More from Books

Thursday

Byron Rogers

Part of the pantheon

Henry Fonda once said that he had never had any ambition to be a film star. But then how could a man want to become someone who came out of nowhere, had no past, so that even the names we know them by were mostly not ones bestowed on them by their parents and the registrar? An old college football star (John Wayne), a virtual tramp who had served time on a chain gang (Robert Mitchum), circus acrobats (Cary Grant and Burt Lancaster)— each had served no professional apprenticeship, but had become more famous than men had ever been, their subsequent careers a source of wonder not just to the world but to themselves. They were the Hollywood film stars of the mid- 20th century, not actors — actors will come again — but stars. These men never will.

Alexander Chancellor

Scaling the musical Matterhorn

This book is an account by the music-loving editor of the Guardian of how he set himself the task of learning to play one of the most daunting virtuoso pieces in the piano repertoire, and to do so within the space of what turned out to be perhaps the most hectic year in the newspaper’s history. Alan Rusbridger didn’t actually meet his self-imposed deadline. He had been overwhelmed by developments at his newspaper — the Wikileaks and phone-hacking exposures (both huge Guardian scoops), the Arab revolutions, the English urban riots, the near-collapse of the European financial system, not to mention the huge financial problems created for the paper by the digital revolution — and so could not put in the hours of practice he needed.

Thursday

Charlotte Moore

Chills, but no thrills

‘Mary and Geordie have lost a child ...Why should they feel they are entitled to grieve? It’s so commonplace.’ Paul Torday’s latest novel is full of such assertions. We are in the Border country, in 2010, and three children have disappeared. Neither the police nor social services can be persuaded to take much interest. ‘Tell you what,’ says the editor of the local paper to Mary, distraught mother of missing Theo, ‘I’ll diary it. If he hasn’t come back in a year’s time we’ll run an anniversary special on him. I can’t say fairer than that.’ The unlikeliness of this response, and the inauthenticity of the tone, undermine what is in some ways a well-crafted novel. There are clumsinesses.

Simon Baker

Novel ways of writing

If you consider ‘gripping metafiction’ a self-contradictory phrase (surely metafiction disables tension through its wink-at-the-audience style?), Nicholas Royle’s First Novel (Cape, £16.99), which is in fact his seventh, may change your mind. Royle (pictured above) teaches creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University, and in this book he gives us Paul Kinder, who teaches creative writing at Manchester while trying to write a novel. The comparisons that we are invited to draw are clear, but to complicate things the novel also contains ‘Nicholas’, a character in a novella by Grace, one of Paul’s students; Nicholas has the same name and is the same age as the author.

Ben Hamilton

A consummate craftsman

It is rare to encounter a writer whose work can be so neatly divided into two halves. George Saunders is known as a satirist with an interest in consumerism and the technology of the near future, but occasionally he will publish moving, sometimes brutal social realist tales. Early stories such as ‘Christmas’ were like strange, dirty artefacts among the glossier SF-tinged material. Tenth of December is such a strong collection because the wackiness is mostly kept at bay. These are stories about people who are trying to do the right thing in an ungrateful world, and there is less of the shrill goofiness that comprised much of his previous collection, In Persuasion Nation.

Patrick Skene-Catling

Pig in the middle

With nice ecumenical parity, Peter Somerville-Large derides equally both Ireland’s principal Christian churches as they compete for the soul, or at least the membership, of young Paul Blake-Willoughby. His discordant Ascendancy parents, a Catholic father and a Protestant mother, are on what the late Brian Inglis, an esteemed Spectator editor, called ‘a descendancy course’. Somerville-Large, who was born in Dublin and educated partly at St Columba’s, — a boarding school modelled on English public schools — is a historical social observer of merciless accuracy and caustic wit, moderated with just a touch of nostalgia.

Fiona Maddocks

His own man | 10 January 2013

Acquainted with Stravinsky, friend of Ravel and Poulenc, prolific composer and well-loved man, Lennox Berkeley (1903-1989) remains an enigma to most of us even if we know little of his enormous output of songs, symphonies, ballets and spiritually inclined choral music. His close friendship and early collaboration with Britten, a decade his junior, will ensure that his name stays in the frame of 20th-century British musical life forever. Yet this self-effacing figure, quick to praise others above himself, has rarely enjoyed the spotlight. He deserves his own twirl. A new collection of writings, letters and interviews, edited by his one-time pupil Peter Dickinson, offers an easily digested introduction to the composer and his milieu.

