More from Books

Wednesday

Andrew Taylor

When the kissing stopped and the killing began

Listing page content here As a genre, perhaps the most important question that the thriller asks is this: do we care sufficiently about the hero to want him (or, of course, her) to survive? In this case the hero is Nick Atkins, who in 1989 is just down from Cambridge. On the brink of law school, he spends time in California, where his life is hijacked by Tabatha, a beautiful Stanford student with a taste for Yeats’s poetry. After several months, Tab abruptly and inexplicably decides that their passionate affair is over and sends him home. She promises to communicate occasionally through cryptic small ads in the California Literary Review. For the next 17 years, her teasing, allusive messages flow like a dark sub- terranean current through Nick’s life.

Robert Beeston

The double life of a people

Listing page content here The crowd of bearded men looked and sounded as though they meant it, punching the air in unison and chanting the familiar slogans: ‘Death to America!’, ‘Death to Israel!’. A quarter of a century after the revolution that swept the Islamic regime to power the official message in Tehran had barely altered. America remained the ‘Great Satan’ and Britain, Iran’s traditional foe, still merited the title ‘little Satan’. But a chance encounter with one of the participants in this supposedly spontaneous, but evidently well-rehearsed, demonstration revealed a very different side to the country. ‘You are from England?’ he said, beaming. ‘You are welcome. My cousin lives in Manchester.

Elfreda Pownall

Chewing it over

Listing page content here I spent many of my school holidays with a kind great-aunt, a deeply religious maiden, most of whose friends were nuns. Beside my bed, as well as Lives of the Saints there was always her favourite book, Jottings from a Gentlewoman’s Garden. Not ideal reading for a nine-year-old, but how glad I am now that I did occasionally dip into it before getting down to reading Bunty under the bedclothes. Otherwise I would not have appreciated the gentle pre-war style that Simon Courtauld seeks to reproduce in Food for Thought: A Culinary Tour of the English Garden.

Frank Johnson

A rather unBritish achievement

Listing page content here Who would have thought that the British, of all unexotic peoples, would turn out to be good at ballet; both at dancing and choreographing it? One minute they could do next to nothing of either. The next the world knew about Britain and ballet was that this damp, dour island off the Continent had a company as famous as any in the world. The newly formed Vic-Wells Ballet gave its first full evening’s programme in the — for ballet — unglamorous Old Vic in 1931. By 1949, as Sadler’s Wells, it was thought glamorous enough to appear in the world’s most star-struck opera house; with Fonteyn and the Sleeping Beauty opening its first season at the New York Metropolitan.

Interconnect

Who done it in Boston?

Listing page content here I’m so glad I came to this book fresh, my mind open and unsullied by all that had gone before. As it was, I could sit back and enjoy the labyrinthine plot with all its platitudinous twists and unexpected turns as a real beginner without one preconceived idea in my head. The mystery of the Boston Strangler, I now know, must be one of the most complex, contentious and still inconclusive cases in the sad and shocking modern history of serial homicide. But let me say straight away that the current wunderkind of American journalism Sebastian Junger is unable to bring us any closer to a satisfactory answer for all his meticulous and exhaustive research.

Caroline Moore

Welcome, little strangers

Listing page content here Every time I pick up the latest novel by Anne Tyler, I wonder whether she is quite as good as her fans, of which I am one, like to think. Is she, in fact, no more than the Thinking Woman’s Good Holiday Read? No more than that! many readers will exclaim (and perhaps, like Henry Tilney, add that men ‘read nearly as many as women’): only a thoroughly readable book that doesn’t insult your intelligence! Even outside the airport bookshop, we are all grateful to find such a treasure. But there are a lot of readable books out there of the sort recommended by the Richard and Judy Book Club (no sneer at all intended: their choice encompasses some excellent works); and the question is why Anne Tyler should stand out.

