More from Books

Saturday

Robert Carver

Short Walks from Bogota, by Tom Feiling

Ten years ago a cartoon appeared in the Independent showing the New World Order — Bush and Blair peering at a distorted global map with only one entry for South America: over Colombia was written ‘Coke-snorting bolshie gorillas’. Back then the Farc guerrillas were on the edge of the capital Bogotá, the country had the world’s highest kidnap rate and ‘failed state’ was considered its next realistic destination. Then even the title of this book would have been ironic, as to walk anywhere was to risk mugging or murder. Tom Feiling, a British journalist and film-maker who has written a previous book on the cocaine trade, knew Colombia in the bad old days.

Jane Ridley

The Criminal Conversation of Mrs Norton, by Diane Atkinson

Caroline Norton seems an unlikely pioneer of women’s rights. Born in 1808, the granddaughter of the playwright Sheridan, she was a black-eyed beauty, a sharp-tongued socialite with a gift for writing. She matters today because she quarrelled with her husband and refused to put up and shut up. That quarrel is the subject of Diane Atkinson’s book.   Caroline and her two beautiful sisters were brought up in genteel poverty by their widowed mother in a grace-and-favour apartment at Hampton Court. Lack of money meant that when Caroline was 19 she was married off to the first eligible man who came along.  George Norton, her husband, was the younger brother and heir to a childless peer named Lord Grantley. George was neither so pretty nor so witty as Caroline.

Alan Bell

The Roxburghe Club, by Nicolas Barker

Book-collecting fraternities are far from uncommon, but none of them is the equal of their British progenitor, the Roxburghe Club, either in age or exclusivity.  This June the members celebrated its bicentenary, apparently in due style. At the inaugural dinner in 1812, 18 book-collectors, chaired by the Lord Spencer of the day, gathered to celebrate the sale at auction of the 3rd Duke of Roxburghe’s copy of a 1471 edition of Boccaccio, for which Lord Blandford had just paid £2,260, then a record price for a printed book. It was exceeded only in 1884, and meanwhile the antiquarian book market went through periods of despondency.

Martin Gayford

Caspar David Friedrich, by Johannes Grave

In October 1810, the poet and dramatist Heinrich von Kleist substantially rewrote a review submitted to a publication he edited, the Berliner Abendblätter. Indeed, as few editors would dare — even in those days — he transformed its tone from critical to positive. The subject was a landscape by Caspar David Friedrich, ‘The Monk by the Sea’ painted c. 1808-10, which was exhibited in Berlin. In the course of his remarks Kleist came up with a startling metaphor: This painting, with its two or three mysterious elements, lies there like the apocalypse ... and since, in its monotony and boundlessness, it has nothing, other than the frame, that might serve as a foreground, the feeling one has gazing at it is as though one’s eyelids had been cut away.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

Alexander Fiske-Harrison enjoys a ‘story slam’ at the Edinburgh Fringe

The Edinburgh Fringe is a place of youthful hopes, naive dreams and occasional flashes of genuine inspiration. Usually these turn out to be very much flashes in the pan. But not so last Friday night’s ‘story slam’ at the Southall: a contest of storytelling between writers, poets and ne’er-do-wells divided into two teams, representing their home cities of Edinburgh and Chicago. The idea grew out of the ‘poetry slam’ format, invented in Chicago in 1980s, which was itself the child — or rather, the polite third cousin — of the ‘rap battle’ wars of words, in which aspiring hip-hop performers would twist language, rhythm and rhyme into weapons to wound an opponent’s amour-propre.

Sam Leith

Sweet Tooth, by Ian McEwan

‘I’m trying to help you, Serena. You’re not listening. Let me put it another way. In this work the line between what people imagine and what’s actually the case can get very blurred. In fact that line is a big grey space, big enough to get lost in. You imagine things — and you can make them come true. The ghosts become real. Am I making sense?’ You can’t say the heroine of Ian McEwan’s latest novel wasn’t warned. Serena Frome is a clever, pretty young woman who led a sheltered childhood as the daughter of an Anglican bishop: ‘We grew up inside a walled garden, with all the pleasures and limitations that implies.

