More from Books

Saturday

Connie Bensley

Enigma variations

This is a novel full of hints and mysteries.  Why does the Dutch woman rent a house in rural Wales, bringing with her a mattress, some bedding and a portrait of Emily Dickinson? What is the matter with her — at times she seems energetic, at others obscurely suffering. And what is she escaping from? In due course information filters through, in a series of deeper hints and teases, and the story switches back and forth between Wales and Amsterdam, where her husband and parents and a friendly policeman discuss the possible reasons for her flight — and speculate about her whereabouts, and how to trace her.

Charlotte Hobson

Joy to the world

Patrick Gale’s new novel could be read as a companion work to his hugely successful Notes from an Exhibition, and in fact, in a satisfying twist, some characters and even objects slip from the latter into this novel. Notes from an Exhibition centred around the character of Rachel Kelly, whose mental instability and solipsistic devotion to her art left a painful mark on her family. The ‘perfectly good man’ of this title is a vicar, Barnaby Johnson, as kind, gentle and balanced as Rachel Kelly was not, yet with the same sense of vocation — in this case, selfless service to the church — that moulds and in its own way scars his family. ‘Ah,’ says his daughter Carrie to another child of a ‘very good man’, ‘you have my deepest sympathy.

Philip Ziegler

Agreeing to differ

‘Frankie and Johnny were sweethearts; Lordie, how they could love.’ The ballad has many variant versions but the denouement is always the same; he was her man and he did her wrong. Rooty-toot-toot three times she shoot, and Johnny ended up in a coffin. Thatcher and Reagan were sweethearts; Lordie, how they could love. But Reagan did her wrong: over Grenada, over nuclear disarmament, as near as nothing over the Falklands. The relationship was to end in ostentatious affection, but if Mrs Thatcher had had a gun in that celebrated handbag, it might have been a case of rooty-toot-toot all over again.

Charles Saumarez-Smith

Last of the swagmen

I have hitherto resisted my wife’s frequent recommendations that I should read a daily blog about the life of the denizens of Spitalfields, but, now that they have been published in book form, I can see why she is such an enthusiast. The Gentle Author is deliberately anonymous and bases his style on a combination of John Gay and Henry Mayhew, a pseudo-18th-century faux naïf, who wanders round his local neighbourhood collecting the tales of ordinary folk, including the last of the so-called swagmen who has a market stall in Spitalfields, the waiter in an Indian restaurant just off Brick Lane, Fred, who sells chestnuts at the corner of Bell Lane and Wentworth Street, and Paul Gardner, the fourth generation in his family to sell paper bags.

Cressida Connolly

Here be monsters | 17 March 2012

The lovely title of this book comes from the philosopher David Hume. The question he posed was this: if a man grew up familiar with every shade of blue but one, would he be able to recognise the hue in a chart of blues, or would it register only as a blank? In other words, can the intellect supply information, or may we know things only through the senses? Dwelling too long on this sort of problem famously sends people mad. Hume himself suffered a breakdown, after which he sensibly made it his business to get out more. In this novel, two of the three people central to the story have experienced, or are experiencing, psychiatric problems, while another important but peripheral character spends the duration locked in a loony bin.

Paul Binding

Abiding inspiration

In 1971 looking back over his life, Lionel Trilling (1905-1975) declared himself surprised at being referred to as a critic. Certainly his plan when young had been the pursuit of the literary life, ‘but what it envisaged was the career of the novelist. To this intention, criticism, when eventually I began to practise it, was always secondary, an afterthought: in short, not a vocation but an avocation.’ As Adam Kirsch comments, in his timely, incisive, succinct study, this admission was made when Trilling was ‘the most famous and authoritative literary critic in the English-speaking world.

John Preston

Africa’s excesses

There are an awful lot of prostitutes in Africa and most of them seem to pass through the pages of Richard Grant’s book at one time or another. All this puts him in a terrible lather — ‘I had been so long without a woman’, he moans at one point, this while weighing up the attractions of a woman called Felicia ‘with extraordinary skin’ in the Rwandan capital, Kigali. But Grant also has a girlfriend back home who he’s determined to remain faithful to, and a mind set on higher things. He wants to become the first person to navigate the second longest river in Tanzania, the Malagarasi.

