More from Books

Saturday

Michael Paraskos

Trouble at mill

I have some sympathy with the pioneering incomers who moved to the Yorkshire mill town of Hebden Bridge in the 1970s. At the time Hebden was in a near terminal decline, its factories closing in rapid succession. As a result, the town suffered one of the fastest depopulations ever seen in Britain, as the more animated locals left to find work elsewhere. The incomers, called ‘offcomers’ locally, sought to reverse this with a strong dose of middle-class culture, although being for the most part liberal Guardian readers they would probably baulk at the idea they ever sought to engineer working-class Hebden into something more bourgeois. Nonetheless, that is what they did, and it worked.

Alan Judd

Mission accomplished

Two shots killed Osama bin Laden, one in his chest and one in his left eye. ‘Two taps’ is standard practice for close-quarter shootings — firing twice takes virtually no longer than firing once and you increase (without quite doubling) your chance of an instant kill. He was in his top-floor bedroom, in the dark, and his killers wore night-vision goggles. He died 15 minutes after the first sounds of attack — the roaring of helicopters, the crash-landing of one outside the compound, the blowing of a steel door in the wall. During those fateful 15 minutes he waited with one of his wives in the pitch black of that small room, paralysed perhaps by fear or indecision and hampered by the design of his house.

Thursday

Polly Toynbee

They’re all in it together

However often rehearsed, the facts remain eye-popping. Inequality has bolted out of control over the last three decades. Democracy has proved increasingly powerless to check the unaccountable runaway oligarchy that fails even to pay its taxes. Ferdinand Mount gives a lucid account of political decay alongside all this looting, a disengaged electorate and a cult of leadership in hock to overmighty media oligarchs, all ominously suggestive of the decline and fall of the Roman empire. When a Tory tells the story, it’s far more compelling than any left-winger. Mount was head of Margaret Thatcher’s Policy Unit from 1982 to 1984 and a director of the then most influential Tory think-tank, the Centre for Policy Studies.

Margaret Drabble

The usual suspects | 3 May 2012

It is disconcerting to discover that a novelist a generation older than oneself has been trying to write ‘a sort of Margaret Drabble effort’, even if the book ‘hadn’t turned out like that at all’. This is how Barbara Pym described her then unpublished campus novel An Academic Question in 1971 to her friend and admirer Philip Larkin. Naturally I was intrigued to know what she meant. Pym’s publishing history is well known: between 1950 and 1961 she published six  highly praised novels, and then ran up against a solid rock of refusals. Jonathan Cape dropped her, and she was told her work was out of fashion. Puzzled and down-hearted, she went on writing, somewhat hopelessly, because she couldn’t help it.

Justin Cartwright

Putting the fun in fundamentalism

Turnaround Books, the publishers of Timothy Mo’s remarkable Pure, are revealed to operate from Unit 3, Olympia Trading Estate, Coburg Road, London N22. From this we may deduce that the publishing history of the three times Booker-shortlisted Anglo-Chinese novelist continues on its maverick way. Imagine if Mo had approached a conventional publisher with a proposition: this is a novel about jihad in south-east Asia, as seen through the eyes of a Muslim ladyboy. Mo’s perversity and boldness apply in equal measure to his hero/heroine.

Lewis Jones

Femmes du monde

At the end of Dreaming in French, in ‘A Note on Sources’, Alice Kaplan terms her narrative ‘this pièce montée’, which is the only time she neglects to supply an English translation. From a scholar of her eminence — she is a historian and critic of French modernity, a professor at Yale, and the acclaimed author of The Collaborator, The Interpreter and French Lessons — such neglect must surely be deliberate. The term was new to me, and the best I could manage was ‘assembled piece’, which in the context seems to be just a pretentious way of saying ‘book’. So I looked it up, as Kaplan probably hoped her more ignorant readers might, and I am glad I did.

