More from Books

Wednesday

Lucy Beresford

Summer reads

Summer reads: doesn’t the very phrase conjure up unfortunate images of lobster sunburn? Summer reads: doesn’t the very phrase conjure up unfortunate images of lobster sunburn? But what to do, when a long summer stretches ahead and there are still hours in the day to kill after you’ve finished watching the footie, or the live feed of Big Brother 7? (I know! compulsive viewing, isn’t it? But that’s for another article.) So, whether you intend to laze on your yacht, trek for gorillas, brave the Bognor rain, or find yourself stranded at Gatwick, everyone needs an undemanding book somewhere in their Louis Vuitton. You don’t have to be so well-heeled to enjoy Plum Sykes’ second novel, The Debutante Divorcée (Fig Tree, pp. 250, £12.

Simon Baker

Coming out of the cold

At the beginning of Andreï Makine’s new novel we meet a young narrator in possession of some fairly bleak certainties. On the subject of love, he tells us that, once affection has been won, the routine of a relationship, or of indifference, can take over. The other one’s mystery has been tamed. Their body reduced to a flesh and blood mechanism, desirable or otherwise ... At this stage, in fact, a kind of murder occurs. Whether or not one sympathises with such epic negativity, it is hard not to admire that casually brutal ‘or otherwise’. And yet the narrator himself is unhappy with his views. He is, he knows, the product of a place (dissident 1970s Leningrad) which instil such wearied hauteur in its young intelligentsia.

William Brett

Nailing the zeitgeist

When Microserfs was published in 1995, it sealed Douglas Coupland’s reputation as a nonpareil, the foremost recorder of American popular culture and the digital revolution. Tracing the lives of a group of computer coders who abandon Bill Gates’ campus-like corporation to start up their own company, the novel became famous as the definitive account of the explosive success of Microsoft, and as a prediction of the eventual disillusionment of its most talented employees. By then, Coupland was already known as the curator of the 1990s zeitgeist after his debut novel, Generation X (1991), was hailed as the defining mouthpiece for his post-Baby Boomer contemporaries. But this status came at a price.

Frank Johnson

A puzzle still unsolved

Sara Moore would explain a rise to power as astonishing as any in history. A down-and-out house-painter and plebeian agitator becomes master at 43 of a country whose most influential classes expected its rulers to be of some social standing, and not to look absurd. The Marx, Lenin and Stalin, all in one, of his revolution; writing the manifesto, building the party; overthrowing the state after a lost war; then murdering his party rivals; becoming the subject of a ‘leadership cult,’ and then war leader; there differing only from Stalin in that he lost. Take away any one part of the whole —defeat in 1918, inflation, the army and bourgeoisie owing no allegiance to the new republic, slump — and it probably would not have been possible.

Allan Massie

Keeping the balance

In a volume of his posthumously published notebooks (Garder Tout en Composant Tout), Henry de Montherlant remarks: ‘Je ne sais pourquoi nous faisons des descriptions, puisque le lecteur ne les lit jamais.’ Well said, but not quite true; there are readers who dote on long descriptive passages. Alain de Botton for instance wrote recently that the best bits of Proust are the descriptions and passages of analysis. Yet for me these are just the parts of A la Recherche which seem stale, while the characters and conversation remain entrancing. So I find myself on Montherlant’s side.

Wednesday

Philip Hensher

The view ahead through the windscreen

Listing page content here Most literary versions of the remote future are dystopias; they are not, of course, really about the remote future at all, but quite openly about the author’s own society in exaggerated garb. The Time Machine is about the division between the effete rich of Wells’s day and the urban lower classes riding the Underground. Nineteen Eighty-Four is, in texture, all about the privations of 1948. Brave New World is about the rise of cheap popular mass culture in the 1920s and 1930s. Will Self’s impressive new book presents, in a way, a pure portrait of the imagined future.

