More from Books
Thursday
Homage to Clement and La Frenais, the writing duo who transformed British comedy
Ray Galton and Alan Simpson remain pre-eminent as writers of television comedy, but their closest rivals Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais — still with us and in their eighties — always possessed more variety. Until I’d wolfed down this genial memoir I’d not known that the script-writing-and-directing duo had adapted Iris Murdoch’s A Severed Head for the screen. They also developed Lucky Jim as a television series and found Kingsley Amis pie-eyed, maudlin and testy, ‘jealous of his son’s success’. They wrote The Jokers and Hannibal Brooks for the disgusting Michael Winner (who once told a starlet: ‘What this part does not require is a diploma from Rada. What it does require is a great pair of tits.
How the Lyons Corner House became a haven for the single working woman
In Whitechapel, in the mid 19th century, rolling and selling cigars was a way for a newly arrived immigrant to scrape a living. This is what Samuel Glückstein did, after he landed in London from Belgium in 1843. He built up his cigar business until he could send for his parents and siblings. One of his sisters married a man named Salmon (also in the tobacco trade) and thus the Salmon & Gluckstein firm was born. The fortunes of these intertwined families and their business empire are traced in this book. Within 20 years they had a large chain of tobacconists, and their brand was known across the country.
Haunted by a black cat: Earwig, by Brian Catling, reviewed
Genuinely surrealist novels are as rare as hen’s teeth. They are a different form from the magic realist, the absurdist, the wacky, the mimsical and the nastily satirical. But Brian Catling is a genuine surrealist novelist, and it no doubt helps that his artwork is surreal (he is professor of fine art at Ruskin College, Oxford: how Ruskin would have loathed him). He has previously written a trilogy of novels, The Vorrh, which has been among my highlights of the past few years. This is a more slender book, but it is slender like a stiletto. If there is one defining feature of truly surreal literature, it is that it defies the imposition of meanings while retaining an affective hold on the reader. Oh, and horrifying them.
Compassion fatigue is as damaging to a doctor’s health as to a patient’s
Medical training is a process of toughening up: take iron that’s vulnerable to rust, add carbon and make steel. That’s the hope. In a large university lecture hall, I remember a consultant standing in front of a PowerPoint slide showing two triangles, one widening to its base, the other tapering to a point. They represented how our clinical knowledge would expand with time, while our compassion would very probably diminish. It was a warning, but one delivered with a tone of inevitability. As a student I deeply resented this idea, but also worried it might prove necessary for survival. Doctors and their patients are surprised when training’s protection proves not to be that of an alloy but rather a metal paint that can be scratched and worn away.
In praise of Tove Ditlevsen — the greatest Danish writer you’ve never heard of
Pick up a Penguin Classic from a cult Danish author who ‘struggled with alcohol and drug abuse’ and took her own life aged 58, and you may have one or two prior expectations. They will probably not include a flirtatious dinner with an enthralled Evelyn Waugh (‘so attentive and kind’) in a Copenhagen restaurant so quiet that ‘we could hear the thumping of ships’ motors far out on the water’. Tove Ditlevsen and the ‘vibrant, youthful’ Waugh have their evening spoiled when her third husband — a crazy, drug-pushing medic — turns up in his motorcycle leathers to drag Tove away for her bedtime injection, plus a bout of rougher than usual sex that leaves her spaced-out, ‘limp and blissful’.
An uncanny gift for prophecy — the genius of Michel Houellebecq
The backdrop of Michel Houellebecq’s novel is by now well established. In this — his eighth — the bleak, essentially nihilistic nature of life is once again only relieved by equally nihilistic humour and sex. From the opening of Serotonin it is clear that we are in safe Houellebecqian hands. About the new anti-depressant that the narrator has been prescribed: ‘The most undesirable side effects most frequently observed in the use of Captorix were nausea, loss of libido and impotence. I have never suffered from nausea.’ There are also those volcanic side explosions which are occasionally mistaken for bigotry by people who don’t recognise that Houellebecq suffers just one bigotry, which is species disgust.
