More from Books

Saturday

Michael Rose

Triumph of the little ships

Michael Rose reviews Antony Hichens' biography of Commander Robert Hichens In an era when the Royal Navy seems to be struggling hard to find heroes, it is a relief to discover that one only has to turn back a few pages of history to the second world war to read of sailors who still acted in the tradition of Nelson. Notable are those who fought in the small boats of the Royal Navy, their most successful commander being Lieutenant Commander Robert Hichens. He was a naval volunteer officer who had been a solicitor before the war. By the time of his death in action in April 1943, he was the most highly decorated RNVR officer of the war.

Richard Briand

Grace under pressure | 16 February 2008

Can a straight-talking Republican Senator, a decorated war hero at odds with the GOP establishment, win his party’s nomination for president? Richard North Patterson insists that the similarities between the hero of his latest novel and John McCain ‘end with his military career and penchant for candor’. There are, nevertheless, numerous other parallels between McCain and Senator Corey Grace. Grace is, after all, a fiscal conservative who opposes abortion but favours stem-cell research, supports campaign finance reform, and favours an amnesty for illegal immigrants. Like McCain, he is also prone to impetuous behaviour, which his enemies exploit to spread rumours that his period in enemy captivity made him unstable.

Caroline Moore

Dial M for mother

Peter Carey’s fictions are like a powerful old-fashioned car driven with the modernist hand-brake on — revved-up narrative that stutters, stalls, leaps in unexpected spasms. With a less good writer this would be intensely annoying. Carey runs through many of the tricks of post-modernism — the tricksy shifts, the dislocations of chronology and viewpoint, the refusal to allow the reader the common courtesy of speech-marks, which might make it altogether too easy to know what is going on — yet, time after brilliant time, he carries it off (sometimes better than others; but this is one of his best). His tricks move beyond mere trickiness.

Allan Massie

The son of Mann

Klaus Mann’s Journals don’t pretend to be a work of literature; they are jottings, records of day-to-day existence, full of names many of which will mean nothing to readers today, even, I suppose, to German ones. ‘I suddenly thought,’ he wrote in January 1933, ‘that these notes could seem terribly superficial to anyone who chanced on them, since they consist of no more than facts such as they are, in no way developed.’ Yet it is precisely in the lack of pretension that the fascination of these Journals rests.

Wednesday

A.N. Wilson

The strange experience of England

The Wessex novels of John Cowper Powys — Wolf Solent (1929), A Glastonbury Romance (1933), Jobber Skald (also published as Weymouth Sands, 1935) and Maiden Castle (1937) — must rank as four of the greatest ever to be written in our language. Even those who do not feel ready for the 1,000-page novel based on Arthurian Britain, Porius (1951) which some consider to be the master work, it should be clear that here we have a truly major figure. Every now and again there is an attempt at a revival. A brave publisher will reissue one of the novels and print on the jacket the plaudits which Powys has received: ‘The only novels produced by an English writer that can fairly be compared with the fictions of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky’, wrote George Steiner.

Blair Worden

Winner by a nose

When, after his exertions on behalf of the love-struck Gussie Fink-Nottle, Bertie Wooster hears himself compared to Cyrano de Bergerac, his literary knowledge rises to the occasion: ‘the chap with the nose’. It was Edmund Rostand’s play of 1897 that brought Cyrano and his protuberance their modern fame. The 17th-century soldier and writer who gave Rostand his model, and who has been overshadowed by his theatrical counterpart for more than a century, would have lain beyond Bertie’s range of reference. Rostand’s drama belongs to a 19th-century French tradition which romanticised the nation’s involvement in the brutal conflict of the Thirty Years War.

Dr Thorpe

A slice off the top

‘I’m not going to pay good money’, Groucho Marx famously quipped, ‘to join a club that lets in people like me.’ In the case of the Carlton Club on St James’s Street, whose 175th anniversary last year was marked by this handsome history, requirements were quite explicit. Membership depended on opposition to the 1832 Reform Bill. Four years later, the Reform Club demanded the exact opposite. Thus, in their political heyday between the first two Reform Acts, these rival clubs became the effective headquarters of their respective parties, a role altered but not entirely diminished in the Carlton’s case by the foundation of Conservative Central Office in the early 1870s.

