More from Books

Wednesday

Andrew Taylor

Deadlier than the male

When does a novel stop being a novel and become a crime story? It’s often assumed that there is an unbridgeable gap between them, but that’s not necessarily so. When does a novel stop being a novel and become a crime story? It’s often assumed that there is an unbridgeable gap between them, but that’s not necessarily so. When Will There Be Good News? (Doubleday, £17.99) is a case in point. It is the third of Kate Atkinson’s novels about Jackson Brodie, a former policeman who is crime-prone in the way that other people are accident-prone. Here he is involved in a train crash in Edinburgh, which brings him again to the notice of Louise Monroe, a hard-bitten Scottish CID officer.

Michael Howard

The power of the evasive word

The Economist Book of Obituaries, by Keith Colquhoun and Ann Wroe De mortuis nil nisi bonum, or so it used to be said. That was then. Now, since the late Hugh Montgomery- Massingbird became obituaries editor of the Telegraph, James Fergusson of the Independent, and Keith Colquhoun and Ann Wroe of the Economist, all has changed, changed utterly. Now obituaries are light entertainment. The great and the good can no longer console themselves for mortality with the expectation of unctuous posthumous tributes: the first paragraph of the Economist’s treatment of Edward Heath warns them what to expect: The tributes spoke of his integrity, his long service and the strength of his convictions. Many of his fellow conservatives were especially keen to emphasise his love of music and sailing.

Saturday

Sam Leith

Love between the lines

Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, edited by Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton Why does this book need to exist? It’s a legitimate question — the correspondence of both these poets has been published in generous selected editions — but an easy one to answer. Quite apart from the fact you’d need prehensile thumbs to follow their exchanges properly through those two fat volumes, the unexpurgated version gives you not only ease but texture: their ‘helter-skelter shop-talk’; gossip about Ezra Pound and Marianne Moore and Randall Jarrell; Lowell ‘exhaustingly’ changing his typewriter ribbons; Bishop getting ‘some of a very old & liquefied jelly bean’ stuck to her letter.

Robert Cooper

Recent audio books | 22 November 2008

To some of us solitude may be sitting on a park bench amidst a bustling city. To Trond Sander, seclusion is a rickety forest cabin in the far east of Norway. For company his only companion is his dog, Lyra. Isolation is 67-year-old Trond’s chosen existence — ‘all my life I have longed to be alone in a place like this’. Do not think for one moment that Out Stealing Horses is in any aspect claustrophobic or disheartening — quite the contrary. Although Trond has recently lost his wife and sister, this is an entirely gloom-free novel. Law-abiders and lovers of our four-legged friends can also rest easy, as no horses were stolen in the making of this novel.

Wednesday

The Spectator

Books Of The Year | 19 November 2008

A further selection of the best and worst books of 2008 , chosen by  some of our regular reviewers Ferdinand Mount I’m not sure quite what it is that captivated me about Tim Winton’s novel, Breath (Hamish Hamilton, £14.99). It’s a sort of Huck Finn goes surfing in Australia. A scrawny kid bums along the coast in search of the ultimate wave and falls under the spell of Sando, the mysterious wizard of the surfboard. Not my scene, to put it mildly, but it is queerly compelling and I can still taste the spray. Mick Imlah’s The Lost Leader (Faber, £9.99) well deserved its Forward Poetry Prize.

Jonathan Sumption

New light on a dark age

Millennium: The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom, by Tom Holland Millennia, like centuries, are artificial quantities, mathematical nothings. Medieval men may not have shared our obsession with marking the years in round numbers. But they had much the same desire to bring form and structure to a history that might otherwise be a mere jumble of events. Chronicles traditionally began at the Creation. All history was a divinely ordained cycle concluding with the last trump. Men lived under the perpetual threat of extinction. Apocalyptic writers of the age were remarkably precise about how it would happen. There would be natural calamities, human catastrophes, plague and mass-murder. Antichrist would come to reign on earth. Then all would be extinguished by the Second Coming.

