More from Books

Saturday

Philip Hensher

And so to plot

There’s a theory, no doubt implausible and based on selective evidence, that alone among the peoples of Europe the English are somehow immune from those fits of mass hysteria which break out with murderous effect elsewhere. It must be nonsense, but it’s very easy to find instances in English history where what looks like the beginnings of a general pogrom take place; and for some reason a brief season of mayhem fails to carry on into the murder of thousands or millions. The nearest thing to observable mass hysteria in this country in recent years, the so-called ‘Diana week’ of September 1997, took many people by surprise and was said, then and more frequently later, to be fundamentally uncharacteristic of the national character.

Saturday

Sam Leith

A healthy enthusiasm for danger

The picture on the dustwrapper of Suffer and Survive shows a genial-looking Victorian gent with a serious moustache — and it does not tell a lie. The physiologist J.S. Haldane was genial, serious, and extremely Victorian. He was an obstinate man of principle. He was a rigorous experimentalist with a philosophical bent. He was loyal but somewhat unfortunate in his marriage: Mrs Haldane spoke more of duty than of love, disagreed violently with his rather liberal politics (she was a fierce imperialist, and in favour of concentration camps in the Boer war), and denied him sex, transferring her attentions instead to a green macaw called Polly. He was a kind father (his children were the geneticist J.B.S. Haldane and the writer Naomi Mitchison), a generous colleague, a doting grandfather.

Sarah Burton

The invisible woman

Elizabeth Marsh was an undistinguished member of an unremarkable dynasty. She was neither famous nor infamous and had no conspicuous talent except, perhaps, for survival. Her father’s family was involved in maritime activity but of her mother we know nothing. Elizabeth herself was married to James Crisp, an entrepreneur of uncertain fortunes from whom she spent long periods living or travelling apart. But it was before she married him that the event which marks her life as unusual occurred: in 1756 the ship on which she was travelling was boarded by Moroccan sailors and she was taken by force to Marrakesh and kept as the prisoner of the acting Sultan, Sidi Muhammed. Though her capture was political, there appears to have been a sexual element in Sidi Muhammed’s plans for her.

Honor Clerk

The school of hard knocks

The Slade of the years immediately before the first world war has always been fertile ground for novelists. As Sarah MacDougall pointed out in her engaging biography of Mark Gertler, Gertler himself and his fellow students have provided copy for anyone and everyone from D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf to Katherine Mansfield, V.S. Pritchett and the woefully untalented and finally mad Gilbert Cannan. Given her previous record, it was probably only a matter of time before Pat Barker joined this list, and Life Class opens in the familiar world of Henry Tonks’s Slade. ‘Is that really the best you can do?’ the formidable Tonks demands, as he critically examines the most recent effort at life drawing by Paul Tarrant, Pat Barker’s protagonist. ‘Then why do it?

Ian Thomson

Dark heart of the deep south

Last March, after an unexpected illness, Michael Dibdin died at his home in Seattle. His death came as a shock to fans everywhere of crime fiction. Dibdin had just turned 60. His Aurelio Zen mysteries are distinguished by their edgy, convincing police work, mordant dialogue and the picture they give of social unease and mayhem in Italy today. Inspector Zen, a Venice-born policeman, is portrayed as a sternly pensive slogger with health and marital problems, a sort of Mediterranean Inspector Rebus. From his début in Rat King (1989), Zen was in a bad way. He smoked too much, drank excessively and fell into lugubrious talk of his (and Italy’s) demise.

Tom Holland

Making the stones speak

The current must-see exhibition at the Museum of London, 150 London Wall, London EC2 (The Missing Link? until 8 August) includes a limestone sarcophagus containing a headless male skeleton. Discovered in the foundations of the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields, just off Trafalgar Square, it has been dated by archaeologists to around AD 410, the traditional date for the end of Roman rule in Britain. Yet beyond the fact that the man in the coffin was in his forties, of average height and presumably elite status, there is little more that can be deduced with any certainty about him. As is the case with so many finds dredged up from the murk of Roman Britain, the urge to speculate is both encouraged and frustated.

