More from Books

Saturday

Dorothy Pope

No Picnic

Ironically, they rode a tandem bike,that warring pair, though any two less like to live in tandem would be hard to find.He rode in front. She took the seat behind. They quarrelled as they puffed up Devon hills.‘You pedalling?’ ‘Of course!’ ‘I swear it feels as if you’re not,’ he snarled. He spoke his mind.She held her tongue sometimes thinking it kind and wiser, since the sidecar held their child,a two-year-old aware and watchful of their wild abuse. Inevitably came the rift.The front, the back, the sidecar came adrift. He took their money, bought himself a carand left. The woman panicked, married far from suitably — again — sank without trace.The infant washed up in a Home for Waifs.

Philippa Stockley

The squalor of the past

The ability to manufacture discontent from whatever materials are to hand is one of the most consistent characteristics of human nature. In Hubbub, pithy historian Emily Cockayne roams the seamy, stinky and squelchy side of English life: ‘The experiences presented here are unashamedly skewed towards the negative . . . . I am deliberately not presenting a rounded view of life — I am simply presenting the worst parts of it.’ For those with a cheerful predilection towards grime, gunge and disease, the torrent that follows is riveting. Within chapters headed Ugly, Itchy, Mouldy, Noisy, Grotty, Busy, Dirty and Gloomy, Cockayne rolls like a pig in a delicious vat of mud.

Saturday

Bevis Hillier

Trick or treat

Why do the French call an April Fool a poisson d’avril and a 1 April dupe a victime d’un poisson d’avril? I have always assumed it is because the victimes take the bait and swallow the hook; but Martin Wainwright tells us that the April Fish derives its name from ‘the dim-witted, bulging look of carp’ — ‘the notion suits the bewildered look of a baffled hoax victim’. This side of the Channel we do refer to a ‘cod letter’, a genre in which I can claim a modest track record. Apparently on 1 April Frogs go round sticking paper fish on each others’ backs. How droll: if they had tried that on Quasimodo, he’d have been the Fishback of Nôtre Dame — high gudgeon amid the bells and corbels.

David Caute

The day of the leopard

One point in Robert Mugabe’s favour, despite the Zimbabwean patriarch’s brutally protracted autumn, is that he was never planted in power by a CIA-supported coup d’état. As Larry Devlin’s self-congratulatory yet revealing memoir makes clear, the same cannot be said of Zaire’s esteemed dictator, Joseph Désiré Mobutu, otherwise known as Mobutu Sese Seko.

Jean Hayes

Playtime | 31 March 2007

Old men with dogs roam the neglected parkWhere they once played as boys. Now take a peepInto the lounge of Number Twenty  ThreeThe Meads. Four sturdy youngsters sitBefore a slick computer, playing  games.A milky, midget, artifical skyHolds them enraptured. Sterile  bullets flashAnd flicker, stuttering across the  screen,While Mother whisks around her  microwavePreparing instant meals from plastic  packs.Better to stay indoors. It’s clean and  nice.That dog-polluted field is a disgrace.Besides it makes less work for  Mummy. SoThe piper bleeps, luring his victims onThrough the dark doorway. Deep  inside that hillAll children are forever quiet and still.

Eric Weinberger

We also do some work

The narrative trademark — or gimmick — of Joshua Ferris’s first novel, Then We Came to the End, is contained in the title: the book is told in the first person plural, which gives this story of Chicago office workers its initial powerful, even oracular, thrust. ‘We were fractious and overpaid,’ the book begins. ‘Our mornings lacked promise.’ Soon comes a key sentence: ‘Most of us liked most everyone, a few of us hated specific individuals, one or two people loved everyone and everything.

Digby Durrant

Past and future imperfect

This is a book about the failure of two marriages. One is destroyed by a past that refuses to slacken its grip, though the marriage itself has to limp on; the other is wrecked by a future impossible to avoid. They are seen through the eyes of four different people, two from one family, two from the other. Ruth, a precocious 15-year-old, has by far the most entries, hence the book’s title. The result of all this is a very crowded and colourful canvas, a patchwork quilt of a book. The two families live within walking distance of each other in a sparsely populated part of Northumberland and they are in each other’s pockets whether they like or not.

