More from Books

Saturday

Ian Thomson

A cure for optimism

Henrik Ibsen’s fictional world of marital breakdown and sexual hypocrisy in the fjords and farmsteads of Norway spread an unfamiliar polar chill at the end of the 19th century. His plays introduced Norwegian literature to a British audience and electrified such writers as Edmund Gosse and G. B. Shaw. His influence can also be felt in detective fiction today from Scandinavia. The fjords and iron-bound rocks of Norway are part of one’s enjoyment of Karin Fossum, for example, the queen of Norwegian crime, whose thrillers conjure an Ibsenesque atmosphere of shadowy menace. Oddly, for a country which gave us trolls, few mythic cave-dwelling creatures appear in Ibsen’s theatre. (Roald Dahl, whose parents were Norwegian, was enthralled by fictional hags and witches.

William Skidelsky

Shooting the breeze for free

The Paris Review came into being in 1953, when a group of young Americans living in Paris, among them George Plimpton and William Styron, decided to start a literary magazine. Their intention was to get away from the academic factionalism that then prevailed in literary journals, and simply publish good writing, whether fiction, poetry or plays. In addition, the group came up with an ingenious format — the Q&A — whereby authors would have the chance to discuss the process of writing with a knowledgeable and broadly sympathetic interviewer. Undoubtedly, the format’s appeal was enhanced by the fact that the Paris Review was cash-strapped. Displaying a financial canniness that is rare among literary types, Plimpton and Co.

Andrew Taylor

A choice of crime novels

Natasha Cooper’s heroine, Trish Maguire, is a barrister who subverts the stereotypes, an outsider whose troubled background sometimes gives her more in common with clients than colleagues. At the start of A Greater Evil (Simon & Schuster, £17.99), the latest novel in the series, Trish’s private life is on a relatively even keel. At work, her attention is on a complex insurance case involving the Arrow, an elegant addition to the City’s skyline which is developing some unexpected cracks. The opposing team includes a heavily pregnant friend, Cecilia. Then Cecilia is brutally attacked in the studio of her sculptor husband Sam. Her baby is born prematurely as she dies. Sam, who has a history of violence, is the police’s prime suspect.

Peter Way

Unfinished Painting

The artist Fothergill; the scene an Essex landscape.Tall trees framing the fields, a church beyond.And riding towards the painter on a sturdy cobA country figure followed by vestigial shapes. The foreground grass growing from half-brushed strokes.The trees massing to summer leaf, as yet part-formed.Those nearly people following the rider and his horse,These ghostly labourers on the land, ephemeral folks. How often do unfinished works compel our gaze.Perhaps because we can complete them in our minds. Michaelangelo still emerging from the marble,Semi-suggestion, a sentence hinted from a phrase.

Jeremy Treglown

The dangerous edge of things | 10 February 2007

If you are English and love the poetry of Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, Zbigniew Herbert or Czeslaw Milosz, you probably have Al Alvarez to thank, directly or indirectly. The unostentatiously brilliant, cosmopolitan reviews Alvarez contributed to the Observer over a decade from the mid- 1950s, together with his taste-changing 1962 anthology The New Poetry and his editorship of a Penguin series of modern European poetry in translation, made him at least as important to poetry-readers as Kenneth Tynan was to theatre-goers. Latterly, most of his work has appeared in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books (where he was one of the founding contributors), but in the 1950s and 1960s he was everywhere, including on radio programmes like The Critics.

Saturday

Anthony Daniels

Virtually a kangaroo court

When Slobodan Milosevic died, more than four years into his trial for war crimes, newspapers around the world said that he had cheated justice. It would have been more accurate to say that he had cheated injustice. Had he lived, the judges would have been faced with an unpleasant dilemma: either to find him not guilty, thus casting a lurid light upon the past activities of their employers, the powers that had brought the tribunal into being in the first place, or to find him guilty and to sentence him to a long prison term on evidence that would not have justified a fine for illegal parking.

