More from Books

Thursday

Peter Parker

The Blind Man’s Garden, by Nadeem Aslam – review

Set in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Nadeem Aslam fourth novel begins with two young Pakistani men slipping over the border into Afghanistan. Jeo is a third-year medical student who has secretly volunteered to treat those wounded in the ‘war against terror’, and he is accompanied by his adopted brother Mikal, who works at a gun shop. The action moves back and forth between the bloody chaos of Afghanistan and the small Pakistani town of Heer, where Naheed, who is married to Jeo but in love with Mikal, awaits their return. Trying to do the right thing in impossible circumstances, whether in love or in war, is central to the novel.

Paul Binding

The Child’s Child, by Barbara Vine – review

‘I always know when a novel is going to be a Barbara Vine one,’ Ruth Rendell said to me in 1998. ‘In fact I believe that if I weren’t to write it as Barbara Vine, I wouldn’t be able to write it at all.’ A Barbara Vine — from the first, A Dark-Adapted Eye (1986) onwards — tends to take a specific period, distinct in mores and cultural tensions, and to concentrate on emotionally charged events, invariably climaxing in violent death, which stand in metaphoric relationship to it. In the body of this latest Vine book — the 192-page narrative actually entitled ‘The Child’s Child’ — all these requirements are amply met.

Martin Gayford

The Books that Shaped Art History: From Gombrich and Greenberg to Alpers and Krauss, by Richard Shone and John-Paul Stonard – review

There is a feeling about this publication of the biter bit, or rather, the observer observed. It consists of 16 essays by leading art historians about the most significant books about art published in the 20th century. The illustrations at the start of each section, rather than being of paintings and sculpture, are of scholars — as one might expect, a diffident-looking, bespectacled crew who look as if they spent more time in the archives than the gym. Anyone with more than a passing interest in the subject is likely to have at least a few of the books discussed here: E. H. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion (1960) for example, or Nikolaus Pevsner’s Pioneers of the Modern Movement (1936).

Thursday

Melanie McDonagh

Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique at 50

It’s the 50th anniversary this year of the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. According to the quote on the cover of my Penguin edition, ‘Feminism … began with the work of a single person: Friedan.’ Quite something, then. In fact any mention of Betty Friedan brings out something like post-traumatic stress symptoms in me, even though she died in 2006. When I was a student I invited her to take part in a Cambridge Union debate on feminism. She came, and frankly it was like entertaining Cleopatra. She was heroically grand, heroically ugly and with a brilliantly American, unabashed sense of her own importance. She asked me what subject I was reading and I said clumsily that I was ‘in history’.

Molly Guinness

‘Diana Vreeland’, by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart – review

Over 80 and almost blind, Diana Vreeland was wheeled around a forthcoming costume exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, issuing instructions all along the way about hats, shoes, lights and mannequins. She seemed, recalled the writer Andrew Solomon, an impossible old lady who couldn’t let go of her control and who was making everyone’s lives miserable for no good reason. And they did everything she’d said, and it was transformed. Her nearly sightless eyes could pick out things my youthful vision could not; enfeebled, she was still supreme at the discipline of chic. From childhood, Diana Vreeland had operated with deep faith in the power of self-presentation.

Michael Paraskos

‘Lord Horror: Reverbstorm’, by David Britton and John Coulthart – review

As the son of the last British artist to be successfully prosecuted for displaying obscene paintings, I have some empathy with David Britton, the last person successfully prosecuted in Britain for publishing obscene literature. Unlike my father, who accidentally strayed into the purview of the police, Britton’s prosecution in 1992 was almost inevitable. His publisher, Manchester-based Savoy Books, was raided by the police with vindictive regularity between 1976 and 1997. Ironically, Savoy has often been reviled as much by the left for its lack of political correctness as by the right for attacking the shibboleths of authority. It embodies a longstanding tradition of non-conformist and essentially anarchist thinking in Britain that also underpins Reverbstorm.

Robin Robertson

Port na h-Abhainne

We walked the cliff of Portnahaven listening to the grey seals sing on Orsay and Eilean Mhic Coinnich across the little harbour. Were they singing for the love of being here in this place, like us, far from griefs — and were they also singing, as we were, to each other?

