More from Books

Thursday

Jane Rye

The Undelivered Mardle: A Memoir of Belief, Doubt and Delight, by John Rogers — review

This ‘wry soliloquy’, as Ronald Blythe calls The Undelivered Mardle in his introduction, is quite unlike anything else, although its ostensible subject, the history of a small Suffolk farmyard church and its parish (accompanied by three excellent maps) might suggest otherwise. Asked to give a talk or ‘mardle’ to raise money for the priory church at Letheringham, and having established that he might ‘question the sense of preserving such relics’, John Rogers paid a series of meditative visits over several months. On the day he was to deliver the mardle he had a heart attack; afterwards, ‘feeling rather feeble’ and aware that as a public speaker he was ‘unpredictable’, he decided to write it down instead.

Andro Linklater

The Real Great Escape, by Simon Read — review

The scene is chilling. Four men stand in the snow, all in uniform. The men are in pairs, one in each pair holds a pistol to the head of the man in front. Behind them two parked cars, 1940s models; in front a snow-filled ditch. What happens next? The right answer depends on which scene you are watching. The one reproduced in both these books (and above) occurred in February 1946, and was a reconstruction staged by RAF police hunting for the killers of two men, Flying Officer Gordon Kidder and Squadron Leader Thomas Kirby-Green. Afterwards, all four participants and the man who took the picture got back in the cars and drove off. In the original scene, which had taken place two years earlier, there was no photographer.

Bevis Hillier

Self-portrait as a Young Man, by Roy Strong — review

Eventually, all of Sir Roy Strong’s voluminous personal archive is going — like Alan Bennett’s — to the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Riffling through it, he realised there was something missing: he had not adequately covered the years between 1935, when he was born, and 1967, when he became director of the National Portrait Gallery — as the Daily Mail put it in 1969, ‘Britain’s most improbable civil servant’. He has written this book to remedy the omission. That it is published by the Bodleian is yet another feather in Strong’s fedora. If you were in the anti-Strong faction (I am not, but it does exist), you might summarise the rite of passage chronicled in the book as ‘from geek to freak’.

Sebastian Payne

To Save Everything, Click Here, by Evgeny Morozov — review

Technology may not have taken over the world, but it is making quite good progress in taking over our lives. Thirty years ago, receiving a phone call was the height of communication stimulus. Now, we are programmed to expect several emails an hour and can become anxious if we don’t receive them. It’s worse than a bad habit. Scientists suggest the constant distractions offered by technology have even altered the chemical balance in our brains. The information revolution has made us more connected, switched-on and informed than ever before. Thanks to near-universal access to the internet, humans can access almost every piece of knowledge accumulated by mankind in the blink of an eye.

Candy Neubert

search party

the worst night coming the bloody dark covers our traces fanning across the grid worked out in the Ops Room section by section any place my heart is gone any direction beginning in the house and loosed off in mid air in some canal or building site or park the hinterlands behind are coded as we slot together drum and lock and screw over the downy skin of the child still held against the light soft as a miracle daring the stars and torches picking through this one o’clock and two o’clock and three.

Diana Hendry

A Tale for the Time Being, by Ruth Ozeki — review

About halfway through A Tale for the Time Being I had the uncomfortable feeling that this was going to be a reincarnation story and that I would soon discover one of the main characters (Jiko, nun, novelist, anarchist, feminist and importantly great-grandmother) to have been reborn as Ruth Ozeki, author of this — this what? A novel with Japanese footnotes, six appendices and a bibliography; a memoir; a semi-autobiographical meditation on time, climate change, history, or all of these? It was a relief to find I was wrong, though fair play, Ruth Ozeki does happen to have a Japanese mother and to be both a novelist (My Year of Meat, All Over Creation) and a recently ordained Zen Buddhist priest.

Thursday

Roland Elliott Brown

The Coup: 1953, the CIA and the Roots of Modern US-Iranian Relations, by Ervand Abrahamian – review

‘What is your idea about Iran?’ friendly Iranians are heard to ask the few foreign visitors who still come their way. One is never quite sure whether by ‘idea’ they mean ‘impression’, ‘opinion’ or ‘theory’. Inspiring landscapes, fine cuisine and a tradition of hospitality make the first category easy ground. The second pertains to politics, and may lead the traveller into the most illuminating, entertaining and disturbing conversations he has ever had. The third, be warned, is dragon country. British theories are infamous. A 1951 Foreign Office document identified Iranians as a people keen on poetry and abstract ideas, but emotional and lacking common sense.