Judith Flanders

Beautiful Victorian behemoth

It would take a heart of stone to contemplate St Pancras station and its appended Midland Grand Hotel without laughing, such is the brio, the swagger, the sheer in-your-faceness of its high Victorian Gothic. Yet it has not always been so appreciated. In the 1950s the distinguished architectural historian Sir John Summerson confided to Sir John Betjeman that he found the design both ‘nauseating’ and unworthy of governmental heritage protection (it was listed anyway, in 1967). The building was in its pomp for a relatively short time; its life as a shabby office or a shuttered, gloomy no-go area lasted much longer.

Jonathan Sumption

For reasons of state

France discovered the Arab world with Napoleon’s ill-fated expedition to Egypt in 1798. If David Pryce-Jones is to be believed, this event marked the beginning of two centuries of pernicious Arabophilia and anti-Semitism, leading successive French governments to support unpleasant Middle Eastern despots and turn a blind eye to Islamic terrorism. Like most large generalisations, this one requires a fair amount of tendentious selection to support it. Pryce-Jones draws his examples from a wide field. The Dreyfus affair, the exclusion of Jews from the higher reaches of the pre-war diplomatic service, the racial policies of Vichy France, the granting of asylum to the Mufti of Jerusalem and later to Khomeini and Arafat, are all pressed into service.

Patricia Huth-Ellis

Separation

Sometimes, in the night, sharing our  bedI feel cage-restrained.I cannot stretch, or scratch, or swearat moths or mosquitoes looking forthe light, or me. I cannot listen to  theWorld Service, speak out loud or  hum. And yet and yet, separated,my being yearns for you.Not for rapturous couplings,not for passion, but for oneness.It is my primordial needto share the beat of breath,the silent, unconscious rhythm of   lifethat is not yet death.

D.J. Taylor

Things falling apart

Q: How to write imaginatively about the developing world? The old Naipaul-style methods of tragicomic ironising seem to be on the way out. Magic realism, where the butterfly clouds float reliably over the parched savannah, is not what it was. On the other hand, allegory-cum-fable — a tradition that extends at least as far back as J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) — is still going strong. Joining it on the rails is what might be called the documentary approach, in which great stretches of past, post- colonial time are populated by characters who, whatever their individual quirks, are above all representative of the historical currents flowing around them.

Allan Massie

When the judges got it right

In 1907 the Nobel Prize for Literature was for the first time awarded to an English-language writer: Kipling. It wasn’t even then a choice that went down well with those whose opinions counted. ‘The denizens of literary London,’ David Gilmour remarked in The Last Recessional, ‘were aghast that the prize should have gone to Kipling while Swinburne, Meredith and Hardy were still alive. It was a case, said one of them, of neglecting the goldsmiths and exalting the literary blacksmith.’ This was a curious judgment, for, whatever else may be said about Kipling, he was, in the short stories especially, the most careful and cunning craftsman. But by 1907 the youthful virtuosity which had so impressed Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry James had staled.

Saturday

Ferdinand Mount

Intolerable, unstoppable, indispensable

There is no getting away from it, Edith Wharton was grand. It never occurred to her to spare expense. On her honeymoon cruise, she and her feckless husband Teddy chartered a 333-ton steam yacht with a crew of 16. When they settled down at 884 Park Avenue, they bought the house next door to accommodate their staff. The famous house she and Teddy built at Lenox, Massachusetts, The Mount — ‘a delicate French château mirrored in a Massachusetts pond’, as Henry James called it — had 100 windows and 35 rooms, looked after by a dozen servants, some of whom never dared to use the front stairs.

Jonathan Sumption

The noise, the smells — and the people

On the opening page of The Waning of the Middle Ages, Johan Huizinga remarked that ‘we, at the present day, can hardly understand the keenness with which a fur coat, a good fire on the hearth, a soft bed, a glass of wine were formerly enjoyed’. Well, C. M. Woolgar can. Not that he is more learned or imaginative than his great predecessor, although he is a fine scholar and a good writer. It is just that the experience of life in the Middle Ages is less distant and arcane than Huizinga thought. Writing in the 1920s in the tradition of romantic pessimism which has dominated so much writing about the Middle Ages, he saw an unbridgeable gulf between medieval perceptions and our own.

