More from Books

Saturday

Lewis Jones

What is it about Stieg Larsson?

Stieg Larsson was a rather unsuccessful left-wing Swedish journalist who lived off coffee, cigarettes, junk food and booze, and died aged 50 after climbing seven flights of stairs, having recently sold to a publisher the series of crime novels now called The Millennium Trilogy. It was originally called The Men Who Hate Women, and in Sweden the first of the series was published under that prize-winningly awful title. The Millennium Trilogy is an improvement, but hardly has the ring of a hit. Nonetheless, it has sold millions of copies and inspired a global cult.

Saturday

Philip Hensher

French with tears

The civilised world has always needed a lingua franca, through which educated people of international outlook can communicate with each other. For centuries that language was Latin, first the language of theology, then of learning — Erasmus, Milton and Thomas More communicated with a wide community of scholars in Latin. Nowadays, the international language of commerce and culture is English, and from Peru to Shanghai the employees of multinationals talk in their barbarous English idiolects of blue-sky thinking and learning curves, just as their children chant along to the lyrics of West Coast rap. Between the age of Erasmus and that of Ricky Martin, there occurred the supremacy of the French language.

Anthony Sattin

Malice in the Middle East

What does it take to shock a writer? At the beginning of his study on the shaping of the modern Middle East, the academic James Barr describes his eyes bulging at the sight of new evidence relating to the depths to which the French stooped when trying to outdo their British rivals. The document revealed how, during World War II, with British forces fighting to liberate France, the French government was funding and helping to arm Jewish terrorist attacks on British troops in Palestine. The move was both supremely cynical and, as this book shows so clearly, entirely in keeping with the behaviour of these two allies: the British and French had been undermining each other in the region for more than half a century.

John Preston

Something happens to everyone

Towards the end of Cressida Connolly’s novel, one of the characters says of another, ‘I dare say she didn’t see her life as completely uneventful. Something happens to everyone.’ You could, I suppose, argue that not a huge amount happens to anyone in My Former Heart — there are no multiple pile-ups, cyborg invasions or satanic rituals. But what there is is something infinitely more rewarding: a succession of relationships analysed and orchestrated by a writer who seems able to peer directly into the human heart, to understand its follies and strivings, and to write about them with such sparkling originality that it makes you see the world afresh.

Harry Mount

Junk, day and night

Travelling the 400 miles from Glasgow to London recently, Theodore Dalrymple noticed that the roadside was littered with food and drink packaging, flapping in the wind like Buddhist prayer flags. Roads didn’t look like that in the boyhood of Dr Dalrymple (b. 1949). Nor are they like that on the Continent. Littering, he concludes, is an unusually British disease. And the reason goes beyond mere national hygiene habits into familiar Dalrymple territory — the fall of man or, more particularly, the fall of British man, and woman. Behind the increase in littering lies a decrease in civilisation: 36 per cent of British children never eat meals at a dining table with other members of the family.

Simon Heffer

England from above

It is a shame that Sir Roy Strong is subjected to the now-obligatory drivel about his being a ‘national treasure’, because this unthinking cliché diminishes his contribution, over more than 50 years, to our cultural life, whether as a curator or, in later times, as a gardener. Sir Roy has also written a number of books, and in his preface to this one describes his mission to bring the past of our country before a general readership. His last, A Little History of the English Country Church, certainly furthered that aim: it described how our shared past could be discovered by looking in these buildings.

Sara Maitland

Infuriating brilliance

A.L. Kennedy is a very remarkable writer. And her new novel — the first since Day won the Costa prize in 2007 — is a remarkable book. What is really extraordinary about it is that at one level it is a pretty trite love story with dark secrets to be revealed and lots of reflection on truth and lies and how the past lingers on and affects the present — bog-standard stuff. The basic set-up is somewhat improbable, and (as always with Kennedy) somewhat elliptical, even evasive. Elizabeth, the protagonist, is crossing the Atlantic on a cruise ship with her boyfriend who may or may not be planning to marry her.

