He might be 85 but Tom Wolfe is going strong with a new book and a dustjacket photo that still sees him working the suit and hat look. And although the new book may be small, it’s got big ambitions: first, to take down an establishment icon, and, second, to reveal the secret behind humanity’s progress. The establishment icon first. He is that infamous scoundrel, Charles Darwin — ‘Charlie’, as Wolfe often calls him, and not in a friendly way.
In March 1981 Margaret Thatcher went to the hospital bedside of Maurice Oldfield, the former head of the Secret Intelligence Service, who was dying of stomach cancer. She found him surrounded by his brothers and sisters, whom she gently asked to leave as she needed to ‘speak privately with Sir Maurice’. When they trooped back after her departure, they found their brother, hitherto calm and resigned about his illness, distraught and weeping. It was the first time any of them had seen him in tears. In answer to their question what was wrong, he answered: ‘Mrs Thatcher asked if I was homosexual. I had to tell her.’ It was the first time any of his siblings had heard any remark about his sexuality.
Centuries before their footballers learned giant-slaying ways, Icelanders knew how to startle the world with tall stories. In the moonscape that birthed Sagas and Eddas, little grew but epic tales. When this novel’s protagonist, the troubled poet-turned-publisher Ari, announces in an interview that he has given up authorship, his aunt Elin sends him a heartbroken letter. To see ‘one of our own’ write books, she writes, ‘made us feel almost as if everything had meaning’. Especially for a restless kid from the black lava fields of Keflavik, ‘this peculiar town situated behind the world’, where nothing happens and ‘it’s just work, just fish, the Yanks and the wind’.
Between agreeing to review this book and receiving it, I got worried. Like many, I adore Doctor Zhivago with its tragic love story between the eponymous doctor-poet and the beautiful Lara, set in post-revolutionary Russia. When in Moscow, I followed the trail of literary pilgrims to Boris Pasternak’s dacha in the writers’ village of Peredelkino. I also had fond memories of Julie Christie and Omar Sharif in David Lean’s epic 1965 film; never underestimate the enhancing effect on romance of fur hats, sparkling snow and long-distance trains. Anna Pasternak, the writer’s great niece, is a journalist and Daily Mail columnist who made her name with Princess in Love.
Peter Ho Davies’s second novel, The Fortunes, is a beautifully crafted study, in four parts, of the history of the Chinese in America. Though it deals, of necessity, with racism in all its insidious forms, it does so with humanity, humour, self-deprecation and a hefty dose of irony. Each section — ‘Gold’, ‘Silver’, ‘Jade’ and ‘Pearl’ — covers a separate period in Chinese-American history. ‘Gold’ follows Ling, a half-white upwardly mobile immigrant, who arrives before the Civil War, starting as a laundryman and progressing to become the valet of one of the four big barons of the Central Pacific Railroad.
On 25 July 1865, during a heatwave, Dr James Barry died of dysentery in his London lodgings. A charwoman came in to ‘lay out’ the body. She had known the deceased gentleman: a strange-looking fellow, about five feet tall, slight and stooped and with a large nose and dyed red hair. But nothing had prepared her for what she found when she folded back the bedclothes. Barry’s whole body — ‘the genitals, the deflated breast and the hairless face’ — was unmistakably female. And as if that wasn’t shock enough, the charwoman’s eye was drawn to pronounced striations in the skin of the belly. As a mother of nine, she recognised them immediately as the marks of childbearing.
On 8 June 1920 an old beggar woman sat against a wall in Kingsway holding a mongrel in her arms and singing aloud. Virginia Woolf noted in her diary that there was a recklessness to her. She was singing for her own amusement, shrilly, and then fire engines came by singing shrilly, too. ‘Sometimes everything gets into the same mood; how to define this one I don’t know.’ In the mid-1980s, on my daily journey to Charing Cross Road, I would get off the 38 bus on the corner with New Oxford Street. Every morning I would see an old woman huddled in the doorway of what is now a building site. Enthroned on her rags, oblivious to her surroundings, she had stopped caring. In her diary that day, Woolf said she was overwhelmed by the dead walking the city streets.
