More from Books

Saturday

Anthony Daniels

Reports from discomfort zones

South African doctors have a very good reputation. The excellence of their medical training is matched by the breadth of their clinical experience. For example, a young South African doctor in surgical training in Britain often has more practical experience of bullet wounds than the boss who is teaching him; or such, at any rate, would have been the case until quite recently, when inner-city surgeons started to treat the victims of drug and gang wars. Jonathan Kaplan is a South African surgeon who has eschewed the conventional career that was clearly within his reach for that of a volunteer surgeon to the war zones of the world. He puts his life in danger to save the injured and maimed, who are often very poor into the bargain (the poor are easier to hit than the rich).

Olivia Glazebrook

Finnish but not yet free

Finland, 1902. The Russian empire controls the country — has done for nearly 100 years — but a resistance to Tsarist rule is gaining strength and volume. In Helsinki, revolutionary discussion is turning into action; in the country, Swedish Finns are comfortable as the ruling class. The House of Orphans is the name given to an orphanage which lies in a town surrounded by forest, to the north-west of Helsinki. It is here that 14-year-old Eeva was taken from Helsinki after the death of her father. Two years later she is sent to work for the local doctor as his housekeeper. To Dr Eklund’s surprise and fascination Eeva is much more than she appears: ‘They’d taken her away and tried to make her into an orphan, but it hadn’t worked. She was still Eeva.

Frank Johnson

The wobbly Anglo-French tandem

In the spring of 1916, the young French officer Charles de Gaulle was captured at Verdun. The French demanded from the British a diversionary offensive to prevent the entire French army from collapsing. Most British troops were not yet trained for such an effort. Nonetheless, they opened an offensive on the Somme. There, the young British officer, Harold Macmillan, was almost fatally wounded. Twenty-seven years later, the Anglo-Americans intrigued against that same de Gaulle in North Africa, and he intrigued back against the same. Churchill sent that same Macmillan from London to help resolve the dispute. De Gaulle survived as Free French leader, partly as a result of Macmillan’s diplomatic skills.

Saturday

Ben Wilson

Brothers and sisters in revolt

After a family quarrel in 1717, George I ordered his son and heir’s imprisonment in the Tower. His ministers had to explain that in England not even a king could dispense with habeas corpus. The King considered bundling the future George II on to a man-of-war bound for the West Indian plantations, but reluctantly conceded to English niceties. Obedience to the law and public opinion did not suit a man who had dedicated his first 54 years to the interests of Hanover before inheriting the British throne in 1714. In his small and happy German kingdom, George had personal power and was treated with honour by his deferential subjects; the British, by contrast, revelled in the tittle-tattle of royal scandal and subjected monarchs to strict conditions.

Jonathan Keates

Marcel the Magnificent

Proust is rapidly becoming the Mozart of the novel, one of those artistic figures before whom, from time to time, we delight to abase ourselves in various not always dignified postures of idolatrous adoration. One acquaintance of mine, for example, currently devotes his leisure hours to marking up A la recherche du temps perdu in different-coloured inks to indicate successive references to food, carriages, clothing etc. A lady in America is busy compiling a Proustian peerage, scanning the small print of silver-fork gazetteers and almanacs for stray duchesses, barons and counts, with the idea of giving us the whole coroneted galaxy in a sumptuous album, complete with escutcheons and portraits.

Joanna Kavenna

Paddling through Canada

There are a lot of travel writers these days setting off ‘in the footsteps of’ someone else, gathering clues and arguing with ghosts. This is partly pragmatism: there are so few untouched trails around that you might as well make a virtue of necessity, lend your narrative some historical backbone and a point of comparison. It means that as you stare across at an interlaced network of concrete motorways and slab-like apartment blocks, you can contrast the contemporary carnage with the three wooden huts your predecessor observed, or discern the vestiges of the past among the urban clutter. Yet at times the genre can flag: the footsteps simply aren’t compelling, the structure is creaky, the premise ultimately dubious.

Andrew Taylor

Ancient trails and quests

Val McDermid is probably best known for her series of sharply contemporary thrillers featuring a criminal profiler. But some of her standalone novels, in particular the superb A Place of Execution and The Distant Echo, have narrative sections that hark back to a generation earlier; and their plots turn upon the long shadows thrown forward by past crimes. The Grave Tattoo takes this process even further back in time. At the heart of the story is the intriguing historical link between the families of William Wordsworth and Fletcher Christian. The two men were schoolfellows, taught by Fletcher’s elder brother. There is a persistent legend that the chief mutineer of the Bounty faked his own death in the South Seas and returned to live and die in the Lake District.

