More from Books

Saturday

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.

Ian Warrell

Pre-Raphaelite of the world

Had there been a poll of the nation’s favourite painting 100 years ago, the front runner would almost certainly have been William Holman Hunt’s ‘The Light of the World’. Its representation of a crowned and bearded figure, knocking at a door that is obstructed by thorns and dead flowers, was a sermon in paint. Viewers were expected to piece together its symbolic references and arrive at the idea of a suppliant Christ, offering to redeem the world with the light of his salvation, even as he meekly awaits admittance by each individual. As well as being a work of faithful naturalism, painstakingly recorded during chilly moonlit nights in the Surrey countryside, it is an image profoundly in tune with the proselytising zeal of Victorian evangelism.

Robert Stewart

All too minor to matter

Monarchy, monarchy, monarchy. Are we so addicted to it that we want to read the life of a boy who came to the throne at the age of nine and died six years later? Chris Skidmore seems to think so. His purpose, he says, is to rescue the ‘lost’ Edward VI from the obscurity to which negligent historians have consigned him and resurrect him as ‘a central figure in the Tudor age’. Can it be done? Amid the contest between the Lord Protector, the Duke of Somerset, and his rivals (first his younger brother, Edward Seymour, and then John Dudley, the Earl of Warwick) for control of the Council which governed England during his minority, was there a role of any significance for Edward to play? Skidmore makes a half-hearted stab at suggesting that there was.

Sebastian Smee

Formal feeling comes good

Contemporary Australian fiction, like Australian film, is known more for its exuberance and antic energy than its reticence and restraint. Deborah Robertson’s Careless, a first novel that has already won her acclaim in her own country, is a marvellous correction to the stereotype. Robertson’s ingredients are simple, but disparate: right to the end, one is not quite sure how they are going to combine. This uncertainty gives the novel an intricate atmosphere of floating suspense. In a moment of murderous rage and insanity, a man drives his truck into a children’s playgroup. Among those killed is the young son of Lily, a neglectful single mother. His older sister, Pearl, survives, and much of the novel is concerned with how Pearl comes to terms with what has happened.

James Delingpole

More than a hint of cordite

The best personal account of tank warfare in the Western Desert is generally reckoned to be Alamein to Zem Zem by Keith Douglas. It is indeed a great book, telling in spare, sensitive, limpid prose how it feels to turn from being a young man with romantic illusions about the nobility of war into a batttle-hardened tank veteran. But because it was written by an upper-class poet there are some elements that are missing. For example, Douglas never mentions how you can tell if a soldier on leave has been involved in a tank battle: for days afterwards, thanks to the constant inhalation of shell fumes in a confined space, he will fart the smell of cordite.

Allan Massie

The rewards of crime

Raymond Chandler once praised Dashiell Hammett for having given murder back to the sort of people who committed it. One knows what he meant; away with murders at the vicarage or on the Orient Express (where, however, a good few have doubtless taken place). Yet it wasn’t really a very intelligent observation because all sorts of people, even little old ladies and clergymen, do in fact commit murder. In any case, what used to be called ‘the hard-boiled crime novel’, even Chandler’s own, marvellous as the best three or four of them are, is often as far from realism as the classic English detective novel.

Saturday

Sam Leith

That damned, elusive Prussian

‘Gott for damn, Rhoades, vos you drunk?’ was the indignant outcry of Captain Berndt, as he rowed alongside the Guendolen. Captaining the Guendolen was Berndt’s British friend and drinking partner Captain Rhoades, a man noted for his ‘Rabelaisian wit’ and ‘unprintable songs’, but who had just steamed up to the German end of Lake Nyasa and disabled Berndt’s ship the Hermann von Wissman with a single shot. Rhoades was not drunk. It was August 1914, and the Great War had just — unbeknownst to the unfortunate Captain Berndt — kicked off in Africa. When we think of the first world war we tend to think of exhausted Tommies drowning in freezing mud in the fields of Flanders.

