More from Books

Wednesday

Lewis Jones

A dark family past

Like the Dombeys, Pitts, Amises et al, les Dumas are famously père et fils, but there was of course also a grand-père, Thomas-Alexandre, or ‘Alex’ the first, who was a wildly romantic figure, a gallant and tragic hero, and the defining influence on his son’s life and work. In his memoirs, of which he devotes more than 200 pages to his father’s life, the author of The Count of Monte Cristo, (Dumas père) remembers how, one night in 1806, when he was not yet four, he was woken with news of his father’s death: ‘taken by God’. He asked where God lived: heaven. Soon afterwards his mother found him with one of his father’s guns. He explained that he was going to heaven, ‘to kill God, who killed Papa’.

Emily Read

The naked body in the pool

Deborah Levy’s Booker-shortlisted novel has, at first sight, all the ingredients of a standard villa holiday-from-Hell story, or indeed film. But this creepy and unsettling tale has more layers to it than most. Two couples, famous poet Joe Jacobs and his foreign correspondent wife Isabel and their friends, fat Mitchell and tall Laura, share a villa outside Nice for a sweltering summer in 1994. Joe and Isabel’s 14-year-old daughter Nina is the uncomfortable and bored observer of the grown-ups’ bickering, and of rapidly surfacing misery. Mitchell is in a permanent rage, which takes the form of shooting and trapping any animal he can lay his hands on — it turns out that their business has gone bust and his life is rapidly disintegrating.

Jonathan Mirsky

‘Ill luck was my faithful attendant’

Here is the melancholy story of Mary Todd Lincoln, widow of President Abraham Lincoln, who was shot next to her on 12 April 1865 as they were watching a play. He died three days later. The book has a single theme with two strands: was Mrs. Lincoln insane before as well as after her husband’s murder? And in subsequent years was she treated with continuous and sympathetic care by her son, Robert, or was he a greedy monster who ensured that his mother was declared insane so that he could get his hands on her substantial estate? Jason Emerson, a journalist and specialist on the Lincoln family, has examined every available document, especially letters, including some he discovered in a trunk never previously opened.

Thursday

Colin Falck

World

when the two-footed Mammal, being someways one of the nobler animals, regains The dignity of room, the value of rareness Robinson Jeffers Spengler was wrong: the world has become the West. Japan has bowed out now; in China they buy art, drink wine, play late Rachmaninov, groom themselves for decline in Prada or Bulgari, wonder which limousines are best. Our hard-won vision fades: dead faiths are reborn; circuses rule the airwaves; Darwin makes way. While bearded prophets prognosticate, announce their day, their raw congregations pray and exchange their porn. Time to turn out the lights. Too late to rely on gold, ammunition, canned food; to make plans to revive old powers we have lost: they are lost. Our last wildness gone, we drift to our ending.

Caroline Shenton

Spin city

‘That terrible place known as Westminster’: many readers might well agree with this, the first mention of our political capital in a charter dated 735 AD. However, as Robert Shepherd, journalist and political biographer, explains in his new book, all is not what it seems. The charter is a fake, cooked up by a 12th-century abbot of Westminster to get one over on those pesky monks at rival St Albans. Westminster, Shepherd asserts, was from the first a city of spin and has remained so ever since (and ‘terrible’ meant awe-inspiringly sacred, not awful, by the way). The boundaries of Shepherd’s ‘historic’ Westminster are tightly drawn.

Marcus Berkmann

Games over

It seems like only hours since they ended, but people have already written and published books about the Olympics, and I have already read one. Nicholas Lezard’s The Nolympics (Penguin, £7.99) was originally planned as a counterblast, a fusillade of righteous rage against what we all expected to be an administrative and sporting catastrophe that would blight what remained of Britain’s international reputation forever. Instead, he was as swept up by it all as the rest of us. Even so, his book is less about watching the Olympics than about being forced to watch the Olympics, and then write 1,500 words a day about it. We can marvel at the wit and fluency he has achieved, faced with this impossible deadline, but to a great extent the book is the deadline.

Rod Liddle

A hero for our time?

