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Saturday

Rupert Christiansen

Antipodean wit and wisdom

Shocking, I know, but I hadn’t paid much attention to Clive James since my dim distant undergraduate days 30 years ago, when I remember being vastly amused by his verse satire of Grub Street parvenus, Peregrine Prykke’s Pilgrimage. Since then he’s rather passed me by — I never thought his television shows up to much, his byline has never grabbed me and I have yet to consult his latest project, described by the blurb as ‘the world’s first serious multimedia personal website’ (serious?). Nothing personal, no formulated opinion of his talent one way or the other, I just wasn’t a fan. Then came the prospect of a trans- atlantic flight, for which I decided his new collection of recent essays would be just the thing.

Anthony Daniels

Colossally bad taste

Everyone loves a good dictator, at least at a distance. Dictators exert the same horror and fascination that snakes have for some people; Latin American literature, for example, would be very much the poorer without them. It seems that we cannot ever know too much about their daily lives, for their arbitrary power over life and death seems to give a wider significance to the most trivial detail of their existence. Peter York, whom the blurb describes as ‘Britain’s original style guru’, has had the clever idea of making a picture book of dictators’ homes, 16 of them in all. The premise of the book is that by their décor shall ye know them.

Digby Anderson

The case of the curious Christian

Alan Jacobs quotes Philip Hensher on C. S. Lewis: ‘Let us drop C. S. Lewis and his ghastly, priggish, half-witted money-making drivel about Narnia down the nearest deep hole … They are mean-minded books, written to corrupt the minds of the young with allegory, smugly denouncing anything that differs in the slightest respect from Lewis’s creed of clean-living, muscular Christianity, pipe-smoking misogyny, racism and the most vulgar snobbery.’ He doesn’t like the ‘science fiction’ trilogy or Screwtape either. Mr Hensher is not about to be obeyed. The Narnia Chronicles have sold 85 million copies and, as a special Christmas present to keep Hensher sputtering, Disney is bringing out its first Narnia film this December. There are more to follow.

Robert Edric

Pursuit in the desert

Seven years after the groundbreaking Border trilogy, Cormac McCarthy has returned to that literary landscape he has made his own, the American-Mexican border: a near-fantastic tabula rasa of unmapped and unknowable spaces and histories, populated by people in thrall to geographic and climatic necessity, and for whom both the present and the future represent only a succession of unavoidable challenges; a landscape endlessly redrawn and reshaped in the formulations of new brutalities, new expectations and new desires. No Country for Old Men is perhaps McCarthy’s most contemporary fiction.

David Prycejones

Earning brownie points

Prospect is a monthly magazine with high aims, and it is therefore welcome. To borrow from the old advertisement for Mars Bars, it fills the gap. It is hard to think of any comparable outlet in this country — as opposed to the United States — where it is possible to publish contributions of 5,000 words and upwards. David Goodhart had the idea of it, raised the money and is the editor. Top marks for all that, with excuses for the horribly arch pun in the title of this selection from ten years of publication. A monthly magazine of this kind ideally promotes its version of right opinion, and scotches its version of wrong opinion. T. S. Eliot’s Criterion, Cyril Connolly’s Horizon, or F. R.

Susan Hill

The wonderful edge of the sea

There are some classic novels about a boy growing up — Great Expectations and Kes spring to mind. Well, here is another. The Highest Tide is one of the best novels it has been my pleasure to read for many a day. And its cover is one of the worst it has been my misfortune to see. The author has been so badly served by this ugly, ill-drawn mess that if you have any sense you will buy it immediately and rejacket it in brown paper, as we did with our textbooks. But buy it you should. It is lyrical, moving, funny and breathtakingly well written. Miles O’Malley is almost 14 and becoming aware of the fact, but there are far more important things in his life than puberty, though his friends would have him believe otherwise.

