More from Books

Wednesday

Francis King

Culture-clash on the campus

Chicago, by Alaa al-Aswani Because I spend part of each winter in Egypt, friends from time to time ask me to recommend, not a guide, but a book that will give them the ‘feel’ of that country. Invariably my choice has been The Cairo Trilogy of Naguib Mahfouz, the only Arab writer to have won the Nobel Prize. But since the English publication of Alaa al-Aswani’s The Yakoubian Building in 2007, it too has become, for me, an instant recommendation. This is a remarkable work, in which the goings-on in a venerable residential block, still in actual existence, is brilliantly presented as a microcosm of Cairo life.

Anita Brookner

A crisis of confidence

The Believers, by Zoë Heller Zoë Heller’s Notes on a Scandal won wide publicity and was deservedly praised for its depiction of female malice and the unhappiness that fosters it. Her present novel is so markedly different that it might have been written by another hand. This is no mean feat, but the effect is disconcerting. To begin with, it is completely Americanised, not only in its setting but in its locution, so that the reader must constantly adjust to different idioms, different references. This too is no mean feat, but somewhat alienating, as are the characters, who are universally charmless. The title is only one indication of their unreliability: they have beliefs which turn out to be misplaced and which have little connection with their behaviour.

Jonathan Mirsky

No love lost

It has been famously written, and often observed, that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Never was this truer than in the case of the Wittgensteins, who were also, some of them, crazy. I take notes in books for review and in this one I wrote ‘nuts’ 23 times. Ludwig, the famous philosopher, was merely the craziest. Three of his brothers killed themselves, and he often considered suicide — insofar as anything he said can be taken seriously. Almost everything he wrote, about which there have been countless decryptions, defies normal understanding. Take the epigraph of Alexander Waugh’s family biography, drawn from Ludwig’s On Certainty: ‘There are an enormous number of general empirical propositions that count as certainty for us.

Sebastian Smee

Going the distance

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, by Haruki Murakami There’s nothing tremendous, startling, or even revelatory about Haruki Murakami’s latest book. The whole exercise is too pointedly modest for that. But it’s a likeable and often rewarding excursion into the writer’s experiences as a runner. It’s also, perhaps inevitably, about Murakami’s life as a writer, since for him, the two are neatly intertwined. So much so that he claims to have come to regard  running as ‘both exercise and metaphor’. Cheesy metaphors are the stock-in-trade of the self-improvement industry, and so it is perhaps inevitable that Murakami takes the opportunity to dish out more than a few life-lessons.

Robert Cooper

A passage from India

Sea of Poppies, by Amitav Ghosh, read by Lyndham Gregory Ever been called a ‘dung-brained gubberhead’ or had your face compared to ‘a bandar’s bunghole’? Welcome aboard the Ibis, a rancid former slaving schooner now transporting migrants, coolies, criminals and opium from Calcutta to China. Here amidst the pounding seas we have the perfect backcloth to Amitav Ghosh’s exhilarating novel, shortlisted for the Booker prize, set amidst the Opium Wars of the 1830s. A mournful sitar creates the mood as our excellent reader, Lyndham Gregory, whisks us from the poppy fields of the Ganges to the perilous high seas.

Saturday

Francis King

More nattering please

There are writers so prolific that one wants to shout, ‘Oh, do give it a rest!’ There are others so costive that one wants to shout, ‘Oh, do get a move on!’ It is into the second of these categories that Francis Wyndham falls. This 403-page volume contains all the fiction, three books in total, that he has produced in more than half a century. It is sad that there has not been far more. The first book is a collection, Out of the War, published in 1974, but originally written during the second world war, when the still teenage author had been invalided out of the army with TB. It is amazing that he should have produced stories so accomplished at so early an age. ‘They seemed to have been written by someone else’, he remarked on their exhumation.

Andro Linklater

Perhaps the greatest?

Alasdair Gray: A Secretary’s Biography, by Rodge Glass It would be easier to write a biography of Alasdair Gray if he were Chinese. There would be no need to divide image from word, myth-making from realism, truth from ideology. He would be reverentially portrayed as a master of pictography conveying the struggle for harmony between the inner and outer essences of man and society. And the great artist himself would live decorously on a large government pension befitting a social treasure.

