More from Books

Wednesday

Allan Mallinson

Prelude to Waterloo

Napoleon has humbugged me, by God. He has gained 24 hours’ march on me!’ The Duke of Wellington’s exclamation was at least honest; he made only a show of calmness when told at the Duchess of Richmond’s ball on 15 June 1815 that the French were across the border. His reputation stood in the balance, along with the peace of Europe; yet by midnight on the 18th he had a famous victory to his name — ‘a battle of the first rank won by a captain of the second’, Victor Hugo would call it, trying to find some consolation in the complete French defeat at Waterloo.

Susan Hill

An indisputable masterpiece

Of how many novelists can it be said that they have never written a bad sentence? Well, it can be said of William Trevor, as it could of his fellow countryman John McGahern, and of many another Irish novelist. What was it that so formed them, to write such elegant, flexible, lucid, beautiful but serviceable prose? Instead of spending time doing MA courses in Creative Writing, all aspirants should be locked in a castle with only the novels of Trevor and McGahern to read and re-read. That would teach them how it should be done.

Caroline Moore

Ticking the boxes

How do you describe novels written by a Fellow of All Souls, laced with extreme post-modern self-consciousness and lavish with cultural references, but revolving almost entirely around graphic permutations of the sexual act? As a genre, it can surely only be called clever-dick-lit. This is Adam Thirlwell’s second foray into this exclusive terrain. His first work, Politics, hit the news when he was included as the youngest writer in Granta’s 2003 list of Best Young British Writers before the novel was even published, which may or may not have affected the reviews. A sour note of envy was certainly struck by some.

James Walton

Rhyme and reason

On the face of it, Nicholson Baker’s books are a varied bunch. His fiction ranges from the ultra close-up observations of daily life in the early novels to the hard-core sex of Fermata and Vox (a copy of which Monica Lewinsky famously gave to Bill Clinton). His non-fiction includes a tribute to John Updike, a plea for libraries not to abandon card catalogues and an attempt to prove that Winston Churchill was a bloodthirsty anti-Semite. There is, though, one quality they do share — and that’s an unmistakable obsessiveness. It’s a quality definitely not lacking in Baker’s new novel either. The narrator of The Anthologist is Paul Chowder, a middle-aged poet in crisis. His girlfriend of eight years has left him.

Wednesday

Philip Hensher

Moments of clarity

By now, Alice Munro has established a territory as her own so completely, you wonder that the Canadian Tourist Board doesn’t run bus tours there. Perhaps they do, even though it presents an appearance more characteristic than inviting. To think of her world is to think of lonely houses at the edge of bleak, small towns; of unsatisfied backrooms looking over muddy fields; of suburbs, making do; of institutions imposed on half-made landscapes, and human disappointment reflected in the world about her characters. It is classic short-story territory, and over the years Munro has carved a substantial reputation without venturing very far from what she does best; the classic short story of disappointment and epiphany, in the landscape she knows and understands.

Andro Linklater

Lessons from the past

Oh the relief of quantitative easing! Who could fail to welcome a fiscal laxative guaranteed to loosen the bankers’ constipated hold on credit? But before much more of the mixture is gulped down, it may be salutary to glance at the effect of the purgatives administered to ease economic bowels in the late 17th century. The credit crunch that afflicted the country in the 1690s produced results with which we are familiar. In the words of Lord Macaulay, ‘the great instrument of exchange became thoroughly deranged, all trade, all industry were smitten as with a palsy’.

Molly Guinness

Missed opportunity

A World According to Women: An End to Thinking, by Jane McLoughlin The Noughtie Girl’s Guide to Feminism, by Ellie Levenson Jane McLoughlin is furious with women. We have let the feminists down and turned off the rational sides of our brains in favour of the thrilling emotional life that popular culture provides. The feminists were too intellectual and too angry with men to win the sympathy of most ordinary women, who generally liked their husbands and fathers. Instead, popular culture took possession of female psyches and has left us unthinking, disunited and unable to cope with, or even identify, reality. A lot of the time McLoughlin is convincing.