Gales and Gaels — sailing solo from Cornwall to the Summer Isles
This is the story of a solo voyage in a 31ft- wooden sailing boat called Tsambika. Philip Marsden pilots his sloop along the west coast of Ireland, then the west coast of Scotland. The Summer Isles lie at his journey’s end, but in fact he is unable to land, owing to unfriendly headwinds — hence those islands ‘must remain in the imagination of the book’s subtitle’. An award-winning writer whose previous books include Rising Ground: A Search for the Spirit of Place, Marsden was a competent sailor before the off (his grandfather taught him), but ‘had never skippered a boat to anywhere I couldn’t reach by lunchtime’. His achievement is all the more impressive as he claims to be ‘not naturally practical’.
Everything you always wanted to know about classical music but were afraid to ask
Novelist, essayist, painter, poet, composer. Oh yes, and pianist: Stephen Hough does all of these things very well — and one of them superlatively. Most of us will know Hough as a dazzling but thoughtful concert pianist, at home with almost all repertoire, but with a special affinity for 19th- and early 20th- century works. He recently played a gilded royal piano at the Proms — and before that published his first extended work of fiction. But don’t call him a Renaissance man. He flinches — and points out he’s not much cop at maths or science. That makes the rest of us feel only marginally better. A pianist has to do something while on the road — all those flights and lonely nights in distant hotel bedrooms.
Thursday
Hitler’s legacy: two books examine different aspects of the horror that was Germany, 1945
Two new books offer very different takes on the utter ruination of Germany in 1945. Each in its own way shows the enfeebling results of our modern obsession with amateur psychologising. Françoise Meltzer’s Dark Lens is based around a couple of dozen snaps which her mother, a Frenchwoman who had been in the Resistance, took of ruined German cities immediately after the war. This personal angle whets the reader’s appetite, as does the reminder of just how strangely fascinated we all are by ruins.
The tsunami of stuff we have and want is based on culture and economics
In 1993, the photographer Peter Menzel travelled across the globe to capture our material world. In each country, he asked a family to empty their home and pose in front of their possessions. In Texas, the Skeen family held up their large illustrated Bible, surrounded by their Ford pickup truck, their mini-van and their dune buggy, their two TVs, multiple electrical appliances, shelves and storage cabinets filled with clothes. But even households in poorer countries revealed more things than one might expect. In Mali, the Natomo family had to make do with $250 a year but had a cassette player. In Ethiopia, the even poorer Getu family lived in a straw hut, yet owned an umbrella. Possessions have been a central feature of human life since the beginning.
Rushdie at his best – Quichotte reviewed
It’s hard to get your head around Salman Rushdie’s latest novel Quichotte, which has been shortlisted for the Booker. It’s a literary embarras de richesse, whose centre can’t really hold, yet it’s written with the brilliant bravura of a writer who can really, really write. More to the point, it’s also funny and touching and sad and oddly vulnerable, rather like its eponymous hero. His name is taken from Cervantes’ Don Quixote, via its Frenchified version, courtesy of the composer Massenet (one cultural allusion at a time is never enough for Rushdie, whose references range from Prospero to Pinocchio, from Ionesco to Oprah, from Wordsworth to The Wizard of Oz).
Two faces of a single calamity: how the war against inequality backfired dramatically
In 2015, Daniel Markovits, a professor at Yale Law School, delivered a commencement address to that year’s graduating class in which he attacked the idea of meritocracy. It was, he said, a gilded cage that imprisons the elite and leaves the rest feeling excluded and undervalued. For Markovits to make these remarks at one of the cathedrals of the meritocratic church — students at Yale typically score above the 99th percentile in the nationwide Law School Admissions Test — was a kind of heresy and it attracted enough attention for him to secure a book deal. Four years later, The Meritocracy Trap is the result.