Philip Womack

Chuckles in the middle of nowhere

I really wanted to like this book. After the dire Eragon, which has now been made into a worse film, and this year’s The Meaning of Night, with its coy Victorianisms and pointless footnotes, I was longing for a ‘fantasy’ that would enchant and amuse in delicious detail. And somewhere, in the 750-odd pages of The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters, there might be such a book. The novel starts off fairly promisingly, with the heroine, Miss Celestial Temple, chasing after the stuffed-shirt fiancé who dumped her. She stumbles across a party which is a cover for a deadly ‘Process’ run by a cabal of people with silly, unconvincing names like Xonq or Lacquer-Sforza.

Jane Ridley

In Her Majesty’s service

The night Prince Albert died at Windsor (14 December 1861) Queen Victoria rushed wild and sobbing from the death bed to the nurseries, where four-year-old Princess Beatrice lay asleep. Grabbing the child, the queen brought her to her bedroom. According to one account, Victoria, stunned by grief, ghoulishly dressed the little girl in the nightclothes of the dead Albert and lay beside her. Afterwards, the queen insisted on having Beatrice, or ‘Baby’ as she was called, with her for hours each day. Beatrice was the youngest by four years of Queen Victoria’s nine children, and this closeness to her grieving mother was, in Matthew Dennison’s account, the defining feature of her childhood.

David Crane

Something rich and strange

It would be hard to exaggerate just how good — or for those who have never read Christopher Rush — what a surprise and relief this book is. In the usual course of events there are few things to lower the spirits like a Scottish memoir, but here in the generosity, invention, compassion and wit of a story of an east coast childhood is the perfect antidote to that melancholy, long, withdrawing roar of the crofting world that seems to form the dismal staple of contemporary Scottish memory. Christopher Rush was born in St Monans on the east coast of Scotland in 1944, the son of a local girl and an English brute of a father just back from the war.

M R-D-Foot

The supreme double-crosser

The formidable Colonel ‘Tin Eye’ Stephens, who ran MI5’s inmost interrogation centre, once recorded that ‘fiction has not, and probably never will, produce an espionage story to rival in fascination and improbability the true story of Edward Chapman, whom only war could invest with virtue, and that only for its duration’. If Ben Macintyre had presented this story as a novel, it would have been denounced as far too unlikely; yet every word of it is true. Moreover he has that enviable gift, the inability to write a dull sentence. An enthralling book results from the opening up of once deadly secret files. Chapman was a professional burglar, who thought himself right at the top of the criminal tree. He was born in a slum village in Co.

Saturday

Honor Clerk

A martyr without a cause

‘Yes, you may well sigh and beat your head on the table,’ the narrator-protagonist of Love Songs and Lies addresses the reader on page 115, but if you’re going to allow Libby Purves’s heroine to get to you this early in the book you’ll be in a bad way by the end. There is a long and melancholy tradition of self-sacrificial heroines to which she all too knowingly belongs, but when it comes to an irritating combination of self-abnegation and sheer wrong-headedness there is not a Fanny Price or Agnes Copperfield in the whole of fiction who could hold a candle to Libby Purves’s Sally Bellinger.

Hugh Cecil

Singing in the mud

This is a courageous and original book. Its editor, Vivien Noakes, is resisting, though not alone (Martin Stephen, Anne Powell, Dominic Hibberd and John Onions could also be cited), a trend of opinion which has shown no sign of receding over the past 50 years: this has effectively labelled Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, and, at a pinch, half a dozen others as the only true voices of the Great War. The canon, mainly anti-war in outlook and confined almost entirely to the Western Front, has dominated the British anthologies, which in turn have profoundly influenced national perceptions of that war. In fact, for 1914-18, the proportion of optimistic and patriotic war poetry to anti-war poetry was very high.

Digby Durrant

An innocent abroad

Even as a boy Charles knew there was something false about his father Adrian Mainguard. Why? Nobody else did. An internationally famed pianist and composer, blessed with Dionysian looks and a forehead Virginia Woolf described as ‘like a bow window revealing his soul … there was something god-like about him’. Benjamin Britten, Auden, Sackville-Wests and Bloomsburys, all chanted praises. He was married to Edie, the daughter of the chairman of Vickers-Armstrong, and had performed for the royal family at Windsor. But still Charles sensed a flaw in the crystal. At least in his own eyes time was to prove him right. ‘Discovery of the truth about him set the compass for my life.