James Walton

Golden corn

Sebastian Barry’s novels, I’m beginning to think, are a bit like that famous illusion of the two faces and a vase. Most of the time you’re reading them, they seem to be wrenchingly powerful and heartfelt depictions of suffering and grief. Yet, it doesn’t take much of a squint for them suddenly to look like the purest Irish corn. When his last novel The Secret Scripture won the Costa Book of the Year Award in 2008, even the judges suggested that it was badly spoiled by a melodramatic twist at the end. The public, who bought it in their hundreds of thousands, clearly didn’t agree — and neither, it appears, did Barry. On Canaan’s Side also comes complete with a big closing revelation that two of the characters are more connected than we thought.

Jeffrey Meyers

Kim Philby’s library

Kim Philby was the only man in history to have been made both an Officer of the Order of the British Empire and a Hero of the Soviet Union. After his defection to Moscow in 1963, aged 51, he admitted missing some friends, some condiments (Colman’s mustard and Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce) and English cricket — though he continued avidly to follow the scores. He was also a keen reader, though access to books in English through the British Council and USIS libraries in Moscow was denied him. Instead — and unusually — he was able to order books through the post and to pay for them with American dollars sent via a Russian bank. I recently found seven typed letters, addressed from Postbox 509, Main Post Office, Moscow, and signed H.A.R. Philby.

Marcus Berkmann

Bookends | 6 August 2011

Of all the great cultural shifts of recent years, the rise to respectability of American comics may be the strangest. Once, Superman, Batperson and the like were just lowbrow trash for kids, but while some of us were looking in the opposite direction they acquired legendary status and became the cornerstones of Western civilisation. Now every other new film features a superhero, backed up by astounding special effects and a marketing budget that could start a small war. Excellent timing, then, for British comics author Grant Morrison to produce Supergods: Our World in the Age of the Superhero (Jonathan Cape, £17.99), a hefty and authoritative overview of the genre.

Saturday

Andrew Taylor

Bookends: Corpses in the coal hole

Ruth Rendell has probably pulled more surprises on her readers than any other crime writer. But the one she produces with her latest novel is a little unusual even by her standards. Set in the present, The Vault (Hutchinson, £18.99) deals with the discovery of four corpses in the disused coal hole of a Georgian cottage in St John’s Wood. The main investigator is Rendell’s long-running series hero, Chief Inspector Wexford, now retired and living part-time in Hampstead. Called in, a little implausibly, as a police adviser, he copes with what are in effect two murder cases, with different timescales, victims, motives — and killers. He and his wife Dora also find the time to sort out a potentially lethal phase in the love life of their feckless middle-aged daughter.

Allan Massie

Life & Letters | 30 July 2011

There was a photograph the other day of a Hemingway lookalike competition in Key West, Florida. Bizarre? Perhaps not. It’s 50 years since he put the barrel of a shotgun in his mouth and blew his head off, but he remains the most famous and widely recognised American writer of the 20th century, indeed of all time. Sadly, however, the lookalikes all take after the bearded bust-up Papa of his last miserable years, not the handsome young author of the great short stories where every word does its work and there are never too many of them. That Hemingway created an American type — lean, rangy, debonair — last example, Gregory Peck as the journalist in Roman Holiday. There was a photograph the other day of a Hemingway lookalike competition in Key West, Florida.

Sam Leith

Mutiny, mayhem and murder

Nothing more gladdens this reader’s heart than a book that opens up an interesting and underexplored historical byway. Well, perhaps one thing: a book that opens up a historical byway that turns out to be a complete catastrophe. On that count, A Merciless Place more than delivers. Here is one of the great colonial cock-ups. It all started with a question that resonates to this day. When your jails are overcrowded academies of crime, and the respectable public lives in fear of what it imagines to be a violent criminal underclass, what do you do with your surplus convicts? Ken Clarke not yet having been thought of, conventional opinion in the 18th century was: ship them overseas and let them be somebody else’s problem. Yes, it hurt. Yes, it worked.