Miles Johnson

The great Russian takeaway

That the rise of a powerful coterie of Russian billionaires overlapped with Britain’s transformation into an offshore tax-haven is unlikely to escape the notice of both countries’ future historians. Indeed it is entirely plausible that had successive British governments in the 1990s been less amenable to foreign wealth, this book would have been entitled Genevagrad rather than Londongrad. Mark Hollingsworth and Stewart Lansley raise interesting questions about how the rocketing price of property, contemporary art and even private school fees of early Noughties Britain, fuelled by a steady supply of roubles, contributed to the bubble preceding the bust.

Patrick Marnham

Populist preaching

Patrick Marnham visits Brazil’s annual festival of literature Many years ago a wild-eyed Englishman hacked his way into the Amazon rain forest and disappeared, never to be seen again. Since then the fate of Percy Fawcett, known as ‘the Colonel’, has remained a mystery. Fawcett, a heavily bearded pipe-smoker in a deerstalker hat, was a figure of fun to the bright young things of England in the 1920s. This was unfair since he was engaged in work of some importance; he was mapping the Brazilian frontier with Bolivia and Peru. Colonel Fawcett returned to the Amazon many times and over the years, distracted from his science, he became convinced of the existence of a Lost World in the heart of the forest.

Wednesday

Ferdinand Mount

The Go-Away Bird

There is no plaque yet on No 13 Baldwin Crescent, otherwise known as ‘Dunedin’. There ought to be. For on the top floor of this shabby yellow-brick house, hidden away between the Camberwell New Road and gloomy Myatt’s Fields, Muriel Spark wrote most of the four or five novels for which we’ll remember her. She was as happy in leafy, run-down Baldwin Crescent as she ever had been or was to be in her long, tense, proud, unforgiving life. She did, it is true, make an excursion to her childhood Edinburgh home to re-immerse herself in the speech of Morningside while she wrote The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in four weeks.

Dan Jones

The new age of enlightenment

God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science, by James Hannam We all have our hobby-horses. James Hannam’s is the abuse of the word ‘medieval’. Hats off. As I have written in this magazine before, using the term as shorthand for anything you consider cruel, arcane or barbarous (be it the Taliban, the hunt, the House of Lords, or whatever) is ignorant and unhistorical. If I had my way, all offenders would get a long spell in the village stocks.  In God’s Philosophers, Hannam has pursed his cheeks and attempted to puff away the common notion that nothing of scientific significance happened in Christendom between the fall of Rome and the birth of Galileo.

Matthew Dennison

Strangely familiar

In 1935, Noël Coward included in his series of playlets, Tonight at 8.30, a jaunty, song-filled exposé, in Victorian dress, of fam- ily relationships, Family Album. Penelope Lively’s novel of the same title, her 16th, covers similar territory — without the jauntiness or predisposition to burst into song. It is an apt title. Lively’s novel is an extended meditation on the meaning of family, the nature of blood relationship and our interconnectedness based on the accident of birth. In place of conventional plot, it proceeds by snapshots and vignettes, a series of portraits and first-person narratives, not so much a story as a sequence of word pictures held together like beads on a string by the flexible thread of the subjects’ kinship.

Graham Stewart

Playing for high stakes

1938: Hitler’s Gamble, by Giles MacDonogh Hitler’s greatest gamble in 1938 was his determination to occupy the Czechoslovak Sudetenland, even at the risk of sparking a European war. Neither Neville Cham- berlain nor the French prime minister, Edouard Daladier, was prepared to play for such high stakes and they threw in their chips, giving the Führer what he wanted without bloodshed. It will therefore come as a surprise that in Giles MacDonogh’s 1938: Hitler’s Gamble, a mere seven paragraphs are devoted to the Munich conference that effectively sealed Czechoslovakia’s fate. Instead it is the Austrian capital that takes centre stage in this compelling survey of a tumultuous year.

