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Saturday

Rosalind Porter

Recent first novels | 30 July 2005

In 1991, A.S. Byatt wrote an introduction to a reissue of her first novel, The Shadow of the Sun (1964), in which she recalls that she had: the eternal first novelist’s problem ... I didn’t want to write a ‘me-novel’ [but] I didn’t know anything — about life, at least. Highly autobiographical first novels are still out of fashion and even budding writers are expected to cast their eye away from themselves. And yet in our culture of instant gratification and celebrity, a writer’s reputation can depend almost exclusively on the critical reception of a first novel. The eternal problem today, it seems, is twofold: we expect first novels to be works of non-autobiographical genius well before a writer has had time to mature.

Frederic Raphael

Golden lads and girls

In the first century bc, the wrestler Nicophon of Miletus was said to have a physique which would have made Zeus himself tremble. He literally outstripped his rivals at the Olympic Games. Nicophon’s mere name, Victory Voice, announced a champion, just as that of Schwarzenegger did in the Mr Universe — and, more recently, in the Mr Governor of California — contests. He had only to flex himself for the rest of the field to wilt. Fantastic is the lid-off Arnie of Thal, an Austrian village in which his father, once of the Nazi party, was postwar police chief. Laurence Leamer’s low-down becomes a pedestal on which Arnie’s occasionally lovable hunkishness is jacked up even higher. How high can he go?

Saturday

John De-Falbe

The lower end of the higher good

This superb novel takes place in the remote settlement of Yazyk, at the end of a 100-mile spur off the Trans-Siberian Railway. It is 1919. Most of the inhabitants belong to a bizarre Christian sect who desire no part in the political upheavals further west. But events have intruded upon them in the form of a detachment of the Czechoslovak Legion. The soldiers are commanded by the terrifying Matula, whose flesh was ‘coarsely flayed by heat and cold and fevers and jaundices and scurvies gone by.’ While his exhausted men dream of escaping from years of fighting to Vladivostock, and thence home to Prague, Matula seems to contemplate establishing a private fiefdom in the wilderness even though he understands that the Reds are closing in.

Antonia Fraser

Staying with the old firm

There have been many books over the years with titles that approximate to Why I Am Still a Catholic. In the Fifties a dream team would have included, I suppose, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene with Alec Guinness, received into the Church in 1956, as a promising newcomer.

Anthony Sattin

A fantasist of the first order

Many years ago, in one of those precious moments of seren- dipity, I came across a novel called Ali and Nino, set in the Azerbaijani city of Baku. This seductive, life-enhancing story tells of a love affair between a Muslim and a Christian at the city’s pivotal moment, just as the oil begins to flow at the beginning of the 20th century. In foreground and background, it deals with what today would be called the clash of civilisations, with Muslim/Christian, East/West, rich/poor tensions. I found it so compelling that I have since reread it several times, given copies to friends and lived with its characters and their dilemma. But what of its author?

Digby Anderson

The barbarians within the gates

Spectator readers have known of Dr Dalrymple for many years through his regular column in this magazine. Every week we muddled our way through, unreflectively finding life all right and other people not so bad. Then, on Fridays we took Dr Dalrymple’s little magic pill and suddenly saw that we were knee-high in a rising sewer. The column was short and usually followed a pattern. There was an abbreviated story of a patient who had tried to kill himself or someone else. The Doctor’s questions revealed a little more of the patient’s disgusting life, and it ended with a comment by the patient showing his total lack of moral responsibility for his actions.

William Feaver

From dumb to singing pictures

Patrick Caulfield’s paintings look specific while giving us tantalisingly little to go on. Where are we? Seemingly, a spotlight moves, the disc of dislocated brightness slithering over tablecloth, tankard, swirly-plastered wall and simulated half-timber. Could this be a Vermeer-themed hostelry for the discriminating guest? Details punctuate the ambience. Take a pew, why don’t we, and let each picture absorb us. Things like chained pen sets and buttoned-effect wallpaper are stimulants for Caulfield, his eye-catchers, his wherewithal.

