More from Books

Saturday

Penelope Lively

Bookends: Deftly orchestrated chaos

The headings set the scene: ‘Last Tango in Balham, in which I meet Marlon Brando on the dance floor of Surbiton Assembly Rooms but thankfully do not have to do anything with packet of country life.’ The essential premise in Melissa Kite’s breezy new collection Real Life: One Woman’s Guide to Love, Men and Other Disasters (Constable, £7.99) is: single girl (of advancing years) desperately seeks man and invariably ends up with the wrong one. Plus a great deal more of mundane affronts to do with TV remote controls that won’t work, Lambeth Council’s wheelie- bin regulations, and the challenge of filling in a passport application form. Real life. Possibly. The fun lies in the enjoyable unreality, the deftly orchestrated scenarios of chaos.

William Leith

Torn in two by Tuggy Tug

This is a book about what we, as a society, should do with hoodies — the familiar hooded young men, black and white, who rob, stab, shoot and sell drugs. Its author, Harriet Sergeant, is a middle-aged woman who works for the Centre for Policy Studies, a right-wing think tank. Should we hug these people? Or should we punish them? If I’ve understood her correctly, Sergeant thinks we hug them too much when they’re young, which means we must punish them for the rest of their lives when they get older. Actually, that’s not quite right. As a society, we don’t exactly hug young hoodies — we just don’t have the collective will to give them a structured, disciplined life. When they don’t do their homework, we don’t make them.

Ben Hamilton

You can run, but you can’t hide

Stuart Evers’ debut short-story collection was called Ten Stories About Smoking, but even readers who are aware of this might be astonished by the multitude of burning cigarettes in his first novel, If This is Home. His characters smoke constantly, as if they are in the Forties film noir Out of the Past, where Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer are apparently incapable of breathing except through cigarette filters. Evers’ novel, also in common with Out of the Past, deals with grim secrets and failed personal reinvention. When Mark Wilkinson flees England and his non-descript northern town for New York City he seems at first to be leaving only the scraps of a misspent youth behind. He makes one close friend in New York and eventually changes his name to Josef Novak.

Zenga Longmore

Carrying on regardless

As a devotee of Fay Weldon I was amazed but nonetheless delighted by the change of her usual style. Set in 1899, her latest novel charts the lives and loves not of She Devils but Lord Dilburne’s household, both above and below stairs. The trademark Weldon wit is very much in evidence, only this time her characters are fetchingly clad in Liberty’s lace with leg-o’-mutton sleeves.England is tottering on the brink of huge change. The Boer War is being fought. Aristocracy and empire are breathing their last. New snobberies are overtaking the old. The story opens with filmic suspense. It is seven in the morning. Mr Baum, a Jewish lawyer, races up the steps of Lord Dilburne’s house in Belgrave Square to deliver catastrophic news.

Justin Cartwright

Welcome to surreal Luton

Nicola Barker’s new novel is set in Luton. You could hardly find a place in Britain  more emblematic of non-being. It has an airport; it used to make something or other, it is not in London, not in the Midlands; its architecture is frightful, its pretentious but tatty hotels are full of middle management businessmen, its streets full of Vauxhalls driven by men with delusions and tattoos. It’s true Barker territory: the utterly grotesque sheltering amongst the banal.

Lloyd Evans

Yesterday’s nearly-men

Francis Beckett has come up with an intriguing new brand of political history. The Prime Ministers Who Never Were selects 14 of Britain’s nearly-men and imagines how they’d have fared in the top job. The big beasts are reduced to footnotes and the prat-fallers occupy centre stage. Beckett himself writes the story of Labour in the 1990s without the modernisers, and 13 other contributors cover the rest. John Smith survives his heart attack in 1994 and wins a 99-seat majority in 1997. His first act is to scrap the Millennium Dome, which Beckett describes as ‘a now long-forgotten proposal to build a vast round shed in Greenwich … which no one could find a use for’.

