More from Books

Wednesday

Andrew Taylor

A choice of crime novels | 21 January 2009

Ruth Rendell’s Kingsmarkham series is set against the changing backdrop of a provincial town over more than 40 years. But her London-based books, though they lack recurring characters and locations, almost amount to a series in their own right. She has made the city her own, and writes with both knowledge and compassion about its streets and buildings, its transport and its shops — and above all about its inhabitants. Her latest novel, Portobello (Hutchinson, £18.99), is almost incidentally a crime story. The road of the title provides the spine of a narrative that shifts expertly between groups of characters in widely disparate social settings. An art dealer tries to conceal his pathetically plausible guilty secret from his GP fiancée.

Chris Skidmore

Pawns in the royal game

The Sisters Who Would Be Queen, by Leanda de Lisle Only recently a portrait minature by Lavina Teerlinc was identified as being of Lady Jane Grey. Her diminutive size, coiffed red hair and crimson lips had suggested that it might be her — except that the eyes are blue, while Jane’s were known to be brown; but Teerlinc was accustomed to giving all her subjects blue eyes. It is all we have; no other portrait of Jane is known to exist. The absence of a recognisable image reflects the problem facing any historian wishing to study her. The evidence is simply not there to form a credible description, let alone a biography, of England’s shortest reigning monarch.

Lee Langley

Troubled waters

Empires of the Indus, by Alice Albinia When Alice Albinia set off for the source of the Indus she was not embarking on a quest for the unknown: she knew where the river rises. She wanted to start her journey at its mouth, the delta on the Arabian Sea, to travel upstream to Tibet and tell the story of the river which gives India its name. Empires of the Indus covers a 2,000-mile journey and 5,000 years of history. Albinia’s prize-winning first book is a personal odyssey through landscape and time, fed by scholarship. Her pages resonate with great names: Timur, Genghis Khan, Alexander, Aurangzeb. But before that we have the conquest of Sindh, the botched finale of the British Raj, Independence, and the horrors of Partition.

Christopher Ondaatje

The life of the heart

Love’s Civil War: Elizabeth Bowen and Charles Ritchie, Letters and Diaries from the Love Affair of a Lifetime edited by Victoria Glendinning, with Judith Roberts It is probable that the Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) was a virgin ten years after her marriage to Alan Cameron, the retired Secretary to the Central Council of School Broadcasting at the BBC. Victoria Glendinning tells us that ‘their alliance was always close — but companionable, not sexual.

Alberto Manguel

No longer at home

The Writer as Migrant, by Ha Jin Three quest-ions, labelled as ‘Aristot- elian’ by the author, begin the Rice University Campbell Lectures delivered by Ha Jin in 2007: to whom, as whom, and in whose interest does a writer write? To which the reader might respond: can any writer truthfully answer any of these questions? The identity of a writer and of his readers is a matter debated long before Aristotle and well into the groves of post-modernist academe. From Homer blindly taking dictation from his muse to Joyce sweating away in the smithy of his soul, the writer has been perceived by himself and by his audience as innumerable things, none truer than another. Ha Jin’s own experience exemplifies these changes of identity.

Wednesday

Philip Hensher

An unlikely bestseller

2666, by Roberto Bolaño Not every writer would write a novel in the form of a completely invented encyclopaedia of imaginary writers and call the result Nazi Literature in the Americas. Not everyone, either, would write a novel in two paragraphs, the second less than 12 words long, or produce a novel about a torturer-poet who writes his work in jet-trails in the sky. As soon as Roberto Bolaño came to the attention of the world, it was clear that, however extraordinary his work seemed in formal design and subject, he might have something even more extraordinary under wraps. After his death in 2003, word emerged from the Spanish-speaking world of a gigantic novel called 2666.

Raymond Carr

Horses decline, dogs advance

The Dog: 5000 Years of the Dog in Art, by Tamsin Pickeral Dogs: History, Myth, Art, by Catherine Johns The Horse: A Celebration of Horses in Art, by Rachel and Simon Barnes These three books are concerned with the representation in art of man’s most successfully domesticated wild animals,: the dog and the horse. Dogs, as carnivores, domesticated themselves as early as 14000 BC, picking up scraps of meat left lying around by our prehistoric ancestors. Horses, as herbivores, were not attracted to such scraps. They were captured in the wild and broken in. Dogs were Jacks-of-all-trades.