Ruth Guilding

Stones of contention

The acrimonious debate over the Elgin Marbles, housed in the British Museum since 1816, provides the catalyst for this new book. Ever since Lord Byron libelled Lord Elgin in verse as, ‘the last, the worst, dull spoiler,’ plundering the temple where ‘Pallas lingered,’ homegrown restitutionists have quoted Childe Harold to support the arguments for their return to Greece. John Keats never saw the Parthenon, but his feelings on first encountering its sculptures in London were just as intense. He sat before them in a reverie, staring for hours as they opened the classical world to him. His sonnets written afterwards remind us that these Grecian marbles belong to our national culture too now, as embedded as Cranmer’s Prayer Book or the King James’ Bible.

Alexander Chancellor

Sweet and sour flavour of the Big Apple

The first thing that came into my mind after reading Gone to New York was a song — ‘Why, oh why, oh why, oh/ Why did I ever leave Ohio? Why did I wander to find what lies yonder/ When life was so cosy at home?’ This splendid, nostalgic song from the 1953 Leonard Bernstein musical Wonderful Town, recently revived on Broadway, has assumed some real-life significance at last. For one can’t help wondering why Ian Frazier, who spent an idyllic youth in the little Midwestern town of Hudson, Ohio, chose to abandon it for ever to become a writer in New York, a city whose night- marish aspects he assiduously chronicles in this book.

Graham Stewart

The weasels in the wordpile

The etymologists of the Oxford English Dictionary should be alerted that Steven Poole has coined a new word. First used as the title for his book, published in 2006, ‘unspeak’ is a noun for a ‘mode of speech that persuades by stealth’. How, it might be asked, does this differ from ‘spin’? Poole contends that politicians do not talk in platitudes as a means of obfuscation, as is commonly alleged, but rather sway debate by consciously deploying language in a careful and manipulative way. In recognising that newspapers and television bulletins have scant space, they have worked out that they need to reduce their arguments to soundbite size. This means deploying devious words. At its mildest, this is really about improving public relations.

Saturday

Tom Fort

Mother Earth in a bad mood

The other day someone — actually it was my MP, the member for Henley-on-Thames and former editor of this magazine — asked me if I ‘believed’ in global warming. The question was put in such a way as to suggest it was a matter of faith rather than commonsense. I replied that only half-wits and conspiracy nuts refused to accept that it was real and largely our doing. The question is no longer whether or not it is happening, but where it will take us and how quickly. If James Lovelock’s analysis of the condition of our planet is sound, the answer is: into the flames of Armaged- don, fast. He suspects we are already past the point of no return; that even if we abandoned our tribal differences and foolish ways now, it would probably be too late.

Charlotte Moore

Up against it down under

William Thornhill, convict, is spending his first night in a mud hut in the penal colony of New South Wales. He’s in Sydney, but this is 1806, and Sydney is little more than a huddle of such huts. Beside him, his wife Sal and their children sleep. Beyond is darkness, the ‘vast fact of the forest’. Above are the unreadable stars of the southern hemisphere, ‘as meaningless as spilt rice’. And then, standing in the entrance, is a naked black man holding a spear. How should Thornhill react? He’s neither a hero nor a villain. In London, he was a member of the underclass; he stole because he couldn’t earn enough to feed his family. Having escaped the gallows, he’s now imprisoned by ‘ten thousand miles of water’.

Hugh Massingberd

Making the surgeon laugh

One of life’s longed-for little twists comes when the nice guy finally asserts himself and reveals a darker side to his personality. Alan Alda, celebrated for having played Hawkeye for 11 years in the television series M*A*S*H* and an actor who always seemed slightly too eager to ingratiate, had his moment of revelation as the creepy senator in The Aviator — a thrilling performance which was nominated for an Oscar last year. Significantly, the sea change occurred in what Alda desribes in this deft and witty memoir as ‘golden time’ following a life-threatening intestinal blockage in Chile in 2003. ‘Now, at last,’ he writes, ‘there was no pressure to succeed. There was nothing I needed to prove to anyone.

