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Saturday

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 9 December 2006

Santa’s Twin (1996) by Dean Koontz Dean Koontz is the author of the schlock-horror novel Demon Seed (later a film) about a woman who is raped by a computer. Further offerings include Watchers, Lightning, The Bad Place, Intensity, Fear Nothing, and False Memory. His talents, however, don’t end there. His publishers explain: ‘At the request of his fans, bestselling novelist Dean Koontz has created a contemporary masterpiece that is destined to take its place alongside “The Night before Christmas” and A Christmas Carol as a perennial Yuletide favourite.

Saturday

Anne Chisholm

A very honourable rebel

In the autumn of 1995 Jessica Mitford, the youngest of the sisters, known to one and all since childhood as Decca, sat down at her desk in Oakland, California to answer a list of questions put to her by a journalist. ‘Yes, still consider myself a communist!’ she wrote, adding, ‘So do the undertakers, I’m sure.’ At the time, she was working on a revised edition of her great work, the 1963 bestseller The American Way of Death, which exposed and mocked the grotesque practices of the funeral business; outraged undertakers had indeed tried to discredit her as a card-carrying red. She was still working on the new edition when she was diagnosed with terminal cancer less than a year later, and instantly embarked on treatment.

Bevis Hillier

Royal gaffes, writers’ mottoes and mating bug

In the 1960s I lived in Hampstead, though all these years I have managed not to write a novel about Hampstead dinner-parties. The area was, and still is, rich in second-hand bookshops. There was one bookseller, long since dead, whose shop I used to visit, not to buy books, but to listen to his talk. Let us call him Turner Paige. He never stopped talking to his customers, in an interminable, E. L. Wisty-like drone, and every sentence was a priceless platitude. I used to stand in front of the shelves, pretending to browse, but inwardly gurgling with laughter as one clunking truism followed another. This was the sort of thing: Charles Dickens was a great comic writer. When he wanted to, he hit the funny-bone every time.

Tony Gould

Megalopolis and micro-organism

The story of Dr John Snow’s investigations into the causes of the cholera epidemics in mid-Victorian London has been written up several times, most recently in a book by Sandra Hempel which I reviewed in these pages six months ago. So do we need yet another account of them? Perhaps not, except that Steven Johnson approaches them from an unusually interesting angle: his book is less concerned with medical history than with urban history and, in particular, the rise of mega- cities. ‘We are now, as a species,’ he claims, ‘dependent on dense urban living as a survival strategy.

Byron Rogers

Partners on thin ice

My one contact with Conrad Black was an exchange of letters following his review in the Daily Telegraph of a book about the 1798 Irish rising. In this he had described the French landing as their most successful military intervention in Britain since Hastings. Helpfully I wrote to remind him of their landing in 1216, when King John’s England was within a whisker of becoming a French province. For the man had, after all, described himself as ‘historian’ on his first marriage certificate. His reply was brief and dismissive. The French army, he wrote, had just sort of wandered about. Well, in a sense they had, but only in the sense that Monty’s army on D-Day had wandered about Normandy: theirs was the last real foothold gained by a foreign army on English soil.

Peter Porter

Because We Can

This sensationWe say is the nationActing its destiny.How like is itTo the smaller act which here we see,The incomplete Devil paying a visit? We know it is our Fate to lack power —Is this our excuseThat we are very smallAmong demagogues whose job is to chooseThe Few’s good or the Good of All? Perhaps at homeThought might roamIn rhyme’s paradigmFrom native spiteIn bed or drawing room to Real TimeDownloaded to us day and night. Should then we askTo whom the task?There have been, we know,Unflinching soulsWho’ve travelled far as thought can go:Why is the world dying between the Poles?

Mary Keen

A choice of gardening books

Aspiration. Aspiration. Aspir- ation is still the watchword for publishers of gardening books. How many heavy, glossy productions filled with Get-the- Look pictures does the average gardener need? Especially when what is always peddled and praised tends to emphasise the haute couture of horticulture. There is a fashionable tendency to over-intellectualise about design. This is not what gardening is about. If you want more of this argument log onto www.thehadspenparabola.com, a website for the competition to redesign the walled garden at Hadspen, where there is some good online reading to be had. Victoria Glendinning is down-to-earth: ‘This is all gardens-in-the-head, not about real gardens and still less about making a garden.

