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Saturday

Allan Massie

A master carpenter

Who did Evelyn Waugh call ‘the only living studio-master under whom one can study with profit’? Answer: Somerset Maugham. Surprising answer? Perhaps. Others judged him more harshly; Edmund Wilson dismissed him as ‘a half-trashy novelist who writes badly, but is patronised by half-serious writers who do not care much about writing.’ Actually Maugham took a lot of trouble over his writing, as his notebooks show. They, incidentally, like Wilson’s own notebooks, are full of descriptive passages in embarrassingly purple prose. Hard to see the point of them; when did either author think he might take one of these passages and shove it into a novel? Maugham also resorts to cliché, on almost every page. This is not necessarily a bad thing, in moderation anyway.

Jonathan Mirsky

The meeting of the twain

Seize the Hour is an admirable example of the storyteller’s power. From Homer to the great playwrights and novelists whose works we can hear or read repeatedly, the telling is all. Achilles pursues Hector around the walls of Troy; we know how it will finish, but like Homer’s audiences we want to hear it again. Anna Karenina throws herself under a train — for us it may be the fourth time. Ahab raises his lance to kill Moby Dick; it will end badly for the captain, but this is the third time we have taken Melville’s mighty story on holiday. I’m sure Margaret MacMillan, Warden-elect of St Antony’s College, Oxford, won’t repine if I say she is neither Homer nor Melville, but she does what they do: she tells a good story.

Jane Rye

Nevertheless, the real thing

It’s difficult not to warm to Mad Tracey from Margate (‘I like Tracey ... I landed on my feet with that name’), the inventor of the Rothko Comfort Blanket for Private Views, however reluctant one may be to have one’s nose rubbed in other people’s bodily fluids and spiritual excretions. She famously staggered out of a solemn television debate saying, ‘I want my mum’, and loves her old Nan so much (as she memorably describes in one of the conversations recorded here) that when Nan dies she visits her in the funeral parlour to pluck her whiskers and do her nails as she used to when she was alive, and gets locked in, to inexplicable strains of ‘The Sun has Got his Hat On’.

Carole Angier

Finding an exceptional voice

At the end of his excellent introduction to Auschwitz Report, Robert Gordon invokes W.G. Sebald’s argument in his last book, On the Natural History of Destruction: compared to ‘natural histories’, e.g. contemporary medical reports such as this one, more literary texts ‘[know] nothing’. W.G. Sebald was one of the greatest thinker-writers of the 20th century, as great in his own way as Primo Levi himself. But here, I think, he exaggerates. The original Auschwitz Report was written by Levi and his friend Dr Leonardo De Benedetti in the spring of 1945, in the transit camp of Katowice, only months after their liberation from Buna-Monowitz, a sub-camp of Auschwitz. It was commissioned by the Katowice Command, as part of the Soviet investigation into Nazi crimes.

Raymond Carr

From West Dorset to Westminster

Claire Tomalin is an accomplished biographer. While she recognises Hardy’s genius, this book is not an essay in literary criticism. With great skill and sensitivity she uses his poetry, novels and his extensive correspondence to illuminate the life of a man for whom she writes ‘the wounds inflicted by life never quite healed’. He never entirely forgave the vicar of Stinsford church, where his family was buried and he himself wished to be, for preaching against members of the lower orders who presumed to escape from their station in life by entering the professions. This was precisely the ambition of Hardy. As a boy of 12 he taught himself Latin, the entry ticket to a wider world beyond the confines of the Dorset village of his birth.

Vernon Bogdanor

Adjustment and reappraisal

Having It So Good follows hard on the heels of Dominic Sandbrook’s Never Had It So Good, which appeared last year. Both are doorstoppers — over 600 pages long — and the reader groans as he picks them up. Soon, no doubt, literary editors will be asking reviewers to weigh books rather than write about them. Having It So Good is, in fact, two books rolled into one. The first, on the high politics of the period, offers an outstanding interpretation of the 1950s, and is likely to become the new orthodoxy against which, no doubt, younger historians will come to react. But Hennessy is more ambitious, insisting, in uncharacteristically pompous terms, that he ‘comes from a British historical tradition that is uneasy with high politics absorbed neat’.