Patrick Skene-Catling

Coming to terms with the old man

Following the success of his first memoir, The Speckled People, Hugo Hamilton has written a second one, with the balanced shapeliness and emotional intensity of a very good novel. The Sailor in the Wardrobe is the story of his rite of passage from restricted late boyhood in Dublin to independent young manhood adrift abroad. The sailor of the enigmatic title was his paternal grandfather, who ran away from Ireland to join the Royal Navy and was killed at sea. His portrait in uniform was kept in the family wardrobe, a symbol of the confinement from which Hugo also yearned to escape. Hugo’s mother was a conciliatory German with Allied military government denazification credentials who migrated to Ireland after the second world war.

Francis King

Dirty tricks down Mexico way

Set in 2020, this has been described as a work of ‘futuristic’ fiction. Most such fiction — Forster’s The Machine Stops, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, L. P. Hartley’s Facial Justice — describes a world radically different from the one familiar to people at the time when it was written. However, in The Eagle’s Throne the fact that Condoleezza Rice is the first black female president of the United States is about all that differentiates Fuentes’ satiric vision of the political world of the future from the actual one today. May it not be that, in setting the date of his story 14 years ahead, he merely wished to avoid the charge that he was pillorying real-life people?

Anthony Daniels

Murdering for diamonds

It was at Freetown Airport, which even before the civil war could be reached only with some difficulty, that I learnt that there was such a product as Johnny Walker Blue Label, about ten times as expensive as the Black Label variety. Since Sierra Leone was conspicuously impoverished and broken-down, I would have guessed from the offer for sale of this ostentatiously expensive luxury (if I hadn’t already known it by other experiences) that the country was in the hands of a rapacious and vulgar elite. The civil war broke out soon afterwards. It seemed that the participants were determined to prove that Gerard Manley Hopkins’ line,’ No worse, there is none’, could have no application in human affairs.

Ferdinand Mount

Ornery and extraordinary

Decayed gentility and a feckless father. These make the springiest springboard for the angry artist. Dickens, Picasso, Joyce, Shaw, Francis Bacon all enjoyed these unsung advantages in life. So did Samuel Langhorne Clemens who called himself Mark Twain, after the cry of the leadsmen sounding the depths in the treacherous waters of the Mississippi (twain=two fathoms, or 12 feet). The Clemenses had come west from Virginia by way of Kentucky with half a dozen slaves and irrepressible dreams of remaking their fortune.

Saturday

Frederic Raphael

The Timon of Lyme Regis

Dr Johnson talks somewhere of a Reverend Dr Campbell whom he calls the ‘richest man ever to graze the pasture of literature’. If his riches derived from his books, he was surely outgrossed by John Fowles, whose novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman topped all the bestseller lists, and remained on the New York Times list for a full year. Fowles’s advances reached $250,000. Even The Ebony Tower, a soft-porn novella, and a clutch of short stories made him a small fortune. Hollywood films were made of FLW (as he refers to it) and of his earlier novels The Collector and The Magus, though none was worth seeing. The movies are always said not to do justice to literary sources, but they often reveal fustian, bluff and heartlessness.

Brendan O’Neill

Pressuring the press

I feel I ought to start this review by letting the authors know that I will not enter into correspondence with them. However much they might loathe what I am about to say and wish to bombard me with emails ridiculing my reasoning, I regret to tell them that I will be far too busy to respond. That might look like a weird intro to a review, until you realise that the authors being reviewed — David Edwards and David Cromwell — run a pressure group called Medialens which is in the business of berating journalists (and encouraging others to do likewise) for their perceived prejudices. Medialens is like a radical leftist version of Ofcom, an unelected outfit that presumes the authority to lecture reporters and broadcasters, usually via email, about their shortcomings.

Jonathan Mirsky

The return of the native

Brian Power’s book, like the best Chinese paintings, contains a lot of empty space. You can either concentrate on what you see, or you can let your mind and imagination glide over into what might have been there. I have a silk-screen of a painting by the Song dynasty master Liang Kai (13th century) on my wall; Li Bai, the great Tang dynasty poet (8th century), probably drunk and standing on tip-toe, is gazing up at the moon. There is no moon in the picture, only the empty, not blank, space. I know the moon is there because in one of his poems Li Bai describes looking up at it. Power’s book is like that. Misty figures appear and disappear; are they real, in a dream, or one of his ‘reveries’?