Andrew Taylor

In search of fresh villains

More than any other literary form, perhaps, the thriller is at the mercy of history — especially that branch of the genre that deals with the rise and fall of empires, the clash of ideologies and the dirty secrets of nations. In the past, most thriller writers, from Buchan to Fleming and beyond, dealt with clear and, above all, present dangers to the body politic. They were concerned, some more plausibly than others, with a world their authors and readers recognised as contemporary. But history has changed direction, and so has the thriller. With the end of the Cold War, the genre has been forced to come to terms with the awkward fact that it no longer has a straightforwardly villainous villain.

Tom Pocock

The man we love to love

The life and death of Nelson grip the imagination, not just because of the bicentenary of Trafalgar but because more is known about him than any other major figure in British history. He was a tireless correspondent, writing for hours with his left hand letters that would be kept in their hundreds because he was famous in his lifetime. These illuminate the complicated, contra- dictory character that continues to entice biographers, whether revisionists, hagio- graphers, bodice-rippers, amateur psychoanalysts, spinners of rattling good yarns, or serious historians, amongst the last being Roger Knight.

Christopher Bland

The gospel according to Lukes

From: ChristopherBland@bt.comTo: Lit Ed@spectator.co.ukSubject: Book Review Dear Mark, Delighted to review Martin’s book; I seem to remember meeting him with Rupert, Conrad and Bill at the Allen and Co. Sun Valley media bash two years ago. He’s clearly put his learning about my rebranding achievements at BBC and BT into practice at a-b global. Now that you’re taking business books seriously, I’ve asked Canongate to send you an early proof of my latest Degreasing the Pole: 10 Tested Ways to Stay on Top. Although it’s too late for poor Conrad. Perhaps a reciprocal review from Lukes?? Best, Christopher BT: No.

Saturday

Raymond Carr

Goings-on after sunset

After 20 years of hard labour Professor Ekirch has produced an absorbing social history of nighttime in pre-industrial society from the Balkans to the British colonies of North America. His vast accumulation of quotations from diverse sources — he has employed ‘a legion of translators’ — threatens, at times, to overwhelm the reader, but they are linked together in a narrative of clear prose. Nighttime for our ancestors 300 years ago had a significance and an importance we have lost. ‘Rather than a backdrop to daily existence, or a natural hiatus,’ Ekirch writes, ‘nighttime in the early modern age instead embodies a distinct culture, with many of its own rituals and customs.

Interconnect

Tripping and bonking

Paul Theroux’s new novel finds Slade Steadman, the 50-year-old author of a celebrated travel book, on the trail to darkest Ecuador in the company of some deeply unpleasant American tourists and his disillusioned doctor girlfriend Ava. The object of his quest is a rare hallucinogen, shyly administered by the local shaman, with which our man hopes to end his long-standing writer’s block and get his professional life back on track. Equally irksome is a second blockage: ‘The sexual desire he had once described in starved paragraphs of solitude … as something akin to cannibal hunger was something he had not tasted for a long time.

Harriet Sergeant

With not much help from Freud

Shortly after the end of the Cultural Revolution, I found myself in a girls’ dormitory of Beijing university. It was a small drab room of eight wooden bunks. The students wore shapeless Mao jackets over hand-knitted jerseys and their hair in plaits. It was very cold. I had asked about their love life. The girls looked puzzled. The Cultural Revolution had promoted puritanism between the sexes. What preoccupied them was not love but hot water. Each day they received one thermos. That was their lot. ‘So if we wash our hair, we can’t have tea,’ one explained, gazing wistfully at my clean head. It is such girls, modest, virginal if a little grubby, that Mr Muo, the hero of Dai Sijie’s latest novel, is in search of.

Digby Durrant

The fake’s progress

Ever since Dixon’s pie-eyed lecture on Merrie England in Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim there’s been a hunger for more exposures of the pretentious absurdities and backbiting jealousies of academia. Here’s another from a distinguished professor of English at London University who’s presumably seen a great deal of it. Perhaps it’s because of this that David Nokes’s book is much closer to farce than to the reality you find, say, in C. P. Snow’s novels set in a Cambridge college or Malcolm Bradbury’s satires on life at the redbrick and new plate-glass universities.