Digby Anderson

Hard acts to follow

Listing page content here At a time when Israel was under the rule of the Philistines, the angel of the Lord appeared to a certain barren woman and promised her a son who would deliver Israel. This son, Samson, when grown meets and wishes to marry a Philistine girl. On his way to her he encounters a lion and kills it with his bare hands. On a subsequent visit to her, he finds the carcase of the lion filled with a swarm of bees with their honey. He takes the honey in his hands and he and his parents eat it. Samson is sent 30 companions to whom he poses a riddle about the honey. The companions extort the meaning of the riddle from his wife and Samson kills 30 of the men.

Anne Applebaum

The slow poison of praise

Listing page content here More than 60 years after its release, Citizen Kane still regularly appears on pretty much every critics’ list of the ‘Greatest Films of All Time’. If it is also regularly mentioned as one of the most overrated films of all time, that too is a testament to the power of its reputation. Not only do critics admire Citizen Kane, they also feel that they are somehow obliged to admire it, as if failure to do so were an indicator of bad taste. But if the critics overdo their praise now, the problem was far worse when the film first appeared. In 1941, there weren’t reams of ‘experimental’ and ‘independent’ film-makers flooding the film-school cutting rooms with their originality.

Anita Brookner

A meeting of true minds

Listing page content here These letters record a friendship that proceeded, unmarred, for 40 years. It began as a simple transaction; in 1938 Sylvia Townsend Warner, as a dare, submitted a short story to the New Yorker. Her editor was William Maxwell. They proved sympathetic to each other, so sympathetic, in fact, that 150 stories followed, and, more important, 1,300 letters, in which it is possible to distinguish real love, albeit of a rare and disembodied variety. Their circumstances could not have been more different. Sylvia Townsend Warner, an immensely popular writer, now diminished by the fate that awaits all once popular writers, lived in Dorset with her female companion Valentine Ackland, while Maxwell was a contentedly married man with two children.

Christopher Howse

Diamonds and other best friends

Listing page content here Recent troubles in the Labour party were likened by more than one unsuccessful letter-writer to the Daily Telegraph to those of the army described by Petronius Arbiter nearly 2,000 years ago: We trained hard; but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form into teams we would be reorganised. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganising; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralisation. That is not by Petronius, of course. It is a sort of urban thumbnail myth circulating with the help of the internet.

Anne Chisholm

The dangerous edge of things

Listing page content here If her name rings a bell at all, Mary Wesley, who died aged 90 in 2002, is remembered for two things: publishing the first of ten successful novels at the age of 70, and knowing a surprising amount, for a ladylike senior citizen, about sex. Even her greatest fans, though, might wonder if she rates a serious, full-length biography, and why a well-regarded writer and journalist like Patrick Marnham, who has previously produced books on Simenon, Diego Rivera and Jean Moulin, should choose her as a subject. All such carping questions can be put aside immediately. This biography is pure pleasure, a riveting, hilarious tragicomedy of manners. Mary Wesley was born Mary Farmar, and her forebears were soldiers from the Anglo-Irish gentry.

Ian Sansom

Rhythm and blues

Nothing much to report here, no news and no surprises: dog bites man; Philip Roth writes another masterpiece. What would be truly shocking at this stage in the late, great unfolding of Roth’s genius would be if he were to write a bad book, something as bad as The Breast, his last bad book, and that was published in 1972. We expect — and rightly — intermittency of genius: Roth, in an effort which already seems like the stuff of myth and legend, defies our expectations.

Wednesday

Interconnect

Sermon

Out of the darkness and the bouillabaisseof nebulae and swirling gas we come,out of the toxic argon wilderness,seeking a sanctuary and a home. Be kind. Love one another. The frogs are dying. The old copper beechfesters in acid rain. The sky corrodes,contaminated birds are robbed of speechand, wrapped in fumes, Antarctica implodes.Be kind. Love one another. Towering tsunamis break upon the shore.The rich pursue a dream of lost content.Drought and starvation threaten more and more.An epidemic claims a continent.Be kind. Love one another. Antipathies accumulate of race.Jew, Muslim, Gentile — which can hate the best?A cashiered commissar, now fallen from grace,downs vodka, nursing gall within his breast.Be kind. Love one another.