Christopher Howse

‘Ware’s Victorian Dictionary of Slang and Phrase’, by J. Redding Ware – review

James Redding Ware, with his idiosyncratic treatment of slang, plunges the reader straight into the late 19th-century Bartholomew Fair of undeserving paupers, loafers, Ally Slopers, theatrical types and demi-mondaines. He drew on his own Grub Street life for this discursive lexicon, from A.D. (‘a drink’) to Zulu Express (the nickname for a Great Western service), published, days before his death in 1909, as Passing English of the Victorian Era: A Dictionary of Heterodox English, Slang and Phrase. The Bodder has faked it up nicely in smudgy facsimile, with burgundy end-papers, a new title and an introduction by John Simpson of the OED, who devours dictionaries with his morning porridge.

James Buchan

‘On Glasgow and Edinburgh’, by Robert Crawford – review

Glasgow and Edinburgh are so nearby that even in the 18th-century Adam Smith could breakfast in one city and be in the other for early-afternoon dinner. For all that, these two cities cherish a rivalry and have followed different paths. Edinburgh, a royal capital until 1603 and a seat of parliament until 1707, and again in recent years, home to a great university and medical school and nurse to writers from Walter Scott to Joanne Rowling, has made almost as much history as Jerusalem. Edinburgh peers down from Castle Hill as if over a newspaper on its toiling rival to the west, besmirched with tobacco and slavery and laden with locomotives, boilers, ships, Vanguard-class nuclear submarines and incessant rain.

Charlotte Moore

‘Mimi’, by Lucy Ellmann – review

Harrison Hanafan is a plastic surgeon in New York. Every day, he slices and stitches deluded women, reshaping healthy flesh to pander to 21st-century aesthetics. One Christmas Eve, absent-minded Harrison finds himself prostrate on the icy sidewalk of Madison Avenue. ‘Ya can’t sit there all day, buddy, looking up people’s skirts,’ says a plump, sweaty-faced middle-aged woman as she hauls him to his feet. This is Mimi, the antithesis of Harrison’s neurotic patients, and — it transpires, after a few more twists and turns — the love of his life. Harrison has recently parted from pretentious Gertrude, a woman who conceived a child by ‘parthenogenesis’ and ‘batiks without irony’.

Simon Akam

The Childhood of Jesus’, by J.M. Coetzee – review

Stripping down prose is not a risk-free undertaking. The excision of adverbs and the passive voice is sound practice in journalism. However, to make very bare writing a thing of beauty in fiction requires enormous skill. Hemingway’s short stories — those clean, well-lighted places — manage it. Despite its author’s fellow possession of a Nobel prize, J.M. Coetzee’s new novel does not. In The Childhood of Jesus the South African eschews the baroque only to tend to the banal. Davíd and Simón arrive by boat in an unmanned Hispanophone country. They come to the city of Novilla, where a bureaucracy serves the needs of newcomers. Davíd is about five.

John Martin

William Burges and the High Victorian Dream’, by J. Mordaunt Crook – review

It is 32 years since the first edition of this hefty book appeared in 1981. The original was based on the research materials amassed by Charles Handley-Read, the pioneer scholar and collector of Victorian decorative arts and one-time art master at Bryanston, who killed himself in 1971. Other people’s research notes are often not easy to use, and Joe Crook has greatly expanded that core material, and presented it in an illuminating schematic way. This second, revised and enlarged edition, as well as correcting errors and fine-tuning matters of detail, incorporates many hitherto ‘lost’ art objects by Burges, rediscovered in the aftermath of the first edition. The rich ‘cream and brandy’ literary mannerisms have also been toned down slightly.

Ian Thomson

‘Fanny and Stella: The Young Men Who Shocked Victorian England’, by Neil McKenna – review

Mick Jagger, the Danny La Rue of rock, impersonates a woman on the cover of the 1978 Stones album Some Girls. Vaudeville performers in the Jagger mould love to put on lipstick and ‘false bubbies’ (as Neil McKenna calls them). Boy X-Factor contestants, with their shaved eyebrows, diamond earrings and nails lovingly manicured, present an almost Gloria Swanson-like image of adornment. Perhaps it is merely romantic to suggest that the stylised wigs and gowns worn by our bishops and high court judges also have a homoerotic component. The former Pope Benedict XVI’s ruby-red pumps were nothing compared to the faux ermines worn in the House of Lords.