Allan Massie

‘Keep all on gooing’

Francis King’s new novel was published a few weeks ago. Francis King’s new novel was published a few weeks ago. Nothing, you may say, remarkable about that. He is among the most professional of authors; writing novels is what he does. Well, yes, of course, but it is certainly worth remarking that his first novel appeared in 1946. A career spanning six decades: not many can match that. What is equally remarkable is that this new novel, With My Little Eye, is as fresh, perceptive, lively and moving as anything he has written. Ford Madox Ford, in one of his splendid books of rambling reminiscences, wrote admiringly of an old Kentish countrywoman, Meary, who, near the end of a hard life, used to tell him that the only thing to do is to ‘keep all on gooing’.

Stephen Romer

Littlestone Days

Littlestone Days After the golf, the bridge and the cocktails,after the sets of tenniswith Noël Coward and the Maughamslooking on from the balcony,‘Ah, the dear boys!’ after sherry and theatricals,the dinner-dances and the outings,after charades and canastaand evenings with the gramophone, you alone of them would turn your backand cycle into the wind, then strideyour giant stride across that sacred name,Dungeness, hiss of a withdrawing seaacross the shingle, the bitter waters,exulting, sacred music perpetuallyon your tongueas you trudged to the Pointsobbing your pent-up grief-and-happiness into the wind, for God’s abundant mercies,in giving you such friends,and this wilderness to walk alone in.

Saturday

Carole Angier

Pied Piper of Bougainville

We won’t know the Man Booker Prize longlist until 7 August, but Mister Pip had better be on it. It knocks the only New Zealand winner so far, the notorious Bone People, for six. It mightn’t win, because it falls to bits in the last 20 pages, but up to then it joins a fresh voice and gripping plot to profound and Booker-worthy themes. It has already won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Mister Pip is set on the real South Pacific island of Bougainville, which fought a separatist war against Papua New Guinea that cost 20,000 lives. The war began in 1990. We join it in 1991, when Matilda, our narrator, is 13.

Jonathan Keates

Into the Norwegian wood

Here is a remarkable novel, one which appears to be about nothing in particular, featuring barely half a dozen characters, several of whom have no names. Hardly anything happens. A boy dies, a man gets shot, another boy is given a new suit, and that, more or less, is that. There is a good deal of description, though of the plainest kind, several emotions are registered after an understated fashion, but the author makes no attempt at centring these elements on a complicated plot. Having reached the middle of the book in the perfectly comprehensible expectation that Something Really Important will take place if only we hang on long enough, we are scarcely surprised when after all it doesn’t.

Philip Ziegler

When Edwina met Nehru

This book falls into two parts. The first is a brisk account of Britain’s involvement with India and of the backgrounds of those people who were principally responsible for unscrambling that relationship. It contains most of the facts that matter, if rather too much social trivia that does not, and is generally fair. Where it is unfair is in its dismissal of Mountbatten as a trivial playboy. It is permissible to make fun of some of the wilder schemes which he championed during his time at Combined Operations — notably the iceberg-aircraft carrier Habbakuk — but unreasonable to dismiss the ingenuity, energy and formidable organising powers which created the machine that made possible the invasion of Europe in 1944.

Jonathan Mirsky

Tales of the Yangzi

In Grand Canal, Great River we enter a world that makes the moon seem familiar. It is also one of the most beautiful books I’ve handled and is a screaming bargain. Philip Watson read Chinese at Oxford and spent most of his working life in the Foreign Office, with postings in Hong Kong and Beijing. In his retirement he sharpened up his skills in that endlessly difficult subject, classical Chinese. He has firm control of a slightly old-fashioned narrative style, in which he apologises for raising arcane matters of Chinese style, geography, military matters, history, poetry, painting and mandarin manners, which he then lays elegantly before you. This is a work of meticulous scholarship in the English tradition of the amateur scholar, or ‘much learning lightly worn’.

Philip Hensher

No more school

When, ten years ago, you bought for Jack or Chloe a jolly-sounding novel about a schoolboy getting up to all sorts of pranks at an academy for wizards, I don’t suppose you could have predicted the tone of the seventh and last book in the series. It is apocalyptic, redemptive, Wagnerian and quite extraordinarily keen on violent death. I think there are 24 named characters who meet a specified death through violence in this volume, and over 50 others, we are told, are killed anonymously. To the adult reader, the routine nature of all these deaths, the inability to register much in the way of a fresh response will be troubling. We are promised grief when somebody on Harry’s side is killed, and ‘screams and cheers and roars’ when an enemy dies.