Caroline Moorehead

Apocalypse now | 10 January 2013

In his introduction, James Fergusson apologises for the title of his book. Somalia, he writes, may no longer be the most dangerous place on earth. Since the summer of 2012, a newly elected government under a former university professor who once worked for the UN is bringing stability to the country, exiled Somalis are going home, Mogadishu is being rebuilt and the pirate menace, if not exactly under control, is being contained. It may be so. But the country Fergusson describes is the stuff of nightmares. In 1960, the former British protectorate and Italian colony united to become an independent Somali republic, under a civilian government.

Jane Ridley

Taking a pop at the Queen

On 10 June 1840 an 18-year-old out-of-work Londoner named Edward Oxford cocked his pistol and fired two shots at Queen Victoria as she made her daily carriage drive with Prince Albert on Constitution Hill. Oxford was mobbed by the crowd, who shouted ‘Kill him!’ He was charged with high treason. Though he claimed that his cheap flintlock pistol was loaded, no ball was ever found. Oxford, who (according to Prince Albert) was ‘a little mean-looking man’, delighted in the attention the shooting brought him. During the trial the family insisted that he was mad. He was found guilty but insane, and sentenced to confinement for life in Bethlem hospital. Oxford was the first of seven men who attempted to kill or assault Queen Victoria.

John Mole

The Afterlife of Literary Fame

I can’t read fiction any more And that’s a fact. Don’t ask me why. God only knows, old fruit. If a poem doesn’t rhyme, forget it. I certainly have. Today’s lunch Was a damned good salmon en croute, And tomorrow more tests, more tests To hear my ticker count its beats Like Tennyson. So put in the boot With the old one two. Pour me a double Straight down the horse’s neck And sound mortality’s horn. Toot toot. As I sit here in the tweeds of bufferdom I try to forget myself. Who’s in, Who’s out? Why should I give a hoot? You won’t persuade me otherwise, Lord Cobber, I’m far too far gone for that. All I shall do is shrug, deny, refute But hope at least this feature you intend Will turn a penny for us both.

Mark Mason

How not to steal a million

‘You’re not going to believe this,’ crackled the voice over the Buckinghamshire police radio in the pre-dawn light of Thursday 8 August 1963. ‘They’ve stolen a train.’ Fifty years on, we can’t believe it either. And to the extent that we do, our fascination with the Great Train Robbery shows no sign of fading. It’s Britain’s real-life Wizard of Oz — no matter how familiar the tale, we can never resist savouring it just one more time. By this new book’s own admission, the ‘definitive’ of its subtitle cannot mean ‘statement of fact’, a single, unarguable version of the the truth.

Margaret Drabble

Her fighting soul

The subtitle of Deirdre David’s life of Olivia Manning, ‘A Woman at War’, has a resonant double meaning. She was, as we are repeatedly informed, a unique example of a woman novelist who wrote as well about war and battles as a man. But she was also at war with herself, with her colleagues, and, most enduringly and curiously, with her husband, the legendary R. D. Smith, known to all as ‘Reggie’. Manning is rightly best remembered for her largely autobiographical novels describing the second world war, The Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy, which gained an afterlife in a memorable 1987 BBC television series.

Thursday

Roger Lewis

The Diana effect

My favourite joke of all time concerns Diana Dors, whose real name was Diana Fluck. She was invited back to Swindon, her birthplace, to open a fete. The vicar, terrified he’d mispronounce her name, mispronounced her name. ‘We have with us today Diana Dors, whom many of you here in Swindon will remember as Doris Klunt.’ Diana’s ambition was to have ‘a big house, a swimming pool and a cream telephone’. She achieved these, plus psychopathic husbands, bankruptcy and an early death from cancer. It is a wonderfully sleazy and vivacious tale, told in po-faced fashion by Niema Ash in Connecting Dors (Purple Inc Press, £14.99).

