Lead book review

Steve Silberman’s stunning new book looks across history, back to Henry Cavendish, the 18th-century natural scientist who discovered hydrogen, Hugo Gernsbach, the early-20th-century inventor and pioneer of amateur ‘wireless’ radio, and countless other technically brilliant but socially awkward, eccentric non-conformists, members of the ‘neurotribe’ we now call the autism spectrum. He argues passionately for the ‘neurodiversity’ model rather than the medical disease model, for society to stop trying to ‘cure’ or ‘normalise’ those with autism, but to recognise them as neurologically differently wired, to accept difference, and support their disabilities when these surface in certain environments.

‘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.

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 to a much bigger subject.

Physicists have a nerve. I know one (I’ll call him Mark) who berates every religious person he meets, yet honestly thinks there exist parallel universes, exactly like our own, in which we all have two noses. He refuses to give any credit to Old Testament creation myths and of course sneers at the idea of transubstantiation. But, without any sense of shame, he insists in the same breath that humans are made from the fallout of exploded stars; that it is theoretically possible for a person to decompose on one side of a black hole and recompose on the other, and that there are diamonds in the sky the size of the moon.

Christian Thielemann (born in 1959) is a self-consciously old-fashioned figure who makes rather a virtue out of his limitations. As a conductor, he stands out in a profession increasingly given to the eclectic, and to performances of music outside the western canon. The practitioners of art music have almost all surrendered to the requirement to reach out, to experiment with the new and the non-European, and to mesh their endeavours with conscious gestures of social improvement. Thielemann could hardly be more out of sympathy with the prevailing mood. He is noisily devoted to musical excellence at all costs, and to long apprenticeships rather than flashes of stardom.

These days, there are few countries as obscure and exotic as Suriname. Perched on the north-east coast of South America, it has the same population as Cornwall but is over 40 times the size. Ninety per cent of it is covered in jungle, and new species are always tumbling out of its darkness (mostly bugs and purple frogs). The current president, Desi Bouterse, is a convicted cocaine smuggler, and during his term in office he has stood trial for multiple murders. Meanwhile, in the country’s pretty little capital, Paramaribo, they speak 20 languages and maintain 15 Marxist parties, all saying something different. During my time there, a caiman would often creep out of the park at night and eat the city’s dogs. Even stranger, all of this began with an English colony.

This is an interesting document, and a pretty bad novel. I don’t know why anyone thought it would be otherwise. In 1960, Harper Lee published To Kill a Mockingbird. It was an important statement, as well as a very good novel. Just as it took the southerner Lyndon B. Johnson to make the most significant civil rights concessions, so literary culture needed a novel written by a woman from the south saying all the right things about race in the firmest way possible. The book was compelling, and immediately made its way into classrooms worldwide, where it has stayed. Subsequently, Harper Lee made it very clear that she would not be publishing another novel — neither writing one, nor producing one written earlier.

This hefty volume is misleadingly titled. It is not an escapist sort of travel book, ushering the visitor around the homelands and houses of the Italian literati. It is a selection of the author’s previous literary articles, mostly book reviews for the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, and believe me it is hardly a sunshine ramble or a splash in the pool. On the contrary, it is an immensely learned, elegantly written rehearsal of the significance of 23 Italian writers, from Dante in the 13th century to Antonio Tabucchi in our own, and as such it amounts I think to an assessment of the Italian sensibility as a whole. Nobody is better qualified than Tim Parks to guide us through such an experience.

It is something of a mystery why the Bodley Head has decided to publish Robert Caro’s The Power Broker in Britain more than 40 years after the initial appearance in the US of this classic work — but better late than never. Caro’s remarkable portrait of New York City’s master planner Robert Moses merits publication in any language, at any moment in time. For its scope extends beyond Moses, fascinating though he was as a person, builder, wrecker, and manipulator of men and money. Caro’s ambition — in a journalistic sense equal to Moses’s ambition in architecture, park creation, and road and bridge construction — is greater than conventional biography.

In March 1923 a large birthday party was held in a studio in Bloomsbury. It is often assumed that the eponymous Group was habitually glum or intense; but there were a lot of parties. The artists were Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, and the birthday was David Garnett’s 31st. David (known as Bunny) was a handsome, fair-haired fellow of bisexual charm, beloved by Grant, among others. His second novel, Lady into Fox, inspired and illustrated by his wife, Ray, had been a literary sensation the year before. There was much energetic dancing, and a floorshow was provided by the Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova, Maynard Keynes’s wife, and by Harriet Bingham, a new friend of Bunny’s, a recent arrival from a very different world.