Anthony Sattin

‘O My America!’, by Sara Wheeler – review

You might not expect Sara Wheeler, the intrepid literary traveller, to be anxious about passing the half-century point. Surely a person who can survive the mental and physical rigours of Antarctica, as she brilliantly documented in Terra Incognita, can cope with ageing and menopause? Wheeler herself was not so certain. In her restless, creative way, she met the advent of what she calls ‘the Frumpy Years’ by taking to the road, following the trails of six indomitable Victorian women across the United States. The combination of that nation of eternal makeover and of Wheeler’s travelling companions makes O My America! a curious and teasing book.

Lee Langley

‘The Infatuations’, by Javier Marías – review

A café in Madrid. From her table across the room a solitary woman watches an attractive couple share breakfast morning after morning and speculates pleasurably about their relationship. One day they fail to appear and as time passes she feels a deepening sense of loss. Later she learns that the man has been murdered, stabbed to death in the street — an apparently senseless crime. The tragedy of the happy couple touches and disturbs her. Then, almost accidentally, she finds herself becoming involved with the widow and the dead man’s best friend. At first all is straightforward: loss, grieving, consolation. Gradually the relationship becomes more complex: she begins an affair with the friend, recognising that she is little more than a stopgap in his life.

Thursday

Peter Hitchens

AC Grayling vs God

‘Atheism is to theism,’ Anthony Grayling declares, ‘as not collecting stamps is to stamp-collecting’. At this point, we are supposed to enjoy a little sneer, in which the religious are bracketed with bald, lonely men in thick glasses, picking over their collections of ancient stamps in attics, while unbelievers are funky people with busy social lives. But the comparison is flatly untrue. Non-collectors of stamps do not, for instance, write books devoted to mocking stamp-collectors, nor call for stamp-collecting’s status to be diminished, nor suggest — Richard Dawkins-like — that introducing the young to this hobby is comparable to child abuse.

Julia Lovell

The curse of the mummy

The former Soviet Union is so down on its economic luck that it can no longer maintain Lenin’s embalmed body. A brash official from rural China called Liu Yingque decides to buy the deteriorating corpse, create a red tourist attraction in his own county, and so make the area rich beyond its wildest dreams. Liu’s only difficulty is finding the millions of yuan necessary to purchase Lenin. He soon hits upon a solution: he recruits a performing troupe from nearby Liven, a village in which every resident is disabled in some way, and dispatches them on a nationwide fundraising tour.

Caroline Jackson

Of vice and verse

‘All human life is binary’, explains a Vestal Virgin to the time-travelling heroine of Ranjit Bolt’s verse novel, Losing It. Young and lovely, Lucy’s plan is to lose her virginity. Entertainingly delivered, it’s an engaging subject, universal and rich in comic scope. Bolt’s burlesque is a frolicsome addition to a scanty genre, reminiscent of The Canterbury Tales via Pope’s ‘The Rape of the Lock’. He plunders deep erudition for this bawdy bildungsroman; not so much virtue rewarded as its abandonment thwarted.

Hugh Cecil

The art of deception

Max Beerbohm, dandy, cartoonist and penetrating drama critic, was par excellence the observer of the glittering English period that stretched from the 1890s to the death of Edward VII, poking unsparing but mainly good-humoured fun at the peculiarities of its political and cultural leaders: Swinburne, Asquith, Lloyd George, Chesterton, Kipling and the King among them. At the same time he was himself part of the scene, the master of a carefully cultivated style. His fellow critic Desmond MacCarthy once wrote of him: I remember walking one night down Piccadilly behind that high-hat with its deep mourning band. It was then perched above a very long dark top-coat with an astrakhan collar... In a gloved hand this figure held an ebony stick with an ivory collar...

John Greening

X5

The bus slows at the dancing blue and ignis fatuus of yellow vest and chequered bodywork. There’s one car in the ditch and one with an L slewed across the featureless straight run from Cambridge. Our driver rolls down the glass – five or six hours, it’s as bad as it gets – and lets the swish and flip and grim theatricality as emergency vehicles keep arriving (cutting tools, the doors of an ambulance swung back) enter the overheated bus alongside cold rumour. Caxton Gibbet watches. So do the chicken bones of that restaurant we had booked for the day of the fire.