowledging that Professor Johnson (a former leader of the ‘Magdalen Mafia’ at Oxford and author of a witty book on the subject) is unpopular in certain circles down here in South Africa. In spite of his record — 12 books, platforms at several esteemed British publications and an engaging prose style — Johnson has been shunned by local book fairs and banished from our op-ed pages. In the early 1990s, the African National Congress went so far as to

Dorian Lynskey

It happened one summer | 27 August 2015

Five songs, only three of which were amplified. Thirty-five minutes, including interruptions. That’s how long Bob Dylan played for at Newport Folk Festival on Sunday 25 July 1965. Even on its own merits, it was a messy, halting set with an inadequate sound system. ‘Why did that matter?’ Elijah Wald rightly asks. ‘Why does what one musician played on one evening continue to resonate half a century later?’ Cameras documented only the stage, and memories are unreliable, so nobody can say how many in the 17,000-strong crowd booed Dylan’s noisy rock’n’roll rebirth, but one eyewitness’s claim that it ‘electrified one half of his audience and electrocuted the other’ is broadly

Elisa Segrave

Life with old father William

This intensely written memoir by Adam Mars-Jones about his Welsh father, Sir William, opens with the death of Sheila, Adam’s mother, of lung cancer in 1998: ‘She died with self-effacing briskness in little more than a month.’ Adam too is self-effacing, moving in while his mother was dying, then staying on as his father’s main carer. The second of three brothers, he explains away this generous act: ‘As an under-employed freelance, I had time to spare.’ ‘Dad’, diagnosed informally as ‘demented’, was by then a retired High Court judge granted a low rent for a large flat in Gray’s Inn. Adam lived in the flat’s converted attic. Adam is thorough

Allan Massie

Another near run thing

Charles VI of France died on 21 October 1422. He had been intermittently mad for most of his long reign, ‘a pathetic figure’ flitting, often witless, around his palaces. He left a ruined and divided kingdom. There was no French prince to follow his funeral. ‘Tradition was maintained by a solitary figure in a black cape and hat’ on foot behind the coffin. ‘It was the Regent of France, John of Lancaster, Duke of Bedford.’ His brother, Henry V of England, married to Charles’s daughter Catherine, would have become King of France had he not died of dysentery two months previously. His infant son, Henry VI, would indeed be crowned

Susan Hill Susan Hill

Gothic mysteries

This is a muddle of novel (originally published last year by Tartarus Press in a limited edition), though there are plenty of indications that the author will go on to do great things. I doubt if he had quite decided what he was writing — a Stephen King horror story, a book about the loss of intense Catholic faith, a serious novel about families, a Gothic mystery.… It has elements of all these, but has not settled down to be any. It is written as though at a distance from the characters, by someone observing them, perhaps ironically, perhaps fondly, never closely. Only the narrator, and his younger brother, Andrew

Sarah Churchwell

A rollicking satire on the way we live now

Jonathan Franzen’s latest novel, Purity, comes with great expectations. Its author’s awareness of this fact is signalled by a series of lampoons of writers expected to produce ‘big books’, writers named Jonathan and an assortment of other self-referential gags, but also the fact that its eponymous heroine, Purity Tyler, is nicknamed Pip. This Pip’s expectations are played off against those of Franzen’s readers: she won’t get what she expects, of course, any more than Dickens’s original Pip did. But to a great extent, our expectations will be met: this is a ‘big book’, a rollicking, sharply observed contemporary satire of family life and cultural politics. There are other burdens for

Olivia Glazebrook

Red for danger

‘Gentlemen prefer blondes,’ Anita Loos pronounced, ‘but gentlemen marry brunettes.’ Quite what they do with redheads she never revealed (and I’ve often wondered), but with Red: A Natural History of the Redhead, Jacky Colliss Harvey sets out to discover everything — what it takes to make a redhead, where in the world they come from and why they exist at all; whether redheads are actually different or just treated differently; how they got their reputation, what that reputation might be and whether they deserve it. The history begins some 40,000 years ago, we are told, when the gene for red hair was carried from ‘the grasslands of Central Asia’ to

D J-Taylor

Spirits of the Blitz

If the early Martin Amis is instantly recognisable by way of its idiosyncratic slang (‘rug-rethink’, ‘going tonto’ etc) then the later Pat Barker can be similarly identified by its finely wrought accounts of physical trauma. ‘Afterwards, it was the horses she remembered,’ runs a specimen sentence from the new novel, ‘galloping towards them out of the orange-streaked darkness, their manes and tails on fire.’ Noonday’s Blitz-era setting — the horses are in flight from a bombed-out brewery — gives Barker ample opportunity to do what she does best: intent descriptions of splayed limbs that are sometimes engaged in the act of love, occasionally the subjects of paintings or, more often,

Patrick Marnham

Liberating Marianne

In Marianne in Chains, his last book on Occupied France, Robert Gildea offered an original view of life in that country between 1940 and 1944, arguing that outside the cities it had not always been as bad, nor had the Vichy regime always been as reactionary, as was subsequently claimed. Confining his research to three departments in the Loire valley, Gildea also suggested that for most people most of the time the Resistance was a dangerous irrelevance, to be avoided wherever possible. These conclusions were presented at a conference in Tours where they caused a minor uproar among French specialists. Gildea, professor of modern history at Oxford University, now turns

Thursday

Daniel Swift

These I have loved

In the preface to his great collection of essays The Dyer’s Hand, W.H. Auden claimed: ‘I prefer a critic’s notebooks to his treatises.’ Auden’s criticism is like that: a passage of insights instead of a single sustained argument, and the same is true of Samuel Johnson, whose works are a pleasure to read for the feeling of the pressure of a great mind at play. Clive James belongs in this company. His new book Latest Readings is a kind of reading diary: a collection of short essays, each prompted by one book or a handful he happens to be reading. They are not in any logical order or sequence, but

Marcus Berkmann

Music for the masses

As pop music drifts away from many people’s lives, so its literature grows ever more serious and weighty, as though aware that this is an art form approaching the end of its time. Having had the pleasure of opening the first volume of Mark Lewisohn’s planned three-volume history of the Beatles and then fallen into a deep sleep attempting to read it, I feel only a sense of impending doom when presented with yet another vast tome of unimpeachable scholarship into the ephemeral. Peter Doggett, a long-serving toiler at the pop coalface, has produced a whopper here, a near-700-page history of pop’s 125 years, with the accent on the popular.

Sara Wheeler

The writing on the wall | 20 August 2015

‘Every day’, writes the foreign correspondent Wendell Steavenson in this account of the 2011 Egyptian revolution, ‘see-sawed between joy and death.’ She covered the 18-day cataclysm and stayed on in Cairo for another 18 months to report its aftermath, filing for the New Yorker among other outlets. The title refers of course to Tahrir Square, the heart of the conflict, a place ‘shaped like a giant teardrop with a traffic circle in the centre’. Steavenson’s previous books include The Weight of a Mustard Seed, a portrait of a Ba’athist general in Saddam’s Iraq; she also reported on the fall of the Soviet Union. In Circling the Square she artfully arranges

Anna Aslanyan

Hurricane Lolita

Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov’s nostalgic memoir, reflects on his life from the age of three to 41, taking us from early-20th-century Russia, soon to be engulfed by revolution, to Europe at the start of the second world war. He planned a sequel to it, based on his American years, but Speak On, Memory was never written, partly because much of that experience had found an outlet in his novels. As Robert Roper argues in his literary biography, it was America that made Nabokov the master we now admire. Nabokov in America, a detailed account of the 20 years the writer spent there, revisits some of the less widely known facts