At first glance Sean O’Brien’s new novel appears to focus on England’s devotion to the past. Even its title carries the sense and long-sustained rhythm of things going on as before. As if to underscore the point, Once Again Assembled Here is set in the autumn of 1968, a year often portrayed in fiction to describe a revolt into the new, but which in O’Brien’s novel merely serves as a reminder that whatever ideas were being cooked up elsewhere, here tradition and continuity would prevail. Here, in this case, is Blake’s, a jingoistic public school on the outskirts of a city still marked by the Luftwaffe’s bombing raids.
A certain sort of male novelist will always aspire to be Joseph Conrad. The seedy cosmopolitanism of his fiction and its worldly, morally compromised protagonists — those European merchant seamen negotiating far-flung colonies — are an attractive counterpoint to the unmanly business of staying indoors to write a book. Toby Vieira’s entertaining, globe-hopping debut tale of diamond smugglers wears its debt to the great man on its sleeve notes. These tout Vieira’s ‘passion’ for Conrad’s work, while his title recalls Charles Marlow, the narrator of Heart of Darkness, sent down an unnamed African river to retrieve the rogue ivory trader Mr Kurtz.
What the Great Eastern was to Brunel, the New English Dictionary was to James Murray (1837–1915) — an unequalled task that was his life, and eventually his death. What was later known as the Oxford English Dictionary should be a ‘sweep-net over the whole surface of English literature’, said Richard Chenevix Trench, one of its instigators in the 1850s, to be prepared ‘by reading all books’. This stupendous aim would have guaranteed its failure had not that hard piece of Roxburghshire granite James Murray set up in his iron Scriptorium at 78 Banbury Road, Oxford, working, working, working, 90 hours a week for years, sifting with a mind full of languages through millions of quotations written on slips of paper in pen and ink by volunteers.
Mark Lawson’s latest novel, set in Britain in the recent past, presents us with a nation in the grip of ‘moral fever’. Here, the ‘giving offence to anyone at all over anything’ is considered ‘a capital crime’; the ‘post-Savile sexual witch hunt’ has trained people to ‘reinterpret heartbreak as violation’; and retribution comes not just in the form of established legal proceedings, but also of the ‘modern madness of amateur arraignment’. Lawson wants to show how pernicious this culture can be. To do so, he presents us with two characters, both academics, who are out of step with it.
Perhaps because so many of them are former drunks and junkies, ‘addiction experts’ are touchy people. Often they don’t like each other — hardly surprising, since they are fighting each other for such a lucrative business. You can make bigger bucks out of selling ‘recovery’ than by peddling drugs. That’s not to imply moral equivalence, but the two do have one thing in common: plenty of repeat customers. In any media report of a celebrity’s battle with substance abuse, the words that you’re most likely to read before ‘rehab’ are ‘in and out of’. Ah, say the addiction gurus, but that’s because they’re suffering from a disease. This is one area in which the rivals speak with one voice.
Architecture is sometimes described as the second oldest profession, but often — in both theory and practice — it competes with the first. In his splendiferous office in Manhattan’s Seagram Building, Philip Johnson confirmed this when he told me, ‘Remember, son, I’m a whore.’ True to his vocation, this was a line he had often indiscriminately used. Architects need to have big personalities because their responsibilities are so huge. Frank Lloyd Wright said that surgeons can bury their mistakes, but architects have to live with them. And so do the rest of us. Few of us have ever met a reticent, self-deprecating architect.
A teenager in the second decade of the Cold War, my father was taught to play snooker by a KGB agent. His own father was the principal of a theological college in London that had been allowed to accept two foreign students from Russia only if, said the Moscow authorities, a third ‘student’ (notably less ardent in his desire to become a clergyman) was allowed to accompany them. And this is the problem of the world of international espionage: you think it’s going to be all poisoned-tip umbrellas and canasta parties but can wind up in South Norwood studying early church history while making sure Sergey and Dmitry aren’t getting the bus up to Whitehall in the afternoons or swapping briefcases with carnation-wearing strangers at train stations.