Saturday

Interconnect

The shape of things to come?

The Dutch film-maker Theo Van Gogh had quite a send-off. As per the plans he drew up himself before his death, the memorial party organised by the Friends of Theo was adorned with a rock band, comedians, miniskirted cigarette girls, and female guests in twin-sets and pearls — something Van Gogh had found an erotic turn-on. A wooden coffin rotated on a platform surrounded by champagne bottles, and the room was scattered with ‘phallic cacti’. On stage were two stuffed goats, supposedly there for anyone who felt the urge to have sex with one. This alluded, defiantly, to what had caused all the trouble in the first place. ‘Goat-f****r’ was Van Gogh’s preferred term for a Muslim.

Tom Fort

The rhetoric of fairyland

I have never met George Monbiot, and I know nothing personally about him to his discredit. I have no reason to think that he is other than polite to shopkeepers, considerate to other road-users, fond of animals, a staunch friend, a sound family man, a respectful and affectionate son. I can only judge the keeper of the Guardian’s green conscience from the tone of his writing, and I don’t much care for it. Each week for ten years or so Monbiot has ascended the pulpit provided for him by successive Guardian editors to preach his world view.

D.J. Taylor

Two stricken strikers

The most affecting moment in Gordon Burn’s new book is only marginally connected to its subjects. Borrowed from Jackie Milburn’s autobiography Golden Goals, it takes in a long-ago Christmas morning when the future England centre-forward woke in the small hours to discover a new pair of football boots — the first ever allowed him — lying among the presents. The temptation was too much to resist. At 3.30 a.m. Milburn let himself silently out of the house to find most of his friends, all wearing their festive sporting gear, ‘playing football by torchlight in the middle of the street’. Best and Edwards offers plenty of twitches on this lost, prelapsarian thread.

Philip Womack

Magic and mischief

Susanna Clarke taps enchantingly into a vein of folkloric gold. She presents our world as existing in tandem with ‘Faerie’, but without butterfly-winged Victoriana. Instead she creates a sense of danger, as if the Faeries in question are the displaced gods of Robert Graves’ The White Goddess, still retaining elements of frightful power over mankind. Her debut novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, was hard to miss: it worked, like a charm. A story of the relationship between two master magicians in the early 19th century, it combined wit, vigour and elegance with a cracking good story.

Patrick Skene-Catling

The sunset burns on

That beautiful, untamed brunette (or was she a woman in Zee & Co.?) was once more fervid than Elizabeth Taylor in party mood. Edna O’Brien at the age of 73, however, is a circumspect Titian, with a porcelain complexion and minimal maquillage. The rebellious country girl, who ran away from a village in County Clare, has been for many years a ladylike resident of London. Or so she appears. One should not judge novelists by their appearance, perhaps, but her presence in her writing is so relentlessly pervasive that it is impossible not to notice the altered superficialities and wonder how she has changed inside. She hasn’t. Readers who loved her anti-authoritarian previous books are sure to love this one too.

Jonathan Sumption

Beware of misleading labels

In the great prize-giving of history, there are only two truly ‘bad’ kings of England: King John and James II. Or three if you count Ethelred the Unready. There is more argument about the ‘good’ ones, but King John’s brother Richard ranks high in most people’s pantheon, right up there with King Arthur and Queen Elizabeth. Plainly, Ladybird Books, Robin Hood on TV and touring exhibitions of Magna Carta, have a lot to answer for.

Rupert Christiansen

Problems of production

Shakespeare aside, there isn’t a dramatist whose work has proved more protean than Wagner’s. Patrick Carnegy explores the astonishing variety of interpretation it has provoked, in a book that has been long meditated as well as meticulously researched. It isn’t comprehensive —Wolfgang Wagner, Rennert, Wernicke and Lehnhoff are only a few of the significant directors who are omitted — but its over-view is magisterial, and, despite its considerable length, the crisply organised structure and unfailing lucidity of the prose make it worth the effort of a thorough and continuous reading. Other scholars have written forcefully on aspects of this subject, but Carnegy’s treatment will surely be considered definitive.

