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Saturday

4 February 2012

A choice of first novels | 4 February 2012

Mountains of the Moon is narrated by a woman just released after spending ten years in jail. The reason for her sentence and the details of her previous life are pieced together through disjointed fragments, forming a complex jigsaw. Lulu had a shocking childhood, with a violent stepfather and negligent mother. Her only loving relatives were her grandfather, who fuelled her imagination by conjuring up the Masai Mara in her dreary south-England surroundings, and her two half brothers, from whom she was eventually separated. This account, related in an idiosyncratic patois, with the matter-of-fact innocence of an abused child for whom abnormality is the norm, is quite horrifying.

Cressida Connolly

Bookends: Trouble and strife

It isn’t true that Joanna Trollope (pictured above) only produces novels about the kind of people who have an Aga in their kitchen: what she writes about are families. Her books have a knack of chiming with current social concerns, of examining how the family is adapting to changing social mores. She is deservedly a very popular writer, but she isn’t a frivolous one. The Soldier’s Wife (Doubleday, £18.99) is a cracking read and has clearly been thoroughly researched. All the little details which animate a novel ring true. It centres on the homecoming of a Major who has been on a six-month tour of duty in Afghanistan, the effect of this supposedly joyous reunion on his wife and children — and himself.

Saturday

28 January 2012

Philip Mansel

Gunboat diplomacy

Britain’s links with the Continent were once deeper and more extensive than those of any other European country. Paris, Rome and German universities played as vital a role in British culture as many native cities. Mediterranean connections were especially strong. Most cities on its shores contain an English church and cemetery. From Minorca to Cyprus, there are few Mediterranean islands that have not been occupied by British troops: the oldest company in Beirut is Heald and Co., the shipping agents (est.1837). Blue-Water Empire aims to tell the story of ‘the British in the Mediterranean since 1800’: 1800 is the year that Malta, soon to be the headquarters of the British Mediterranean fleet, was conquered from France, with Maltese help.

John De-Falbe

Chaos and the old order

If Gregor von Rezzori is known to English language readers, it is likely to be through his tense, disturbing novel Memoirs of an Anti-Semite (partly written in English), and/or his ravishing memoir Snows of Yesteryear. Rezzori was born in 1914 in Czernowitz in Bukovina, when it belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After the first world war he became a citizen of Romania, from where, as a so-called ethnic German, he was ‘repatriated’ to Germany during the second world war. From the 1960s he lived in Italy, at Santa Maddalena, the home that he shared with his second wife near Florence, which she has since set up as a writers’ retreat. In the garden there is a porphyry pyramid, a monument to the deceased writer on which is inscribed ‘citizen of Czernopol’.

Susan Hill

The phantom lover

Driving past several long abandoned second- world-war airfields in East Anglia last year I was struck by how spooky they seemed, just like the decommissioned army base that used to exist near me. Places where people have not only lived and worked but which form the background of wartime drama, and from which men went to their deaths, are bound to be haunted, and in Helen Dunmore’s short novel, it is an airfield that once saw Lancaster Bombers fly out into the night that forms a ghostly scene. Isabel is newly married to a doctor, Philip, and the two have moved to Yorkshire where he is now a GP. It is the early 1950s, the country is still redolent of wartime hardships, ration books, nasty linoleum in rented flats and nosey landladies.

Minoo Dinshaw

A feast of vanities

The name of Savonarola slides off the tongue as if concocted for an orator’s climax. But when it came to names, whether by melody or reputation, the Florence he knew offered aggressive competition. Pico della Mirandola, Lorenzo ‘il Magnifico’ de’ Medici, Botticelli, Michelangelo and Machiavelli all shared his era. In an unexpected and sympathetic conclusion to the radical friar’s latest biography, Donald Weinstein defends one of George Eliot’s least loved novels, Romola: Eliot’s success in bridging the 400-year historical and cultural divide between herself and Savonarolan Florence was remarkable, and her judgment of the Frate himself nuanced and independent.

