More from Books

Wednesday

Cressida Connolly

Two were barking

Julia Blackburn has written about Goya, about the island of St Helena, about the naturalist Charles Waterton, about a talking pig; and she has turned her attention to other strange and various things besides, but she has never written a dull sentence. It is clear from the first few lines of this book that The Three of Us is going to be fascinating. Dark, too. This is a family memoir, from Blackburn’s early childhood with both her parents, progressing through their divorce to a series of ever more difficult triangles featuring herself, her mother and a series of male lodgers. There was nothing conventional about Blackburn’s parents. Her father, the poet Thomas Blackburn, was: ‘an alcoholic who for many years was addicted to a powerful barbiturate. . .

Jonathan Keates

Cities of the coast

In the days when English counties were untouched by the dead hand of central government rationalisation, odd little chunks of them used to fetch up in neighbouring shires, appearing as little green or brown blobs, defiantly labelled ‘part of Leicestershire’ or ‘part of Somerset’. The Mediterranean sometimes seems like a larger version of this topographical oddity. Officially it is part of the Atlantic, an awkward remnant of what was formerly a vast marine depression stretching far into central Asia. But who beside its shores has felt depressed for very long? The Atlantic is where we go for granite and fog, grey waves and annihilating icebergs, to be overwhelmed by ‘l’immense démence de la mer’, as Victor Hugo called it.

John McEwen

Poles apart

With more Poles in Britain than at any time since the second world war, when the 17,000 remnant of the Polish army arrived after the fall of France, this book could not be more pertinent. Nor could it have been written by anyone better. Douglas Hall (b. 1926) was the first Keeper (indeed the Alfred Barr) of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. He made a virtue of a small budget by backing artistic outsiders rather than hot favourites, and these uprooted Polish painters were by definition eccentric. Under his keepership no British public gallery did more for them in the long years of their exile.

Saturday

Jonathan Mirsky

The making of modern myths

Who are the big intellectuals today? There are academics, to be sure, each with their speciality, and journalists, ditto. When something comes up the BBC will call on them to pontificate, to explain, but only on their speciality. Off their own piste they are no more valuable than a saloon-bar or dinner-party bore, eager to tell you ‘what I always say’. I don’t exempt myself. Tony Judt, now a professor at New York University, is the rare real thing, the author of 11 books on Marxism and French intellectuals, European resistance and revolution, language in a multi-state world; he is to consider what has happened in post-war Britain, the US, Israel and France.

Matthew Dennison

Not the marrying type

Those days are gone in which romantic novels had heroines called Muriel. Even on first publication 84 years ago, The Crowded Street was not a conventional romantic novel nor Muriel Hammond a conventional heroine — but the former embraces elements of romance, the latter aspects of heroism. The subversion of our expectations of heroism and romance provides the dynamic of Winifred Holtby’s second novel, originally published in 1924. The Crowded Street is a family saga, comedy of manners and roman à clef. It tells the story of Muriel Hammond, from schoolgirl to maturity. The Hammonds inhabit the determinedly genteel Yorkshire village of Marshington, its confines narrow, its mindset small.

Andrew Taylor

Cries and whispers

C. J. Sansom’s Shardlake series concerns the activities of a hunchback lawyer struggling to make a living in the increasingly dangerous setting of Henry VIII’s reign. The first three novels have been deservedly successful, not least because of Matthew Shardlake himself, a man of intelligence and integrity who has managed to survive with his essential decency intact. He had a particularly harrowing time in the previous book in the series, Sovereign, when he narrowly averted a rebellion, survived torture in the Tower and was publicly humiliated by the bloated and paranoid tyrant on the throne of England. Now, 18 months later, things are about to get even worse.