Michael Gove

Not what Europe wants to hear

Between the revolution and the firing squad, a Russian aristocrat once observed, there is always time for a bottle of champagne. Between the demographic disaster and the collapse of Western civilisation, Mark Steyn appears to believe, there’s always time for a rip-roaring op-ed and a series of blistering jokes. No writer I can think of manages to combine utter bleakness about mankind’s prospects with a genius for one-liners like Steyn. More gloomily pessimistic about our civilisation’s future than Peter Hitchens at a fetish night in Heaven, and yet consistently funnier than any mere humorist or jobbing stand-up, Steyn is a master of gallows humour. And in this book we Europeans are the condemned men.

Graham Stewart

To flee or not to flee

‘Why is no one talking about what is happening in our country?’ demands the splash across the front cover of the latest book by George Walden. It is therefore something of a surprise in the pages that follow to find the former Conservative minister discoursing at length on the problems of immigration, terrorism, crime and house prices — all familiar mainstays of the modern conversational canon. To be fair, it is Walden’s contention that these are but contributing factors to a national malaise manifesting itself in the under-reported fact that so many Britons want to leave the country of their birth. What is more, it is not our cleaners, plumbers and fruit-pickers who are throwing in the towel in the face of cut-throat competition from the Polish diaspora.

Jonathan Keates

How at last we got it together

Stand in the Corinthian portico of the National Gallery’s main building and look due south beyond Nelson’s Column into Whitehall. Your gaze lights upon Hubert Le Sueur’s Baroque equestrian statue of King Charles I, and if your eyesight is especially keen, you might just glimpse a projecting corner of Inigo Jones’s Banqueting Hall. In this trio of eye-catchers lies the fons et origo of our national collection, at least according to Jonathan Conlin in the opening pages of The Nation’s Mantelpiece. For scarcely had Charles stepped out from the Banqueting Hall for his beheading in 1649 than his stupendous assemblage of pictures, with its Raphaels, Titians and Mantegnas, was broken up and sold.

Fiona Maddocks

The other side of silence

Asked by a journalist whether he went to the opera, John Cage replied, ‘No, I listen to the traffic.’ The remark, often quoted, was less sententious than this abbreviated form would imply. Typically Cage, more interested in communicating than teasing despite his reputation as one of the funniest conversationalists, continued with an explanation: ‘I live in the Sixth Avenue area in New York, and there is lots of noise there. That is my music.’ Ever the pioneer, Cage (1912-92) influenced a generation of composers and artists inspired by his experimentalism. Everything he did was new. Most was little understood at the time outside his immediate circle. He used chance, via the I Ching, and electronics.

Saturday

Frederic Raphael

Mr Facing- both- ways

The classical scholar T. P. Wiseman decided that, once he had passed his 42nd birthday, his middle-aged hands were no longer apt for writing about the erotic Catullus. In his 90th year, Leo Abse manifests no such squeamishness in this psychoanalytic study of Daniel Defoe. Neither embarrassed nor embarrassing, he sees no reason to abate his hot pursuit of the more or less hidden impulses that, he argues, enabled Defoe to impersonate both Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders with such instant insolence. Defoe has been condemned as a hack, an opportunist and a turncoat.

Interconnect

Magic in the Gulf of Finland

Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book had been published before in this country, but when, two years ago, the enterprising Sort of Books reissued it for the first time in many years, it seemed that its moment had come. I pressed it on a lot of people, often to find that they, too, had discovered this extra- ordinary masterpiece. Something about its quality of rootedness, of unnarrated exploration of a tiny territory strikes a chord just now. It is the opposite of escapist; rather, a hymn of praise to the scrap of land wherever we may find ourselves. It’s a book of the utmost simplicity, and almost without discernible plot. A grandmother and her grand-daughter spend their summers on a minuscule island in the Gulf of Finland.