More from Books

Saturday

Victoria Glendinning

Peace under the Iron Mountain

When he was little, John McGahern’s mother took him with her to the school where she taught, through the lanes with flowering hedges linking the small reedy lakes of Co Leitrim, in the lee of the Iron Mountains. This physical and emotional geography is in his bones, and the source of ‘an extraordinary sense of security, of deep peace’. Over and over, in this memoir as in childhood, he goes up the cinder path to the little iron gate, past Brady’s house and pool and the house where the old Mahon brothers lived, past the dark, deep quarry and across the railway bridge and up the hill past Mahon’s shop. A similar litany-like repetition was a disconcerting feature of his novel For They Shall Face the Rising Sun.

William Brett

Trapped in a shaming role

Racial shame looms large in this ‘imaginative reconstruction’ of the life of Bert Williams, the black American entertainer. Williams only began to achieve notable success after deciding, in 1895, to smear his face with burnt cork and widen his lips with make-up, in order to ‘play the coon’. He would shuffle his feet and boggle his eyes, thereby providing white audiences with a stereotype they could easily recognise. Performers can experience complex and ambiguous emotions when presenting characters for the benefit of audiences, and the adoption of ‘blackface’ by black performers is perhaps the most potent example of this phenomenon. It is for this reason that Caryl Phillips is entitled to turn Williams’ story into a novel.

Zenga Longmore

The distaff side of death

The reason one heads straight for the obituary column when one is confronted by the Daily Telegraph is the abundance of rarefied mischievousness one finds therein. If it is grovelling hero-worship you crave, then Telegraph obituaries will disappoint. In Chin Up, Girls! we delight in a portrait of Dame Barbara Cartland: ‘In her later years, she cut an unmistakeable figure in a froth of pink ball gown with extravagant, almost clown-like make-up — her cheeks pulled back with sadly visible bits of sticking plaster … She was a formidable fairy queen.’ Ah! A morning devoid of sunny Telegraph obituaries is a morning misspent. I was slightly apprehensive about the idea behind Chin Up, Girls!. Why women’s obituaries?

Sam Leith

The everlasting guessing game

On the very first page of Peter Ackroyd’s biography, you learn something strange and interesting about the first few moments of Shake- speare’s life: ‘A small portion of butter and honey was usually placed in the baby’s mouth. It was the custom in Warwickshire to give the suckling child hare’s brains reduced to jelly.’ Who knew that the first food our greatest dramatist tasted was jellied hare’s brains? Yuck. On page after page that follows, he dishes out similar morsels.

Saturday

Caroline Moorehead

Campaigning on the campus

Do campus novels reflect the reality of university life? When I was a Fellow of Peterhouse, back in the Eighties, I was asked with tedious regularity whether the experience resembled Porterhouse Blue, Tom Sharpe’s grotesquely overblown satire. But even as I (truthfully) denied it, a few vignettes would slide past my mind’s eye — such as my very first Governing Body meeting, when, sombrely robed, the Fellows debated, hotly and with manifest ill-will, whether the vomit by the chapel was beer- or claret-based. This was, of course, a matter of college politics.

Sarah Burton

Lucky dip for lovers

First published in 1857, The Ladies’ Oracle dates from a period when very little literature of real merit was widely considered appropriate reading material for respectable young women, with the consequence that the presses fairly overran with little books designed to fill, rather than enrich, their idle moments — lest the Devil had plans for them — and otherwise kill the precious hours they had before serving their time as wives. Many of these handy volumes were promoted as instructive or edifying; others had less serious intentions and one suspects that many a hopeful maiden would have hastily shoved her copy of the Oracle into her needlework basket on hearing the approach of mater, pater, governess or nurse.

Jonathan Cecil

Top marks for charisma

In the delightful correspondence (1944) between the late actress Athene Seyler and the actor Stephen Haggard, she inquires of a potential professional performer: Does he aspire to be a power in the theatre, a leader or more vulgarly a star? Then let him be prepared to devote his entire energies, thoughts and interest to his job. He must breathe, eat and dream the theatre: I have never known a successful actor do less. This will limit him as a person and as a citizen. He must of necessity be an egoist and will probably become a bore. He must give up a wider life and concentrate on his job. This masterly description of a star player — though I’ve seldom heard him called a bore — fits Laurence Olivier perfectly.