Rod Liddle on Brexit: The Great Betrayal reviewed
Rod Liddle has taken a huge gamble with this book. It could be out of date very soon. The book’s premise is a conversation he had with his wife on the day after the Brexit vote in 2016. She, like Liddle, is a Brexiteer and said to him that morning, ‘They won’t let it happen.’ Liddle agreed. ‘Betcha we don’t leave,’ he said. And that is the book’s principal argument: we’ll never leave the EU. The Great Betrayal was published in July and, so far, Liddle is right. But what about on 1 November: will this book be massively outdated and will Britain be out of the European Union? It’s anyone’s guess. Even now, quite a few of the references in the book are dated. It was published before Boris Johnson became Prime Minister.
The great American trauma in minute detail
Why, I asked some months back in these pages, do the protagonists in American fiction these days seem so lost? What is it they’re all so het up about? Well... everything. At least according to the narrator of Ducks, Newburyport. Lucy Ellmann’s monster novel is a more or less non-stop narration of the thoughts of one Ohio housewife, a former college teacher who now bakes pies for money, attempts to keep her household shipshape, feels the pinch of post-bail-out America, is frustrated in the usual ways, and frets persistently about the physical, moral and emotional safety of her offspring (other people’s too) in those ostensibly United States.
Welcome back to Gilead: Margaret Atwood’s triumphant reclaiming of her work
‘Penises,’ Aunt Lydia muses, ‘them again.’ Penises are always causing trouble, even in the God-fearing dystopian state of Gilead. The Testaments is set 15 years after the end of The Handmaid’s Tale, at a time when young girls, carefully and modestly brought up to become wives to the regime’s male elite, are beginning to rebel; some would rather die than get married and there has been an attempted suicide via secateurs in the flower-arranging class. ‘Perhaps we need to change our educational curriculum,’ Aunt Lydia thinks, ‘less fear-mongering, fewer centaur-like ravishers and male genitalia bursting into flame.
Thursday
Tobias Jones finds in Italian football hooliganism a mirror image of Italy itself
Ultras (Italian football hooligans) initially evolved along the same lines as their more infamous English counterparts, emerging in the 1960s and becoming fully fledged in the 1970s. Their ritual, tribal aggression supplied an outlet for youthful male violence in the relatively peaceful second half of Europe’s most savage century. At first, the curve’s semi-circular ends,behind the goals where ultras congregated were, for all their territorial violence, politics-free, but Tobias Jones notes ‘how hard certain ultras were rubbing the lamp [of fascist revivalism]before the genie appeared’.
Edna O’Brien’s heroic tribute to the girls kidnapped by Boko Haram: Girl reviewed
This novel is strikingly brave in two ways: first, in the fortitude of its writer, the redoubtable Edna O’Brien, who, aged 88, travelled twice to northern Nigeria, her bra stuffed with thousands of dollars, in order to research this story. With some irony, she ended up staying in a convent with kindly nuns who helped introduce her to its subject: the girls kidnapped by Boko Haram in 2014. Second, the way, in these days of cultural appropriation, that O’Brien takes on the persona of a very young (she doesn’t know how old she is) kidnapped African girl, Maryam. But this book is at its core a misery memoir about the dreadful things done to women and girls in the name of religion. It’s hardly an area O’Brien can’t lay claim to.
Books and Arts | 12 September 2019
20th-century assassins – How to be a Dictator reviewed
Frank Dikötter has written a very lively and concise analysis of the techniques and personalities of eight 20th-century dictators: Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Kim Il-sung, Duvalier (Haiti), Ceausescu (Romania) and Mengistu (Ethiopia). As a comparative study of those individuals, it is enlightening and a good read. The title and parts of the foreword indicate that it aspires to be a guidebook of tactics for those aspiring to be dictators and to retain their status as such. There are some weaknesses in this broader ambition. These eight men were not altogether uniform in their methods of obtaining power, retaining it, or losing it, and certainly not in their abilities. Stalin, Mao, Kim Il-sung and Duvalier died in office to great public lamentations.