Andrew Gimson

Prophet of doom

Enoch Powell was defeated. He condemned Edward Heath for being the first prime minister in 300 years who entertained, let alone executed, the intention of depriving Parliament of its sole right to make the laws and impose the taxes of this country. But Heath was victorious: in 1972 he led the United Kingdom into the European Economic Community, and in 1975 the British people ratified this decision by a majority of two to one in a referendum. Powell thought this was a disaster. As he put it in 1976, with characteristic lack of understatement: ‘It is the nation that is dying, it is dying politically — or rather, perhaps, it is committing suicide politically — and the mark of death upon it is that it has lost the will to live.

Jonathan Bate

Catholic beauty

In 1992 the Roman Catholic historian Eamon Duffy of Magdalene College, Cambridge published a large book called The Stripping of the Altars. Deploying a wealth of evidence, Duffy argued that the English men and women of the 16th century, especially in the provinces, did not really want to be ‘reformed’. They liked their old Catholic ways. The feasts and festival days fitted with the rhythms of the rural year. The architecture, furnishings and images of late medieval churches had given stability and comfort to parish communities. The common people only ever became reluctant Protestants. It is often said that history is written by the winners.

Sam Leith

Down the mean streets

One of the fun facts you occasionally hear people brandish about Raymond Chandler is that he was at Dulwich College with  P. G. Wodehouse. It’s a slight fiction —Wodehouse was actually there seven years earlier, so we can’t picture Chandler giving him a bog-wash — but one that sticks because of the contrast: good egg and hard-boiled egg. How could this suburban public school produce, at once, the laureates of Edwardian toffery and LA private-dickery? Reading Tom Williams’s absorbing new biography of Chandler, though, what struck me was not how different but how weirdly similar Wodehouse and Chandler are as writers.

Saturday

Andrew Taylor

The plot thickens | 14 July 2012

The husband-and-wife team that is Nicci French wrote 12 standalone psychological thrillers before switching to a series with last year’s Blue Monday. Their central character, Frieda Klein, a psychotherapist who moonlights as a quasi-detective, returns in Tuesday’s Gone, together with a number of other characters, including the melancholy DCI Malcolm Karlsson and his team. The book begins promisingly with a Deptford social worker visiting a middle-aged woman with dementia, only to find that her client is serving tea and iced buns to a naked man sitting on her sofa. To make matters more piquant, the man is a rotting, fly-ridden corpse with a missing finger.

Patrick Skene-Catling

Swinging into action

Whereas it is generally agreed that music has charms to soothe a savage breast, Congreve might have added that music also has the power to inflame bellicose fervour. Patrick Bade, who lectures at Christie’s Education and the London Jewish Cultural Centre, has written a commendably exhaustive history of how all sorts of music were used to strengthen civilian and military morale and to demoralise enemies immediately before and during the second world war. The BBC radio programme Music While You Work, for example, was believed to help make British factory workers contentedly productive. Musical propaganda broadcasts were supposed to convince Germans that we were patriotically more ardently motivated than they.

Richard Walker

Bookends: Cycle of pain

Reg Harris by Robert Dineen (Ebury Press, £16.99) is about a man who was once Britain’s number one athlete: a professional cycle track sprinter who dominated the worldwide sport for 15 years. And what is cycle track sprinting? It is racing on a prepared track with one or more opponents. It is also a form of torture. A great road race held over days or weeks, like the Tour de France, has been described as a Calvary. But track cycling is definitely torture. Like torture, the tools are simple but the variations are infinite. Like torture, it is a psychological contest. Like torture, the inner scars are indelible. The leading exponents of this cruel craft were traditionally French, Belgian, Dutch and Italian.

Adam Zamoyski

Ghostly traces of a vanished land

This is an entirely pointless but curiously engaging and even tantalising book. A youthful love affair in Montreal with a girl of Latvian descent plants the word ‘Courland’ in the author’s mind. He finds it mellifluous and somehow magical. The girl’s beauty and otherworldliness add a sense of mystery. An Alsatian cousin whose father, drafted into the Wehrmacht, had been killed there in 1945, prompts darker reflection. The discovery that a workmate at the Paris paper he works for is a descendant of the legendary Duchess of Dino, granddaughter of the last of the Dukes of Courland, introduces an intriguing note of nostalgia for a lost elegance.