Hugh Massingberd

A Norfolk not an Ess

A special thrill when visiting country houses — as I used to do every week in the unconvincing guise of what Evelyn Waugh described in A Handful of Dust as a ‘very civil young man’ engaged in chronicling family seats — was the occasional opportunity of handling one of Humphry Repton’s original ‘Red Books’. This had been beautifully prepared and bound in red morocco for the owner’s late-Georgian predecessor by the great landscape gardener in order to provide the client with a visual explanation of his ideas for ‘improvements’.

Andro Linklater

The spacious firmament on high

This is the most dazzling era in astronomy that human history has ever known, but for all the attention it commands it could be the dullest. It seems almost routine, a swiftly forgotten news item at best, to see images of Mars beamed back from the planet’s surface or to have a comet’s content analysed by fragmenting its surface with a rocket. The astonishing construction of a space station circling the earth is of such little interest, it is wholly obscured by anxieties about the Shuttle that serves it. The seven-year, 2.2-billion-mile, inch-perfect flight of the Cassini spacecraft to examine Saturn’s moons registers only slightly more than the discovery this summer of 30 million new stars in the Milky Way by the Spitzer infra-red space telescope.

Anita Brookner

Take-over bid by a stranger

This is a novel on a rebarbative theme: incapacity. Not the sort of incapacity one observes in others; rather, incapacity as a curse one suffers on one’s own. Paul Rayment, a man of 60, is flung off his bicycle by an oncoming car and loses part of his right leg. He recovers, more or less, and is returned home to his solitary flat, in the charge of a nurse, Marijana, a Croatian immigrant. He refuses a prosthesis and is reduced to an even lonelier and more circumscribed existence than he had previously experienced. He becomes acutely aware of his childlessness, which torments him. He also becomes aware of Marijana, yearns for her, for her children.

Richard Shone

The calm and solid Cubist

The personalities of only a handful of artists are known to the public at large. Most live on through their work with, perhaps, a ticket of biographical cliché attached to their reputation — Van Gogh’s ear, Lautrec’s legs, Turner lashed to the mast of a ship in a storm. A few are known through the distortions of the biopic — Michelangelo, Gauguin, Pollock. With others, the very sparseness of available human detail — about Piero or Vermeer, for example —becomes their name tag. Of the great names of 20th-century art, Georges Braque is still among the unknown personalities. This problem is addressed in Alex Danchev’s very welcome, readable biography.

Saturday

Interconnect

Under the volcano again

In 2003, Robert Harris published Pompeii: A Novel, which for vitality and entertainment and the atmosphere of the decadent Roman world around the Bay of Naples in the first century AD can hardly be beaten. The great eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 and the destruction of the playground city of Pompeii is made even more cataclysmic by Harris’s angle on it. Not until nearly the end of the book does he describe the mushroom cloud, the blood-red lightning, the choking ash four feet deep, the terrifying withdrawal of the sea, the darkness and the final silence.

Raymond Carr

Playing the marriage market | 3 September 2005

In November 1895 the most eligible bachelor in London society, the ninth Duke of Marlborough, married Consuelo Vanderbilt, the richest American heiress available. It is sometimes assumed that the British aristocracy crossed the Atlantic en masse in search of heiresses who might replenish fortunes devastated by falling rents during the agricultural depression of the late 19th century. However, most titled aristocrats continued to marry within their class, as did American millionaires. But the Duke of Marlborough, relatively poor as dukes went, was strapped for cash which would enable him to restore the tarnished reputation of his family and the glories of Blenheim Palace.