Lee Langley

Stepping-stones of his past self

Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, by Paul Theroux When Paul Theroux set off from Victoria Station in 1973 his plan was to cross Europe and Asia, taking as many trains as he needed to get him to Tokyo, returning on the Trans-Siberian Express. From the four-month journey came a travel book that was not quite what he intended: ‘I sought trains. I found passengers.’ The Great Railway Bazaar sold 1.5 million copies in 20 languages. Thirty-three years and 40-odd books later, Theroux — ‘twice as old as the person who had ridden those trains’ — set off again, travelling in his own footsteps to see how much he and the world had changed.

Caroline Moorehead

Of zyzzyva and syzygy

Letterati: An Unauthorised Look at Scrabble and the People Who Play it, by Paul McCarthy Make no mistake: Scrabble is a brutal game. Given a chance to foil an opponent, the dearest friend will turn sly and dogmatic. No surprise then to discover that in North America Scrabble is a cut-throat business, in which computer-generated word-lists, strategy and money have come to dominate the game. For Paul McCarthy, whose account of the North American circuit, Letterati, is a celebration of professional Scrabble, the ‘parlour players’ (sometimes known as ‘kitchen-table players’) who spend lazy Sunday afternoons munching snacks and debating the spelling of arcane words are just so many dinosaurs.

Wednesday

Sam Leith

When we lost our mojo

Eden, the only male British prime minister known to have varnished his fingernails, was easily the best-looking individual, of either sex, to occupy that office in the 20th century. With Our Times, A. N. Wilson concludes the sequence of British history books he started in The Victorians, and the sentence that opens his chapter on Suez is a fine instance of his style. It has three characteristic qualities: it is irrelevantly judgmental; it drops in a nice piece of gossip (the pregnant ‘known to’, arguably, making that two pieces of gossip); and it makes you want to read on. This is an enormously enjoyable book, a non-systematic, chatty and wilful piece of work, slaloming through familiar terrain with brio and dash rather than statistics and documents.

Sarah Burton

A fascinating woman, ill-served

Star of the Morning: The Extraordinary Life of Lady Hester Stanhope, by Kirsten Ellis Unlike her republican-minded father, ‘Citizen Stanhope’, Hester declared ‘I am an aristocrat and I make a boast of it’. After falling out with him (her mother had died when Hester was four) and quarrelling with his heir, her brother, in her early twenties she made her home with her uncle, William Pitt the Younger, but even a privileged position at the centre of London political and social life was not enough for Hester. She embarked on a series of love affairs and adventures which were to earn her notoriety and were to end with her living almost alone (and at least slightly deranged) in the fortress-like house she had built on a hill near Mount Lebanon.

John Mitchell

All things to all men

Michael X: A Life in Black and White, by John Williams Poor Michael. His life became a complete mess and in 1975, aged 41, he was hanged for murder in the prison in Port of Spain, Trinidad. One of the victims was his young cousin, Skerritt, a local barber; the other, more sensationally, was an Englishwoman, Gale Benson, daughter of Captain Leonard Plugge, an eccentric Tory MP. This book tells the whole story of Michael’s life and career, concentrating on the late 1960s in London, when he was at the peak of his notoriety. It is fluently written and totally gripping throughout. On one level it is a social comedy, sparkling with celebrity names of rock-stars and the beat-hippy literati.

Philip Ziegler

Adventures of a lost soul

Ettie: The Intimate Life and Dauntless Spirit of Lady Desborough, by Richard Davenport-Hines There was something not quite right about Lady Desborough. Richard Davenport-Hines, in this intelligent and well-written book, extols her charm, her wit, her courage, her vitality, her infinite capacity to convince any man that he was uniquely talented and the only person with whom she was concerned. The roll-call of her conquests — Balfour and Asquith, Churchill and Kitchener, Kipling and Siegfried Sassoon — attests to her potent and widespread appeal. Beatrice Webb, a woman who might have been expected to deplore everything that Ettie Desborough stood for, paid tribute to her ‘great organising capacity ... iron will, excellent temper and methodical mind’.