Ian Thomson

Meandering through the boondocks

South of the River is a stadium-sized novel of over 500 pages. It has the scope and ambition of an American McNovel — Don DeLillo’s Underworld, say, or The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. At first it appears to be in narrative disarray, the plot leaping backwards and forwards in time. A theme soon emerges, however, as the disparate stories converge. Touted by the publishers (or by the author) as ‘the big British novel of our times’, South of the River opens with Labour’s election victory in 1997 and chronicles the misfortunes of a south London family over a period of five years up to 2002. London south of the river has not been mapped in a novel of this bulk for some time.

Lee Langley

A marvel in marble

The Moghul monarchs’ way of life was an extravaganza of such breathtaking splendour that in comparison the Sun King’s Versailles seems understated. Both Shah Jahan and Louis XIV came to the throne in 1643 and their courts had much in common: architectural grandeur, luxury, a love of jewels and a flair for excess. What was unique to the Muslim emperor was his devotion to a consort throughout their long marriage. Her death in childbirth and his desire to create a worthy mausoleum resulted in what many consider the most beautiful building in the world — the Taj Mahal.

Michael Carlson

Murder in the South

When David Rose visited Columbus, Georgia, to write a story about capital punishment in the United States, it drew him inexorably into a decade-long battle for justice on behalf of Carlton Gary, a black man on death row, convicted 20 years ago of a series of rape/murders of elderly white women committed some eight years earlier. The handsome, womanising Gary, what would now be called ‘a player’, was an unlikely candidate for such killings, and the ‘violation’ of the title is as much his by the criminal justice system as that of the murder victims. The setting is pure To Kill a Mockingbird. Columbus is a typical small Southern city, its economy dependent on nearby Fort Benning.

Andrew Lambirth

Barbarity tinged with splendour

If you missed the exhibition of Glitter and Doom which ended last month at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, this handsome hardback catalogue is a good armchair substitute. It contains three very readable essays — by no means typical of exhibition catalogues — and a wealth of colour illustrations. Sabine Rewald, the show’s curator, sets the art historical scene in her introduction, followed by an excellent piece by the cultural critic Ian Buruma, entitled ‘Faces of the Weimar Republic’. The third contribution is again art historical: a brief history of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement in Germany by Matthias Eberle. Neue Sachlichkeit translates as ‘New Objectivity’, and it is the portraits of this tendency which form the subject of the book.

Marcus Berkmann

Broadening the vision

‘Popular science’: for some readers this remains a problematic category. I’m sure proper scientists look askance at civilians reading such books on public transport, imagining their own abstruse specialities dumbed down for the hard-of-thinking. And the vast mass of arts graduates, who hate and fear science, remembering the bad trousers and unfortunate hairstyles of science undergraduates in their day, happily admit that they know nothing of the subject and understand even less. Some people I know have been boasting for nearly 20 years that they gave up A Brief History of Time before the end. It’s all too sad for words. Stephen Hawking, though, has much to answer for.

Allan Massie

Angus Wilson taking risks

Auden, discussing Troilus and Cressida, remarked that major writers set themselves new challenges, and so risk failure, while minor ones are content to do the same thing as before and so risk nothing. There’s something in this, though, like many of his pronouncements, it’s too sweeping to be altogether true. (Besides which, the major/minor categorisation is tiresome, even if we all resort to it from time to time.) Instead of indulging in the sheep-and-goats of major/minor, it may simply be that some writers become bored with what they have done, or fear becoming what Graham Greene called ‘prisoners of their method’, and so strike out on a new line; plenty of bad writers after all set themselves new and different challenges, even if they fail to meet them.

