More from Books

Saturday

Francis King

Why, oh why?

In my many years as a judge for the J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography, I have been constantly surprised by the high proportion of books that deal with the subject of adoption. It is usually a melancholy story of young people who, as their 18th birthdays approach, become obsessed with the need to meet their natural parents, only eventually to find themselves being entertained by families with which they have nothing in common; of couples who suddenly discover that the children that they had come to regard as their own have now abruptly given precedence in their affections to total strangers; and of women who, having made the terrible sacrifice of surrendering a child, now only agree with extreme reluctance to have their past shame, guilt and anguish revived for them.

Christopher Howse

Jail birds

Next to his photographs of 40 women who have spent time in Low Newton prison, Adrian Clarke has juxtaposed short accounts from each of how she got there. Low Newton, near Durham, built in the 1960s and 1970s, holds 360 women, including lifers. Of the 85,000 in prison, 4,400 are women. Is there a face you can call a prison face, as some see in a single mother a pram face? Most look puffy, pale, older than their years and above all tired. Some look scared, a few defiant, none happy. Dazed and confused would cover them. Some are pictured with china figurines, cherubs embracing, or one of those dancing flowers — things that would be ‘nice’, if they weren’t in such a mess. It is not easy to guess the women’s stories from their portraits.

Saturday

Sam Leith

The dying of the light | 7 August 2010

The phrasing of the subtitle is exact: a memoir in blindness, not of blind- ness. Like a portrait in oils — blindness being not just the subject, but the stuff of which this painfully stumbling, uncertainly reaching book is made. And not of, because it’s not something looked back on, like the memoir of a childhood: the blindness is still there waiting. ‘In’ acknowledges that, the way those even decades in recovery say ‘I am an alcoholic.’ And that, of course, heartbreakingly, is there too. In 2006 the novelist Candia McWilliam started to lose her sight, and to lose it in an unusual and tormenting way. She suffers from something called blepharospasm, a disease where the muscles that hold her eyelids open malfunction.

James Buchan

A foot in both camps

As a five-year-old in the Arab quarter of Jerusalem in the 1950s, Kai Bird overheard an elderly American heiress offering $1 million to anyone who could solve the Arab-Israeli conflict. Tugging on his father’s sleeve, he said: ‘Daddy, we have to win this prize.’ Crossing Mandelbaum Gate, Bird’s memoir of growing up in the Middle East, is full of such generosity and innocence. In 1956, Kai’s father, Eugene Bird, moved his young family from Oregon to East Jerusalem, where he was to serve as American vice-consul in a city divided in two by the 1949 armistice line.

Charles Cumming

Good at bad guys

Thriller writers, like wolves and old Etonians, hunt in packs. In the summer months, roaming from city to city, we can be found at assorted festivals and crime fiction conventions, gathered on panels to discuss the pressing literary issues of the day: ‘Ballistics in the Fiction of Andy McNab’, for example, or ‘The Future of the Spy Novel in the Age of Osama bin Laden’. The high tide of these get-togethers is the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, which takes place every July, over four days, in Harrogate. This year, the guest of honour was Jeffery Deaver, recognised across the pond as one of America’s pre-eminent thriller writers.

Inigo Thomas

A smooth passage

Jonathan Raban left Britain and moved to Seattle in 1990, when he was 47. He sold his Volkswagen on his way to Heathrow airport. He bought a Dodge with Washington state plates the next day, and in this second-hand car he would, over the years, travel through and write about his new country. ‘The Pacific Northwest continues to be a magnet — the strongest regional magnet in the country, I would guess — for hopefuls and newlifers of every imaginable cast,’ Raban wrote in the summer of 1993, in a piece that’s now republished in Driving Home: It feels like the last surviving corner of the United States to be widely promoted … as the one green spot in the moral sand-waste of the world.

Christian House

A choice of first novels | 7 August 2010

Write what you know. Isn’t that what aspiring novelists are told? Write what you know. Isn’t that what aspiring novelists are told? While two first-timers have taken the advice this summer, there is also an exception to prove the rule. In The Imperfectionists (Quercus, £16.99), Tom Rachman draws on his time at the International Herald Tribune to write a quirky patchwork tale of an English-language newspaper based in Rome. Cyrus Ott, helmsman of an American industrial dynasty, chronicles the paper’s fortunes, from its inception in the 1950s to the Noughties. Interspersed are the stories of the various reporters, editors and readers whose lives are anchored to Cyrus’s grand enterprise on Corso Vittorio Emanuele II. They make for a hapless bunch.