Allan Massie

The fate of the Running Man

Listing page content here Evelyn Waugh told Ann Fleming that ‘Tony Powell’s latest volume [Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant] is a sad disappointment — only three pages of Widmerpool’. That was in 1960. A few years earlier, my classics master, urging me to read Powell, said, ‘The pre-war novels; I don’t like this chap Widmerpool.’ Few Powell fans would agree. Most are on Waugh’s side, delighting in the monster. Still, I’ve been thinking about a question posed by Colin Donald in a paper given at last December’s Anthony Powell Centenary Conference. ‘Does Widmerpool “add up” as a character?’ he asked.

Saturday

Theodore Dalrymple

Medicine and letters | 13 May 2006

‘That Shakespeare,’ a German friend of mine once said to me, ‘knew a thing or two.’ ‘That Shakespeare,’ a German friend of mine once said to me, ‘knew a thing or two.’ You can say that again. Sometimes, indeed, I think he knew everything, at least everything about human nature. When a religious fanatic tells me that this or that holy scripture is all I need as a guide to life, I reply with a single exclamatory word, ‘Shakespeare!’ He even knew about — or perhaps I should say, anticipated — insurance and social security fraud. At any rate, they would not have surprised him, or an attentive reader of him.

Bevis Hillier

Books do furnish a TV series

Listing page content here When I was younger, I used to think, ‘If ever you become famous, on no account agree to be interviewed by Lynn (“Demon”) Barber.’ The call never came; but, if it had, I hope my resolve would have remained adamantine, whatever her blandishments. You can see what she made of her victims in her collected profiles, Mostly Men (1991). Richard Harris has ‘a very surprising habit’: he ‘plays pocket billiards’ throughout the interview. ‘He puts his hand down inside his tracksuit and sort of rearranges things.’ Richard Adams, author of Watership Down, is in floods of tears most of the time, even blubbing into his meat pie at lunch.

Douglas Hurd

Ill-considered imperial gestures

Listing page content here During 1956 three major powers made dramatic efforts to prop up their position by the use of armed force. The British and French, in collusion with Israel, invaded Egypt to overthrow its dictator and regain the Suez Canal; their attempt failed within a few hours. The Soviet Union used its tanks to suppress a working-class revolt for the freedom of Hungary; despite the world’s execration they succeeded in re-establishing their control for another 30 years. It was the coincidence of these clashes which made the drama. Both came to a head in the same few days at the end of October. Peter Unwin comments and analyses these events in the best Foreign Office style — which is a compliment.

Sebastian Smee

Missing the middle path

Listing page content here Reading David Mitchell’s fourth novel, which is told through the eyes of a 13-year-old boy, reminded me why girls have little or no interest in the contents of boys’ heads until they are well out of their teens. It’s horrible in there. Thirteen-year-old boys, in particular, are revolting concoctions of fear and loathing, of hormones and confusion and clumsy self-assertion. This presents Mitchell, a writer of enormous talent but uncertain depth, with a problem. The truer and more lifelike he makes his narrator’s voice, the more he risks boring us silly with early teen preoccupations.

Judith Flanders

The master and the loyal retainer

Listing page content here It was not easy to be an attendant at the court of King Pablo, for Picasso, ‘with his fringe of white hair round the back of his head, his never tiring black eyes, his red shirt, is always the centre of everyone’s thoughts, especially as everyone else’s movements depend on his and no one, not even he, knows what it will be’. It was no easier to be King Pablo: P. wanting everyone to enjoy themselves started making masks with the tablecloths and most of the guests put them on, but some began to smuggle them under the table as valuable souvenirs. P., seeing this, looked around with an angry face and, collecting all the masks, crumpled them up and threw them into the sea.

Wednesday

Allan Mallinson

No end of a lesson

Listing page content here ‘We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse.’ Kipling’s re- proof, in ‘The Lesson’, on the conduct of the Boer war would serve well as the subtitle of this impressive review of the mess that is the Iraq intervention. The authors are the chief military correspondent of the New York Times and a retired Marine Corps lieutenant general and sometime military correspondent for the same newspaper. Their access to officials and classified documents is remarkable. They are certainly no apologists, unsurprisingly, coming from the NYT. Their intention is ‘to provide a comprehensive account and rationale of the foreign policy strategy, generalship and fighting … in all its complexity’.

