More from Books

Wednesday

M R-D-Foot

Triumph and tragedy

The 90th anniversary of the start of the battle of the Somme falls on 1 July. Several books mark it; it made a scar on the nation’s memory that is still severe, and it is still often called the day when the army suffered its worst casualties. Strictly, this is not true, for General Perceval in Singapore surrendered 80,000 men to a smaller force of Japanese on 15 February 1942. But on 1 July 1916 the army did suffer its worst total of dead on a single day: 19,240, and nearly 40,000 more were wounded or went missing. It was the first major action in which Kitchener’s new armies fought; whole battalions of ‘Pals’ from northern industrial towns were almost wiped out.

Olivia Glazebrook

Sex, comics and the Holocaust

Howard Jacobson has called Kalooki Nights ‘the most Jewish novel that has ever been written by anybody, anywhere’. What does this mean? It is a novel whose hero, Max Glickman, is Jewish. It is a history of two Jewish families living in Manchester, the Glickmans and the Washinskys, and a study of the degrees by which successive generations adapt to English society and English culture. It is a book full of Jewish words and phrases, Jewish customs and Jewish friends and relatives. In fact the only non-Jews in the book are either Max’s wives and girlfriends (a plentiful crew), his sister’s boyfriend Mick, and Dorothy, the half-German girlfriend of his neighbour Asher Washinsky. Oh, and a rather odd TV producer named Francine.

Philip Ziegler

Uneasy biographical bedfellows

The dust jacket of this book shows two heads confronting one another: General MacArthur, aggressive, arrogant, defiantly puffing cigar smoke at the world at large; the Emperor Hirohito, impassive, phlegmatic, quietly obstinate. The subtitle, ‘MacArthur, Hirohito and the American Duel with Japan’, similarly suggests that within the book a double biography will be found. The formula can work effectively. Hitler and Stalin, Wellington and Napoleon, were titanic figures whose careers meshed closely, each having the other frequently in his thoughts, each consciously or unconsciously adjusting his behaviour in reaction to the other. The trouble about this book is that MacArthur and Hirohito do not relate to each other in this way.

Stephen Abell

Small maelstrom in Yorkshire

An abiding impression of the Victorian period is its mania for being straight-faced to the point of seeming strait-laced, for order and precision, for enumeration and explication. The Times affirmed that ‘just now we are an objective people. We want to place everything we can under glass cases, and stare our fill.’ Gathering the Water tells the story of the 1847 flooding of the Forge Valley in West Yorkshire for a reservoir in a fussy, finicky Victorian way. And the problem is not staring our fill, but finding enough to fill our stare. Charles Weightman, the narrator, is the ‘flooder’ charged with supervising the evacuation of the remaining habitable homes in the valley before the water comes surging in.

Jonathan Keates

A visionary rooted in this world

Dante has suffered rather too much from his admirers. Barely was he cold in his grave at Ravenna than the process of reinventing him began. The Florentines, who had earlier driven into exile the man they dubbed an instrument of the Devil, hastened to claim him for their own, appointing Giovanni Boccaccio, his earliest biographer, as their city’s official public lecturer on the poet’s most famous work. First merely entitled Commedia, the visionary epic picked up its Divina from Boccaccio, and the process of literary canonisation began.

Marcus Berkmann

Myself when younger

A screenwriter’s lot is not a happy one. You write all those scripts, most of which never get close to being made; you must deal with dim, philistine producers and deranged, egomaniacal directors who don’t necessarily know what they want but know that what you have written is not what they want; you must watch in impotent silence as idiot actors abandon your lines altogether and start ‘improvising’; you take the blame if the film is a turkey and see others take the credit if it’s a huge success; and you enjoy almost no respect from anyone else in the cinematic food chain, as you are only a writer. And what for? Only vast riches and the occasional Oscar nomination if you are very lucky, and the chance to direct your own script if you are even luckier than that.

Anthony Thwaite

Pity (for E, aged three)

I picked a beetle up and let it go,And that was pity;But not the pity that you could not goToday, as you’d been promised, to the ZooBecause you were too sick.So ‘What a pity’ were the words I spoke,And then you asked your question: ‘What is pity?’ I’ve searched and searched, but can’t find out the trickTo tell you what it is. My glib words chokeAttempting to spell out the different senseOf rescuing the beetle, and why youDid not go with us to the promised Zoo.What is the difference? How can I sayThat pity is a debt I cannot pay?