Philip Hensher

Findings of the Dismal Science

This is the sort of book we can expect to see a great deal more of in the future. After Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point — a study of the way products or ideas move from niche positions to mass markets — economists and journalists have been racking their brains to come up with usefully saleable theories. Each one begins with profiles in New York magazines; the book, largely made up of stories, follows; and then, no doubt, a lucrative career spinning this highly anecdotal material to CEOs. An amusing book, this one, certainly more so than the works of most practitioners of the Dismal Science. It’s best enjoyed, though, as a series of music-hall turns, tall tales and outrageous paradoxes rather than anything resembling an argument.

Saturday

James Fleming

Of fulmars and fleams

Kathleen Jamie is a poet. This might be described as her occasional book, in the sense of being a record of what she saw, smelt, heard or felt during these various experiences and expeditions. Most are concerned, loosely, with natural history —ospreys, wild salmon, corncrakes, whales; all of them pertain to Scotland (of which she is a fine-voiced native). There is nothing fey or arty about her writing. She has an inquisitive, unpredictable, generous mind that she speaks firmly. In this connection, much of one chapter discusses a pair of peregrines trying to nest nearby. It is notorious that J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine (1967) is the last word on the subject: an unrepeatable and magical combination of observational and literary skills — the Tristram Shandy of bird books.

Byron Rogers

Hanged on a legal quibble

Who killed Lord Haw-Haw? It was I, said Hartley Shawcross. I was the attorney general who led his prosecution personally under the Treason Act, even though my constitutional expert advised me that we did not have a case in law, and one of my predecessors in office had confessed himself ‘incredulous’ at its being brought at all against someone who was not, and had never been, a British subject. It was I, said Frederick Tucker. I was the high court judge who heard the case even though six years earlier I had described the accused as ‘a traitor’, and should thus have considered myself ineligible. It was I who, instead of leaving it to the jury to decide, in the course of it ruled that the possession of a British passport in itself brought allegiance to the Crown.

Alexander Masters

From faintly weird to fiercely eccentric

HERMIT WANTEDFree meals and accommodation.Situated on grand estate.Would suit the quiet type. When Giles and Ginny married ‘it was like a great clanging-together of bank vaults that rang out across the land’. Now Ginny demanded a savage. She had discovered an empty cave in the woods, and it needed to be occupied. The applicant to her ‘Situation Vacant’ notice in the local paper must not shave, cut his hair, trim his fingernails — do anything but look rough; in particular, he must not speak. Then she and her guests could ride out after supper to spy on him. At first, all went well with the successful unsavoury applicant, until they forgot to feed him. Then Hermit turned ignoble and pinched the baby.

William Reesmogg

Friends, rivals and countrymen

This is an ideal John Murray book, dealing with historic personalities, with a narrative reinforced by family papers and an understanding deepened by family connection. Robert Lloyd George, the author, is the great-grandson of David Lloyd George, the prime minister. I hope it will be a best- seller, and can imagine it being un- wrapped, with real pleasure, from parcels beneath half the Christmas trees of Old England. What is surprising is that a book on this friendship has never been written before. David Lloyd George was the prime minister who won the first world war; Winston Churchill was the prime minister who won the second.

Sam Leith

Mad, good and dangerous to know

‘Tomorrow morning some poet may, like Byron, wake up to find himself famous,’ wrote Randall Jarrell, ‘for having written a novel, for having killed his wife; it will not be for having written a poem.’ Jarrell’s cynicism is too slick, too rueful; but it does snag something in Robert Lowell, as it does in several of the American poets of his generation. Lowell was, at his best, a towering poet, but his public fame often rested on other things: that he was Boston posh; that he publicly thumbed his nose at the government; that he was, above all, mad. He was all these things, and a great poet, too. It’s easy myth-making to say that Lowell’s genius and his madness went hand in hand, but it’s certainly the case that they took turns at the helm.