Lucy Beresford

Too French by half

Take Harold Pinter: dismissed at the outset for having written an impenetrable play, but who nearly 50 years on ends up being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. I ask you, who’d be a critic? I mention this by way of an apology should, in 50 years’ time, Simon Liberati pick up a gong of similar importance. Because right now, his debut makes little sense. It’s very French, in a surreal, self-absorbed type way. At its core lies an exposé of a debauched layer of society, comprising a flaky group of world-weary, heroin-addicted teenage prostitutes and equally louche adults. The novel’s semi-hero is Claude, a man of ‘Luciferian beauty’ who in his forties is haunted by the memories (or apparitions) of girls he has slept with and pimped for.

James Buchan

The holy terror himself

Osama: The Making of a Terrorist is not so much another biography of old beardie as a worldly and suave example of a once thriving subclass of literature, the newspaper correspondent’s memoir. Born in Buffalo, New York on ‘the day President Roosevelt closed the banks’ in 1933, Jonathan Randal reported for 40 years on the wars of the post-colonial era, beginning with the struggle for independence in Algeria in the 1950s and ending with Bosnia in the 1990s. For most of that time, he was correspondent for the Washington Post.

John De-Falbe

The rich harvest of the random

There is a delightful moment in this novel when Nathan, the narrator, is standing on one side of the street with his nephew, Tom, and they see Nancy Mazzucchelli on the other side. Tom thinks of her as the BPM, the Beautiful Perfect Mother, and he would never dare approach. Nathan simply walks over and starts talking to her. Characters do things like this in Auster novels — they assert themselves over destiny with clear logic and sunny optimism; they know what they want for lunch and they ask for it. The moment is delightful, however, because what animates Auster’s work is the unexpected.

Graham Stewart

Instant post-mortem verdicts

Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us. In every life there is the subject for a sermon. Perhaps that is why so many sons of the manse have ascended into Fleet Street’s paper pulpits. Indeed, if there is one area of journalism that has progressively improved over the last 20 years it is the obituary notice. It is the reporter’s craft fused with the scholar’s judicious sense of perspective. The ability of the four quality newspapers to start each day with a fitting judgment on the lives of the departed is an astonishing achievement. Nothing comparable can be found in even the most renowned foreign journals.

Simon Jenkins

Nobody has been left out

Histories of Victorian London now come two a penny. They are the left-wing historian’s answer to biographies of Good Queen Bess. What is there new to say? We start with fog and smells and move on to disease and the working classes. We meet Charles Booth and Henry Mayhew. We chastise the rich and welcome the shift from charity to democracy. Over the Great Wen hovers the great messiah, Improvement. It brings gas, drains, electricity, Peabody homes and rights for women. The millennium arrives with Selfridges and the Underground. Then the Great War spoils everything. Stephen Inwood is a master of the genre.

William Feaver

Ego trip with excess baggage

Readers may sympathise with Tracey Emin. Her big mouth and huge appetite for self- advertisement make her a ready target; she’s so shameless and yet, by her own account, so abused. (‘And then they started: “SLAG, SLAG, SLAG.” A gang of blokes, most of whom I’d had sex with at some time or other…’) Life has dealt her a raw yet currently rewarding deal. And now that she’s a proper celebrity, as real as Cindy Sherman — the photographer of a thousand guises — and much more in-your-face, she owes it to her public to keep delivering, living her dreams, spicing resolutions with relapses. Margate’s most famous daughter grew up in what were, by her account, intermittently abject circumstances.

Jane Gardam

Looking for trouble and finding it

Thrillers now come heavily disguised, and but for the blood-stained head-lamp on the jacket of this one and the warning across the corner, ‘Be careful who [sic] you trust. It might just be the death of you’, one would take the book to be a straight- forward, if lurid, portrait of a bright girl with an adrenalin problem. Holly Krauss, talented, good-looking and running her own successful business, is attracted to danger and bad company as well as to drink and sexual excess. After a long day in the office she courts sexual, financial and marital disaster of an evening. Bruised, beaten-up and minus items of her underwear, she always limps back to a (very unobservant) kindly husband who works from home as an illustrator. He is enigmatic but constant and sane.