Matthew Dennison

Liking to be beside the seaside

This is the second time The Fortnight in September has been reviewed in The Spectator. On its first appearance, my predecessor applauded ‘more simple human goodness and understanding … than in anything I have read for years’. The year was 1931. Three-quarters of a century has passed, and what to that earlier reviewer was a study in contemporary ordinariness has become a period piece. But the passage of time and the disappearance of the novel’s mise-en-scène — the interwar world of seaside boarding houses — have not altered its impact. My own verdict and that published in these pages 75 years ago overlap entirely. Mr and Mrs Stevens have three children, a cat and a canary. Mr Stevens is chief invoice clerk in a company of stationers.

Nicolas Barker

A mixed bag of memories

In 1958, half way through the century here recorded, the late and much lamented National Book League put on the first ever antiquarian book fair, with 24 members of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association exhibiting. ‘We hope,’ wrote The Book Collector, ‘that the ABA will be encouraged to make this an annual event.’ It did, and in the process transformed the way old books were bought and sold (a fact unnoticed here). It became the custom for some celebrity (or what passed for one) formally to open the fair. One year it fell to my turn. I had noticed that all previous openers had always said, sententiously, how much they owed to the booksellers they knew.

David Ekserdjian

Christmas art books | 2 December 2006

The seemingly unstoppable rise of the exhibition catalogue happily does not mean that nothing else gets published, and my selection of glossy delights to drive away the Boxing Day blues has more than its fair share of goodies that were not born in museums. The Royal Tombs of Egypt by Zahi Hawass (Thames & Hudson, £39.95) is a spectacular case in point, which not only contains numerous gorgeous photographs of the paintings and carvings within them, but also some remarkable six-page fold-outs. Hawass is above all concerned with the subject-matter and meaning of these decorations, which were based upon such texts as the Book of the Dead, and proves to be an exemplary guide to their intricate iconography.

Anita Brookner

Prize-winning novels from France

The Prix Goncourt was awarded, as of right, to Jonathan Littell for Les Bienveillantes (Galli- mard). Les Bienveillantes, the Kindly Ones, is the name usually given to the Furies. The narrator of this masterly novel, Max Aue, the director of a lace factory, is writing his account of the second world war, in which he served on the wrong, i.e. German side. Notable for his sane and reasonable tone of voice the narrator divulges, without much compunction, that he is a former Nazi, an SS officer who was present in all the main theatres of war, initially in Lithuania and the Ukraine, and latterly in a devastated Berlin. He is also notable for his imperturbable sense of right and wrong, or rather his conviction that these terms are implausible. The gas chambers? On whom do we lay the blame?

Allan Massie

Roth marches on

Writing here (18 November), Anita Brookner described Joseph Roth’s reports from France 1925-39, The White Cities, as ‘her best read of the year’. I’ve had a copy for several months now, and I keep dipping into it and always finding something new, surprising and delightful. The rediscovery of Roth has been one of the happiest things in recent years; it owes much to the devotion and excellence of his translator, Michael Hofmann, and of course to the support given by his publisher, Granta. Roth is probably best known for The Radetzky March, one of the masterpieces of 20th-century fiction. None of his other books may match that; why should they?

Saturday

The Spectator

Christmas Books 2

Anthony Daniels J. G. Ballard’s Kingdom Come (Fourth Estate, £17.99) is a dyspeptic vision of a dystopian Britain that has already half-arrived. He is a close observer of our national malaise: indiscriminate consumerism combined with a sense of entitlement, and therefore of resentment. His profound understanding of the place of the teddy bear in our national life made me laugh. Bruce Clark’s Twice a Stranger: Greece, Turkey and the Minorities They Expelled (Granta, £20) is a brilliant, subtle and very moving exploration of the ironies of modernisation and nationalism in Greece and Turkey. Greek Moslems were deemed Turks, and Turkish Orthodox deemed Greek, and expelled from their ancestral homes accordingly.