Oliver Gilmour

The unromantic approach

John Worthen, a D.H. Lawrence specialist, approaches Robert Schumann’s tormented life without any apparent musical or medical expertise. His aim is ambitious: to prove that Schumann was not the quintessential Romantic figure of folklore and that he died of tertiary syphilis. He attempts to argue that Schumann was not manic-depressive, schizophrenic, unbalanced or even unstable. His publishers, meanwhile, claim that this book ‘frees Schumann from 150 years of myth-making and unjustified psychological speculation’. Worthen hardly covers the music, so nor do I. In 1985, Peter Ostwald, professor of psychiatry at the University of California, published Schumann: Music and Madness.

Saturday

Allan Massie

Beware the lie of the lips

Everyone, I suppose, now knows that Gordon Brown was the first student rector of Edinburgh University. Though based on Continental models, the rectorship is a peculiarly Scottish institution. The rector is elected by the students, and elections have often been lively affairs. (The plot of John Buchan’s Castle Gay turns on the kidnapping of a newspaper magnate in the course of one such election, though this is a case of mistaken identity.) The rector is entitled to chair the University Court and serves as the representative of the student body in relations with the university authorities. A new rector’s inaugural address used to be fully reported in the Scottish press and some of them became famous — J.M.

Peter Oborne

A dark tale of insider dealing

For the most part political diarists are located on the fringes rather than at the centre of power. The two finest British journals from the 20th century were written by failures — Alan Clark and Chips Channon. Only rarely did they gain the sustained access they craved to the great figures of their day. They were looking in hungrily from outside, yearning for advancement which never came. Both journals gain a great deal of narrative pace and comic structure from this frenetic search for power and status. The reader knows, but the diarist does not, that the quest is doomed. Alastair Campbell, by contrast, was at the centre. His comparatively lowly title of press secretary, enhanced to director of strategy and communications after 2001, gave no hint of his true importance.

Anita Brookner

Linked by an oblique sadness

Connoisseurs of the short story will welcome this new collection by William Trevor, his first since 2004. Trevor has been compared with Chekhov, not without justification. He works by indirection, avoiding judgment, his sense of tragedy well concealed by a partiality for unfulfilled lives left free to exist on the page without the author’s intervention. Here destinies may be thwarted but the process will be a reflective one, mercifully free of irony. It is the absence of irony that gives these stories their pre- as opposed to post-modern stamp, and the scrupulous neutrality that refuses to pander to the reader’s expectations. Certainly his characters lack ardour, but that is the price one sometimes pays for dignity and even a sort of wisdom.

Edward Skidelsky

Faith in the future

John Gray’s latest work brings together many themes that will be familiar to fans of this scintillatingly gloomy intellect. It denounces neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism as forms of utopianism, destined like all previous forms to shipwreck upon the hard facts of human existence. It emphasises al-Qa’eda’s roots in Western political extremism rather than Islamic tradition. It envisages a world in which history, far from coming to an end, has resumed its usual bloody course against a background of dwindling oil resources and proliferating weaponry. And it insists that our only escape from this miserable farrago lies in the company of ‘mystics, poets and pleasure-lovers’. All this is vintage Gray.

Jane Rye

The Painters’ Painter

‘Give me the cheque, you look like a decaying oyster’ — thus Roger Hilton accepting the John Moores First Prize in 1963, at the height of his career. At the dinner afterwards, very drunk, he was so rude to an alderman sitting next to him that the poor man had a heart attack and died at the table. It beats Tracey Emin’s ‘I want my mum’ by a country mile, and, although for British artists in recent years the reverse may have seemed to be the case, Andrew Lambirth believes that Hilton’s standing as a painter has been affected by such outrageous episodes, there being ‘a lingering belief in the art establishment in Britain that no artist who could behave so badly could actually be the real thing as a painter’.

Robert Stewart

Shakespeare got it wrong

The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England’s Self-Made Kingby Ian Mortimer Henry IV, in Ian Mortimer’s graceless (and sense-defying) words, is ‘the least biograph-ied English king to have been crowned since the Conquest’. No longer. Here is a full and richly detailed life. Not a deal more would need to be said were it not that Mortimer has invited us to look upon his book as representative of a new species of biographical history. In his introduction Mortimer argues against the traditional view that a lack of documentary evidence (chiefly letters) places limits on medieval biography. His book is intended to demonstrate that not only is a ‘personality-based’ biography of Henry possible, but that biography is the most important approach to the past.