Saturday

Philip Hensher

A crash course in survival

No one would be allowed to have J. G. Ballard’s career nowadays. When you consider the life of the average English novelist, what Cyril Connolly called the poverty of experience seems almost overwhelming, as the budding writer moves from school to university to a creative writing MA and on to the two-book contract. It is as thin a body of lived experience as the average Labour Cabinet minister possesses. Reading J. G. Ballard’s autobiography, you sometimes need to pause to remind yourself just how young he was at the time of many of the atrocious events described. At the point where most English autobiographies are just beginning, as the subject leaves university, enough horror has been lived through by Ballard to supply a lifetime’s imaginative transformations.

Nicholas Haslam

Getting a kick

One frequently reads of chaps for whom their epiphany was the first sight and sound of Julie Andrews. Mine happened a good few years earlier, lying bed-bound with polio, just after the war. Someone had sent my mother a boxed set of the Broadway cast of Annie Get Your Gun. Ethel Merman’s flamboyant voice belted from the radiogram. I was entranced, learning every note and word perfectly. From then on all I ever wanted was to be Ethel. Reading this book, which is really a re-hash of Merman’s two autobiographies, reminds me of my childhood ambition, tempered with a certain relief that I did not achieve that particular goal. Miss Merman was indeed the biggest star of the American musical theatre for over 60 years.

Molly Guinness

Problems of keeping mum

Grandmother’s Footsteps is about three generations of women. When Evelyn died she left a diary for her daughter, Verity, and granddaughter, Hester, to find. They don’t actually discover the revelatory document until years later when Verity’s husband has died, leaving another mysterious paper trail. The tagline of the book muses, ‘Will the past ever let you go?’, but Charlotte Moore actually asks more interesting questions, and is intelligent enough to show that it is rather up to those left behind to decide whether or not to let the past go. Evelyn, Verity and Hester are all very different; Evelyn was a suffragette and a woman of letters, Verity a mouse-like woman of no particular intelligence or ambition, and Hester is tidy with cool intelligence.

Carole Angier

The unwilling executioner

Carole Angier reviews Imre Kertész’s new novel Fatelessness, Imre Kertész’s first novel, fitted one of the coolest accounts we have of Auschwitz into a mere 262 pages. Detective Story, his third, distills it still further into 113, each of them mercilessly sharp and clear. This time Kertész sets his story in an unnamed South American dictatorship; but there are several connections. Like Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich, the Colonel’s regime lasts only a few years; one of his torturers carries a book about Auschwitz; and their two main victims are Jewish. Like many of the Nazis’ victims, Federigo and Enrique Salinas are wealthy, educated and assimilated members of their society.

Patrick Skene-Catling

Genius under many guises

‘A satisfactory novel should be a self-evident sham,’ in an opinion Flann O’Brien (1911-1966) shared with one of his fictional characters, ‘to which the reader could regulate the degree of his credulity’. Furthermore, the inhabitants of novels should be allowed ‘a private life, self-determination and a decent standard of living’. The distinction between reality and fantasy in the author’s life was nebulous. His own identity, by choice, was often unclear. One of 12 children, as an adult he preferred seclusion, hiding behind the interchangeable masks of a multiple persona.

M R-D-Foot

Our deadliest secret

This book shows how successive cabinets have handled the deadliest secret of modern times, what to do about nuclear bombs, since the first ones went off in 1945. As the subject was so secret, not much has ever been allowed out into the public domain; but Hennessy’s scholarly skills have been such that he has unearthed all of that, and here lays it out in scores of documents in facsimile. This gives the reader an engaging sense of being himself involved in actual research; and his commentaries illuminate each paper. He begins with the now famous memorandum by Frisch and Peierls, of March 1940, from which the whole ghastly project derived.