Rod Liddle

A trail of blood and bigotry

This is an even better book than the author’s erudite, dense and sprawling triumph of last year, Earthly Powers. With Sacred Causes, we are now in the present day, near enough — and that terrible, human, susceptibility to secular or religious ideologies possessed of unbending certitude, which in a way is Burleigh’s theme, should tweak the interest of all those who worry a little about the rigorous proclivities of Islam; just as it should interest those who are dubious of the fashionable thesis that, were we to smite God fatally once and for all, our troubles would be over.

Victoria Glendinning

The Gang of Three

Adam Sisman begins his story of one of the most famous friendships in literary history with the vivid account of a young man who, having already walked 40 miles, takes a short-cut across a Dorset cornfield, running to greet two people working in their garden. The young man is Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the friends are William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy. Over the ensuing six years the three were rarely parted for long. Their rambles together in the Quantocks are legendary.

Raymond Carr

Gates to, or escapes from, reality

This anthology is a sheer delight, full of good things. It gets off to a splendid start. On its dust- cover is a picture of a dog with a light bulb in its stomach; underneath is a gem from Groucho Marx: ‘Outside a dog a book is a man’s best friend. Inside a dog it’s too dark to read.’ Reading this book is like riding a good horse through an interesting landscape. You get a glimpse of familiar great oaks: Wordsworth at breakfast cutting the pages of Burke’s works with a knife greasy with butter. You ride past newcomers like Helena Hanff, shocking her friends by casting into the waste- bin books she will never read again. You spot old friends like Tony Hancock. Authors, like actors, are narcissists.

Jane Gardam

Getting on and getting by

This is the sketchy diary of a 60-year-old woman with an amusing, runaway pen, written over 19 months. She is scatty, impulsive, open-minded and living cheerfully in Shepherd’s Bush, which never ceases to intrigue her (‘Today I saw a man standing on his head in the middle of the pavement’). Wide-eyed and aware of men, it is easy to see her as Bridget Jones’s mother, but she is not silly. She is strong in adversity, loyal to sick friends whom she sees through to the end and she expresses her fearless if curmudgeonly opinions even at her own dinner parties, where, often, silence falls. She is a passionate atheist, though the last entry has her embracing a black evangelical priest.

Adam Zamoyski

Correcting received opinions

Norman Davies is always at his best challenging received ideas and inherited perceptions, and the areas covered by these essays provide him with rich hunting-grounds for both. The title is misleading in that he ranges around Australia, California and Siberia, not to mention the Middle East, as well as Europe, and takes swipes at prejudices held by the pundits of many nations and cultures. I have to confess a slight prejudice against compilations of essays and lectures. There is always an element of unevenness in quality, a lack of unity and a certain amount of repetition. Ideally, each piece should be read on its own, independently of and at least a few days apart from the others, not a luxury a reviewer can permit himself. Above all, lectures are best listened to, not read.

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 14 October 2006

A Time Before Genesis (1986) by Les Dawson The rare book shown above (try getting hold of a copy) is Les Dawson’s only serious work of fiction. It provides a disturbing insight into the mind of the late comedian. Its thesis is that the earth has, for millennia, been controlled by alien forces who have had a hand in everything from the Maya to the Miners’ Strike; in its magisterial sweep the book takes in the Spanish Inquisition, the rise of Hitler, the Kennedy assassination, Glastonbury, the Second Coming, cigarettes stubbed out on the eyeballs (twice), various scenes of sexual mutilation, the projected collapse of the EEC in 1989 and the Sino-Russian war of 1992.

Saturday

Charles Moore

A voice crying in the wilderness

Richard Dawkins is an evangelical. The cover of this book, with its red explosion and large writing, reminds one of those popular volumes by Protestant pastors which purport to prove that JESUS IS ALIVE. Dawkins has all the fervour and anger of such persons, and their well-meaning puzzlement that so many cannot see what to them is so blindingly obvious. ‘Can’t you see’, yells Dawkins, ‘JESUS IS DEAD?’ As the more zealous evangelicals sometimes take refuge in statistics — ‘Last year, 13,732 people in the State of Oklahoma were healed of cancer by accepting Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Saviour’ — so does Dawkins.