Now that even candidates for President of the United States can rise up from the undead dregs of reality television, it comes as no surprise to read that the National Youth Orchestra of Iraq owes its origins to a conclave of television execs. In 2008, Channel 4 and the independent production company Raw TV took upon themselves to campaign for a youth orchestra in Iraq, focusing their programme around the story of Zuhal Sultan, a 17-year-old Iraqi pianist. Later that same year, the Scottish conductor Paul MacAlindin was savouring a fish-and-chip supper in his favourite Edinburgh pub when his eye caught a headline in the Glasgow Herald about the same project — ‘Search for UK maestro to help create an orchestra in Iraq’ — and he thought: ‘I know how to do this.
The Schooldays of Jesus is not, as it happens, about the schooldays of Jesus. It is the Man Booker-nominated sequel to The Childhood of Jesus (which, you guessed it, did not once refer to the childhood of Jesus either). J.M. Coetzee is now so much part of the literary pantheon, so liable to be rewarded by the critical classes and the academic industry surrounding him, that he no longer needs to worry about basics such as having a title that makes sense. He should still worry, one feels, about telling a story worth following. Like its predecessor, his new novel is set in a nameless Spanish-speaking province; a Kafkaesque, ‘featureless’ and ‘dreary’ place.
With a title like A Beautiful Young Wife, this is of course about the decline of an older husband. Professor Edward Landauer, virologist in avian flu at Utrecht University, sees Ruth Walta’s bottom passing on a bicycle and knows she must be his. Full of autumnal entitlement, at 15 years her senior even Edward is surprised when this vegetarian PhD student of sociology loves him back. They marry. But with time, incompatible ideas — about vivisection, interior decoration and the meaning of human good — drive Edward to a public bathroom and into the arms of his colleague, Marjolein. As a regular at any coffee shop in a university town you may well overhear a story like it, invariably soliciting the same response: ‘How predictable.
Night of Fire is Colin Thubron’s first novel for 14 years. For most of us he is better known as a travel writer, perhaps the finest of our time. But between journeys there have been seven previous novels, and this new one draws on his travelling. Ostensibly confined to a house converted into single apartments, and a night when it is consumed by a fire starting in its basement, it actually, in its chapters each devoted to one of its seven characters, wanders the world, while also moving to and fro in time. The seven characters are designated by role or occupation: landlord, priest, neurosurgeon, naturalist, photographer, schoolboy, traveller. We know from the first that they are all doomed: they will die this night.
Was it perhaps the landscape historian Oliver Rackham who gave rise to our present preoccupation with old trees through his pioneering works on ancient woodland? He certainly pointed out more than 40 years ago that 10,000 centurion oaks ‘are not a substitute for one 500-year-old oak’. Since then, shelves of books have been written on these veterans, and in The Long, Long Life of Trees Fiona Stafford makes a welcome and entertaining contribution. She draws on material from fields including folklore, natural science, literature, cultural history, European art, ancient mythology and modern medicine to illuminate such trees’ central place in western civilisation. Sometimes all of these are skilfully blended in her accounts of different species. The yew is a good example.
Elvis only ever appeared in one commercial in his life — for Southern Maid, his favourite jam doughnut shop. That commercial appeared on the Louisiana Hayride radio show in 1955. But since his death in 1977, Elvis has appeared in adverts all over the world: ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love’ has been borrowed to flog bathroom fragrances; a Greek dairy company used ‘Always on My Mind’; and Coca-Cola, BMW and Nike have all been promoted with ‘A Little Less Conversation’. Ted Harrison’s central thesis — that Elvis has been much more heavily and successfully commercialised in death than in life — is convincing. This is an odd, rambling, repetitive book, too clumsily written, even for Elvis maniacs like myself, to be worth buying.