Sara Wheeler

Lust in a hot climate

This sprightly book recounts the life of Idina Sackville, the author’s great-grandmother. A glamorous aristocrat with a penchant for scandal, she married and divorced five times and was a protagonist of the Happy Valley set, the coterie of dim and adulterous cocktail-swiggers who achieved notoriety in inter-war Kenya (pronounced Keenya). Idina was not beautiful — according to Frances Osborne she possessed ‘a shotaway chin’ — but she had what it took. Painted by Orpen and photographed by Beaton, she epitomised the androgynous, indifferent chic of the age.

Martin Davies

Coming up trumps

There is an old Arab saying, ‘among the one-eyed close one eye’ (when in Rome…), a saw which seems particularly appropriate for Hugh Miles’s second book, set in and around the City of a Thousand Minarets. Novel or travelogue? — the reader sometimes wonders which, with a narrative too close-up and personal for the average travel (residence) book. But whatever the ratio of fact to fiction, this book has the feeling of a novel — and a good one at that. Jane Austen’s definition springs to mind: ‘The happiest delineation of the varieties of human nature, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, conveyed in the best-chosen language.

Sarah Burton

Dramatic thrills and chills

To be a member of a good audience is exhilarating. The sounds that it makes around you are as much a part of the show as the sounds from the stage: the sound of alert anticipation before the curtain rises — the sound of silence — the sound of implications being understood — the sound of generosity in laughter and response. This description occurs early in the first half of the collection, where Frayn describes the processes involved in the writing, rehearsal, re-writing and performance of his original plays.

Pj Kavanagh

Llamas but no locals

Richard Askwith is Associate Editor of the Independent and lives in a small Northamptonshire village; presumably he commutes. After a year’s absence abroad he returns to his village and finds that two loved neighbours have moved, eight houses (out of 94) have been sold, and five more have ‘For Sale’ notices outside them. The pub had closed; the sub-Post Office was closing. (The school and the shop had closed years ago.) … One nearby farm — which hadn’t even had electricity when I first visited it a decade or more ago — had become a state-of-the-art equestrian centre. ‘And what’s wrong with that?’ demands his wife, who is a sensible Chorus throughout this book.

Wednesday

Jane Ridley

Doctoring the record

The Story of San Michele is one of the great bestsellers of all time. It languishes on the shelves of second-hand bookshops, the autobiography of a Swedish doctor who fell in love with the island of Capri. The author, Axel Munthe, is a shadowy figure, a name often mentioned but (to me at least) an enigma. Munthe’s life, as related by Bengt Jangfeldt in this new biography, was an extraordinary adventure, far more exciting than his autobiography. He was entirely self-made. Born in 1857, he was a middle-class Swedish boy, the son of a pharmacist. When he began to cough blood as a medical student, he left Sweden in search of the warmth of the south.

Philip Mansel

Through Levantine eyes

The corniche at Izmir had a magic atmosphere. Lined with cafés and orchestras playing every kind of music — Western, Greek, Turkish, Armenian — it had the reputation for making the gloomiest laugh. Though ‘terribly chee-chee’ (i.e., they spoke with a sing-song accent), the women were famous for their allure. The trade in figs, raisins and opium made the city the richest in the Levant; it had the first cars, first cinemas and first girls’ schools. Nowhere else, it was said, did East and West mingle in so spectacular a manner. In 1919, as Giles Milton describes in this indictment of nationalism, Izmir Greeks welcomed a Greek army with flowers and an outbreak of looting and killing Turks. Turkish revenge was pitiless.

Byron Rogers

At her most disarming

I must declare an interest at the outset. Thirty or so years ago I went out, or walked out (or whatever the phrase is), with the author, until, that is, the night when, for reasons I have never been able to establish, she hit me over the head with a stainless-steel electric kettle. You may not have read a book review starting quite like that. At the time all she said was, ‘You were being even more irritating than usual’, so, reading her memoir, I turned nervously to the chapter entitled ‘Men, Love and Sex’ but found no reference to me or the kettle. As a friend said of his time with an eminent woman writer, ‘Chap before me, he got a short story. I didn’t even get a sonnet.