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

A Decade at the Donmar, 2002-2012, by Michael Grandage

Here’s a picture book that triumphantly exceeds the narrow bounds of the coffee-table genre. At £50 it’s hardly an impulse buy, but the photographs, covering Michael Grandage’s ten years in charge of the Donmar Warehouse, are sumptuously reproduced. And Grandage’s text is a revelation. It offers a fascinating glimpse into the mentality of a man who has established himself as London’s leading creator of Mercedes-class theatre. And it’s crammed with juicy gossip too.  Every Grandage production is rooted in two disciplines: performance and design. He aims to create a ‘forensic, beat-by-beat examination of a play’.

Penelope Lively

Being Sam Frears, by Mary Mount

Sam Frears is 40. He has an extremely rare condition called familial dysautonomia, or Riley-Day syndrome; the life expectancy for most babies born with this is five years. Mary Mount has made her account of what it is like to be Sam a short impressionistic chronicle, interspersed with comments from his mother, Mary-Kay Wilmers. The result is both illuminating and empathetic, with a picture emerging of someone who has refused to be defeated by his condition. Sam has limited vision now and is physically hampered, but he acts, he enjoys the climbing wall at a leisure centre and he is the charismatic centre of a circle of friends. I did not see the Storyville documentary, My Friend Sam, made by Toby Reisz and shown on BBC 4 earlier this year.

Charlotte Moore

My Dear Governess, edited by Irene Goldman Price

‘I have finished Julius Caesar since I last wrote & I cannot say that it left a very glowing impression on me. It was too much like my own earliest attempts at tragedy to move me in the least.’ So wrote the 16-year-old Edith Wharton in 1878 to Anna Bahlmann, her governess and literary confidante. Wharton’s letters to Bahlmann only came to light in 2009. Edited and carefully annotated by Irene Goldman-Price, they chart Wharton’s progress from precocious adolescent, to brilliant New York socialite, to sophisticated queen of European literary society, to tireless charity worker, divorced, estranged from her family, struggling to ease the plight of refugees in a Paris torn apart by the first world war.

Olivia Glazebrook

Even the Dogs, by Jon McGregor

Jon McGregor’s debut, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2002 and won both the Betty Trask Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award in the following year. So Many Ways to Begin, his second novel, was on the Booker longlist in 2006 and last month his third book, Even the Dogs (which was published in 2010), won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. McGregor’s talent is formidable, his purpose is serious and his discipline is exemplary: this novel turns an unflinching gaze on its subject — a group of homeless drug addicts in a depressed Midlands town — and expects an equal commitment from the reader.

Claudia FitzHerbert

The Daylight Gate, by Jeanette Winterson Claudia FitzHerbert

The story of the Pendle witch trials in 1612 is well known, thanks to the publication of The Wonderfull Disoverie of Witches in Lancashire by Thomas Potts, clerk to the Lancashire Assizes in which ten of the 12 accused were condemned to death by hanging. But it is also unknown because Potts’s certainties are not ours. We know who was accused of what but not why, although several of the cases collapsed into each other, with one defendant being released after a witness was ‘proved’ to have been in the pay of a Catholic priest. Witchery and popery were equally reprehensible, target culture making it imperative for Potts and his cronies to nail someone for something.

Caroline Moorehead

Occupation Diaries, by Raja Shehadeh

A group of friends, Palestinian and foreign, go to picnic at a wadi between Jerusalem and Jericho. They are wearing bright, casual summer clothes. On a nearby rock sits another party of picnickers, only they are dressed in veils, long skirts and black coats. For a while no one says anything. Then, suddenly, over a gesture of defiance, a row erupts between these secular liberals and the devout Islamicists. Once upon a time, writes Raja Shehadeh in Occupation Diaries, the two groups would have exchanged friendly greetings. Today there is only suspicion and antagonism; the people of Palestine, who not so long ago lived peacefully together, are now driven apart by deep rifts.

Peter Jay

National Service, by Colin Shindler

For over 15 years after the second world war young men between the ages of 18 and 20 were conscripted by law to serve in Britain’s armed forces for two years. This was officially in order to man the army, navy and air force sufficiently for them to be able to perform the roles which government assigned to them, mainly in the management of British colonies and, after the formation of Nato, in opposing the feared westward expansion of the Soviet Union. Some serious fighting was done in Korea and later in Malaya, which was surprisingly successful from the colonial point of view. Others of us disported ourselves in the Middle and Near East, in Cyprus, in Africa and — reputedly the most boring — in the British Army on the Rhine. Some were just stuck in Britain.

