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Saturday

Frank Field

A false dawn

Gordon Brown has a number of key political challenges to satisfy simultaneously if he is to lead his party to a fourth consecutive election victory. As Lee’s outstanding book makes plain, the Prime Minister’s immediate political task is to distance himself from the unpopular aspects of the Blair legacy without falling into the hole Al Gore dug for himself. Brown’s task is much more difficult, however. No one thought Gore had much influence on US politics. No one could believe the same here, with Brown’s unparalleled imperial power over home policy. The Prime Minister has also to deal with the Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath Question. This strategy coalesces around attempts to develop a new sense of Britishness.

Charlotte Moore

The parent trap

Nick Hornby has often written perceptively about male adolescence, but Slam is the first of his books to be aimed at an adolescent male readership. Teenage boys will read music magazines, sports reports, pornography and cereal packets, but they are notoriously averse to reading — or rather, finishing — books. Can Hornby break the habit, or lack of habit? Slam’s main subjects are sex and skateboarding, both calculated to have instant appeal for the target audience, but Hornby’s treatment of them is thoughtful, careful and wholly untitillating. Instead of pandering to youthful fantasies of conquest and glory, he sets out, in the nicest possible way, to expose the gap between fantasy and reality.

Oliver Gilmour

The call of the wild

Jean Sibelius was an epic figure: an orignal who never strove for originality. Not for him the frippery of a Stravinsky (‘with his stillborn affectations’) or the artificial contrivances of Arnold Schönberg. Sibelius was his own man, and a deeply human one, moved and moulded by the harsh Finnish landscape. This gave his music a rugged and austere quality, prompting the composer to reflect, ‘My orchestration is better than Beethoven’s and I have better themes than his. But he was born in a wine country — I in a land where surmjölk [curdled milk] is in charge.’ Sibelius was not an arrogant man. As Andrew Barnett reveals in this fine biography, he was full of contradictions and self-doubt.

Richard Shone

Sinister levity of an all-seeing spider

As an an outstanding English painter and a delectable personality, Edward Burra deserves this entertaining biography. It should be admitted, however, that because Burra was a letter writer of great verve and individuality, half Jane Stevenson’s battle is won: the quotations flare up from the page. Luckily, they do not destroy the surrounding narrative, for Stevenson too can be stylish and sharp. Anyone who knows the engrossing volume of Burra’s letters Well, Dearie!, edited by his lifelong friend William Chappell, will surely pounce on this new book to reacquaint themselves with those letters already published and laugh aloud at extracts that will be new to them. A Burra letter is a joy forever: droll, delicately malicious, irrepressibly camp, full of forensic observations.

Patrick Skene-Catling

Disgusted of Donegal

There is none of the lugubriousness of Angela’s Ashes in this memoir of an Irish childhood in the dim days of old, before the advent of the Celtic Tiger, but Patricia Craig had her problems. In 1959, because of the ‘corrupting influence’ of her misbehaviour, the Dominican nuns expelled her at the age of 16 from their convent school in Belfast, and she was barred from other Catholic schools in the neighbourhood of the Falls Road. Now a respected literary critic, anthologist and broadcaster, Craig reminisces in unequivocal prose that expresses a sturdy and benign temperament. In retaliation back then in Ireland’s medieval era in the middle of the 20th century, she expelled Catholicism from her life. For her, apostasy was liberation.

Nicholas Harman

The loss of enchantment

Children who have seen an electronic dinosaur wheel across the sky are not much amazed when a man with his sleeves rolled up takes the rabbit out of the hat. Manual illusions have been overtaken by the digital kind, and traditional conjuring is mostly for the nostalgia market. But it finds its niches; Michael Bailey, a former chairman of the Magic Circle (the illusionists’ upmarket trade union) who has written its centennial history, modestly describes himself as ‘the leading British corporate magician’. Far from restoring the fortunes of companies that someone has sawn in half, he helps senior managers with the arcane business of bonding. Conjuring has gone respectable. For much of its long history it was anything but that.

Simon Baker

A very English domesticity

Anthony Thwaite is among the last surviving links to the Movement of the mid-1950s. That group (which was named by J. D. Scott, a former literary editor of this magazine) was ideologically diffuse — largely because it wasn’t a movement in the formal sense — and short-lived, but its members’ early work marked the transitional stage in literature between patrician romanticism and demotic, illusion-free modernism.