Jonathan Mirsky

Stalling at the starting line

Seven per cent of zebra finches stutter. So did Moses, Demosthen- es, Aesop, Churchill, Darwin, Nietzsche, André Malraux, Marilyn Monroe, Henry James, Somerset Maugham, Charles I, George VI, and Lewis Carrroll. So do Margaret Drabble and Marc Shell, the author of this comprehensive, learned, even playful book. And so, declaring an interest, do I. Many stutterers are left-handed, they don’t stutter when they sing (although Monroe pretended to), make love, or, usually, when they speak another language (I do in Chinese). Stutterers try to disguise their handicaps, hemming and hawing like James, speaking slowly and thickly like Darwin. Some speak extra fast. Some are often silent, others gabble away. As with death, non-stutterers rarely mention stuttering to stutterers.

Allan Massie

The art of the irrelevant

Asked whether a good review would sell a book, the publisher Rupert Hart-Davies replied, ‘No, but a concatenation of good ones may do so.’ One would like to think this true, even while observing that the bestseller lists regularly feature novels which are either not reviewed at all, or have been given brief and sometimes scornful notices. No doubt this was always the case, sales of the likes of Edgar Wallace and Dennis Wheatley not depending on reviews. The means by which a book becomes a bestseller have always been mysterious, though nowadays the level of the promotion budget and the willingness of publishers to pay for lavish displays in bookshops seem also essential to the creation of a bestseller. Few literary novels come into that category.

Wednesday

Mark Archer

Standing room only

The story of the Black Hole of Calcutta was once as familiar to schoolchildren as the battle of Hastings or the Gunpowder Plot. On 20 June 1756, after a fierce battle lasting several days, in which the British defensive force of 515 men had held out against an Indian army numbering tens of thousands, 146 survivors — men, women and children — were locked into a room that measured 14 ft by 18 ft. The room had only two small, high, barred windows for air. The monsoon had not yet broken and the temperature would not have fallen below 100 F all night. When the door was opened in the morning, all but 23 had died from suffocation and thirst.

Brian Power

The forecast is disaster

The oracle bones in Peter Hessler’s book were discovered in the 19th century, near Anyang in the North China Plain. They were the shoulder blades of oxen and deer and the carapaces of turtles. Archaeologists dated them to about 1300 BC in the Bronze Age. The bones had been used for divination. Questions in ancient Chinese were inscribed on them; they were then heated with a live coal, and the replies of the gods were indicated by the shape of the cracks produced. The replies were brief; ‘disaster’ was a favourite word. Peter Hessler’s account of his fascin- ation with archaeological finds is inter- woven with his writings as a journalist in Beijing between 1999 and 2004. The total effect is that of a brilliant tapestry of ancient and modern China.

Montagu Curzon

As per the American dream

If ever you need to rouse a vineyard owner from vinous slumber, creep up behind him and whisper ‘Parker’. He will leap to his feet, eyes blazing, either with $ signs or with aggrieved Gallic pride. For the name of Robert M. Parker Jr is charged with electricity throughout the world of wine. His is an extraordinary story, in human and sociological as well as in wine industry terms, and here is very well told, with due verve and enthusiasm. It will fascinate anyone interested in late 20th-century developments, not only wine-lovers. Elin McCoy knows and has worked with Parker; she is a distinguished food and wine writer, and she can be critical of him. Many can’t. To his subscribers he is ‘Mr P.

Frederic Raphael

Her own worst admirer

Audrey Ruston was born in Brussels in May 1929, of a Dutch baroness, Ella van Heemstra, and an English father, Joseph Ruston, some kind of toff, among whose distant ancestors was James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, the third husband of Mary Queen of Scots. Ruston soon abandoned his wife and daughter for a long lifetime of alcohol and irresponsibility. Before he did so, he became an enthusiastic fascist. In 1935, he took the literally fellow-travelling Ella to Munich to have lunch with Hitler. After the war, Ruston hyphenated his name to embrace the Hepburn, from which his deprived daughter took her stage and film name. Audrey and her mother were trapped in Arnhem when the Germans invaded the Low Countries in 1940.