Minoo Dinshaw

The First Crusade, by Peter Frankopan

Perhaps more than any other single historical event, the First Crusade (1096-99) lends itself to the narrative technique. This was the quest — and a successful one — on the part of Roman Catholic Europe to regain the Holy Lands taken during the Muslim conquests of the Levant four centuries earlier. Its rich cast of characters — among them Bohemond of Taranto, Raymond of Toulouse and Godfrey of Bouillon — caught between conflicting motives of faith, avarice, loyalty and ambition, have inspired magnificent epic poetry. Their ultimate goal was the recovery of Jerusalem — and as Sir Ronald Storrs, British Governor during the Mandate once said, ‘There can be no promotion after Jerusalem.’ Where that quest began, however, is  more vexing.

James Walton

Bookends: The Saint Zita Society, by Ruth Rendell

Sometimes it seems as if Ruth Rendell’s heart just isn’t in all that killing any more. Certainly, her latest book, The Saint Zita Society (Hutchinson, £12.99), works best as a portrait of modern London, sharing many of the characteristics of novels like John Lanchester’s Capital and Sebastian Faulks’s A Week in December. The murders, when they finally happen, not only go unsolved, but even largely uninvestigated. They also feel rather sketchily plotted and weirdly peripheral to the action. The setting is an upmarket street in Pimlico whose inhabitants include a paediatrician, a classic gentlewoman of the old school and, naturally, a horrible City financier and his lazy wife.

Stig Abell

Umbrella, by Will Self

James Joyce once described Ulysses — in dog Italian — as a ‘maledettisimo romanzaccione’, or monstrously big novel. It has come to stand as a modernist masterpiece, and also the acme of difficult, inaccessible, unwieldy fiction. It is to be read (if at all) effortfully, in sweaty admiration, and mercifully short chunks. One cannot help recalling Joyce when grappling with Will Self’s big new monster of a novel. And just occasionally, Self allows his formidable phrasemaking to drift towards bad Joycean pastiche: breastfeeding seen in terms of ‘hawsers and pipelines coiled away into milky fartysteam’, the ‘jewfoody stench’ of an old apartment, and the like. But no matter.

A.N. Wilson

Bertie: A Life of Edward VII, by Jane Ridley

This book deserves to be named in the same breath as those two great classics of royal biography, Roger Fulford’s Royal Dukes and James Pope-Hennessy’s Queen Mary. It shares with those two masterpieces the double advantage of being profoundly learned and a cracking good read. There is scarcely a paragraph of Bertie which does not contain new material, most of it culled from the Royal Archives, but also from a wide variety of other sources, including the diaries — which Jane Ridley discovered in the Royal College of Physicians — of Bertie’s German medic, Dr Sieveking. Its most affecting passages — and there are many — derive their power from the accumulation of carefully gathered detail.

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Gentleman abstractionist

Adrian Heath (1920—92), like so many artists, was a mass of contradictions. Jane Rye begins her excellent study of him by quoting Elizabeth Bishop: ‘A life’s work is summed up as the dialectic of captivity and freedom, of fixed form and poetic extravagance, of social norms and personal deviance.’ Heath thought of his painting as an attempt to reconcile the intellectual and the sensual, a meeting point of classical and romantic. Roger Hilton complained that Heath couldn’t decide whether he wanted to be a painter or an accountant. Certainly, Heath did not conform to the public’s cherished image of the artist as bohemian.

Wynn Wheldon

Tricks of the trade

If you are in the habit of reading short-story collections straight through you will not fail to notice the repetition of motifs in Ryan O’Neill’s playful debut. I’ve no doubt he would like you to, for his book is a set of variations on the theme of language. We meet tattoo artists, English teachers, readers of comics, short-story writers, parents uttering racist epithets (‘Chink’, ‘Abo’ ‘Goon’), translators and a failed novelist called Thomas Hardie; there are also maps, mail-order books, pornographic magazines and changes of name. Even buildings have last words: a ten-year-old headline outside a derelict newsagent, the walls of which were ‘a palimpsest of graffiti’.

Anne Chisholm

The serpent in the garden

Loss of innocence happens to us all and is one of the great themes of literature. With The River, a novella first published in 1946 and now rightly republished by Virago, Rumer Godden gave us not only her best book (she wrote more than 60) but a small masterpiece, a near perfect account of how childhood has to come to an end and the serpent must enter the garden. Her story of an English family living on a river in Bengal (now in Bangladesh) is closely based on her own early life.