They were in the Greek Orthodox cathedral in London on Valentine’s Day 1989 for Bruce Chatwin’s memorial service — all of London’s literary elite, Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Antonia Fraser and the rest. Outside the cathedral the journalists and snappers had gathered, but they were not there for Chatwin. Halfway through the service Rushdie felt a tap on his arm. From the pew behind, the American novelist Paul Theroux whispered: ‘I suppose we’ll be here for you next week, Salman.

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Sweetest songs of saddest thoughts

In February 1966, in the first flush of his fame, an interviewer asked Bob Dylan what his songs were about. ‘Oh, some are about four minutes,’ he responded. ‘Some are about five. And some, believe it or not, are about 11 or 12.’ The joke was justified, in a sense. Why should any artist be made to reduce his work to a soundbite? At the same time, in Dylan’s case, the verbal sleight was part of a pathology of evasiveness, a refusal, even an inability, to meet the eye of a question, which presents the would-be biographer with serious difficulties.

Michela Wrong

The first casualty

Some years ago, I was included in a round- robin from a group of African writers trying to whip up support for an anti-Ryszard Kapuscinski campaign. The plan, as I recall it, was that members of the African intelligentsia should loudly denounce the legendary Polish reporter’s depiction of their continent at the readings he was due to give during a US book tour. I ignored the email, which had the tang of a witch-hunt. The determination of a group, whose members presumably embraced the principle of free speech, to crush a colleague’s work had echoes of the Rushdie affair. A colleague, what was more, who was old, ill and clearly reaching the end of his productive life.

Roger Lewis

Rollicking self-invention

When I was in the sixth form, I thought Anthony Burgess the greatest writer imaginable. The outlandish vocabulary, the fireworks, the bravura, the glorious showmanship — surely this was what literature was all about? Then I grew up and realised he was absolutely terrible — a cackling and grim caricaturist, pseudo-forceful and very dead. Whilst it is true that few of his 60 or so books come off at all — and that his confidence in himself was never as great as he pretended it to be — I rather love the old rogue again now. There is something splendid and heroic about his boastful, mendacious personality (‘At the moment I’m working on a novel about the life of Christ’).

Michael Paraskos

An everyday story of country folk

It is not a criticism of Philip Almond that The Lancashire Witches, published to mark the 400th anniversary of the Pendle witch trials, is a depressing read. On the contrary, Almond has produced a fine and lively study of the events in 1612 when eight women and two men were tried for witchcraft. What is depressing is how ordinary those involved seem to be. This is not a story of gothic horror or bizarre group psychosis. It is a tale of people being caught out for doing relatively ordinary things. The Pendle witches were not members of some pagan or Wiccan cult, or even genuine devil-worshippers. As Almond makes clear, much of the folklore and superstition that came to be called witchcraft had previously been part of life.

D.J. Taylor

Bleak expectations

Shiva Naipaul died unexpectedly in the summer of 1985, six months after his 40th birthday. In his decade and a half on Grub Street, he published three novels, a brace of polemical travelogues and the scintillating miscellany of stories and occasional pieces collected in Beyond the Dragon’s Mouth (1984). An Unfinished Journey, an account of a Sri Lankan trip, whose 80th page he had reached when he suffered the heart attack that killed him, was issued posthumously in 1986. He was much loved (see the portrait by Geoffrey Wheatcroft in Absent Friends, 1989), much admired, much abused and — almost inevitably, given some of the things he wrote about — much misunderstood. The memorial essay prize instituted in his name by The Spectator after his death has been revived this year.

Kathryn Simmonds

Post It Notes

Self-adhesive suns they glow fluorescent on grey monitors wanting for a world ess misremembered. Oh, how biddable! Our paper geisha girls, dancing in an open window breeze, only to die the deaths of petals curling, ips unpeeling from a disappearing love.

Stig Abell

Nothing connects

This is a slight book containing short stories about minor characters. And it is about to receive some fairly faint praise. A Possible Life, Sebastian Faulks’ 12th novel, does little to confirm exactly where he sits in the modern British canon. It probably does not matter greatly; on this showing, he is a competent creator of unmemorable prose, but there is little more to conclude than that. His resolutely low-key approach is certainly deliberate. A Possible Life tells five separate life stories of individuals (two from the 19th century, two from the 20th, and one from the 21st), who struggle in their attempts to establish a meaningful existence.