Bevis Hillier

He told it like it was

Cardinal Newman and James Lees-Milne had these things in common: both were Roman Catholic converts; both were predominantly homosexual; each wrote about himself with brilliance; and both wrote lousy novels. Osbert Sitwell shared three of these attributes, but was not a Catholic convert and teased his boyfriend David Horner for becoming one. Some will think it heretical, but I am tempted to add to the list of great self- portraitists who wrote indifferent novels, Compton Mackenzie, Anthony Powell and John Fowles. I recently reread Mackenzie’s Sinister Street (1913-14), wondering whether it could be adapted as a Merchant-Ivory type of film. It has fine passages of prose; but the whole thing is so shapeless and meandering that a movie script would be a very tall order.

William Leith

Man’s craving for spirits

When I finished this book I asked myself why, considering its undoubted qualities, I found it so difficult and strenuous. Reading it, I felt like a man inching up a sheer rock-face. Sometimes I would get to the top and take a peek at the view. But then I’d come crashing down again, and wonder what it was I’d actually seen. But I didn’t give up. I got to the end, and lay down on my bed, and began to wonder what it was all about. There were times when, briefly, I believed I had grasped what Marina Warner, the exceptionally well-informed author, was trying to tell me. But her subject is immensely difficult, at times impossible. The subject is phantasmagoria — or, more precisely, that which does not exist, but appears to.

Lloyd Evans

Looking at language

No civilised person knows who John Humphrys is. I’ve looked into it and I discover he’s rather a sad case — an insomniac who telephones politicians at dawn and interrupts them while they’re still half asleep. This strange career has won him celebrity among the restless multitude who, like him, insist on getting up in the middle of the night. It has also won him a book contract. His last work was about sloppy English. So is the new one, but as he unfurls his endless series of hastily written gibberish it becomes clear that he’s less interested in inarticulacy than he is in his jumble sale of parochial antipathies.

Jonathan Mirsky

The time of the hedgehog

As I read this big, enthralling book I often wrote the words ‘muddle,’ ‘misunderstanding,’ and ‘the brink’ in the margins. From 1955, when Nikita Khrushchev came to power in the Soviet Union, until his dismissal, sudden, unexpected and brutal (but not violent) by his comrades and ex-protégés in 1964, the world teetered several times on the edge of nuclear war, most notably during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

Geoffrey Owen

Tycoons of our times

How should the lives of business tycoons be judged — by their personal wealth, by the size of the companies they created, or by how long their business survives after their death? If the last of these criteria is chosen, then the record of recent British business leaders is not impressive. A good many of the men and women who figure in this collection of business obituaries — mainly covering people who died in the last ten years — were shooting stars; they had brief moments of glory but no staying power. Freddie Laker pioneered low-cost air travel; Joe Hyman saw how polyester and other new fibres would transform the textile industry; but the careers of both men ended in disappointment.

Allan Mallinson

Apportioning the honours

Who, in the end, defeated Napoleon Bonaparte? This is the question that Robert Harvey, journalist and former MP, asks at the end of his most comprehensive account of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. It is pertinent, as he points out, since all the coalition members at one time or another lay claim to the honours: Dogged Austria deserves a large share of the credit for rising from defeat again and again. Prussia, after its lamentable initial performance, renewed some of its national pride at the end. Russia can claim credit for the 1812 campaign, in which although there was no great feat of Russian arms, the French were completely routed. Harvey’s final verdict is, however, unequivocal: ‘the lion’s share must surely go to Britain’.

Gerard Noel

Bursting out of the closet

Born in 1947, Jeremy Norman belongs to the first generation of homosexual Englishmen able to express their sexuality openly and without fear of prosecution, courtesy of the Sexual Offences Act of 1967. As his entertaining memoir attests, Norman has certainly made the most of his freedom. Not only has his life been ‘a frenzied dance and feast of pleasure’ but, as an astute businessman, he has plundered the pink pound in a succession of enterprises including Heaven, the world’s most famous gay nightclub. And, perhaps most remarkably of all, he has lived to tell the tale. The 1967 Act did not change the world overnight. In Norman’s view, it took another 20 years for homosexuality to become socially acceptable as well as legal.