More from Books

Saturday

Allan Massie

A subject in need of a writer

‘Have you your next book in mind?’ ‘Not yet, I can’t fix on a subject,’ my friend replied. ‘What about Ouida?’ I said. Actually this exchange has taken place a couple of times, and on each occasion my suggestion was received without enthusiasm. Perhaps it was thought patronising: Victorian romantic novelist, suitable subject for a clever young modern woman. But it was not intended as such, for Ouida was a remarkable woman and a remarkable writer, and I would dearly love to read a good new biography of her. She is, I suppose, largely forgotten, and I doubt if anything she wrote is in print, though you can pick well-worn copies of her books up cheaply in second-hand bookshops. She was born in Suffolk in 1839 to an English mother and French father.

Sebastian Smee

A mask that eats the face

A man whose personal life contains as many potentially unflattering episodes as V. S. Naipaul might easily have been resistant to the idea of biographical scrutiny. In fact, however, Naipaul has shown himself remarkably hospitable to the idea. In 1994 he went so far as to say: ‘A full account of a writer’s life might in the end be more of a work of literature and more illuminating — of a cultural or historical moment — than the writer’s books.’ Writing in the introduction to his authorised biography of Naipaul, Patrick French makes use of this (surely disingenuous) statement to legitimate his project. But he also makes it clear that he is not fooled: into Naipaul’s willingness to co-operate with him he reads as much narcissism as humility.

Philip Ziegler

Flies on the wall

Philip Ziegler reviews a collection of history essays To invite 20 eminent historians to describe the world-changing event in history which they most wish they had witnessed is an ingenious publishing idea likely to produce an entertaining and even modestly instructive book. Happy evenings could be spent around the dinner table debating the choices and suggesting altematives. It is perhaps a reflection of contemporary society, for instance, that none of the historians chose to witness the Crucifixion or the Resurrection — the two events (or non-events) which above all shaped the Christian world. On the whole the historians have chosen their subjects with a view to elucidating the true facts rather than merely witnessing a sensational spectacle.

Byron Rogers

Changing all utterly

This is a book so remarkable that after finishing it you will find yourself casting the film that will surely get made. Kevin Myers, a young freelance Irish journalist — James Nesbitt, he of the Yellow Pages and Pontius Pilate; Pastor Oliver Cromwell Whiteside, a Protestant fundamentalist preacher who speaks throughout in the accents of the American South — Strother Martin ; assorted IRA and UVF men, their randy wives and girlfriends — the entire repertory cast of the Carry On films. For Myers, whose memoir this is, has succeeded in something you would have thought impossible. He has reduced the Northern Irish Troubles to murderous black farce while convincing you this is how it really was.

Simon Baker

Sounds of the Seventies

One of the difficult tasks when writing fiction about the recent past is to let the reader know the approximate year in which the action is taking place without giving the impression of scene-setting. A mediocre novelist will cram the early dialogue with clunky references to Ted Heath’s chances at the next election or the BSE crisis, before allowing the political talk to disappear once the desired effect has been achieved. Philip Hensher, at the beginning of this novel, provides his setting with great economy, not through dialogue at all but through a single object: a cocktail stick pinioning a combination of diced cheddar, pineapple and sausage. Once that unholy trinity of sweet-savoury kitsch has appeared, this can only be middle England in the 1970s.

Tuesday

Diana Hendry

Boys will be boys

Reading this novel I couldn’t help but think of the opening lines of Miroslav Holub’s poem, ‘A Boy’s Head’ — ‘In it there is a space ship/ and a project/ for doing away with piano lessons.’ Not that Robbie Coyle, the hero of Crumey’s novel and the son of a socialist/communist father growing up in a small Scottish mining town in the Seventies, has to endure piano lessons, but he is consumed by a passion to become an astronaut, practising in his kitchen cupboard capsule and tuning in to the stars on the ‘flight control panel’ of the radiogram.

Saturday

John De-Falbe

Flouting the rules

This intriguing novella tells the story of a drop of oil from its earlier form as the heart of a prehistoric horse to its combustion in the engine of a Ford, where it intersects with the lives of two humans. On one of these, ‘the soot particles of the ex-heart of the horse’ operate as a lethal carcinogenic agent. Related in brisk, incisive prose, the narrative consists of complex mechanistic chains that zoom from macro to micro, with chunks of technical detail that are more usually found in textbooks, or on helpful university websites, than in a novel.