Juliet Townsend

Reliable friend, less reliable consul

The twin graves lie side-by-side in the Protestant cemetery in Rome, much visited, much photographed; one decorated with the lyre of the poet, the other with the palette of the painter. Beneath the first lie the remains of one of England’s greatest poets, who died at the age of 25. Beneath the second lies a minor artist and consular official who survived into old age, and whose stone is inscribed: ‘Joseph Severn, devoted friend and death-bed companion of JOHN KEATS.’ Severn’s grave would be forgotten and unvisited if it were not for the pilgrims who come to venerate Keats. In the same way, his life would be forgotten and unvisited if it had not been for his association with the poet.

Charlotte Mitchell

A devotee of Devon

The regional novel in England sounds like a dull and worthy research topic; investigating it might be entertaining at times, but I suspect that one would just end by concluding that it existed once, and does so no more. People still write novels about life in various regions, of course; some writers still specialise in a particular area, but the glory days are over. When Cold Comfort Farm came out in 1932 to deal it a death-blow, there were still dozens of writers making an honest living in this way; it is often said to mock Mary Webb’s books, but Sheila Kaye-Smith, Eden Phillpotts, Alice Dudeney and many others were just as vulnerable.

Philip French

Frantic and fantastic

There is now an established tradition of busy stars not reading the books to which they put their names. It stretches from Hedy Lamarr, who 40 years ago sued the ghostwriters of Ecstasy and Me for misrepresentation some while after publication, to Victoria Beckham who claims never to have read a book, not even her autobiography. According to the distinguished film historian, David Thomson, who licked Fan-Tan into shape for publication, it seems likely that the dyslexic Brando belonged to this elite company and never read this posthumously published novel. Without his name on it, the book would never have appeared under the imprint of a reputable publisher.

Sam Leith

Tragical- comical- historical

After the Victorians opens with a coronation at which ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ is played, and an expedition to the Himalayas: King Edward VII took the throne, Younghusband and his Maxim guns took Lhasa. It closes with a coronation at which ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ is played, and an expedition to the Himalayas: Elizabeth II took the throne, Hillary took the summit of Everest. By the second time round, the chorus of ‘Wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set’ has, as A. N. Wilson points out, more of hope in it than expectation. We’d had the unimaginable slaughter of two world wars, the collapse of Britain’s industrial base and overseas dominions, and we were deeply in debt to a nuclear America.

Saturday

Andrew Taylor

Foul play in Hull

It is always interesting to see what happens when a literary novelist turns to genre fiction. Swan Song is the third novel of Robert Edric’s trilogy about Leo Rivers, a private investigator based in modern Hull. The format is instantly familiar because Rivers is a modernised and home-grown Philip Marlowe — detective, knight-errant and laconic narrator — though Rivers lacks both the literary panache and the glamorously self-destructive habits of his original. Three young women, two of whom dabbled in prostitution, have been murdered. The principal suspect for the most recent murder is the victim’s boyfriend, now in a coma following a drug overdose.

Dr Thorpe

The battles of a lively young cub

In June 1944 two prospective Labour MPs, Harold Wilson and Kenneth Younger, travelled back to London, unsuccessful in seeking the Peterborough candidacy. On the train, they compared notes on the difficult adoption process. Both were returned to Parliament next year in the Labour landslide, but though Wilson was to become prime minister, Kenneth Younger remains one of the forgotten names of postwar Labour politics. His career has long merited serious treatment and Professor Geoffrey Warner’s impeccably researched book, part memoir, part diary, fills a great gap in postwar biography.

James Fleming

Best of friends | 27 August 2005

Birds are our pals. They awaken us, sing us happy songs and delight us with their plumage colours. In the garden they are undemanding visitors, not inferior to neighbours or family. The migrating species perform feats of navigation that in a human would have that person crowned upon landfall. They can fly at great speed and do amazing acrobatics. The literature on them is huge. Languages are stuffed with references to our friendship. Every house in Britain has a bird picture somewhere. And all this stems from what is, most often, a tiny frame. That little scolder the wren weighs the same as a green table grape. Moreover, they’re big business. Along one flyway alone in the USA wildfowlers have an annual expenditure of $58 million. And they’re big in politics.