Alan Strachan

Not always a saint

On her sole experience of sharing a stage with Sybil Thorndike the redoubtable old dragon, Marie Tempest, found all her scene-stealing tricks foiled by her co-star. Hear- ing of Thorndike’s later damehood she muttered: ‘That’s what comes of playing saints’. Thorndike was, of course, always associated with Saint Joan from her first portrayal of Shaw’s heroine in 1924 through revivals at home and overseas to her final encounter with the role in her eighties on radio, that matchless voice still silver-toned. Other saints included Teresa of Avila along with women carrying a nimbus of sanctity or the mystic — Katharine of Aragon, Edith Cavell and a memorable Mrs Moore in a stage version of A Passage to India.

Harriet Sergeant

Three men and a singer

Ian Buruma’s latest book, The China Lover, is a fictionalised take on themes previously examined in his impressive body of non-fictional work. His views on Japan, its history, films and underworld as well as the role of the outsider, the relationship between East and West and much more are all unpacked here as we follow the life of the teenage singer and actress, Yoshiko Yamaguchi. She takes us on a tour of Manchuria and Shanghai in the 1930s, Japan during the American Occupation and, finally, Lebanon in the 1970s. These are periods and places that Buruma knows intimately and writes about with confidence. Yamaguchi’s story is told from the perspective of three men who encounter her at different periods of her life.

James Delingpole

Extraordinarily ordinary

I see from the cover of this book that at least three reviewers had kind words to say about Gordon Brown’s previous effort. ‘Very moving,’ the Guardian wrote. ‘Readable and intelligent,’ alleged the Sunday Times. ‘Trust me: this is a fine book,’ claimed The Spectator. Perhaps they were being polite because the author is not a professional writer, or because all his royalties will go to charity. Perhaps Courage was a dramatically better book. Wartime Courage, though, is lame. And I’m not just saying that because Gordon Brown’s economic incompetence has caused me such misery.

Hugh Brogan

Myth-maker at work

The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington, by Jennet Conant It is a curious fact, not enough appreciated, that the qualities which make men successful entrepeneurs — imagination, courage, energy, ambition and so on — can be nearly useless in politics, diplomacy and war. Thus, William Stephenson, a rich Canadian businessman, was set up in New York (or set himself up) as one of Britain’s leading intelligence agents during the second world war. His principal achievement, for good or ill, was his contribution to the establishment of the OSS, forerunner of the CIA. ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan was a close friend.

Jonathan Keates

Grandmother’s footsteps

The Island that Dared, by Dervla Murphy Up the airy mountain, down the rushy glen, where the deuce can we go without Dervla Murphy getting there before us? This miracle of ubiquity has rattled from end to end of the Andes, tracked the Indus to its source, ridden a mule through Ethiopia and a bicycle across Romania. If her curiosity, stamina and resourcefulness are remarkable, so too is her modesty, a virtue not always uppermost among travel-writers. She demands no special praise from us for having endured the rigours of her various journeys and this lack of ego-preening lends a greater authenticity to the overall atmosphere.

Joanna Kavenna

Top of the world

Late Nights on Air comes daubed with the usual eulogies, yet this is one book that truly merits the ecstatic blurb and more besides. It is Elizabeth Hay’s third novel, after A Student of Weather (2000) and Garbo Laughs (2003), both of which have been lauded in her native Canada and, to a lesser degree, beyond. Late Nights on Air is set largely in the mid-Seventies, in Yellowknife, the main town of Canada’s Northwest Territories. Harry Boyd, edging into his forties, has failed elsewhere, and has come to lick his wounds at the local radio station where his career began.

Philip Hoare

Where did the joke end?

Lord Berners, by Peter Dickinson Lord Berners spent his life with his reputation preceding him.  Lovingly fictionalised as ‘Lord Merlin’, he of the multicolour dyed pigeons in Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, less sympathetically rendered as ‘Titty’ in Harold Nicolson’s Some People, Sir Gerald Hugh Tyrwitt-Wilson, 14th Baron Berners (1883-1950), suffered forever from a status imposed from outside. As a composer, painter, novelist, poet and parodist, Berners’s dilemma was diagnosed accurately by Harold Acton: ‘Had he been less versatile he would have been less charming but more profound’.