William Leith

Sounding a false note

In this book John K. Cooley, who has spent a lifetime writing about international intrigue, investigates the subject of forgery. More specifically, he looks at the way people have tried to use forgery as a way of waging war or seizing power. It seems like a terribly dry subject at first — lots of stuff about currency and exchange rates and the gold standard. You need to concentrate. But it’s a fascinating subject, and by the end, this book really made me think. First of all, I had the impression that counterfeit money is quite a rare thing. Not so, says Cooley. As long as currency has existed, people have been forging it. For instance, early pilgrim settlers in America traded with native Americans in their currency of seashells.

Matthew Parris

A willingness to believe anything

As I intend to dispute the entire thesis on which this little book rests, I should say at the outset that it is one of the best short contributions to an important argument I have ever read. Cleanly and crisply written, entertaining and clear, and packed with factual ammunition, Counterknowledge makes the ideal companion for any huntsman minded to go shooting down silly ideas. And Damian Thompson bags a whole cartload of them. Idiotic 9/11 theories, religious nuttery and creationism, Da Vinci Code-style false history, and homeopathy and ‘alternative’ medicine of every sort, fall flapping to the ground: victims of Thompson’s arsenal of information, unsparing logic and clear aim.

Wednesday

Sam Leith

Both sublime and ridiculous

Sam Leith reviews Toby Faber's history of Fabergé eggs What a great idea for a book, this is — and how well-executed. Toby Faber has produced, at just the length to suit it, a hugely enjoyable and informative account of the making and afterlife of the best-known examples of the jeweller’s art. Here is a series of love stories; a historical panorama; a tale of grotesque imperial frivolity, of barbarous totalitarian wrecking and of all-American hucksterism; a parable about the nature of value; and, above all, a portrait of the endless and winning absurdity of economic man in pursuit of shiny gewgaws. The first Fabergé egg was given as an Easter present in 1885 by Tsar Alexander III to his wife Marie Federovna.

Raymond Carr

Pistols at dawn

Early on the morning of 21 September 1809 two ministers of the crown in the Duke of Portland’s cabinet met to fight a duel on Putney Heath: they were George Canning the Foreign Secretary and Lord Castlereagh who was what we would now call Minister of War. Castlereagh the challenger was a crack shot; Canning had never handled a pistol in his life. As his letter to his wife settling his affairs makes clear, he believed he stood a good chance of being killed. Giles Hunt extends his account of the duel to embrace the study of the personalities of the two combatants and the political system within which they operated.

Roger Lewis

His mysterious ways

Norman Mailer spent his life hunting for a subject big enough to suit or satisfy his titanic ego. The post- humous On God suggests he finally hit the spot. The Almighty is made to come across as an embattled novelist — as a version of Norman Mailer himself in fact — ‘a mighty source of creative energy,’ whose most developed works are human beings, though ‘think of the excitement of God when the dinosaur came into being’. Yes indeed — the mighty brontosaurus can readily be seen as Mailer’s evolutionary ancestor. Earlier in his career, however, God wasn’t quite so competent and went through a long apprentice phase marred by failures — fish ‘with hideous eyes’ and ‘worm life, frog life, vermin life’.

Pj Kavanagh

Thinking like a river

‘You can tell a river-lover. They cannot help but pause on a bridge to investigate what lies beneath.’ It is hard to imagine anyone not doing that, but our author is a generous soul and wishes to include us all in his passion. I wanted to celebrate the ways in which rivers stirred spirits and set imaginations alight; to learn how they were worshipped, and then abused and overlooked … I needed to make a river journey; the question was, which river? He chooses the River Trent, which cuts across England from west to east, more or less dividing south from north, 170 miles of it before it disappears into the Humber; but he chose it, surely, because he knew nothing about it and wanted to find out.