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 1 December 2007

A. E. van Vogt was a doyen of the Astounding generation of mid-20th-century science-fiction writers, a group whose senior members included Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein. Among van Vogt’s novels are The Voyage of the Space Beagle, Slan and The World of Null-A. He also produced this little book, published in 1992 but conceived much earlier, a pre-feminist and pre-pop-biology attempt to pin down the problem of the violent male, or as he also termed it, the ‘right man’ — ‘right’ in the sense of wishing always to be right. The ‘right man’ is abusive towards women, is prone to outbursts of jealous rage, has a secret death-wish, and can be found at the helm of ‘all Communist countries’.

Saturday

Spectator Reviewers

Books of the Year | 24 November 2007

William Trevor Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man by Claire Tomalin (Penguin, £8.99). This is a classic biography, gracefully written, driven by a perception that never falters. The contradictions and lingering mysteries in Hardy’s life, both as a man and a novelist, are investigated fruitfully but gently, without gratuitous or prurient curiosity. Speculation is offered with well-mannered diffidence when there is doubt; with the certainty of exemplary research when there isn’t. A worthy addition to the best of Hardy’s novels, A Time-Torn Man often reads like a particularly good novel itself. Equally a treat is Eleven Houses by Christopher Fitz-Simon (Penguin Ireland, £18.

Sam Leith

The volcano’s resonant rumble

In the cartoonist Martin Rowson’s comic strip critique-cum-spoof of The Waste Land, Ezra Pound appeared in cameo as ‘Idaho Ez’ — a sort of demented janitor shuffling through the middle of the action, muttering to himself and pushing a broom. This captures, albeit cruelly, a version of the way his reputation survives: opaque, marginal, bonkers — his primary importance in 20th-century poetry if not actually janitorial then that of a curator. The other side of his image, of course, is as a comic turn in the lives of his contemporaries, whether as the loony old anti-Semite in St Elizabeth’s or as the attention-seeking young flâneur described fancifully by Ford Madox Ford: Ezra . . .

Rupert Christiansen

Lives less ordinary

Peter Gay opens his survey of the culture of Modernism with a discussion of Baudelaire’s call to artists to draw their inspiration from contemporary urban realities, and closes it with some sort of ironic ne plus ultra, as Damien Hirst roars with laughter after a ‘pile of organised chaos representing the detritus of a painter’s studio’ that he presented as an installation is mistakenly swept into a bin bag by an innocent cleaner assuming it to be bona fide rubbish. In between, Professor Gay travels through 150 years of the history of the visual arts, literature and music. It must have been an exhausting journey for this distinguished Yale-based chronicler of the Enlightenment and German intellectualism, now in his mid-eighties.

Raymond Carr

Portrait of a lady

Clarissa Eden’s father was the younger brother of Winston Churchill. Her mother was the daughter of the seventh Earl of Abingdon. She was born into an upper-class society which still, as in Trollope’s novels, was organised to bring daughters into contact with eligible husbands at summer balls. A beauty, with her mother’s blue eyes, she would have triumphed as a debutante. But she soon got bored with the social rituals of the season; ‘one dance,’ she wrote, ‘was very much like another’. Always independent-minded, Clarissa struck out on her own and sought her chosen friends among artists and writers. She attended Ben Nicolson’s parties where a drunken Philip Toynbee sang communist songs.

Sarah Burton

Inscrutable lords of the deep

The sperm whale, more than any other whale, has captured the public’s imagination, to the point that when the average person envisions a whale, it is the sperm whale that they most often see. As a child I definitely saw, in my mind’s eye, the whale that swallowed Jonah as a sperm whale (although I may have conflated this monster with the beast that swallowed Disney’s Pinocchio). Moby Dick was a sperm whale. The huge head, the low, long, tooth-studded jaw, the oddly placed eye, the fountainous blowhole, the massive flukes, and the legendary power of the sperm whale (the only whale known to have deliberately sunk ships) all combine to make it, as Dolin puts it, ‘the whale’s whale’.