Marcus Berkmann

Bookends: Pure gold

Even nowadays, a 50-year career in pop music is a rare and wondrous thing, and for a woman triply so. And yet Carole King’s golden jubilee passed a couple of years ago without a murmur, let alone a box set. You get the impression from A Natural Woman (Virago, £20) that that’s the way she likes it. After writing hit after hit with her first husband Gerry Goffin in the early 1960s, and selling 25 million copies of her second solo album, Tapestry, in the early 1970s, she has enjoyed a steady rather than stellar career, which has given her time to bring up four children and go back to the land and milk goats in Idaho for a few years, because that’s what she wanted to do. Her memoir, unghosted, is as female as Keith Richards’s was unequivocally male.

Sophia Waugh

Family get together 

Mark Haddon is in what must sometimes seem like the unenviable position of having written a first (adult) novel which was, and continues to be, a smash hit. Drawing in part on his own experiences of working with the autistic, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time has become one of those books that anyone who claims to be a reader must know. His second novel, A Spot of Bother, did not receive the same acclaim, perhaps partly because the subject was a man in mid-life crisis who convinces himself he is dying. It too was wonderful, though — funny, perceptive and moving. His latest book, The Red House, is in the same mode as the second.

Emma Clark

Reading the runes

Martin Palmer is without doubt one of our leading authorities on the subject of Nature and sacred writing today — among his previous publications being Sacred Gardens and The Sacred History of Britain. One of the primary aims of his latest book is to teach us how to ‘read’ our surroundings; for, he believes, like all sacred art, Nature can be read as a book, if only one understands the language. Thus, through ‘decoding’ the towns, villages and countryside of Britain, we may come to see that ‘we are caught up in a part of something much greater and grander than ourselves’.

Saturday

Victoria Glendinning

Nature study

On my desk is the vertebra of a narwhal. It was given to me by a man in Canada after a convivial dinner. Narwhals are Arctic whales with long spiky tusks on their noses. This vertebra is about three inches across, embedded in bone expanding into waisted wings, like a propeller. If I were the award-winning Scots poet Kathleen Jamie I would be describing it better. A whale vertebra, for her, felt ‘grainy, not quite cold’, and smelt of wax crayons, which are, or were, made of whale oil. She was in the Whale Hall of the Natural History Museum in Bergen where the dusty skeletons of 24 whales hung by chains from the ceiling. They were being cleaned, before removal to a modern display.

Byron Rogers

Out of sight, out of mind

Arthur Newton and Peter Gavuzzi, long-distance interwar runners, are two of the most extraordinary British athletes. They are also the most forgotten. This is because the distances they favoured were too long to be accommodated by any athletics event: to them a marathon would have been a mere warm-up jog, their distances were 100 miles, and, in one case, a run across the whole of the United States, when they completed 40 miles a day for 80 consecutive days. Mark Whitaker has thus set out to write a poignant account of unrecognised achievement. The only thing is, in the process he has written the most bizarre and bleakly humorous book there will probably ever appear on athletics.

Cressida Connolly

It concentrates the mind wonderfully

It’s odd, but we mostly go about as if death were optional, something we could get out of, like games at school. Philip Gould, in When I Die, admits that he never gave it much thought. Then he got oesophageal cancer. He had a horrible operation, got a bit better. Then the cancer came back. He had chemotherapy, more surgery, a lot of pain. And it came back again: ‘I knew then that the game was up.’ Having worked as Tony Blair’s strategist, Gould at first imagined his illness as another kind of campaign. But once his death became certain, he underwent a remarkable change: The unvarnished certainty that you are going to die within a certain period of time is an immensely powerful thing.

Mark Mason

Celebrating the Tube …

The London Underground is methadone for people with nerd habits. Were it not for its twisty, multi-coloured map, its place in the capital’s history, its tendency to throw up facts such as ‘the QE2 would fit inside North Greenwich station’, we’d be on the hard stuff. The smack of nerd-dom. We’d be on the platform at Crewe with notebooks, taking down numbers, ruining our marriages. As it is we maintain social respectability by obsessing about the Tube. The Tube is sexy in a way that mainline trains aren’t. Even young people, proper trendy young people who know the names of bands, get excited by the Tube.