Andro Linklater

Losing the rat race

This is a book for anyone whose blood ever ran chill on reading the most sinister recipe in fiction, Samuel Whiskers’ instructions on how to cook Tom Kitten: ‘Anna Maria, make me a kitten dumpling roly-poly pudding for my dinner, make it properly with breadcrumbs.’ With or without breadcrumbs, or indeed butter and flour as Anna Maria preferred, rats will eat anything, dead or alive, from kittens to albatrosses. This is a book for anyone whose blood ever ran chill on reading the most sinister recipe in fiction, Samuel Whiskers’ instructions on how to cook Tom Kitten: ‘Anna Maria, make me a kitten dumpling roly-poly pudding for my dinner, make it properly with breadcrumbs.

Anita Brookner

A singular voice

Barbara Pym, now thought of as a reliable and popular novelist of the 1950s and 1960s, has almost disappeared from sight, overshadowed by the more explicit and confessional writers we are accustomed to reading today. Indeed her eclipse was sudden and unforeseen: her mature novels were rejected by three major publishers when she was only midway through her career, and it was only through the generous comments of two of her admirers, Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil in the Times Literary Supplement in 1977, that she was brought again to public attention.

James Walton

Don’t blur the lines

Did you know that on the Central Line’s maiden journey to Shepherd’s Bush, one of the passengers was Mark Twain? Or that The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Sign of Four were both commissioned by the same publisher at the same London dinner? Or that Harrods dropped the apostrophe from its name in 1921, a full 19 years before Selfridges followed suit? My guess is that you probably didn’t — which is where Walk the Lines comes in. Did you know that on the Central Line’s maiden journey to Shepherd’s Bush, one of the passengers was Mark Twain? Or that The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Sign of Four were both commissioned by the same publisher at the same London dinner?

Christian House

A choice of first novels | 30 July 2011

As L.P. Hartley noted, the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. And no more so than during the two world wars, a fact that has provided a rich seam for several debut novelists to mine this summer. In Mark Douglas-Home’s puzzler The Sea Detective (Sandstone Press, £17.99), the tidal pull of a long-gone drama creates a psychological undertow for its hero Cal McGill. As the novel opens, Cal is on the run after covertly planting arctic flowers in Scottish ministers’ gardens as a subtle protest against the administration’s environmental policy. Cal is an oceanographer, skilled in the mapping of briny mysteries, logging sinister flotsam and jetsam through analysis of currents and shipping routes.

Sam Tanenhaus

Appetites and resentments

According to Richard M. Cook, who is Alfred Kazin’s biographer as well as the editor of his journals, the nearly 600 pages of entries assembled in this book represent only one sixth of the total mass Kazin deposited in the archives of the New York Public Library. According to Richard M. Cook, who is Alfred Kazin’s biographer as well as the editor of his journals, the nearly 600 pages of entries assembled in this book represent only one sixth of the total mass Kazin deposited in the archives of the New York Public Library.

David Crane

What was it like at the time?

At midday on Thursday, 8 June 1933 — Erik Larson is very keen on his times — the newly elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt had a call put through to the history department at the University of Chicago. At midday on Thursday, 8 June 1933 — Erik Larson is very keen on his times — the newly elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt had a call put through to the history department at the University of Chicago. Since taking office in early March Roosevelt had been trying to fill the post of ambassador to Berlin, and with none of the usual suspects prepared to take on the job and Congress on the point of adjourning for the summer recess, time was fast running out.

Hilary Mantel

Portrait of a marriage

In her foreword to Elizabeth Jenkins’s 1954 classic, The Tortoise and the Hare, Hilary Mantel reminds us of the unaccountability of love Apart from a war, what could be more interesting than a marriage? A love affair, though it is one of the central concerns of fiction, is a self-limiting tactical skirmish, but a marriage is a long campaign, a grand game of strategy involving setbacks, bluffs and regroupings — a campaign pursued, sometimes, until the parties have forgotten the value of the territory they are fighting over, or have abandoned their first objectives in favour of secret ones.