Jane Ridley

A scandalous woman

Lady Worsley’s Whim, by Hallie Rubenhold There is a magnificent portrait by Reynolds at Harewood House in Yorkshire of Lady Worsley. She wears a sweeping red riding habit, she looks self-assured and alert, and she holds a riding crop as an allusion to her skill as a horsewoman. In reality, as Hallie Rubenhold’s book vividly reveals, Lady Worsley was one of the most scandalous women of her day, the subject of the first squalid celebrity divorce. Lady Worsley, who rejoiced in the odd first name of Seymour, was a massive heiress. She inherited a fortune of over £60 million in today’s money from her father, Sir John Fleming, who owned a farm in the London suburb of Brompton. Aged 18, she married a wealthy, socially ambitious baronet named Sir Richard Worsley.

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 19 November 2008

Chekhov originally wrote the dramatic monologue, On The Harmful Effects of Tobacco, in 1886, and substantially revised it for a second version of 1902 shortly before his death. It deals with Ivan Ivanovitch Nyukhin, a hen-pecked husband who delivers a lecture (at the request of his wife) on the evils of smoking. The play has largely been ignored by Chekhov scholars in the West, despite the fact that the original version was popular in Russia in the 1880s as a farce: it was only published in translation in 1954, and appeared in the edition shown above in 1977.

Saturday

Charles Sprawson

‘The college of God’s gift’

The only man from Dulwich College I have ever known, or met, was a master at my school, M. H. Bushby. A distinguished cricketer at Dulwich, he went on to captain Cambridge. Here he is described, in later life, as a ‘much respected and much loved housemaster’, so my attitude to Dulwich has always been entirely favourable, though all I knew of it was its vague outline on the edge of the South Circular road, a distant palazzo surrounded by extensive playing fields. This monumental volume, beautifully produced by the college, leaves nothing out. Old boys of Dulwich are known as Old Alleynians because of its founder in 1619, Edward Alleyn, who played all those ‘over-reaching’ heroes in Marlowe’s plays.

Allan Massie

Author! Author!

Malcolm Lowry liked to quote the Spanish philosopher, Ortega y Gasset, who saw Man’s life as a sort of novel, made up as you go along. Certainly there are times when life aspires to the condition of fiction. The story of Peter Mandelson, George Osborne, Nat Rothschild and the Russian oligarch might have been written by several novelists. Somerset Maugham, for instance, would have told it straight, dead-pan, through his favourite disillusioned, mildly cynical, narrator — old Mr Maugham himself, scarcely disguised — and would have presented it as an example of human folly. His focus would have been on Osborne, depicted as a callow young man of dangerous sincerity.

Adam Nicolson

Out of his shell

Notes from Walnut Tree Farm, by Roger Deakin, edited by Alison Hastie and Terence Blacker The writer, Robert Macfarlane, said of his friend, Roger Deakin, that everything Deakin had ever said tended ‘towards diffidence, an abrogation of the self’. It was a fierce verdict. Not a denial of the self or even a suppression of it but an abrogation, an annulment or cancellation of who he was. Macfarlane meant it as no criticism. He loved and even revered Deakin and Deakin, by his own account, replied, quoting Keats that ‘We should rather be the flower than the bee’, that the recipient, the quietist, whose governing quality was an alert passivity, was the man of virtue.

Byron Rogers

The mannikins don’t walk

All in the Mind, by Alastair Campbell It was a good idea. You start with a psychiatrist, and not any psychiatrist, but a professor of psychiatry, a man ‘widely viewed as one of the best psychiatrists in the business’, specialising in the treatment of depression; then you give him a caseload of depressives, and not any depressives, but a Balkan rape-victim, an alcoholic English Cabinet Minister, an immigrant forced into prostitution, a young woman hideously scarred by fire, a successful barrister caught out in his adulteries; and you see him as they see him, calm, omniscient, dispensing advice and hope. Then you have him crack up. It was a very good idea.

Linsey Mcgoey

Doing good and doing well

Philanthrocapitalism, by Matthew Bishop and Michael Green Some say there’s no such thing as pure charity. All altruistic gifts are rooted in the self-interest of the giver, whether the goal is to increase your social status or your tax portfolio. If that’s true, the only thing new about philanthrocapitalism is that people such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are being more upfront about the need to make money out of charity. And they are confident that combining business acumen with philanthropy will improve the world that made them rich in the first place. Worth an estimated $30 billion, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had long been the largest charity in the world, with more money to battle global health inequalities than the UN’s World Health Organisation.