More from Books

Saturday

Byron Rogers

Welsh wizard prang

A Pembrokeshire Pioneer by Roscoe Howells In 1903, in one tremulous little 12-second hop, just 10 feet off the ground, Orville Wright made the first powered flight by a man. Or was it? In the village of Saundersfoot on the Pembrokeshire coast there is the belief amongst the old who can still remember what their fathers told them that a local carpenter, Bill Frost, flew seven years before the Wrights. The author of this book, Roscoe Howells, novelist, local historian and farmer, is 87. I must declare an interest at this point. I came across the story about 15 years ago, and wrote about it. In the course of my meeting Mr Howells and many other OAPs what staggered me was the off-hand way they all talked about the event. ‘Oh yes, old Bill Frost. He kept goats, you know.

Tom Fleming

Starved for choice

Zugzwang by Ronan Bennett Zugzwang, from the German Zug (move) and Zwang (obligation), is a term used in chess when the player whose turn it is to move has no move that does not worsen his position. It is not merely a bad position, but the state of being obliged to move when no move at all would be preferable. Ronan Bennett, who co-writes an enjoyable chess column for the Observer, has used the concept as a starting point for his fifth novel.

Brian Masters

Cash for cachet

Them and Us: The American Invasion of British High Society by Charles Jennings A dinner-party hosted by Chips Channon at his ostentatious Belgrave Square flat in 1936 frames this book. It is described in the introduction and appears again in the final chapter, for its composition defines what had gradually happened to high society in the previous 50 years.

Saturday

Oliver Rackham

Long live the weeds and the wilderness

The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane Robert Macfarlane is a Cambridge don, Fellow in English at Emmanuel College, with an artistic eye for wild and lonely places. He was a friend and follower of Roger Deakin, whose last book I reveiwed three weeks ago. Deakin swam in strange waters; Macfarlane sleeps — or spends the night — in unlikely places, such as tentless on the top of Ben Hope, northernmost high mountain in Britain, in a northerly hailstorm in winter. Both of them attempt the heroic task of conveying the genius loci of wild landscapes in words, with little help from pictures or maps.

Jonathan Mirsky

You have been warned

The Confidence Man: His Masquerade by Herman Melville Many years ago in Texas, a movie advertisement urged viewers ‘to thrill to Herman Melville’s immortal story of the sea, Moby-Dick, with Gregory Peck in the title role,’ prompting the New Yorker to comment, ‘A whale of a part.’ And how! I’ve just finished reading the book again. It was my fifth read and the first time I’ve read every word. When I was a boy I read the whaling chapters and skipped everything else. Later I advanced through the hero Ishmael’s relationships with the harpooner Queequeg, Captain Ahab and the first mate, Starbuck.

Allan Massie

Likely lads in their day

Simon Raven’s first novel, The Feathers of Death, was published in 1959 Simon Raven’s first novel, The Feathers of Death, was published in 1959 when I was in my second year at Cambridge. We fell on it with glee, as I remarked, a few weeks after Raven’s death, to a fellow-novelist, somewhat to her amazement. ‘I’ve never read any of his books,’ she said. ‘I think my husband has.’ Not so surprising perhaps. I doubt if he ever had many devoted female readers. What attracted us to the novel was not so much its for the time decidedly daring story — army officer’s affair with blond, blue-eyed drummer Malcolm Harley — as the tone and style. This was nicely summed up by the Sunday Times reviewer, J. D.

Wednesday

Sam Leith

Waking up late at the Palace

The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett Since The History Boys transferred first to Broadway and then to the cinema, Alan Bennett has made the journey from national treasure to international superstar. The dustwrapper of this droll novella spends two lines on the London gongs that play picked up, and more than five lines on the American awards (‘five New York Drama Desk Awards, four Outer Critics’ Circle Awards . . . six Tonys including Best Play’), festooned with which he returned to his native Yorkshire. The catalogue of glory reaches a final climax: ‘He was named Reader’s Digest Author of the Year 2005.’ I imagine that would have made Bennett smile when the proofs came through.