Raymond Carr

A city frozen in time

Pompeii, by Mary Beard In the early morning of 25 August AD 79 Mount Vesuvius blew its top. First came a rain of pumice stones; the roofs of Pompeii collapsed under their weight. Worse was to come: a burning lava, flowing at great speed against which no living being could survive. Pompeii was a city in flight, all normal occupations hastily abandoned. The majority, especially the rich, escaped to the countryside. Those who left it too late were incinerated, unable to make their way through streets filled with pumice. The city in flight became a city of the dead buried under thick layers of volcanic dust. It was not rediscovered and excavated until the late 18th century.

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 10 September 2008

Ruth Rendell, it turns out, as well as being the queen of ‘adventure sex’, is a furious decentraliser. In this small book of 1989 she argues not only for devolution for Scotland and Wales but autonomy for the English regions and a ‘cantonisation’ of the UK along Swiss lines. Undermining the Central Line is nothing to do with the Tube system, therefore, but is a plea to ‘give government back to the people’, published in the year of the introduction of the Poll Tax and a few months before the fall of Margaret Thatcher in 1990.

Saturday

Tom Holland

Bright sparks of the Dark Ages

Travelling Heroes: Greeks and Their Myths in the Epic Age of Homer, by Robin Lane Fox In Book II of the Iliad, Homer describes for the first time a Greek advance across the plain of Troy. Various similes are deployed to convey its impact, most of them precise and vivid, as Homer’s similes invariably are. One of them, however, has always inspired a faint measure of perplexity. Describing the impact of the Greek troops’ feet on the earth, Homer compares it to ‘the anger of Zeus who delights in thunder, whenever he lashes the ground around Typhoeus in Arima…’ Zeus, of course, was the king of the gods, and Typhoeus his deadliest rival, a colossal and snake-headed monster — but what or where was Arima?

Anita Brookner

A far cry from Paradise

This strange novel is described as a ghost story, although it reads like a nervous breakdown in which both writer and reader are embedded. So constricted is the narrative that the central figure, Jim Smith, delivers no opinion of his own, although his past life appears to have been full of incident: extensive travel, a business career, apparently successful, in London, a certain level of worldly experience which has vanished, leaving him without attachments or points of reference.

Allan Massie

Life and Letters | 6 September 2008

‘The result is a minor masterpiece, so good that one can even forgive the author’s affected forays into demotic English (‘don’t’ and ‘wouldn’t’ for ‘did not’ and ‘would not’, etc.).’ Setting aside the writer’s mistake — ‘don’t’ being the contraction of “do not” rather than ‘did not’ — this sentence brought me up sharp , all the more so because it was the conclusion of Jonathan Sumption’s review in this magazine of John Guy’s book about Thomas and Margaret More; and Jonathan Sumption is not only a Spectator reviewer, but also one of our finest historians.

Wednesday

Jane Ridley

A chilly professional

The Forgotten Prime Minister: The 14th Earl of Derby, by Angus Hawkins Who was the 14th Earl of Derby? He was three times Conservative prime minister, but few people have heard of him today. He became leader of the Tory rump after Peel smashed the Conservative party in 1846, and he remained leader until ill health forced him to resign some 22 years later. He was immensely rich, with estates in Lancashire yielding a princely income of £100,000. He was clever and a swashbuckling orator — the ‘Rupert of debate’, Bulwer-Lytton called him. He was also a gifted classical scholar. Confined to his bed by an attack of gout, he spent the time composing an acclaimed translation of Homer’s Iliad. In spite of all this, he has been forgotten. Rightly so, some might say.

Sara Wheeler

The iceman cometh

True North: Travels in Arctic Europe, by Gavin Francis This is an old-fashioned travel book of the linear variety. Roaming the northern fringes of Europe with a tent and a nose for a story, Scottish doctor Gavin Francis looks beyond the icebergs and the stunted willow seeking ‘a back country of the imagination where myth and reality intertwined’. Beginning at Unst, the northernmost of the Shetlands, Francis sets out to ‘follow a route that Europeans had taken towards what they once saw as the very limits of the world’. Heading by ferry to the Faroes, he continues to Iceland, Greenland, the snowy hinterland of Scandinavian Finnmark, and finally Svalbard, the Norwegian archipelago that includes Spitzbergen.