Saturday

Charlotte Moore

Wisdom through waiting

Grace Waterhouse ‘knew in general terms that [she] was marrying a hero’. Grace is the central character of this, Thomas Keneally’s 24th novel. In old age she looks back to the second world war and tries to disentangle the circumstances of her widowhood: her husband Leo’s capture and beheading at the hands of the Japanese. Leo Waterhouse, ‘the most beautiful adult boy’, was ‘a fulfilment of daydreams’. He looked like Errol Flynn and was as adventurous and brave as the characters Flynn played. As a key member of the Independent Reconnaissance Squad, Leo’s job was to spearhead stealth raids on the new Japanese empire in the southern Pacific.

Said K-Aburish

Ignorance is no excuse

Imperial Life in the Emerald City is the best account I have read of why the American occupation of Iraq has gone so drastically wrong. It is an exceptional piece of work, well researched, well written and well judged. Having lived the Iraqi story for over 30 years, from advising Saddam’s government on Iraqi-American relations to resigning in protest against his use of chemical weapons, I cannot remember a book that does more to enhance our understanding of the country than this one. On the whole the quality of reporting on Iraq since the American invasion has been dismal.

Anthony Sattin

The future is black

The title of Peter Godwin’s beautifully written and magnificently poignant memoir is taken from Zulu lore, which states that solar eclipses are caused by a celestial crocodile eating the sun. Within the covers we are offered twin eclipses, one caused by life ebbing away from Godwin’s father, the other by the darkness of Robert Mugabe’s increasingly repressive regime in Zimbabwe. Godwin was born and brought up in Zimbabwe by white immigrants. His parents were among the last of the pre-independence white arrivals, escaping the horrors of a Europe made ugly by the second world war and arriving in what was, at the time, an oasis of calm, wealth and beauty. They became good, solid citizens.

Kenneth Steven

Voting with My Feet

I wish I could be fun at parties too: Slap men across their backs and flirt with girls, Tell ribald tales, play games with young blonde curls, Shout, ‘Murphy, man, remember at the zoo!’ Instead I drink too much and hog the loo, Avoid the crowd and wince at insults hurled, Trip over doctors’ shoes, get caught in pearls, Knock over priceless Mings . . . but then what’s new? At home they thought me hapless, shook their heads At all attempts to play the suave, cool guy, Just said that I’d been born with two left feet. So now I’m stuck at parties with fat Neds With gorgeous dolls upon their arms. Bye bye, I’m off wherever the real thinkers meet.

William Skidelsky

The critic and the novelist

Novelists do not always make the best critics, and vice versa. But there are writers — Henry James, Virginia Woolf and John Updike spring to mind — who are similarly gifted in both fields. Such cases are interesting because of the questions they raise about the relationship between the novels and the criticism. How similar are the two stylistically? Can the judgments of the critic ever be independent of the inclinations of the novelist? (Or, to put it another way, are writers likely to favour those novelists who most resemble themselves?) Trickier still is the question of truthfulness: which, out of the fiction or the criticism, can best be said to represent the real author? Fiction’s domain is the imagination, whereas criticism deals with facts.

Jonathan Keates

A golden age for ghouls

The 17th century was the heyday of the English ghost. Up and down the kingdom during those ‘distracted times’ of the Gunpowder Plot, Civil War and Commonwealth, spectres, revenants and phantoms were at their most restless and fretful. Church bells rang without human agency, invisible armies clattered to and fro in the darkness, drummers sounded a ghoulish tattoo through midnight bedchambers, a whole menagerie of ectoplasmic beasts terrified kitchenmaids or sent children into hysterics.

Adam Zamoyski

No redeeming features

Until fairly recently, the name Thyssen-Bornemisza held generally positive associations — with vibrant German industrialism, responsible capitalism, pan-European cosmopolitanism, artistic connoisseurship and philanthropy, all tinged with a pleasant whiff of Hungarian nobility. Just how deeply erroneous these are revealed to have been is staggering. August Thyssen, who created the family fortune in the second half of the 19th century, was neither an inventive manufacturer, nor an adventurous entrepreneur, nor a creative capitalist. He made his money by marrying sensibly, associating with the right people and taking advantage of opportunities. He was a careful, thrifty, cost-cutting, cheese-paring and exploitative industrialist, more of a quartermaster than a captain of industry.