Tuesday

Jane Ridley

God and the GOM

Richard Shannon has been writing about Gladstone on and off for almost 50 years. His first book, a study of Gladstone and the Bulgarian Agitation, was published in 1963. He is the author of a major biography of Gladstone in two exceptionally hefty volumes, which appeared to critical acclaim in 1982 and 1999. So why does he feel the need to hammer out another 200,000-odd words on the GOM? Well, the answer is really frustration. Shannon disarmingly admits that his two fat volumes of biography were ‘too dense for their own good’. Not enough people read them. Shannon had a view of Gladstone, but the message wasn’t getting across. The purpose of this (relatively) slim version is to drive home the Shannon thesis.

Saturday

Justin Cartwright

Daring to defy the myth

Weimar lasted 14 years, the Third Reich only 12. Yet Weimar is always seen as a prelude to the Third Reich, which appears to have been created by Weimar’s failures. Actually, as Eric Weitz argues, the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) was not responsible for the Reich; it was a democratic, socially aware and progressive government, way ahead of many other European governments in its introduction of workers’ rights, public housing, unemployment benefit and suffrage for women. However, Weimar was, from the beginning, the target of the anti-democratic forces of the established Right — as Weitz describes the disparate forces which could be found in the nobility, the army, business, the churches and in the civil service.

Jonathan Keates

Spartans did it wearing cloaks

However loaded or coded, ‘Greek love’ is one of our more misleading cultural terms of convenience. It refers to an aspect of classical civilisation whose existence many people continue to find either embarrassing or reprehensible. Even now Hollywood chooses to present Achilles and Patroclus as best buddies US-Army style rather than as lovers unabashedly showing what Aeschylus, in a lost play about them both, calls ‘reverence for awesome thighs’ and is careful to excise all but the most oblique homosexual nuances from a screen portrayal of Alexander the Great.

S E-G-Hopkin

Pulp fiction for the intelligent

The late Alan Coren once called a collection of articles Golfing for Cats, in order, he claimed, to maximise his sales by tapping in to two profitable markets at once. Michael Moorcock has lavishly adopted this stratagem. The cataloguing data for this book defines it as: ‘1. Detective and mystery stories. 2. Fantasy fiction.’ The author himself claims it as a tribute to the Sexton Blake series (for which he wrote his first published novel), but there is hardly a tree in the orchard of pulp fiction from which he has not scrumped: the Western story, the gumshoe, the horror. For each he finds an answerable style, even to the occasional vulgarism and clumsy piece of exposition. The hero is allowed omniscience and his favourite brands of tobacco and alcohol.

Wednesday

Peter Oborne

The vile behaviour of the press

This book exposes newspapers to the same merciless, lethal and sometimes unfair scrutiny which the press itself has long shone on politicians, the royal family and numerous other targets. The results are devastating. Nick Davies has amassed an overwhelming weight of evidence that the British media lies, distorts facts and routinely breaks the law. It is hypnotically readable, commands attention right to the end and has troubled me profoundly ever since. No journalist with any sense of decency can read this work without at times feeling anger and personal shame. I have worked for 25 years as a reporter and thought I understood the business fairly well. But again and again Davies provides fresh jaw-dropping evidence that journalism in Britain today is bent.

Jervoise Andreyev

A very vicious circle

This book is startling, original, enormously disturbing, horribly unscientific but compelling. Did you know that Dachau housed the world’s first and largest organic garden, established to produce various foods, including honey, for the German elite? Or that to find a ‘healthier cigarette’, 12 billion were manufactured using asbestos filters? Production stopped because the filters removed too much of the taste, not because of increased delivery of cancer-causing agents to the body. And who says history doesn’t repeat itself? In the UK, the care of the elderly infirm has long been dumped on local authorities and this government now plans to restrict specialist help for patients with chronic diseases.

Jane Rye

Champagne on dirty floorboards

Jane Rye on William Feaver's biography of Lucien Freud Lucian Freud describes his paintings as largely autobiographical, which seems to imply some sort of readiness to expose his private life to the public gaze; but he does so on his own terms and is notoriously reluctant to let anyone else poke about in it. At the end of Lawrence Gowing’s 1982 monograph the author quotes Freud as saying ‘there is another reason for not writing about my life. IT IS STILL GOING ON’. William Feaver, it appears, is his licensed Boswell: recording conversations, taking photograhs of the reluctant artist, staying on for lunch.