Marcus Berkmann

Turned Out Nice Again, by Richard Mabey – review

We don’t have an extreme climate, says Richard Mabey in Turned Out Nice Again (Profile, £8.99). We don’t have tsunamis, active volcanoes, monsoons or Saharan duststorms. ‘What we really suffer from is a whimsical climate, and that can be tougher to cope with than knowing for sure you’re going to be under three feet of snow every December.’ Perhaps appropriately, then, he has written quite a whimsical little book, scarcely longer than a pamphlet, exploring the glorious oddness of British weather with characteristic elegance and perspicacity. East Anglian gales, ‘ranting uninterrupted from the Urals’, are ‘a sight more brazen than the tree-top gossip of the Chilterns’.

Lloyd Evans

Mr Speaker: The Office and the Individuals since 1945, by Matthew Laban – review

The sheer workload. That’s the first big surprise in Matthew Laban’s absorbing history of the Speakership since 1945. Typically, the Speaker rises at dawn and holds several hours of preparatory meetings before parliamentary business starts after lunch. Though helped by two deputies, the Speaker must remain on duty into the small hours. Loneliness and overwork have created casualties. Horace King (1965-1971) liked an early-evening stiffener consisting of half a pint of sherry enlivened with four fingers of Armagnac. As he staggered towards his ceremonial perch one night, he was heckled by Labour’s chief whip, Bob Mellish. ‘Horace, I’ll have you out of that chair within three months.

Andrew Taylor

The Dance of the Seagull, by Andrea Camilleri, translated by Stephen Sartarelli – review

In the first six pages of Andrea Camilleri’s new novel, Inspector Montalbano drinks at least four cups of coffee and watches a seagull dance to its death in front of his verandah. Its beak pointing at the sky, the bird spins in its last agony. Afterwards, the inspector places its corpse in a plastic bag, swims into the sea and commits it to the deep. It’s an arresting, eccentric episode which, together with the coffee, gives a glimpse of what lies in store. Montalbano is never far removed from his next cup of coffee. He’s also strangely sensitive, alert to the nuances of life and death; his imagination often tips him into nightmare, which is not always convenient, particularly at the scene of a crime.

Jonathan Mirsky

Letter from an Unknown Woman and Other Stories, by Stefan Zweig – review

Do men or women of the world still exist? Well-educated, they are from families that value taste, manners and intellectual cultivation, and with enough money to allow their children to acquire these qualities; they attend concerts, look at paintings, travel and meet men and woman of distinction. They could, for example, while still young, watch Rodin perfecting his sculpture, write operas with Richard Strauss or help James Joyce find the perfect words for turning something he had written into other languages. Stefan Zweig was just such a man. He was born in 1881 to a wealthy Jewish family in Vienna, during the last Golden Age as he put it. He and his wife killed themselves in 1942 in despair at Hitler’s destruction of their civilisation.

Daniel Swift

Hamlet’s Dreams: The Robben Island Shakespeare, by David Schalkwyk – review

The so-called ‘Robben Island Bible’ is one of the holy relics of Shakespeare criticism. It is a copy of a 1970 edition of Shakespeare’s complete works, kept by a political prisoner on Robben Island, the notorious island jail off Cape Town, during the 1970s and 1980s. The possession of such a book was against the rules, but its owner, Sonny Venkatrathnam, convinced the guards that this was a Bible, and inside the prison it functioned as something like a holy text. The inmates passed around the collection of plays and poems, and 34 signed their names next to a favourite passage. Apartheid was founded upon division. In sharing the Robben Island Bible among themselves, these prisoners used Shakespeare to found their own community.

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Confronting the Classics, by Mary Beard – review

The Emperor Augustus, ruler of the known world, once spotted a man in the street who looked a bit like himself. ‘Did your mother ever work at the palace?’ he asked him roguishly. ‘No,’ the man replied, ‘but my father did.’ Augustus could have had the man killed for this scurrilous (and slightly surreal) insinuation, but fortunately he had a sense of humour. As too, Mary Beard tells us, did the Emperor Elagabalus, who used to seat his dinner guests on cushions that, unbeknownst to them, were full of air. As the meal progressed, a slave secretly let the air out, so Elagabalus could enjoy the sight of his companions subsiding, until they slid beneath the table.