Noble Frankland

Finding the tools to finish the job

This massive study of Hitler’s war economy runs to half the length of War and Peace, partly for the reason that the author shares with Tolstoy the annoying habit of repeating himself frequently and at length. Although I suspect the book will be cited more often than read and perhaps more often read than understood, it must all the same now be enrolled by any serious student of the second world war as belonging to the list of indispensable sources available. Adam Tooze’s formidable intellect and impressive industry certainly entitle it to that. History may be regarded as a rope consisting of many strands of different strengths and sizes but all of which contribute to the whole resulting rope.

Christopher Woodward

A question of all hanging together

The Royal Academy has had the brilliant and brave idea of asking James Fenton to write its history. Fenton is not only a great poet, but also one of Britain’s most interesting writers on art. In his first collection Terminal Moraine (1972) he published a beautiful poem on the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, and I find that I have carried with me from one museum job to another cuttings of his articles from the New York Review of Books and the Guardian. He begins with Zoffany’s group portrait of the 36 artists who founded the Academy in 1768 in order to exhibit contemporary art and to teach young artists to be as good as the French and Italians.

William Brett

The diary maid

With her poetry collection The World’s Wife (1999), Carol Ann Duffy provided a voice for the women that have been silenced in the course of history. Jane Harris has done something similar with The Observations, a bawdy tale narrated by Bessy Buckley, a (too) young Irish prostitute turned serving maid. Set somewhere dank and dour in Scotland in the middle of the 19th century, this rambunctious story revolves around Bessy’s relationship with her mistress, Arabella Weir, who is writing a treatise on the domestic class. The Observations bears all the hallmarks of a Gothic novel — locked boxes, sordid pasts, mistaken identities, ruined reputations. But it is made unique by the narrator’s voice, for which I can think of no parallel.

Wednesday

A.N. Wilson

Values and fluctuations

Every now and then there are surveys in which groups or individuals are asked to name books which have changed their lives. In my life, the publication of John Gross’s The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson when I was a bookish teenager, undoubtedly determined for me the direction I wanted my life to take. There are two particular quotations in it which stayed forever in my mind. One was from Andrew Lang, when he said: Marryat never made us wish to run away to sea. That did not seem to be one’s vocation. But the story of Pen [that is, Thackeray’s Pendennis] made one wish to run away to literature; to the Temple, to the streets where Brown, the famous reviewer, might be seen walking with his wife and his umbrella.

Robert Salisbury

The art and craft of government

Any book about the exercise of power that carries a ringing endorsement by Peter Hen- nessy on its dust-cover promises well. Perhaps, therefore, it is the fault of this reviewer that he felt that Professor Mulgan had generated rather less excitement than Professor Hennessy had promised. Hennessy’s own books reflect his own personality: they fizz, they crackle with excitement and find it difficult to suppress whoops of laughter. Yet they illuminate and inform. In this book, Geoff Mulgan’s remarkable command of the literature of power ranges not just over the European tradition, from Solon to Bobbitt, but, in a world where Western supremacy is being challenged by China, India and Islam, over Eastern traditions as well.

Lloyd Evans

Nul points for conduct

Great writers are never that great close up. Ralph Pite’s revealing biography of Thomas Hardy focuses on the emotional character of the poet and novelist. He comes across as difficult, snobbish, tight-fisted, self-centred, hypocritical, and, worst of all, ungrateful to those who helped him in the early stages of his career. The great champion of the rural poor was a mean and petty-minded employer. He never tipped his servants. He interfered constantly with minor building alterations. And if the grate was stacked too high he would remove surplus coals and lay them on the fender as a rebuke to the maid. Though his works suggest an abiding interest in women’s rights, he was opposed to female suffrage.

Adam Zamoyski

A long losing run

This is indeed a story of war, passion and loss. But those looking for a bittersweet tale of romantic Polish aristocrats stoically facing their doom at the hands of the Nazis and Soviets will get a great deal more than they bargained for. This is Gone with the Wind scripted for the Addams family. The sorry tale opens in 1914 with the author’s grandfather running out of the bedroom on his wedding night and shooting himself with a revolver. He survived, and whatever his problem may have been, it was eventually resolved: he produced a brace of children, to which his wife added an extramarital supernumerary. It might have been better if they had remained childless. Hushed-up adulterous affairs between close cousins had led to his marrying his aunt.