Eric Anderson

Public skool monkey business

Listing page content here I misjudged this book. I thought the airport fiction promised by the literary editor would take me nicely to New York, where I was going the next day. However, at 846 pages, weighing in at one kilo, Jilly Cooper’s Wicked! is long enough to get you to Australia. On my second evening in America the waitress, after reciting in a sing-song monologue the specials for the evening, added, ‘And I also must recommend that you see Wicked, the musical, while you’re here.’ ‘What’s so good about it?’ I asked. ‘Oh, the flying monkeys,’ she said. ‘They’re marvellous and they really fly.’ It turned out to be a different Wicked.

Alexander Waugh

The book that didn’t make the short list

Listing page content here The councils of the early Christian Church were not always agreeable occasions. The bishops quarrelled terribly, at times getting so angry with one another as to clash in frenzied battles of ripped clothes, flying fists, blood and broken noses on the council chamber floor. Of all the issues that most inflamed these holy men none was more contentious than the question of which books should be chosen to constitute the official canon of the New Testament. The bishop who finally won his way was one of the most violent and intimidating of them all, Athanasius of Alexandria, but it was not until 405 AD (some 40 years after his death) that Pope Innocent I eventually ratified Athanasius’s list.

Richard Ollard

Humanity makes all plain

Listing page content here The title of this well edited and interesting book is misleading. First it suggests a complete collection, which would, if it were ever accomplished, require several volumes. Second, the letters, though mostly written by Pepys, include a considerable number of those written to him and even occasional papers which are not letters at all but throw light on incidents that were important to his career. These are all well chosen and their annotation makes their significance clear to the reader who is not already a knowledgeable Pepysian.Pepys’s letters, though always characteristic and generally well expressed, have not the piercing quality of the Diary.

Saturday

Ronald Segal

The most sinful of the seven

Michael Dyson is Foundation Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Religious Studies and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, the author of 12 previous books, and an ordained Baptist minister. Pride is his own contribution to a series of linked lectures and books on the seven deadly sins. There is no doubting the primacy of pride among the seven. The Greeks had a word for it. As hubris, presumption or arrogance, it loomed large, often along with its retribution or nemesis, in drama, poetry, history, philosophy. In the development of Christian theology, St Augustine saw pride as the source of original sin, and Pope Gregory confirmed it as the root of all evil.

Emma Tennant

Songs of prayer and praise

The Church of Scotland has recently published a new edition of its hymnary, the first for 30 years. A committee of ministers had the difficult task of deciding which of the old hymns to reject in order to make room for the new songs — many of them from Africa and South America — which have ‘enlivened worship’ over the last few decades. John Bell, who convened the committee, tells us in his introduction that the aim was ‘to combine the best of the new hymnary with the cherished and rich tradition that had nourished and sustained previous generations, and so sound forth the eternal gospel in a world constantly changing in customs and culture’. Bell is himself a distinguished composer and hymn-writer.

Stephen Abell

Swansong at twilight

It is, if you stop to think about it, an important literary question: what, exactly, is the point of short stories? They so often can — to this reader at least — be dismissed merely as stunted or early-aborted novels, a single idea gestated in the writer’s imagination that has inescapably failed to divide, multiply and develop into a full-grown body of work. They feel incomplete, inconsequential, unsatisfying. Fortunately, Francis King has shown us a (perhaps the) redeeming feature. He has realised that a short story is the perfect form to tell of shortened existence, of life not being allowed fully to develop or finally being brought to an end. His writing is dissatisfied, but not unsatisfying.

Charlotte Moore

Missing the happiness boat

‘Competitive and rapacious and amoral and moralising and just plain mad.’ That’s how middle-class American motherhood seemed to Judith Warner when she returned to the ‘pressure cooker’ of Washington DC after having her first child in Paris, where she had enjoyed the readily available support and relaxed attitude to parenting that French mothers apparently take for granted. Perfect Madness arises from Warner’s conversations with American parents in their thirties and forties — educated, able, affluent people who ought to be leading happy and fulfilled lives. Instead, she finds a society fuelled by neurotic anxiety.