Thursday

Cressida Connolly

How Many Camels are there in Holland? by Phyillida Law – review

Phyllida Law has a delightfully natural style, a gift for anecdote and the knack of seeing the funny side of pretty much everything.  She’s a good actor: she’s obviously a fine cook, too, if the recipes in How Many Camels Are There in Holland? Dementia, Ma and Me (Fourth Estate, £12.99) are anything to go by. Also included are a series of her lovely watercolour sketches, of Tuscan villas, Christmas stockings, her mother asleep. Is there nothing the woman can’t do? Someone so accomplished could write a book about their weekly trip to the supermarket and make it highly amusing. A volume about her mother’s decline into dementia is hardly a more promising proposition, yet this is a funny, brave and heartening volume.

Stig Abell

The Scent of Death, by Andrew Taylor – review

Raymond Chandler once said that ‘the detective story, even in its most conventional form, is difficult to write well. Good specimens of the art are much rarer than good serious novels.’ This holds true for genre writing generally. Historical fictions, like murder mysteries, can often be dismissed as the thoughtless product of the hack, not the artist. For every ‘good specimen’ (and one might nominate Gore Vidal and Hilary Mantel as practitioners of this art), there are shelves groaning with the mediocre, the outright bad, and even the so-bad-it-is-good (Dennis Wheatley). Andrew Taylor, an expert in the realm of murder and mystery fiction (he reviews crime novels for this magazine), must know the potential pitfalls.

Wynn Wheldon

I Know You’re Going to be Happy: A Story of Love and Betrayal, by Rupert Christiansen – review

This is an unsettling book. On the face of it a memoir by the opera critic of the Daily Telegraph, it veers from social history to intimate confessional, from objective understanding to subjective contempt, with strong elements of hatefulness. In the summer of 1959 the author’s father, a prominent journalist and son of Arthur Christiansen, Beaverbrook’s great editor of the Daily Express, left the family to live with (and eventually to marry and have a family with) his secretary. What Christiansen describes in his book is the fall out from this act of betrayal. The subtitle includes ‘love’, which must refer to the son’s love for his mother.

Penelope Lively

The Unknown Bridesmaid, by Margaret Forster – review

The power of the past, the directive hand of childhood: the themes of The Unknown Bridesmaid are familiar fictional territory. But Margaret Forster has a deft and idiosyncratic touch in this story of child psychologist Julia, whose young clients reflect the trauma of her own early years. Sessions with Camilla, Precious, Janice, Claire and others are intercut with Julia’s own memories, so that gradually we learn what happened to her after her father’s early death and that of her mother when Julia was a teenager. For the reader, she presents something of a challenge. The memories are candid: her behaviour was insufferable.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

A Green and Pleasant Land: How England’s Gardeners Fought the Second World War, by Ursula Buchan – review

Here are some statistics about wartime fruit- and vegetable-growing in England which this book tells us. In 1942-3, there were 1,750,000 allotments, amounting to 100,000 acres, or an area the size of Rutland. But in a 1944 survey, it was discovered that only 34 per cent of urban gardens were growing fruit and vegetables, and only 10.9 per cent of households cultivated an allotment. The north-west of England turned out the worst figures, with only 28 per cent of households growing vegetables. As Ursula Buchan writes, ‘Picking sun-warmed greenhouse tomatoes to add to a salad is a pleasure; weeding round shot-holed brassicas on a windswept allotment is not.’ And this was what weary English householders worked out for themselves, as the war wore on.

Maurice Riordan

The Cuckoo Clock

for Michael Donaghy, 1954-2004 Parking near St Pancras long before light, it wouldn’t spook if you peered from a shop front or popped from a grille — remembering the night we arranged a rendezvous at the Elephant, you like a meerkat in-and-out of the subways on the traffic island, head cocked but hesitant when I called A Mhíchíl through the sodium haze — who already must have felt in your brain a faint alert above the chug of the Riesenrad… I observed the scared look but never imagined you’d be panicked or with a farcical skip be gone: feral, too soft you were, but glad in your heart as you eyed up the sky, quickened your step of a sudden, and gave me the slip.

Richard Davenporthines

Distant Intimacy: A Friendship in the Age of the Internet, by Frederic Raphael and Joseph Epstein – review

One often hears the caterwaul that the harsh new technology of emails has killed the gentle old craft of letter-writing.  Joseph Epstein and Frederic Raphael — septuagenarian pen-pals who have never met, the one based in Chicago and the other dividing his year between South Kensington and Périgord — have set out to prove the doomsayers wrong by publishing their email traffic for the year 2009. Epstein and Raphael start with one disadvantage, perhaps. They have the wit to be great letter-writers, but not the frustration.  It is unfulfilled talents or time-wasters, failing to find other means of self-expression, who excel as correspondents.