Wednesday

Jonathon Porritt

Poisonous passions

Fifty years on since the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, this is indeed an excellent time to assess its cumulative historical impact. After all, it is still cited as one of the most important environmental books of the 20th century, and seen by many as the publishing phenomenon that launched the modern environment movement. Many of today’s environmental leaders have enthusiastically acknowledged Carson’s attack on the indiscriminate use of man-made chemicals to control pests as a critical influence on their own intellectual development. All of which makes it an irresistible target for one of the most virulently anti-environmental ‘think tanks’ in the USA today — the Cato Institute, the publisher of Silent Spring at 50.

Richard Ingrams

Memories and inspirations

I had never come across commonplace books until I met up with my school friend Paul Foot in Oxford in 1958. The idea, he explained, was that you kept a notebook in which you transcribed anything interesting you came across in the course of your reading. I started doing it the following year. The first two of the following quotes are from D. H. Lawrence, then my favourite writer: Horace is already a bit of a mellow varsity man who never quite forgot Oxford. No old world tumbles except when a young one shoves it over. And why should one howl when one’s grandfather is pushed over a cliff? Goodbye, grandfather, now it’s my turn. Justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be believed. (Beachcomber) Wherewould we be without a sense of humour? (Very slight pause) Germany!

John Julius-Norwich

The stranger on the train

What a pleasure it was to be reminded in a ‘Life and Letters’ column by Allan Massie (28 July) of Desmond MacCarthy. He was an old friend of my parents’ and, in the immediate postwar years, a fairly frequent visitor to their house in Chantilly, outside Paris. One Friday afternoon — it must I think have been 1950 or 1951 — we were sitting opposite each other as the train rattled through Normandy. I was at that time reading Russian at Oxford and was struggling through War and Peace in the original. Not surprisingly, the book caught Desmond’s eye. ‘Did I ever tell you,’ he murmured in that wonderful velvety voice of his, ‘did I ever tell you that I knew the Tolstoys?

Richard Davenporthines

Flaws in our national treasure

Charles Dickens remains in his bicentennial year as much a national treasure as Shakespeare, and just as deeply embedded in the English psyche as the Bard, declares Michael Slater, an Emeritus Professor of Victorian Literature at the University of London. Among the innumerable Victorians who sanctified domesticity, sentimentalised hearth and home and idealised family love, Dickens is especially conspicuous. Few people nowadays know Coventry Patmore’s Angel in the House, but many have seen depictions of Bob Cratchit’s humble Christmas dinner in A Christmas Carol.

Philip Marsden

Rock of ages | 19 September 2012

By any measure the small town of Lalibela, hidden away amongst the gorges and plateaux of Ethiopia’s central highlands, is one of the most remarkable religious sites on earth. A dozen or so churches have been carved out of the rock and connected by a labyrinth of trenches, tunnels, culverts and crypts. The churches are substantial, elaborate and in their overall effect unlike anything else in the Christian world. Interiors disappear into chiselled-out arcades and apses; the light falls through intricate cruciform windows. The columns are so evenly spaced, the vaults so regular that it is easy to forget that every inch of these ‘buildings’ had to be designed and executed using negative space, a stone-carver’s technique that allows for no margin of error.

Lloyd Evans

Variety was the spice of life

Tough job being a disused prime minister. John Major has resisted the temptation to flounce off in a sulk, or to play the international peacemaker, or (as Harold Macmillan was said to do during the 1970s) to fantasise about a glorious comeback urged on him by a despairing populace eager to rediscover its lost greatness. Instead, Major has become a social historian. After a book on cricket he now offers us a personal history of the music hall. His father, Tom Major (b. 1879), made a living as a comic artiste for over 30 years, and his recollections are the starting-point for Major’s investigations. Music hall grew out of the glee clubs and saloon theatres of the 18th century where ‘catches’ (hummable melodies) were played to boozing crowds by impromptu artistes.