Stanley Johnson

Grace under fire

To reach Sir Christopher Ondaatje’s Glenthorne estate you have to drive down a three-mile track which drops 1,000 feet to the only piece of flat land between Porlock and Lynmouth. Here, in 1831, the Reverend Walter S. Halliday built a substantial house, hemmed in behind by the towering Devon cliffs but enjoying an uninterrupted view over the Bristol Channel to the Welsh mountains. Halliday plays an important role in The Glenthorne Cat. Working in his library one wintry evening, Ondaatje looked up to find the reverend gentleman sitting in a nearby chair wrapped in scarf and nightgown.

Saturday

Andrew Taylor

Recent crime novels | 3 May 2008

Laura Wilson specialises in acutely observed psychological thrillers, in most cases set in the recent past. Stratton’s War (Orion, £18.99) marks a departure for her in that it is the start of a series. Set in London during the phony war before the Blitz, it kicks off with an ageing and almost forgotten silent film star impaled on the spikes of a Fitzrovia railing. DI Ted Stratton is unconvinced that it is suicide, and his investigations lead him deep into Soho’s flourishing criminal underworld. Meanwhile in a rather smarter part of London, the glamorous and unhappily married Diana Calthrop, a newly recruited MI5 agent, grows increasingly concerned about the activities of a high-ranking official, whose loyalties are suspect.

Philip Hensher

The last laugh

David Lodge’s writing career spans nearly 50 years. Coincidentally, my son was reading (and hugely enjoying) How Far Can You Go? when Deaf Sentence arrived for review: it seemed generationally fitting that the teenager should be reading about sex and religion, and his mother a novel about deafness, death, erectile dysfunction and the search for a care home that does not smell of ‘urine nauseatingly mixed with air-freshener’.

Jonathan Sumption

Our new puppet-masters

This book is about large-scale organised crime. The Sicilian mafia was the prototype which gave its name to a whole class of criminal activity. Hence Misha Glenny’s title. But he is not much concerned with these declining mastodons of the international crime scene. The focus of the book, and its main strength, is its coverage of the rising international gangs of eastern Europe and the former USSR, regions where Glenny was based for a number of years as a correspondent of the Guardian and the BBC. There are sections on Latin America, the Far East and other regions as well. But they are a good deal less substantial. The rise of international crime since the 1980s is an extremely complicated phenomenon.

Oliver Gilmour

A career in the West

Was Sergey Prokofiev a better diarist than a composer? We embark on this new volume with the 23-year-old enfant terrible living in St Petersburg. We are there during the ten days that shook the world, and although initially unshaken, Prokofiev escaped the turmoil of revolution and in 1918 headed for San Francisco. The following years take us to most of the rest of America, as well as to Paris, London, Barcelona and Tokyo. Both volumes of diaries — the previous one, Prodigious Youth, covering 1907-1914 — are beautifully presented and meticulously annotated, representing an extraordinary achievement by their translator Anthony Phillips.

Jerome De-Groot

Howling to the moon

During the Cultural Revolution Chairman Mao called for intellectual city-dwellers to spend time in the countryside and be ‘rusticated’. The official paper the People’s Daily voiced Mao’s call for integration in 1968: ‘they must be re-educated by workers, peasants and soldiers under the guidance of the correct line’. As a consequence, millions of students were distributed amongst the various farming and agricultural communities of rural China. Jiang Rong’s first novel draws on his experiences as a shepherd amongst the nomadic tribes of the grasslands of Inner Mongolia during this period.

Wednesday

Philip Hensher

Ruling the waves

Tim Winton is a prodigy among novelists, publishing his first novel when barely out of his teens and one of the great masterpieces of world fiction when only just 30. Like many such novelists — Thomas Mann and Javier Marias come to mind — his later work has tended to explore exquisite technical points, inviting his readers to exert their capacities within a structure unfamiliar and often cryptic. The Turning, his previous book, seemed, like Confessions of Felix Krull, to challenge the reader to bring a high level of cunning to match his own virtuosity. Like many such writers, too, he has retained a degree of respect for fictional textures of lucid simplicity.