Ian Thomson

Godfather of rap

At a funeral in New Orleans in 1901, Joe ‘King’ Oliver played a blues-drenched dirge on the trumpet. This was the new music they would soon call jazz. A century on, from the hothouse stomps of Duke Ellington to the angular doodlings of Thelonious Monk, jazz survives in the vocal inflections of rap. To its detractors, rap presents black (increasingly, white) people to the world in terms the Ku Klux Klan might use: illiterate, gold-chain-wearing, sullen, combative buffoons. (‘Life ain’t nothing but bitches and money’, harangued the Los Angeles combo N.W.A. in a reversal of Martin Luther King’s ‘black improvement’.) Yet Bob Dylan had offered an early version of rap in ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’; rap has its pedigree.

Hugo Rifkind

The frontiers of freedom

The problem with Nick Cohen’s very readable You Can’t Read This Book is the way that you can, glaringly, read this book. This isn’t quite as glib an observation as it sounds. Cohen’s central point is that the censors’ pens did not fall down with the Berlin Wall. And yet here he is, very obviously free to tell us about them. Cohen is a rambunctious pessimist.

Jonathan Mirsky

Fall from grace

Barack Obama is not up to the job. That is Ron Suskind’s oft-repeated contention. The President, he states, compromised with, rather than curbed, failing American financial institutions, and has surrounded himself with warring staffers who are either no more competent than he is or, if expert, disregard his wishes. Following a picture caption that reads ‘Obama showed real weakness in managing his own White House,’ Suskind, a Pulitzer Prize winner, justifies his title: The confidence of the nation rests on trust.Confidence is the immaterial residue of material actions: justly enforced laws, sound investments, solidly built structures . . . . Gaining the trust without earning it is the age-old work of the confidence men.

Cressida Connolly

Finding Mr Wright

The film When Harry Met Sally may be infamous for the scene in which the heroine mimics orgasm in a crowded café, but the real point of the story is a question: can a man and a woman ever be true friends, or must sex always get in the way? Jack Holmes and His Friend poses the equivalent question about a straight man and a gay one. If it’s made into a movie, the working title will surely be When Harry Met Gary. Homosexual writers seem to be much better than straight ones at combining high literary style with vastly enjoyable descriptions of really filthy sex. Edmund White is a master of both. This novel is like one from the French 18th century, where passages of intricate social comedy alternate with carnal episodes of Baroque detail.

Allan Massie

Life & Letters: The Creative Writing controversy

It came as a bit of a shock to learn from Philip Hensher’s review of Body of Work: 40 Years of Creative Writing at UEA (31 December) that there are now nearly 100 institutions of higher education in Britain offering a degree in Creative Writing. I suppose for many it’s a merry-go-round. You get the degree and then you get a job teaching Creative Writing to other aspirants who get a degree and then a job teaching … and so it goes. This, after all, has been the way with art colleges for a long time. I sometimes think I must be one of the few surviving novelists who has neither studied nor taught Creative Writing.

Saturday

21 January 2012

Sam Leith

Age of ideas

Sam Leith on Tony Judt’s rigorous, posthumously published examination of the great intellectual debates of the last century When the historian and essayist Tony Judt died in 2010 of motor neurone disease, among the books he had planned was an intellectual history of 20th-century social thought. As the disease robbed him of the ability to write, his friend Timothy Snyder proposed making this book — out of the edited transcripts of a long conversation they would conduct over several weeks in 2009. The book-as-conversation is, as Snyder points out in his foreword, a rather Eastern-European artefact. That’s apt to its content: Snyder is a historian of the region.

Anthony Sattin

Spirit of place | 21 January 2012

There are two ways of viewing the changes sweeping through the Arab world in general and Cairo in particular. There is the significance of individual events, such as the moment that the Tunisian street trader Mohamed Bouazizi set himself alight and lit the fuse on protests that brought down the government of President Ben Ali. And there is the bigger picture, one that looks back at the years of economic decline, decades of abuse, mismanagement and corruption. In this long awaited book, the London-based Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif gives us two very different views of individual events, a tale of two halves.