Marcus Berkmann

Bookends: A life of gay abandon

Sometimes, only the purest smut will do. Scotty Bowers’s memoir, Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars (Grove Press, £16.99) is 24 carat, 100 per cent proof. Now rising 89, Scotty (pictured above in his youth) was for years the go-to guy in Tinseltown for sexual favours. Black, white, short, tall, same sex, opposite sex: he could supply it all. But this was no prostitution ring he was running, good lord no. He didn’t charge for his services. He just liked ‘to help folks out’. And he was winningly discreet — until now, that is. His book is Hollywood Babylon and then some, sharing with that legendary and error-packed volume the advantage that everyone written about is long dead.

Saturday

David Gilmour

‘Viva la muerte!’

The Spanish Holocaust is a book that will give readers nightmares: it gave me two in a single night. Even people who think they have read enough about the Spanish Civil War to feel inured to its horrors will still be appalled by the intensity of the cruelty and repression here revealed. ‘Of the folly and wickedness of the military rising’, wrote Gerald Brenan in The Spanish Labyrinth, ‘there can today be no two opinions.’ Nor today, more than 60 years after he wrote those words, can there be two opinions about the sadistic and merciless repression planned and perpetrated by General Franco and his conspirators.  Reading Paul Preston’s narrative is like watching a Spanish Schindler’s List without a Spanish Schindler.

Andrew Taylor

Thirty years on

One of the pleasures of Alan Judd’s books is their sheer variety. His work includes biographies of Ford Madox Ford and Sir Mansfield Cummings, the first head of what became MI6, as well as nine novels, many of which have little in common with each other apart from unflashy but elegant prose. The Devil’s Own Work, for example, is a brilliant novella, almost a fable, that explores the fatal temptation of a novelist and the relationship between art and success. Another, The Kaiser’s Last Kiss, shows us both the Third Reich and the elderly Kaiser Wilhelm in a wholly unexpected light. Three of Judd’s novels, however, have both a protagonist and certain themes in common.

Robert Stewart

Patriot or traitor?

The mighty convulsion that was the French Revolution has stirred the blood of historians from Thomas Carlyle to Simon Schama and consideration of it still inflames opinions. At its centre stood Maximilien Robespierre — 5’ 3”, stern, unaffacted in manner or dress, Spartan in his domestic habits — deified by his followers as the ‘Incorruptible’ and vilified by his opponents as a traitor to the ideals of 1789, bent on dictatorship. Peter McPhee spares us speculation (Robespierre left no memoirs or diaries) on his subject’s ‘inner life’.

Hunter Davies

The triumph of failure

In l958, my hero in life, the person I most wanted to be, was Keith Dewhurst. I had arrived on the Manchester Evening Chronicle straight from Durham as a graduate trainee reporter, which was a laugh, as they did no training. Keith was the paper’s Manchester United reporter, knew all the players, went to all the games, and he wore a white raincoat with the collar turned up. Rapture. I don’t think I exchanged more than a few words with him, just ogled his raincoat from afar. Have never met him since. If I were to, I am sure he would deny he ever wore a white raincoat. It was all part of my fantasy.

Sara Wheeler

A paralysed landscape

‘Very, very, very sexy’, a field-researcher scratches in his Antarctic notebook. He is describing a meteorite the size of a £1 coin that he has just picked up off the ice. The episode, recounted in Gabrielle Walker’s hugely informative book, reveals the passion of intrepid polar scientists. From the enthusiasm and diligence on display in these pages, one senses that the author shares their feelings. With a PhD in natural sciences and a solid career in science journalism, Walker is well placed to tackle the wide range of polar disciplines. She calls the Antarctic a ‘science playground’, and has visited five times, kneeling over holes in the ice with many of the world’s leading researchers.  The book is structured geographically.