Lucy Hugheshallett

Raining on their parade

Julius Caesar’s deputy, Cleopatra’s second lover, Marcus Antonius is the perennial supporting act. Julius Caesar’s deputy, Cleopatra’s second lover, Marcus Antonius is the perennial supporting act. In books about Caesar (like Adrian Goldsworthy’s recent biography) or about Cleopatra (mine among them), he appears as a partner, in the ballet-dancing sense of a burly chap whose prime task is to lift a more glittering other into the spotlight. Now he has been allotted half a book: but Goldsworthy is not the man to give him his due of appreciation. Author and subject are absurdly mismatched. Goldsworthy begins by telling his readers that Cleopatra ‘was not really that important’, but he does allow her some intelligence and charm.

Diana Hendry

The French connection

If ever there was a novel to which that old adage about not judging a book by its cover could be applied, it’s this one. If ever there was a novel to which that old adage about not judging a book by its cover could be applied, it’s this one. What you’d expect, picking up Lisa Hilton’s The House with Blue Shutters and seeing, on the front, a nondescript young woman contemplating a blue-shuttered house, is romantic fiction. Historical, claims the blurb. Indeed there’s both romance and history here in a novel that moves between German-occupied France of 1939 and today’s France of second homes and holiday gites. But overall it’s food and sex (sales-team pressure?) that dominate and detract from both romance and history.

Blair Worden

A place in the Pantheon?

Hugh Trevor-Roper might have been a great historian, taking his place in the Pantheon alongside the great historians of the past, from Xenophon to Macaulay. But the mark of a great historian is that he writes great books, on the subject that he has made his own. By this exacting standard [Trevor-Roper] failed. Adam Sisman’s assessment, in his compelling new biography (Hugh Trevor-Roper, Weidenfeld, £25), though I dissent from it, is a measured one. It is balanced by recognition of the extent of Trevor-Roper’s achievements. Many of Sisman’s reviewers have been less measured.

Saturday

Philip Hensher

A world in a handful of words

Though Lydia Davis probably first came to the attention of English readers through her translations, she has been making a substantial reputation for herself in America with sharp, inventive and demanding short stories. Her field is awkwardness, social ‘leakage’, as sociologists say, and the often bad fit between acts and speech, language and meaning. There is a certain delectable inappropriateness in the fact that some readers (like me) will first have encountered her as one of the translators of Penguin’s 2002 Proust. She did an accurate job, but as a writer herself she could not be much further from that great but voluble and frequently casual writer (your punctuation, Marcel, your punctuation).

Lydia Davis

My Neighbors in a Foreign Place

Directly across the courtyard from me lives a middle-aged woman, the ringleader of the building. Sometimes she and I open our windows simultaneously and look at each other for an instant in shocked surprise. When this happens, one of us looks up at the sky, as though to see what the weather is going to be, while the other looks down at the courtyard, as though watching for late visitors. Each is really trying to avoid the glance of the other. Then we move back from the windows to wait for a better moment. Sometimes, however, neither of us is willing to retreat: we lower our eyes and for minutes on end remain standing there, almost close enough to hear each other breathing.

Chris Patten

L’homme qui dit non

The study of history is a subversive calling. All countries make up a story that suits their idea of themselves. Authoritarians stamp out independent historical scholarship; extreme nationalists simply vilify those who try to tell the tale of what really happened. Charles de Gaulle stands at the heart of what France likes to think about itself; Winston Churchill plays a similar role on this side of the Channel. Even a Francophile like me concedes that there is a deal more fiction about the French story than the British. The distinguished historian Robert Gildea has helped to tear the covers of what he has called the ‘redeeming, unifying heroic story’ of France’s wartime years.