Maureen Waller

Queen of sorrows

She was the ill-educated younger child of the Duke of York; a mere female, she was sickly and not expected to survive, let alone become Queen. But, as this monumental and long overdue reappraisal shows, it was a mistake to underestimate Anne Stuart. She had always been ambitious and had great tenacity. She had no qualms about putting her beloved Church of England above loyalty to her father and King, the Catholic James II. Indeed, she was a key player in the Revolution of 1688. Legislation declaring that the monarch could not be Catholic or married to a Catholic meant that the question of her Catholic half brother’s legitimacy and his right to the throne was never an issue for Anne.

A.N. Wilson

Helping our unbelief

Over 125 of the 320 pages in this book are either blank, or taken up with black-and-white illustrations, of subjects as various as Madonna and her former husband Guy Ritchie, slates arranged by Richard Long, Buddhist truth-seekers going for a walk in a wood, and a little boy having his Bar Mitzvah in a New York restaurant. It is in the remaining 200 or so pages that the author must persuade his readers that there is no reason why atheists should not practise a religion, or, if they are not disposed to follow one of the existing cults, why they should not make one up for themselves. It is an attractive point of view. ‘La guerre’, as Clemenceau noted, ‘c’est une chose trop grave pour la confier à des militaires’.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

Stronger than fiction

I think it was a Frenchman — it usually is — who observed that the English love their animals more than their children. At first glance, General Jack Seely’s Warrior: The Amazing Story of a Real War Horse — originally published as My Horse Warrior in 1934 — is striking proof of this. In an entire book devoted to the exploits of his horse, the author’s final mention of his son Frank is stunning in its brevity: We had a last gallop together along the sands, Warrior and [Frank’s charger] Akbar racing each other; then I drove him in a motor-car to rejoin his regiment .… He asked me to take care of Akbar, and I replied that Warrior would take care of that. He was killed not long afterwards while leading his company.

James Mather

Holy law

In the autumn of 1347, the Black Death arrived in Egypt. In the 18 months that followed, mosques turned into mortuaries across North Africa and the Levant. By the time the pestilence had subsided, up to a third of the Muslim world lay dead. Theologians delved into their books and found a comforting spin: infection was a blessing from God, they pronounced, and all believers touched with it were bound for paradise. The hordes who fled their villages to escape the disease were apparently unconvinced. So too was an Andalusian scholar named Ibn al-Khatib, whose observations showed it to be spread by human contagion, not the hand of the Almighty. Proof taken from the traditions, this man retorted to the jurists, had to yield to the perception of the senses.

Marcus Berkmann

Bookends: Doors of perception

Unlike most of the old rockers he writes about, the esteemed US critic Greil Marcus is becoming more prolific as he enters his twilight years. An eccentric monograph on Van Morrison was swiftly followed last autumn by a luxuriant collection of his writings on Bob Dylan, and now arrives The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years (Faber £14.99). Marcus doesn’t just inhabit the more rarefied and cerebral wing of rock criticism: he pretty much defined it. Unlike most rock hacks he is not particularly interested in the musicians and their often tarnished legends. No, he listens and listens to the music, listens some more, thinks about it for years, listens some more and then finally commits his thoughts to print.

Saturday

14 January 2012

David Crane

Titanic mistakes

There is nothing quite like a good centenary to remind us how surprising it is that anyone got out of the 20th century in one piece. In the space of a few weeks this spring will be the 100th anniversaries of the Titanic and Captain Scott’s death, and from then on it’s going to be pretty much downhill all the way — the Balkans in 2013, Sarajevo in 2014, the Armenian massacre in 2015, Jutland and the Somme in 2016, the Russian Revolution, Spanish flu, Amritsar, civil war in Ireland, the rise of the dictators ... until before we know where we are it will be 2080 and — light at the end of the tunnel at last — the centenary of the birth of John Terry.

James Le-Fanu