Anthony Cummins

A matter of life and death

Hmm. Of the 30-plus characters in this novel, not one is both black and British. Odd, since it’s set in 2007-8, in south London. An early passage shows us a Polish builder listening to a ‘crowd of black kids’ on the Northern Line: ‘You never—’ ‘He never—’ ‘Batty man—’ And that’s it: six words in 650 pages. Capital, a metropolitan panorama that takes in the dawn of what we call ‘the current climate’, is wonderful — warm, funny, smart — but you do feel John Lanchester might be afraid to fall flat on his face with a fuddy-duddy faux pas. So no black Britons or (equally weirdly) teenagers of any colour, unless you count a Senegalese football star whose job stops him doing anything teenagey.

Alexander Larman

Apocalypse now

The blurb on the front of Grace McCleen’s debut novel (from Room author Emma Donoghue) proclaims it to be ‘extraordinary’, and goes on to praise it as ‘brutally real’, commending its mixture of ‘social observation and crazy mysticism, held together by a tale of parent-child love’. Unusually for a blurb, this is all accurate. McCleen’s novel may not be perfect, but it has a compelling and, at times hideously tense narrative that makes it an arresting read. It is deservedly named as one of Waterstones’ most promising debut novels of 2012.

Lewis Jones

The end of the affair?

Of those caught up in the 1963 Profumo affair, the only winner seems to have been that blithe spirit Mandy Rice-Davies. Everyone else lost. Profumo’s family bore the brunt, of course, especially his son David, archetype of the boy sent crying home from school, who wrote a brilliant book about it, Bringing the House Down (2006). Harold Macmillan and the Conservative party were driven from office. Yevgeny Ivanov was recalled to Russia. Stephen Ward was hounded to death.

Philip Mansel

Charming, cold-eyed cosmopolitan

At last a diary as penetrating on Berlin as the Goncourt brothers’ on Paris has been translated into English. The author, Count Harry Kessler, resembled a character from Sybille Bedford’s masterpiece, A Legacy. Born in Paris in 1868, he was educated in England, France and Germany. His father was a Hamburg banker; his mother was an Irish-Scottish beauty called Alice Blosse Lynch, admired by the Emperor Wilhelm I. At once German and European, Kessler rotated, as freely as some do today, between London, Paris and Berlin. After a year in the army, and a voyage round the world, Kessler devoted himself to the arts. Exhibitions and parties, and  long descriptions of landscape, fill his diary. He did not find social life hollow.

Mark Mason

Bookends: Down on the farm

Can we please have an inquiry into why already talented people are allowed to go off and be brilliant at something else too? As a quarter of Blur, Alex James (above), spent a decade creating critically acclaimed yet commercially successful pop anthems, thereby earning himself access to more drink, drugs and Doris than you could shake a Fender Precision bass at. Fair enough, say the rest of us (through gritted teeth). What isn’t on is the fact that it now seems James, having retired to a farm in the Cotswolds, can also write like a god. This won’t come as a total surprise to readers of The Spectator, where the ex-pop star used to detail his cheese-making, barn-building, sow-sourcing adventures.

Saturday

John Sutherland

Man of mysteries

It was always William Wilkie Collins’s good luck — though in later life something of a humiliation — that he was dragged along on Dickens’s coat-tails — not least in this bicentennial ‘year of Dickens’. In December, the BBC will be showing a dramatisation of The Moonstone. T. S. Eliot (no less) called that tale of theft, somnambulism, Scotland Yard, opium and wily Indian thugs ‘the first and best of detective novels’. That, one imagines, would have elicited a snort of contradiction from the author of Bleak House, but the compliment is not far off the mark. Andrew Lycett is currently at work on a full-length biography and, in the meantime, Peter Ackroyd offers us this elegant extended essay between hard covers.

Jonathan Bate

Fatal impact theory 

As schools are for education, so universities are for higher education. In a civilised society, children should leave school literate, numerate and with some knowledge of science, history and culture. But society also needs an elite educated to a higher level. Universities are for the preparation of the next generation of doctors, United Nations interpreters, lawyers, structural engineers, archaeologists, nuclear-weapon designers, literary critics, astronomers, economists and so forth. That’s the short answer. The long answer would require a great deal more than is found in Stefan Collini’s brisk and very witty book.