John Preston

The further tragedy of unknowing

Margaret Evison spent Easter 2009 with her 26-year-old son Mark, who was about to go to Afghanistan as a lieutenant in the Welsh Guards. They walked around her garden talking about death in a general sort of way; Mark was worried that he might make a mistake which would lead to someone else dying. ‘He did not discuss the possibility of his own death.’ A month later, she returned from the newsagents to see a casually dressed man outside her house ‘apparently loitering with some intent’. He explained that he was a major in the Army and asked if they could talk inside. Two days after that, Evison was being driven to Selly Oak hospital in Birmingham when an ambulance sped by with a police escort. Inside was Mark. He had been shot while out on patrol in Helmand.

Philip Ziegler

More Lothario than Hamlet

Ronald ‘Trader’ Faulkner is that relative rarity: an unassuming actor. In their memoirs most actors, after the obligatory two or three chapters describing the hardships at the outset of their careers, indulge in a paean of self-glorification — mentioning their failures, certainly, but only so as to highlight their far more considerable successes. Faulkner is different. At one point he refers to himself as ‘a struggling actor approaching middle age’. (His wife somewhat brutally agreed: ‘Let’s be honest, you’ve had your chance as an actor, and at 40 you still haven’t made it.

J P O'Malley

A chapter of history

Michael Gorra’s Portrait of a Novel is a lucid critique of how Henry James came to write a book that would permanently change the art of literary fiction. The Portrait of a Lady was first published in 1881, with a second revised version appearing in 1908. James’s heroine is the spirited Isabel Archer — a young woman, fond of her freedom, who is betrothed to a respectable New England mill-owner. Isabel is unexpectedly rescued from this engagement, however, and taken by her aunt to Europe. Soon she inherits a fortune, which will bring with it, she believes, the independence she craves. But then, in Italy, she falls for the fascinating charm of Gilbert Osmond, and eventually marries him. It is here that the novel explores themes of morality, freedom and civilisation.

Molly Guinness

Women, beware these women

When Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider read this review, they’ll exchange a pitying smile and quietly start waiting for my distress call. For woe betide any woman who thinks she can live without the Rules: they are hard and fast and apparently foolproof: ‘You can truly do the Rules on any guy, in any situation, and get the fabulous payoff: a guy who is crazy about you!’ Time and again, women have thought they could ignore just one of the Rules, only to find themselves paying $300 for an emergency consultation with Fein and Schneider. When their first book of Rules came out in the 1990s, it was a surprise bestseller. It has spawned a relationship consultancy and a clutch of spin-off books.

Michael Holroyd

Controversial confessions

Stephen Grosz is a psychoanalyst who has worked in the United States and Britain. Over his career he has been ‘sitting with patients for thousands of hours,’ he writes. Occasionally he has used his notes and observations for addresses at clinical seminars or for contributions to psycho-analytical journals. But this is the first time he has consulted his files in order to publish a book for the general reader. ‘This book is about change,’ he tells us. Naturally his troubled patients are seeking change, though they sometimes shield themselves from his professional intrusiveness. There is the risk, too, of change being for the worse — for the consultant as well as for the patient. These sessions are a learning process for both of them.

Piers Paul-Read

Horrors too close to home

Reading this new edition of W.G. Sebald’s discursive meditation upon the blanket bombing of German civilians during the second world war took me back to Berlin in the early 1960s when German writers from the Gruppe 47 were in the ascendant, and no self-respecting avant-garde author wrote novels with stories or plots. They did not even write essays but rather ‘texts’; and I see that Notting Hill Editions, whose elegant slim editions resemble those published by Suhrkamp or the Carl Hansa Verlag at the time, also use the word ‘texts’ for literary writing. W.G.

Friday

Lewis Jones

The Wiggins streak

As the first British winner of the Tour de France and a gold medalist at London 2012, Bradley Wiggins is a national hero, and though he insists he is an ordinary Kilburn lad he keeps dropping hints about a knighthood. So it is only fitting that, at the age of 32 and with the help of William Fotheringham, he has written My Time (Yellow Jersey Press, £20). Beneath the dustjacket its covers are the dashing yellow of the maillot jaune, with portraits of our hero front and back and ‘WIGGO’ on the spine, the ‘O’ shaped as a Mod roundel. Inside are more than 40 photographic plates, most of which show him looking pained and moody on bicycles; there is one of him shaving, but only his face, as he sculpts those celebrated sideburns.