David Caute

Movies and talkies

Mornings in the Dark: The Graham Greene Reader edited by David Parkinson Arriving at Oxford in 1923, the young Graham Greene made one move he was to regret 30 years later, when applying for a US entry visa — he joined the Communist party for a few weeks. Much less regrettable, he appointed himself the film critic of Oxford Outlook (editor G. Greene). This of course was the heyday of the silent movie and the undergraduate Greene could be found bent over the latest piece on montage by Pudovkin or Eisenstein in the magazine Close-Up. He later recalled his horror at the arrival of ‘talkies’ — it seemed like the end of film as an art form, just as he later regarded the arrival of colour ‘with justifiable suspicion’.

Ben Wilson

The politics of the plot

The Arcadian Friends: Inventing the English Landscape Garden by Tim Richardson The man ‘of Polite Imagination’, according to Joseph Addison, was able to delight in things lesser mortals might fail to appreciate, particularly the landscape. ‘It gives him indeed a kind of Property in everything he sees, and makes the most rude uncultivated Parts of Nature administer to his pleasure.’ If an Englishman’s home used to be his castle — the basis of his liberty — his garden was a blank canvas on which to express his originality and freedom. This book ends with the arrival of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown in the 1740s, and Tim Richardson regards his work as creatively conservative and formulaic.

Saturday

Juliet Townsend

Back to St Trinians

The Great Big Glorious Book for Girls by Rosemary Davidson and Sarah Vine One of the publishing triumphs of last year, The Dangerous Book for Boys, with immaculate timing tapped into a rich vein that combined nostalgia with exasperation at the seemingly unstoppable advance of Nanny State, with her stifling regime of risk assessment and avoidance. It followed a long line of similar books stretching back over 200 years. In fact its objectives were identical to those of the authors of The Boy’s Own Book of Sports and Pastimes (c.

Matthew Dennison

Boy of the streets

Hotel de Dream by Edmund White Seven years before his untimely death from consumption at the age of 28, Stephen Crane published Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. It was 1893 and the time was out of joint for a grimly realistic fictionalisation of the life of a prostitute. Nineteenth-century sensibilities recoiled. Crane enjoyed a succès de scandale, and established himself at the forefront of American literary modernism. Fellow American author Edmund White — himself no stranger to the succès de scandale — has chosen Stephen Crane as the subject of his new novel. Crane is a cultish writer, largely unknown to British readers.

Simon Baker

Two can be as bad as one

Secrets of the Sea by Nicholas Shakespeare Nicholas Shakespeare’s new novel is set in Wellington Point, an inauspicious fictional Tasmanian town. It is a place offering few prospects: the only jobs are menial, and the only person with any vim is the odious Ray Grogan, an estate agent who seduces local women by comparing them to the Taj Mahal by moonlight. People who move to Wellington Point do so, more often than not, for a quiet life. One such person is Alex Dove. Alex’s English parents arrived, full of hope, in Wellington Point before Alex was born, but his father became inward and alcoholic, interested only in building ships in bottles. He and his wife were killed in a car crash when Alex was 11, and Alex was sent to England.

Roy Kerridge

Taking the life out of the Lane

On Brick Lane by Rachel Lichtenstein Brick Lane, a long and ancient street in London’s East End, casts a spell of fascination on all who go there. To walk down Brick Lane is to take a voyage through the past, where Huguenot weavers of the 18th century meet fellow ghosts of Jewish anarchists, and their history is everywhere you look. My own family history touches lightly on the Lane, for my grandfather owned a workshop there in the 1920s, and my stepfather discovered an anarchist printing press hidden in a ruined house there in the 1950s. Whitechapel Library, next door to the Art Gallery, is not strictly speaking in the Lane, but Rachel Lichtenstein includes it in this book of tape-recorded interviews. It is, or rather was, just round the corner to the Whitechapel end.

Jeremy Treglown

Sticking close to his desk . . .

The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad by John Stape Why did he do it? In his late thirties, Joseph Conrad abandoned the modestly successful career as a seaman which he had steadily built up. Though the job involved tiresome exams and increasing responsibilities, it had been his ‘great passion’, he wrote a dozen years later. ‘I call it great because it was great to me. Others may call it a foolish infatuation. Those words have been applied to every love story. But whatever it may be the fact remains that it was something too great for words.’ Yet he gave it up, opting instead for writing, marriage and a family, all of which made him miserable. Writing, in particular, was agony to him.