Theodore Dalrymple

The unselfish gene

On Kindness, by Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor Whenever I say to someone that I do not believe that there is a universal human right to healthcare, that person always asks whether, then, I want to see people dying in the street from treatable disease. I in turn ask that person whether he can think of any reason for not allowing people to die in the street other than that they have a right to treatment. The fact that, as often as not, the person has great difficulty with this question suggests not only that our state, but our minds and moral imaginations have become highly bureaucratised. There is no doubt, I think, that we have difficulty with the notion of kindness nowadays.

Ian Thomson

On the run in the Rockies

The Outlander, by Gil Adamson The Outlander, a strikingly good first novel by the Canadian poet Gil Adamson, is a drama of extremity and isolation set in the Rocky Mountains of Canada in the early 1900s. Much of it reads like a pastiche Western with elements of supernatural grotesquerie out of Stephen King or even The X-Files. Turn-of-the-century Alberta is portrayed as a menacing backwater, where settlers are in danger of being scalped by Crow Indians and fur-trappers disembowelled. Into this pioneer territory comes Mary Boulton, a 19-year-old housewife who has just murdered her husband. In physical and emotional disarray, she is on the run from her brothers-in-law, who want her blood in return for the crime committed.

Anne Applebaum

Arthur at Camelot

Journals: 1952-2000, by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, edited by Andrew Schlesinger and Stephen Schlesinger Before sitting down with this hefty doorstopper of a diary, first ask yourself whether you agree — or can imagine yourself agreeing — with the entry Arthur Schlesinger, Jr made on 27 March 1950: ‘I adore sitting around hotel rooms with politicians and newspapermen exchanging gossip over drinks.’ If you do, or can, then you will enjoy this book, for it largely consists of a half-century’s worth of gossip, most of it obtained by sitting around hotel rooms with politicians and newspapermen over drinks.

David Crane

His own best biographer

Byron in Love, by Edna O’Brien ‘We would entreat him to believe that a certain portion of liveliness, somewhat of fancy, is necessary to constitute a poem,’ wrote Henry Brougham in the Edinburgh Review, when the young Byron was unwise enough to expose his first, dismal book of juvenilia to the gaze of ‘Citizen Mob’, ‘and that a poem in the present day, to be read, must contain at least one thought, either in a little degree different from the ideas of former writers or differently expressed’. It is as well for a lot of us that there seem to be different standards for biographers ,because there can be even less to be said for a new book about Byron than there is for most literary retreads.

Saturday

Allan Massie

Getting the detail right

Evelyn Waugh told Nancy Mitford he was ‘surprised to find’ that Proust ‘was a mental defective. He has absolutely no sense of time.’ Evelyn Waugh told Nancy Mitford he was ‘surprised to find’ that Proust ‘was a mental defective. He has absolutely no sense of time.’ (Joke, given the novel’s title?) ‘He can’t remember anyone’s age. In the same summer as Gilberte gives him a marble and Françoise takes him to the public lavatory in the Champs Elysées, Bloch takes him to a brothel.’ Well, I can’t remember just where all this comes in A La Recherche, but suspect that either Waugh or Scott-Moncrieff, whose translation he was reading, made a confusion of tenses.

Wednesday

Sam Leith

Not so fantastic

The Natural History of Unicorns, by Chris Lavers ‘A long time ago, when the earth was green,/ There were more kinds of animals than you’ve ever seen./ They’d run around free while the earth was being born,/ But the loveliest of all was the unicorn.’ So Shel Silverstein’s saccharine ditty informed generations of kiddies. As Chris Lavers’ whimsical, scholarly and continually absorbing book tells us, there’s a lot more to unicorns than that. The first mention of a unicorn in literature appears four centuries before the birth of Christ, in a ‘mess of a book’ called Indica by the Greek orientalist Ctesias of Cnidus.