Lewis Jones

Bookends: … and the inner tube

In the early 1990s, when Boris Johnson was making his name as the Daily Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent, Sonia Purnell was his deputy, and last year she published a biography of him — the second, and surely not the last — entitled Just Boris: A Tale of Blond Ambition. Now follows Pedal Power: How Boris Failed London’s Cyclists (Aurum Press, £2.05), which is described as an ebook but is more accurately a (badly written) epamphlet. There are ‘votes in cycling’, as she puts it, ‘in a way that there never has been before’, and she means to sway those votes in the imminent mayoral election. She is, though, a more effective biographer than a polemicist.

Saturday

Conrad Black

The American way of justice

Conrad Black sympathises with the NatWest Three — victims of British cowardice and a corrupt US legal system It was the misfortune of David Bermingham and his co-defendants to be very peripherally connected to the Enron debacle. Enron was the ultimate hot financial client for a merchant banker and designer of sophisticated financial vehicles, the author’s occupation at Greenwich National Westminster. Bermingham’s offence was to produce a spectacularly imaginative new structure for an existing financial company, which impressed the Enron financial officers, at a time when Greenwich National Westminster was being offered for sale and NatWest itself was a takeover candidate.

Michael Howard

A law unto itself

One could meet any day in Society Harold Acton, Tom Driberg or Rowse: May there always, to add their variety, Be some rather Odd Fish at The House. Thus W. H. Auden (something of an odd fish himself) reminiscing at a Christ Church gaudy half a century ago. There have certainly been quite a lot of such fish in living memory, not least in the Senior Common Room.

Robert Chandler

Ultimate issues

In his preface to this anthology of brief memoirs, Robert Silvers suggests that its ‘invisible, tragic core’ is to be found in an account by Isaiah Berlin of one of his several meetings with Boris Pasternak. Pasternak told Berlin how Stalin had once telephoned him to ask him two questions: had Pasternak been present when Mandelstam read out his notorious ‘Epigram’ about Stalin; and was Mandelstam a ‘master’? Pasternak sidestepped these questions by saying that it was essential that he and Stalin meet: they needed to ‘speak about ultimate issues, about life and death’. This was in 1934, not long before Mandelstam’s first arrest.

Charlotte Moore

Cry freedom

Scenes From Early Life is a rather dull title for a deeply interesting book. It is a novel; this is stated on the jacket, as if anticipating the possibility that readers may question that definition. Set in Dacca (now Dhaka), it is about the emergence of Bangladesh as a state independent of Pakistan after the savage civil war of 1971. Philip Hensher has drawn on memory and history — family history and ‘real’ history. Historical characters, notably Sheik Mujib, the courageous and civilised Bangladeshi leader, mingle with semi- and wholly fictional ones. The joins are seamless. Finishing the book, I was startled to realise that Hensher, an Englishman, had written a novel without a single English character in it, and that I, at least, had been wholly convinced.

Lloyd Evans

In Blair’s shadow

An ebook arrives! The future of publishing on my hard-drive. All the big profits are in cyber-publishing these days, as I discovered last month when I downloaded an ebook for three quid and found it contained just 85 pages. This one, by Alwyn W. Turner, has only 72 pages, but it’s a penny cheaper at £2.99. I read it in less time than it takes to bake a potato. Turner’s theme is the agony of the British left. In 1992, Labour’s shock defeat at the polls plunged the party into despair and gave the modernisers a mandate to do whatever was necessary to win power. Turner’s plan is to revive our memories of that ignoble turning-point and to enshrine 1992 as the must-have date of 2012.

John Preston

One that got away | 21 April 2012

There are six drawings in the back of this book. They’re not very good drawings. In fact they look as if they come from an unusually hamfisted comic strip. However, it’s their crudity that makes them so powerful. One shows a young boy being suspended over a coal fire, a rope round his wrists, a chain round his ankles and a hook through his abdomen. The boy is Shin Dong-hyuk, the only person born in a North Korean labour camp ever to have escaped from one. Shin’s first memory is of being taken to see an execution aged four. He watched a man having his mouth stuffed full of pebbles in case he tried to shout out anything unpatriotic, and then shot.