Ian Garrick-Mason

Two pairs of unsafe hands

Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power by Robert Dallek For a man who once promised the press, way back in 1962, that ‘you won’t have Nixon to kick around any more’, Richard Nixon has turned out to have a remarkably long political afterlife. After a five-and-a- half year presidency, he spent the two decades after his resignation in 1974 patiently building, through books and foreign visits, his reputation as a wise elder statesman.

Saturday

Allan Massie

From Shetland with truth

A novelist is rarely well-advised to write his masterpiece in his fifties, unless his position at the top of the tree is secure. His themes and style are no longer likely to be in fashion. A younger generation of writers is occupying the attention of reviewers and speaking with greater immediacy to the public. This was Eric Linklater’s experience. He had achieved popularity and critical respect in the Thirties with Juan in America and his best prewar novel Magnus Merriman, and maintained his position after the war with Private Angelo and Laxdale Hall. But by the mid-1950s, when he wrote The Dark of Summer, he was, if not in the wilderness, at least on its fringes. Yet this is a great novel, beautifully crafted, its themes sombre and important.

Patrick Skene-Catling

Homage to arms

Coward on the Beach by James Delingpole If you are not the right age to have enjoyed the thrills of serving in uniform in a really dangerous military campaign, the next best thing is to imagine one and write about it. That is what James Delingpole has done, very well indeed. His assiduous research, in the field, in the Imperial War Museum and elsewhere, his uncanny empathy with the officers and men of the 47th Royal Marine Commando, and his prose style, vigorous, witty and elegant, have produced a novel about the D-Day invasion of Normandy that’s a welcome corrective to the Spielberg–Hanks version and promises a lot more excitement to come. This novel is only Volume One of a projected ten-volume saga, which may well deserve the title A Dance to the Music of War.

Robert Stewart

Peanuts and popcorn and crackerjack

Baseball Haiku: The Best Haiku Ever Written About The Game edited by Cor van den Heuvel and Nanae Tamura Every American schoolboy and schoolgirl knows the mock epic, ‘Casey at the Bat’ (which William Schuman made into an opera), and Franklin Adams’s ‘saddest of possible words,/Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance’ (of the Chicago Cubs’ double-play past masters). The historian, J.H. Hexter, analysed a baseball game to help him fathom the depths of causation in history; Stephen Jay Gould made extensive use of batting statistics in support of a theory of evolution. Baseball reaches parts of Americans that other games still cannot reach. It continues to lie warm and deep in the national spirit, renewing it every spring and hibernating there when the snows close in.

Christian House

Short but neat

No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July Short-story compilations are a tricky beast. For writers, publishers and readers alike they all too frequently prove unsatisfying. Those who’ve mastered the form draw their stories together in a tapestry of narrative voice, social milieu and location to create a cohesive whole from stand-alone parts. Such writers, from William Trevor and Susan Hill to Russell Banks and Raymond Carver, have built successful careers from recognising this truth. With her début collection, No One Belongs Here More Than You, Miranda July follows firmly in their footsteps, especially Carver’s. This is blue-collar America brought to life in a pointillist fashion, achieved through the accumulated impact of small moments gathered together.

Andrew Taylor

A choice of crime novels | 18 August 2007

Since the 1990s, a tartan tide has flooded the coasts of crime fiction, and it still shows no sign of ebbing in terms of either quality or quantity. Broken Skin (HarperCollins, £12.99) is Stuart MacBride’s third investigation set on the wilder shores of Aberdeen and featuring Detective Sergeant Logan McRae. The novel opens as Logan’s volatile girlfriend, PC Jackie ‘Ball Breaker’ Watson, acts as bait (and lives up to her nickname) in a successful police operation that captures the Granite City Rapist. The only problem is that the rapist turns out to be the boy wonder of Aberdeen Football Club, and therefore the darling of the media and equipped with the best defence lawyer money can buy.