Patrick Skene-Catling

Mud, blood and jungle rot

The Matterhorn, at 14,679 feet in the Alps, is said to be very difficult to climb. It is an apt military designation for a (fictional) jungle peak that United States Marines were ordered to assault, abandon and assault once more, against fierce opposition, to establish an artillery base near the North Vietnamese border during the Vietnam war. Matterhorn is also a suitable title for a formidable epic novel, which is arduous reading but well worth taking on, especially if there is any need for further testimony that war is a criminal waste of time, money and men. About 60,000 Americans died in Vietnam to prove the point. It is being demonstrated again, with carefully limited casualties, in Afghanistan, but even greater expense and popular misgivings.

Anne Chisholm

No love lost | 31 July 2010

There is chick lit, or witless, ill-written, juvenile popular fiction, and then there is superior chick lit, which is smart and amusing and written for grown ups. Both these novels fall into the latter category, both are second books by well-regarded journalists and both are worth taking into the garden or on the plane this summer. Lucy Kellaway of the Financial Times stays in the office, where her first hilarious satire of corporate life and the pompous executive male, Martin Lukes: Who Moved My Blackberry? was located. This time, her target is the tragi-comedy of the office affair, and revolves around the ill-judged but irresistible romantic adventures of two women, Stella, the office star, and Bella, the office beauty.

Philip Ziegler

The invisible man

Nicklaus Thomas-Symonds’s study of Clement Attlee is a specimen of that now relatively rare but still far from endangered species, the ‘political’ biography. Nicklaus Thomas-Symonds’s study of Clement Attlee is a specimen of that now relatively rare but still far from endangered species, the ‘political’ biography. It pays scant attention to anything except Attlee’s political career, and rigorously eschews any prying into whatever dark corners there may have been in his private life. Some may think that no politician’s career can fully be understood unless it is viewed in the context of what was going on in his domestic setting. Usually this is a point of view I would defend.

Benjamin Moorehead

Over and out?

Cricket writing, in the age of professionalism, affords less room to dreamy scribes. Fact and revelation are preferred to style and reflection. The roaming tour diary is rare, ghosted autobiographies rife. There are notable exceptions, of course, and we can happily toss Duncan Hamilton among them. Hamilton is on a roll. He has won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year twice, in 2007 and 2009, the latter for his biography of Harold Larwood, chief executioner — and victim — of the infamous Bodyline tactic used to nullify Don Bradman’s Australians in 1932-33.

Saturday

Margaret Macmillan

The threat of holy war

John Buchan’s Greenmantle remains a marvellous read, even if its plot is absurd. John Buchan’s Greenmantle remains a marvellous read, even if its plot is absurd. Who could credit a story about German attempts, headed by the unlovely Kaiser Wilhelm and the glamorous and suitably ruthless Hilda von Einem, to stir up a world-wide Muslim holy war against the Allies during the first world war and ultimately build a vast German empire stretching to India itself? Now Sean McMeekin shows that fiction, after all, was not so far from the truth, and he makes the most of what is a very good story. He starts in the late 19th century with the construction of the Berlin to Baghdad railway.

Peter Hoskin

Same old perversions

Memory Lane always looked so unthreatening to me. But this is Bret Easton Ellis, so a cast reunion for the characters he first wrote about in Less Than Zero 25 years ago is bound to end in tears, screaming and blood. And so it does, with grim efficiency. No sooner has our protagonist, Clay, checked back into his Hollywood apartment complex, than he is plunged feet-first into a swamp of paranoia, sin and violent double-cross. As the doorman says to him on his return, ‘Welcome back.’ So what’s Clay been up to all these years? Becoming a screenwriter would be the literalist’s answer, but drifting further into Easton Ellis’s subconscious is more the truth of it.

Cressida Connolly

Mother issues

The Norwegian, Per Petterson, was not well known until his 2003 novel, Out Stealing Horses, became a surprise international bestseller. It deserved the many prizes it garnered: it is a wonderful book, unsettling and minutely observed. Readers may recall that the closing scene of that novel has the young narrator walking with his mother: ‘We went on like that, arm in arm like a real couple . . . it was like dancing.’ An earlier book, To Siberia, is an imagined account of Petterson’s mother’s young life as a girl in wartime, moving from Danish Jutland to Norway. By contrast, I Curse the River of Time is about the end of a mother’s life. Discovering that she has cancer, the woman returns from Norway to a summer house in Denmark to reflect on her ebbing life.