Lewis Jones

Beating his demons

When I first read Naked Lunch, as a teenager sleeping rough in a Greek olive grove, I thought it funny, baffling and vile, its hallucinatory horrors recalling paintings by Francis Bacon — ‘mouth and eyes are one organ that leaps forward to snap with transparent teeth’. A diet of ouzo and dodgy mousaka played havoc with my bowels, and the pages before me were soon behind me, which I thought would please William Burroughs, whose humour was decidedly cloacal. It would also have pleased Edith Sitwell, whose review suggested that such was a fitting use for the book: ‘I do not wish to spend the rest of my life,’ she sniffed, ‘with my nose nailed to other people’s lavatories.

Saturday

Allan Massie

Life & Letters | 8 August 2009

Between 1945 and his death in 1961 Ernest Hemingway published only two books, apart from collections of stories mostly written before the war. The two were Across the River and Into the Trees and The Old Man and the Sea. The first was generally considered a failure, the second a success; and it’s doubtless perversity that makes me much prefer Across the River. The meagre tally might suggest he was burned out, but for most of the time he was working hard on various projects, and the difficulty was to finish books.

Wednesday

Paul Johnson

One man and his dogma

‘The second world war lasted for 2,174 days, cost $1.5 trillion and claimed the lives of over 50 million people. That represents 23,000 lives lost every day, or more than six people killed every minute, for six long years.’ This neat summary is characteristic of the way Andrew Roberts uses statistics to bring home to the reader the enormity, the waste and the horror of that terrible conflict. The book is long, but it is tightly written, every page packed with terse comment, well-organised facts and, often, telling details. It has a thesis: Hitler lost the war essentially because he was a Nazi, and allowed his race theories and ideological cruelty to get in the way of rational decision-taking.

Marcus Berkmann

Diagnosing the nation’s ills

It must be 20 years since Spectator readers first encountered the name Theodore Dalrymple. It’s not his real name, of course. Several times over the years people have told me of his true identity, which I have always instantly forgotten, presumably because I don’t really want to know it. Far more appropriate that Dalrymple should operate within his own world and on his own terms: as a doctor and a psychiatrist, working in an inner-city hospital and a nearby prison, dealing every day with the detritus of our native land, the slum-dwellers, the underclass, call them what you will. His dispatches from this frontline — closer to your home and mine than any other — have always had a tone and a quality entirely their own.

Simon Baker

Past imperfect | 5 August 2009

We Are All Made of Glue, by Marina Lewycka The Rehearsal, by Eleanor Catton Yalo, by Elias Khory, translated by Humphrey Davies We Are All Made of Glue is Marina Lewycka’s third novel — or, more accurately, her third published novel, since she famously made her way through several other works and a rain-forest’s worth of rejection-slips before finding success with A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (2005) at the age of 59. It is a multi-stranded book narrated by Georgie Sinclair, a Yorkshire-born woman in her forties who now lives in London.

Robert Beeston

The great thaw

We had a running joke in my family that entering the Soviet Union was a bit like smuggling in somebody else’s nose. Every school holiday, as I presented my passport to the granite-faced Soviet border guard at Moscow’s Sheremetevo Airport, my photograph would be scrutinised at length to make sure it matched my face. Sometimes more senior guards would be summoned in an agonising ritual that left Western visitors in little doubt they were entering hostile territory. Our apartment was bugged. We were followed. Russians were not allowed to visit our flat without permission. Those who challenged the regime — the tiny group of courageous dissidents — were inevitably broken by the system.

Katherine Ashenburg

The human condition

The hardest thing about the advent of a new collection of stories by A. L. Kennedy — her fifth, called What Becomes — is the search for synonyms for ‘brilliant’. Her uncanny dialogue is as note-perfect as J. D. Salinger’s, her vision as astutely bleak as Alice Munro’s, and her ability to summon up a society in a few strokes rivals William Trevor’s. To these gifts, Kennedy adds a few twists all her own — a relish for the grotesque, sudden splashes of violence, and the kind of contagious, verging-on-hysteria laughter that attends final examinations, wakes and other emergencies. Readers of Kennedy will find the terrain in this collection familiar.