Sudhir Hazareesingh’s bold new book is built on the assumption that ‘it is possible to make meaningful generalisations about the shared intellectual habits of a people as diverse and fragmented as the French’. France, as General de Gaulle pointed out, has such a fetish for singularity that it produces 246 varieties of cheese. Can France be any more a nation of thinkers than England is of shopkeepers? Hazareesingh, an Oxford don, brings specific strengths to this daunting task.

Should sugar be taxed? Some of the contributors to The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets seem to think so. Sugar certainly appears less appealing than it used to. Its negative effect on our teeth is undeniable, and it now takes the rap for many of the ills we formerly blamed on fats, such as obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes. But sugar is also now bound up with politics, because of its historical connection with slavery. Our awareness of this we owe to the groundbreaking, imaginative scholarship of Sidney Mintz, whose 1985 Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History is easily the most frequently referenced work by the 265 contributors to this massive volume.

Few monarchs could become novelists. They wouldn’t be able to develop the practice, or possess the necessary temperament. No monarch could sit in the corner of a room observing, or walk the streets unnoticed. They don’t have much of a chance of a long morning working quietly, without interruption, or of seeing what ordinary people are like at their most natural and unselfconscious. (Imagine what changes would have had to take place in Edward VII’s life before he could have thought of writing fiction.) If they are never going to have the chance to observe and to write, they are also unlikely to have the disposition to do so. The future monarch will be assured from birth that his is the existence that matters.

With summer on its way, thoughts turn south to olive groves and manicured vineyards, to the warm water and hot beaches of the Mediterranean. But this sea that is a place of rest and beauty for some of us is the scene of drama and often despair for many others, among them people trying to cross from North Africa. So which is it, a place of calm and beauty, of refinement and culture, or one of drama and much tragedy, buffeted by the consequences of geo-political shifts? The Mediterranean has long been used to reconciling opposites, as two new books make abundantly clear. To ancient Greeks and Romans, the Mediterranean and its neighbouring seas was literally the ‘middle earth’, the centre from which everything radiated.

The oceans cover seven-tenths of our planet, and although it may not seem like it above the surface, they are very busy. Helen Scales and Christian Sardet are marine biologists: Sardet is apparently known as Uncle Plankton, and those multitudes of drifting organisms — ‘plankton’ comes from the Greek planktos, meaning to wander or drift — are his life’s work. Scales’s focus is the shell-making creatures that are molluscs, though focus seems an inappropriate word for such a vast body of life: a 1993 survey of just one island, New Caledonia, found 2,738 distinct species, and 80 per cent of them were new to science.

Christmas Eve 1944 found thousands of Allied — mostly American — troops dug into trenches and foxholes along the Belgian front, where they sucked at frozen rations and, in some places, listened to their enemies singing ‘Stille Nacht’. Their more fortunate colleagues in command posts gathered around Christmas trees decorated with strips of the aluminium foil more usually dropped from planes to jam enemy radar signals. The following morning a wave of Junkers dropping magnesium flares led the German Christmas Day onslaught, soon answered by American P-47 Thunderbolt fighter bombers, dropping napalm ‘blaze bombs’ or strafing with machine guns.

The story is an interesting one. Gunpowder had to be manufactured. In 1916 one of the places dedicated to the dangerous and difficult task was remote Kent. A fire broke out and led to a series of huge explosions. Deaths and injuries were not widely specified at the time for reasons of morale, but 109 men and boys were killed. The explosives industry was a necessary, profitable but immensely dangerous one. It took the 1654 Delft explosion — in which Carel Fabritius was killed — for society to realise that explosives should probably not be manufactured in cities. The Kent disaster took place a couple of miles from Faversham, and the works had been built at a safe distance from the town precisely to limit the number of casualties in case of disaster.

Saul Bellow died in 2005. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976. The first installment of Zachary Leader’s exemplary, scrupulous, dispassionate, detailed, well-read, enthralling biography runs to over 800 pages and takes us only as far as 1964. The length is important. It allows Leader to adjudicate calmly, weigh the evidence — sometimes remaining undecided — and quote Bellow freely, so that the biographical narrative is enlivened by Bellow’s prodigally gifted prose, little injections of bliss.

For most of us, the centenary of the Great War means recalling the misery and sacrifices of the Western Front: Ypres, the Marne, Arras, Verdun, Passchendaele, the Somme. Few of us give as much thought to the Eastern Front and, apart from regular studies of the ever-popular, self-mythologising Lawrence of Arabia, fewer still dwell on the first world war in the Middle East. This was the theatre that hosted the Arab Revolt, famously dismissed by Lawrence as ‘a sideshow of a sideshow’. The Great War centenary brings renewed attention to another neglected tragedy of the conflict. Starting in 1915, the Turks embarked on a process that culminated in the systematic extermination of the Armenian people.