Christopher Howse

Foreign friends

From Bonbon to Cha-cha, edited by Andrew Delahunty On the spine of From Bonbon to Cha-cha shines the silhouette, in gold leaf, of a dancing couple, which makes the volume look a little vulgar on the shelf. This is no mistake. The Strictly Come Dancing triumph of celebrity over expertise is to be applied to marketing dictionaries. The first edition of this item was published in 1997 as The Oxford Dictionary of Foreign Words and Phrases. That’s too dull a menu to entice today’s drinkers of machiatto and chompers of ciabatta. Books on words are big business and there is a dictionary war between rivals. Oxford, with a history of subsidising lexicography, more or less willingly, now seeks to monetarise its computerised verbal capital.

Jonathan Mirsky

The misery of an intellectual

Reborn: Susan Sontag, Early Diaries, 1947-1964, edited by David Rieff Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir, by David Rieff Susan Sontag, who died in 2004, was one of the late- 20th century’s famous public intellectuals. A stupendously well-read novelist, essayist and critic, strikingly good looking with her white badger-lock, she was engagé, pronouncing on many subjects, from Chinese dissidents to the meaning of disease. She appeared unassailably self-confident, so it is sad, but a bit of a relief, to learn from this first volume of her journal, begun when she was 14, that Sontag was precocious but also deeply depressed. I can’t recall reading a more melancholy book.

Nicholas Usherwood

The Leap from the Judas Tree

Stephen Chambers, by Andrew Lambirth Of the same 1980s generation as Peter Doig and the Young British Artists (Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin et al), Stephen Chambers has always pursued a far more maverick, and profoundly more interesting, path. Starting out as a well-regarded, heavy-duty abstract painter while still a student at St Martin’s School of Art, he had his perceptions utterly changed by a spell as a Rome Scholar c.1983, the pursuit of a way of painting that could pin down his intensely sensual response to the complexities of the seen world quickly becoming the preoccupation of a lifetime. The outcome is paintings which, in their idiosyncratic blending of figurative and abstract elements, defy simple categorisation.

Mary Kenny

Was the Abdication necessary?

At least one very startling claim emerges in this study: according to her own account, Wallis, Duchess of Windsor, never consummated her first two marriages. Indeed, she never allowed any man (before the Duke of Windsor, presumably) to touch her ‘below the Mason-Dixon line’. If this is true, it makes a nonsense of the Abdication, since an unconsummated marriage, within Christian canon law, is automatically grounds for annulment. This would mean that the lady was not — or did not need to be — a divorcee, and thus her pairing with Edward, Prince of Wales, should have raised no objection whatsoever.

Monday

Robert Salisbury

A strong line required

Putin and the Rise of Russia, by Michael Stuermer For many years, Professor Michael Stuermer has been one of the West’s most respected authorities both on Russia and on Germany. As at home in English as in his native German, he has pursued not only an academic career, but has brought lustre to the usually grubby trade of journalism as chief correspondent for Die Welt. Few can be as well qualified to write about contemporary Russia, to analyse the extraordinary phenomenon of Putin or to add a late addendum on Putin’s successor, Dmitri Medvedev. The resulting book is authoritative, readable and concise.

David Caute

The Millers’ tale

Arthur Miller, 1915-1962, by Christopher Bigsby Arthur Miller was born in 1915 in Jewish Harlem, the son of immigrants from the shtetl, enjoying comfortable family wealth until his father’s business collapsed. The key events in forming his political outlook were the Depression, the Spanish Civil War, the Cold War — and the slow-to-dawn truth about Stalinism. The ever-present corollary is ‘New York Jew’. At the outset of a biography encompassing the man and his work, Christopher Bigsby points up Miller’s recurring debt to the classical Greek theatre, ‘where a society could engage with its myths, its animating principles.’ Tall and strong, Miller remarkably was never conscripted during the second world war.

Carey Schofield

Division and misrule

‘The 20th century was not kind to Pakistan’, Tariq Ali says in the first sentence of his latest book on his native land. ‘The 20th century was not kind to Pakistan’, Tariq Ali says in the first sentence of his latest book on his native land. The glib opener is a taste of what’s to come. It is both annoying and accurate. The 20th century created Pakistan, after all, and — apart from eight most difficult years since the turn of the millennium — the country has known no other.