Saturday

Allan Massie

Scribble, scribble, scribble

Why do we write? Dr Johnson had no doubts, or pretended to have none: ‘no man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money’. This is manifestly false, unless you make writing for some other reason one of your definitions of the word ‘blockhead’. In any case it’s not true of Johnson himself. Despite the indolence for which he reproached himself, he was an assiduous correspondent, writing long thoughtful letters to his friends. Likewise, there are those who — obsessively — keep journals or diaries without, until recently anyway, expecting ever to profit from them. The American novelist Jay McInerney has suggested that writing comes ‘out of a deep well of loneliness and a desire to fill some gap.

Honor Clerk

A new way of seeing

In one of his more endearing flights of fancy, Eddie Izzard once speculated on what the Greeks did with themselves in the Wooden Horse while waiting for nightfall in Troy. It was clearly something that Homer had never got round to thinking through properly, but for Izzard, once a chap has got into his breastplate, helmet, greaves and short pleated skirt the answer is obvious — housework, and not just housework but hoovering the inside of his temporary home before he gets down to the real business of the warrior hero.

Edward Norman

Scripture was composed by believers

It is difficult enough to evaluate the evidence that the British government is supposed to have received before its decision to engage in the Iraq war: imagine, therefore, the enhanced problem in determining the evidence for the Resurrection of Christ — 2,000 years after the event. There are also 2,000 years of accumulated attempts. Now Professor Vermes offers a further essay; his version is lucid and uncomplicated and unoriginal. His arguments are, in their way, fair- minded, but no new insights extend before us, and his conclusions, impeccably liberal, add virtually nothing to understanding. Vermes writes from a Jewish perspective, and with the authority of an established scholar; he is a Fellow of the Jewish Academy.

Anita Brookner

Not going to London to visit the Queen

It is a pleasure to encounter a new writer, particularly if that writer is modest, competent, and above all unheralded. Frances Itani is Canadian and recognisably from the same background as Alice Munro, although lacking Munro’s wistfulness and emotional delicacy. She is unknown in this country, although the author of a previous novel. On the strength of Remembering the Bones she has it in her to reach a wider audience. Her story is simple. Her protagonist, Georgina Danforth Witley, has been invited to Buckingham Palace, one of a handful of Commonwealth citizens who share their birthday with that of the Queen.

Lloyd Evans

Having the last laugh

Hard to define Lewis Hyde. Antiquarian, classicist, story-teller, mythographer, connoisseur, philologist, teacher and scholar, he is as multifarious as the trickster archetype which forms the subject of his new book. In Greece trickster appears as Hermes, and Hyde begins with the Homeric Hymn written around 420 BC which deals with Hermes’s birth and career. Zeus runs off with Maia and together they produce a cunning, wily boy, full of flattery and schemes. Hermes stumbles across a turtle and turns it into the first lyre. Longing for meat, he steals cattle from Apollo and evades discovery by driving them backwards across sandy ground so that their hoofprints point away from their destination. Rubbing sticks together, he makes a fire and burns a sacrificial offering.

William Skidelsky

A world without frontiers

Alberto Manguel, the dust jacket informs us, is an ‘anthologist, translator, essayist, novelist, and editor’ who was born in Argentina, moved to Canada in the 1980s and now lives partly in France. A generous gloss on this would be to say that he is an intrepid crosser of boundaries, someone whose identity is too open-ended for him to confine himself to any one profession or place. Less charitably, one might say that he is a man who doesn’t like to be pinned down. I felt a similar ambivalence on reading The City of Words. It is a work of staggering scope and erudition, packed with interesting information and arguments, and often beautifully written. Yet it, too, is hard to pin down.

Tuesday

Matthew Dennison

Echoes of the invisible world

In 1958, Daphne du Maurier published a collection of short stories, The Breaking Point. Justine Picardie’s novel Daphne begins the year of the stories’ composition, 1957. Du Maurier, then Britain’s best-selling novelist, struggles with her own breaking point. Newly acquainted with the infidelity of her husband, Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Browning, known as Tommy, she oscillates between anger and despair. Tommy succumbs to a nervous breakdown. Daphne’s mood is not lightened by her current literary preoccupation, a biography of Branwell Brontë. In Picardie’s hands, Daphne dreams of rescuing Branwell from critical obscurity by proving him the author, at least in part, of his sister Emily’s Wuthering Heights.