Cressida Connolly

A friendly poet

In real life, Stephen Spender was gentle and very tall, with wide-open pale blue eyes and a persistent air of slight hesitancy, as if he expected to be violently contradicted at any moment. He had one of the nicest voices I’ve ever heard, a voice which might have been made for poetry: impossible to imagine it raised in anger. In conversation Spender would bow his head, blink slowly and say ‘yes’ a lot, even if he wasn’t in accord with what was being said; this gave his interlocutor the agreeable (and strangely rare) sensation of being truly listened to. He spoke with openness and sincerity; he could also be conspiratorial and prone to giggles, although he wasn’t really a funny man. He was a generous host. He had a boyish smile. You couldn’t not like him.

Anita Brookner

Shy of the crowd

Elizabeth Taylor, the best-kept secret in English fiction, wrote novels and short stories in the 1950s and 1960s and thus contributed to the nostalgia for that modest period so keenly felt today by those who lived through it. She is an honourable writer; no publicity, no interviews, no mission statements — merely an unwavering production of impeccable work. Writing before feminism became encoded in dogma, she nevertheless had an unfailing and unmistakable female intelligence: wry, observant and discreet. She herself, whatever secrets she may have harboured, is invisible behind the screen of her impeccable style.

David Gilmour

Giving Italy the boot

If a pollster were to ask us which country we thought had produced Europe’s greatest artists, which had built its most beautiful cities and which had provided the world with it finest singers and composers, most of us would put Italy in first or second place.  And if we were asked which country had developed the best cuisine, which one contained the loveliest man-made landscapes and which had produced the most stylish designs in clothes and motor cars and many other things, we would also rate Italy highly, perhaps in the first four or five, certainly near the top of the premier league.

Juliet Townsend

A courtly man hunt

In ‘He Fell Among Thieves’ Henry Newbolt describes a young man’s voyage to service in India: He watch’d the liner’s stem ploughing the foam. He felt her trembling speed and the thrash of her screw; He heard the passengers’ voices talking of home. He saw the flag she flew. And, with any luck, as ‘the moon made a silver path over the smooth sea’, he would find himself on the boat deck with his arm round the shoulders of an attractive girl and the prospect of an enjoyable shipboard romance ahead. The playfully nicknamed ‘Fishing Fleet’ was at sea with its cargo of girls in search of a husband in India or Ceylon, and men returning from leave in England on the lookout for a wife.

Saturday

James Mather

City breaks

The city might have been invented by the Ancient Mesopotamians, but for most of human history urban living has been a decidedly minority pursuit. For 1,000 years before 1800, only 3 per cent of the world’s people were city dwellers. Today that proportion has risen to more than one half and by 2050 it will touch three quarters. With these striking statistics P.D. Smith begins his journey into the urban age (which, it turns out, is all of history and a chunk of prehistory besides). Darting between continents and across millennia, he sets out to show how little the experience of urban living, working and playing ever really changes. Cultures and civilisations vary across time and place, he says, but the city is universal. To understand it is to understand much about humanity itself.

Anthony Sattin

Twists and turns through history

Jeremy Seal is a Turkophile, but don’t look to him for a grand history of the republic or lives of the Ottoman sultans. That is not his way. He prefers to approach things obliquely and, in particular, to come at them from an angle dictated by chance and beginning with a discovery. His first book, A Fez of the Heart, looked at Turkey and Turks through the prism of their most iconic piece of clothing: the fez. His previous book, Santa: A Life, was decided upon when he discovered that St Nicholas was a Turk. And now another discovery: the Meander. We all know the idea of meandering. The word, with its sense of twisting and turning, and also of being convoluted, of going slowly, taking time, was used by ancient Greeks and Romans.

Matthew Dennison

Old lovers…

If it is true that we demand of our favourite authors above all consistency — a certain fidelity to the territory that they have earlier marked out as their own — Ancient Light contains ingredients certain to please Banville aficionados. ‘Images from the far past crowd in my head and half the time I cannot tell whether they are memories or inventions,’ the novel’s narrator tells us at the outset. On the instant we are transported back through four decades of Banville’s writing: ‘We imagine that we remember things as they were, while in fact all we carry into the future are fragments which reconstruct a wholly illusory past,’ he asserted in an earlier novel, Birchwood, written in 1973. And so, in Ancient Light, it proves to be.