Anthony Daniels

No simple solutions

The epidemic of Aids among heterosexuals of which we were once warned by public health officials is now almost as forgotten as the global freezing of which the environmentalists in the 1970s also warned us. Only in Africa has Aids spread through the general population, reducing the already low life expectancies of several countries still further. The African exception has long puzzled doctors. Why should Africa be the exception? Various theories have been put forward, from general malnutrition to the prevalence of other sexually transmitted diseases that facilitate the entry of the virus into the body and the polio immunisation experiments conducted in the 1950s in the Congo.

Stephen Abell

Borders of the possible

The original title for this novel was Jews with Swords, which perfectly captures its spirit as well as its subject. It also, incidentally, suggests a good literary parlour game, in which classic works are simplistically renamed to reflect their content: Day Out in Dublin, for Ulysses, or Beautiful Child Abuse, for Lolita, perhaps. In any case, the original title for Gentlemen of the Road is apposite, because it at once points to a historical period of weapon-wielding (10th-century Khazaria, as it happens) and offers a clue to the exuberant manner in which the tale is told. Michael Chabon is a literary novelist, but has here ‘gone off in search of a little adventure’ with a pleasurable crack at swashbuckling genre fiction.

Andrew Taylor

A choice of crime novels | 24 November 2007

Name to a Face (Bantam, £14.99) is Robert Goddard’s 19th novel. With characteristic brio, he combines the Black Death, the wreck of Sir Clowdisley Shovell’s flagship off Scilly in 1707 and the theft of an 18th-century ring with adulterous shenanigans in modern Monaco, a drowned journalist, near-identical twins and major-league EU fraud. Tim Harding, a world-weary landscape gardener, is drawn into a lethal quest to connect these disparate elements. It takes him from the Riviera to Penzance, from London to Munich, and in the process forces him to confront not only a ghost from his own past but also what he really wants from the present. The plotting in this intelligent thriller is exceptionally good.

John De-Falbe

A one off

Late in My Tango with Barbara Strozzi, Phil Ockerman, the main narrator, goes to Diamond Heart in Scotland, ‘a centre of dynamic calm in which mind and spirit gather energy for the next forward move’. He is the stand-in writer to teach a course on ‘The Search For Page One’. If Russell Hoban finds it difficult to get started on a novel then I suspect he refers back to something like this: Girl meets Boy; people may be drawn in more than one direction at once; they often have their own agendas: love is not simple. Will he/she, won’t he/she? Characters from other books wander in to say hello; images recur. Phil reminds us that we were introduced to Diamond Heart in Her Name Was Lola — ‘Bloomsbury, 2003’.

Interconnect

Adjustment

Adjustment So much for the ineffectual sandbags: we were put in touch with the loss adjuster, who came when the ‘black water’ had retired. They would indeed replace the white goods (for which we’d better find the lost receipts) but, with a droll glance at the furniture, he let us know that didn’t mean what was wrecked already might be redeemed nor that the house would be caulked and fitted out with gopher wood against a future flood. He must have seen a rainbow smudge of expectation in our eyes. His soles scuffed the buckled floor boards — the alluvia of silvered dust, clay, gravel, seeds and spores still promising the new, the better life.

Justin Marozzi

His own man

What little most of us know about Omar Khayyam can be summarised in two words: the Rubaiyat, a collection of his free-spirited quatrains made famous around the world by the translations of the 19th-century poet Edward Fitzgerald. It has been said that these immensely popular books, first published in 1859 and running into numerous editions, contributed more phrases to the English language than the Bible and Shakespeare combined. Hazhir Teimourian, a respected commentator on Middle Eastern affairs, has offered readers a much broader study of this 11th-century polymath in a work of considered scholarship and tremendous imaginative sympathy.

Mary Keen

Recent gardening books | 24 November 2007

Celebrity gardeners are what publishers are banking on this year. The Dowager Marchioness of Salisbury, known in New York as ‘the high priestess of historic garden design’, has given us her gardening autobiography. A Gardener’s Life (Frances Lincoln, £35) is illustrated by another aristocrat, Derry Moore — in private life Lord Drogheda. The book looks as beautiful as the gardens that the Marchioness makes. Her famous style of scholarly nostalgia can be seen in Ireland, France, Italy and America, as well as at Highgrove and in many English gardens, including her own newest venture, on a Chelsea roof. Cranborne remains for me the dream garden and Hatfield, perhaps her greatest achievement, appears all ‘luxe, calme et volupté’.