Raymond Carr

A tapestry’s rich life

Listing page content here The Bayeux tapestry records pictorially in a series of 56 panels, stretching for 70 metres, the last successful invasion of England. It reveals that the invasion of 1066 was a combined operation involving the building of 800 ships to transport an army of some 12,000 men and 2,000 horses across the Channel. For its time it was as complex a piece of planning as the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944. Since its creation, probably in the 1070s, the tapestry had rested for centuries in comparative obscurity in the care of Bayeux cathedral. In the 18th century, squabbling British antiquarians, for whom the artefacts of the past constituted a supplement, even a substitute for the written record, had established its historical importance.

Graham Stewart

Toughing it out together

Listing page content here Since the Suez debacle, the chemistry between American presidents and British prime ministers has helped determine the ‘special relationship’s’ potency. Between Harold Macmillan and John F. Kennedy, as with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, it was dynamic. Between Edward Heath and Richard Nixon, John Major and Bill Clinton, it was inert. Many commentators reasonably assumed London-Washington relations would go the same way in 2000 when Tony Blair’s best buddy, Clinton, vacated the White House and in swaggered George W. Bush. To the horror of metropolitan opinion, Bush and Blair proceeded to form an alliance more controversial than any that had existed between their 20th-century predecessors.

Jonathan Cecil

Anxieties on and off the stage

Listing page content here On the face of it the actress Anna Massey’s life would seem to have been a charmed one. The child of distinguished theatrical parents — Raymond Massey, the powerful Canadian actor, and Adrienne Allen, the original Sybil in Private Lives — Miss Massey was steeped in the world of the stage and made her first professional appearance in a West End starring role. Hers was the title part in The Reluctant Debutante, working with the greatest light comedienne of her time, Celia Johnson, and a fine supporting cast. Anna Massey more than held her own in their company.

D.J. Taylor

Fragments of village life

Listing page content here Brick Lane, Monica Ali’s first novel, sold a great many copies and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. It was also criticised by those guardians of the public conscience who write letters to newspapers on the grounds of cultural tourism. Despite her impeccable Bangladeshi origins, these detractors alleged, the Oxford-educated Ms Ali was clearly unqualified to write about the realities of life in the polyglot East End. No doubt one or two of the same criticisms will be levelled at her choice of a sequestered Portuguese village as the setting for novel number two. For all the modesty of its style and some highly uncontentious subject matter, Alentejo Blue is a risky enterprise.

Deborah Devonshire

Jack the lad

‘Coming out’ had a different meaning in 1938 to what it has today. Nearly 70 years ago the London Season followed much the same pattern as it had before the first world war. For a small section of people there were three frantic months of entertainment. For 18-year-old girls and their young men friends there was a dance (and sometimes two) four nights a week, and often one in the country on a Friday night (not on Saturdays, because it was not seemly to dance into Sunday morning) from early May until the end of July. The bands, led by Ambrose, Carol Gibbons and, best of all, Harry Roy, played all night, every night for our pleasure. We took this strange state of affairs for granted; it was part of life to be enjoyed or endured according to temperament.

Sebastian Smee

The art of the matter

Listing page content here Peter Carey’s ropy, visceral prose casts a powerful spell. It has a swarming, improvised quality which besieges and easily overwhelms objections, including any reluctance to credit his convoluted, sometimes outlandish plots. And yet those plots remain a problem. They somehow bring a hint of affectation and conceit to a sensibility, a way with words, that is otherwise stridently free from mannerisms. Theft: A Love Story is told by two narrators in alternating chapters. One of them is Michael Boone, or Butcher Bones, a once renowned Australian painter now enduring a humiliating slump in fortune. He relates the bulk of the tale.

Allan Massie

A late beginner

Sometimes at book festivals I am asked which historical novelists I most admire and enjoy. ‘Alfred Duggan,’ I say first, and am usually met with a blank response. This is not entirely surprising. Duggan died in 1964 and most of his books are out of print. Some will know of him as a friend of Evelyn Waugh from Oxford days. ‘A full-blooded rake ... we were often drunk ... Alfred almost always.’ He remained in this condition for some 20 years, Waugh himself eventually doing much to rescue him from alcoholism. So there was an unusual pattern to his career, as Waugh remarked in an article published in The Spectator soon after his friend’s death.