David Crane

Raking through the embers

It is difficult to put a finger on the reason, but there has always seemed something particularly dismal about the Gunpowder Plot. There is obviously a lot to be said for any conspiracy that can erase the Stuart line from English history at a blow, but from Robert Catesby and the rest of the old Essex mob to the wretched James everyone on both sides of the plot is so profoundly unsympathetic that it is hard to care at this distance what happened to any of them. A romantic’s case — largely rooted in Aubrey — might be made for Sir Everard Digby, but, as James Travers’s beautifully illustrated presentation of the archival sources underlines, the single real exception is the broken and sadly compromised figure of the Jesuit, Henry Garnet.

Roger Lewis

The man in the iron mask

Isn’t it peculiar when people change their name? John Wilson becoming Anthony Burgess, Peggy Hookham being borne aloft as Margot Fonteyn, or Richard Jenkins leaving Port Talbot as Richard Burton. When a person insists on being called somebody else we are witnessing an identity crisis. (Frank Skinner was Chris Collins until 1987. It is rumoured that as Chris Collins he still attends Johnson and Boswell conferences in Lichfield and presents academic papers.) The cocktail of vanity and self-loathing involved in renaming yourself is pungent and extreme — and helps to explain the career of Sir Michael Caine CBE, who was born in 1933 as Maurice Micklewhite, the son of a Billingsgate porter, and raised in a one-room flat off the Old Kent Road.

Oliver Gilmour

Ten men went to mow

Sitting at Stamford Bridge at the weekend, Chelsea trailing Bolton 0-1, I reflected on the nature of 11 brilliant players and their manager. After Mourinho’s half-time talk, Chelsea scored four goals in 10 minutes. There are inspiring and uninspiring gaffers. If he were a conductor, José Mourinho would be a virtuoso, but what does this imply? Passion, charisma, sensitivity, psychological insight and a spiritual dimension are all vital, but perhaps Otto Klemperer, one of the subjects of this impressive book, succeeded in subsuming all this into a simple phrase, ‘the power of suggestion’, in a 1969 interview: ‘The art of conducting lies, in my opinion, in the power of suggestion that the conductor exerts — on the audience as well as on the orchestra.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

The perils of peace

In 1945, Europe lay prostrate after the greatest and most terrible war in history. More than 35 million people had been killed, Tony Judt says (other estimates are even higher), with combatant deaths easily outnumbered by civilian; whole countries were starving, scores of cities were razed. That was not what optimistic souls — or maybe anyone — had foreseen in the first decade of the century, when Europe seemed to be living through an age of peace, rising prosperity and increasing freedom which promised to last for ever. That happy century from Waterloo to the Marne had ended literally with a bang in August 1914.

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 5 November 2005

Lecherous Limericks (1975) by Isaac Asimov Isaac Asimov’s ambition was to have a book in every one of the major Dewey Decimal categories. This one fits in the category labelled ‘dirty poems’. It’s a collection of 100 original limericks dealing with what Asimov called ‘actions and words concerning which society pretends nonexistence — reproduction, excretion, and so on’. They are accompanied by prim exegeses on metrical structure and rhyme-scheme, which at least have the virtue of making the book a lot longer than it would otherwise have been. Perhaps surprisingly, given the possibilities of ‘young women from Venus’ and ‘old men from Uranus’, none of the limericks have extraterrestrial themes.

Saturday

Brian Masters

How to ruin a good story

Buried within the pages of this book there lies an extraordinary story worth the telling, the bald facts of which require none of the elaboration to which they are here subjected. In 1896 a certain Anna Maria Druce, of 68 Baker Street in London, petitioned the home secretary to have her late husband’s coffin opened, on the grounds that his funeral in 1864 had been a purposeful sham devoted to ceremonial disposal of an empty box. Mr Druce had not died at all; he had simply wanted to revert to his other identity as the 5th Duke of Portland, of Welbeck Abbey near Worksop.

Andro Linklater

The art of limiting distortion

He had bought a large map representing the sea, Without the least vestige of land: And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be A map they could all understand. ‘What’s the good of Mercator’s North Poles and Equators, Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?’ So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply, ‘They are merely conventional signs!’ As The Hunting of the Snark suggests, what gives rise to a map is an absurd logic best appreciated by a mathematician like Lewis Carroll. The problem that cartography seeks to solve is also the one that drove painters to experiment with perspective and cubism: how best to represent three dimensions on a two-dimensional surface.