More from Books

Saturday

Caroline Moorehead

The grass below, above, the vaulted sky

It was soon after he finished work on Flora Britannica, his hugely successful book about the wild plants he had spent his life exploring, that Richard Mabey fell ill. It began as a nagging feeling of ‘ill- fittedness’, being out of kilter with his surroundings, and with the loss of all taste and hunger for work. An author and naturalist with a string of memorable and excellent books behind him, he simply ran out of words. By the time he was diagnosed as suffering from severe depression he had fallen out with his much loved sister, sold the family home, and was spending most of his time, when not in hospital or drinking in the pub, lying curled up on his bed facing the wall.

Pn Furbank

Stories about story-telling

The story that John Barth has to tell is that he had planned a book, to be entitled Ten Nights and a Night, in which he would reprint ten already published stories, interweaving them with a new story about his relations with his Muse. The purpose would have been to put these tales into a narrative frame, ‘connecting their dots to make a whole somewhat larger (and perhaps a bit friskier) than the mere sum of its parts’, on the model of The Thousand and One Nights and the Decameron. But before the book was completed there came the events of 9/11, which seemed to make story-telling hopelessly irrelevant. Still, the story-telling in the Decameron took place under the threat of the Black Death and hence was a studied gesture of irrelevance.

Jonathan Sumption

The way of the world

This book stands in an ancient intellectual tradition. Its theme dates back to the year 1798, in which the English economist Thomas Malthus published his famous theory of demography. Human population, Malthus reasoned, grows exponentially, as each extra couple multiplies itself in turn; whereas food production can increase only arithmetically, and beyond a point not at all. Return to equilibrium is possible only through starvation or disease, provoked either by natural catastrophe or by wars over the scarce remaining resources. The resources of the earth have proved to be more elastic than Malthus foresaw. The mechanisms by which they may be exhausted are infinitely more complicated than he realised.

Philip Hensher

School for scandal

The time is the late 1990s; the setting a boarding school called Hailsham. This being a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, the narrator, Kathy H., who attended the school, is looking back after some years and trying to make sense of her story. The school, it is quickly made clear, is not quite like other schools, the pupils not quite like people we know, and the 1990s slightly different from the decade we might remember. There is talk of ‘carers’, of the ‘fourth donation’, of ‘completing’, of someone called Madame. There don’t seem to be any holidays, and, anyway, the kids don’t have parents; nor are they orphans. In the outside world, they just have what are called ‘possibles’; people who bear a strange resemblance to them.

Saturday

Johann Hari

The decline of the West?

David Thomson is one of a handful of highbrow film critics writing today, along with Ron Rosen- baum and David Lane, whose work will still be read decades from now. He is best known for his amazingly ambitious Dictionary of Film, an ocean of mini-essays about every major figure in international film in the past century, and the best toilet-side reading on earth. Somehow Thomson has come up with an even more daring agenda for his follow-up performance. In Scott Fitzgerald’s final, unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, he writes that Hollywood ‘can be understood, but only dimly and in flashes. Not half a dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads.

Douglas Johnson

There shone one woman

In January 1798 Talleyrand gave a magnificent ball designed to honour Josephine, who had married Bona- parte two years earlier. Everyone who mattered in Paris was there, whether old nobility or former terrorists.

Daniel Neill

You can’t go home again

Bombay, the biggest city on the planet, is built on a combination of palm fronds, fish entrails and the dreams of 14 million people. Originally comprising seven islands off the west coast of India, large areas of the city were reclaimed from the Arabian Sea during the 19th and 20th centuries. Nowadays, 500 people arrive in Bombay every day, filling every available square foot of land and adding to the agglomeration of dreams that sustains it. Maximum City relates some of these dreams: from Bollywood moguls to Hindu nationalists, from gang members to bar dancers. The central theme of the book is one of nostalgia.

Kate Grimond

Pigtails among the haystacks

During the bitter winter that seized Britain in earnest at the end of January 1947, the children of the village of Farnborough on the Berkshire Downs went to the pictures in Wantage to see Courage of Lassie but were unable to return home on the bus because of a heavy fall of snow. Accompanied by ‘big Mrs Willoughby (20-odd stone), who never took off her pinafore and had arms like skittles’, they trudged the five miles back on foot through the fresh snow in the dark. ‘There was a strange ethereal light on everything and a deep silence. It was as though we were the only people left on earth.’ So begins what might be called an embroidered memoir by Candida Lycett Green of her childhood in Farnborough.

Anne Chisholm

The limits of post-mortem knowledge

Not many collections of old reviews and lectures make worthwhile books, no matter how skilfully topped and tailed; but everything Hermione Lee, who both writes and teaches biography, has written about the state of the biographer’s art in recent years is worth re-reading. The title is off-putting, suggestive of the morgue, and there is something irritating about the subtitle as well: ‘life-writing’, apart from being clumsy, suggests that ‘biography’ is somehow old-fashioned, perhaps unlikely to lure students to a seminar.

Caroline Moore

Baby, it’s cold outside

The very title of Leaving Home announces a quintessential Brook- ner theme. A heroine in her novels will always face a struggle to escape, not only from an airless, restrictive upbringing (almost invariably embodied in a claustrophobically close relationship with her mother), but also from traits embedded in her own character. Her problem is that she has been so moulded by maternal genes and love, so bonded and bounded by her environment, that her character has become inseparable from her upbringing — and can, indeed, only be described as a ‘mindset’. Emma Roberts has been brought up by her widowed mother, cocooned in mutual love ‘so exclusive … that it was experienced more like anguish’.

Raymond Carr

Micawber with a touch of Skimpole

Biographers, in their desperate search for a suitable subject hitherto undiscovered by their professional colleagues, sometimes light on a figure once well known, but who has fallen into disrepute. Such was the fate of Leigh Hunt, now resurrected in these two books. Anthony Holden is a professional biographer whose subjects have ranged from Olivier and the Prince of Wales to Tchaikovsky. Using the abundant written sources of the epoch, he has produced a long, well-researched life of Hunt from his fame as a schoolboy poet in 1800 to his death in 1859. Professor Roe is a distinguished literary critic and historian of the Romantic movement. His learned and perceptive book ends in August 1822 with the cremation of Shelley’s decomposed body on the beach of Viareggio.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Defeat and betrayal

When Paul Foot died last July, he was more widely and deeply mourned than any other journalist for years past, apart perhaps from his great friend Auberon Waugh. Born in 1937, he was a contemporary of the gang who founded Private Eye (and whose mortality rate has been frightening: few of the original group made it to 70, and many not even to 60). Although he wrote over the years for many papers, he always returned as if by instinct to Private Eye. He occupied a special place there, the proverbial piano player in the brothel. When anyone complained about the spiteful tittle-tattle or mean-spirited jokes (which is of course what people buy the magazine for), ‘Footnotes’ could be held up in reply.

Saturday

Brendan O’Neill

A floating, maybe drowning voter

John Harris, the mop-topped commentator from Manchester, better known as a music journalist (and a very fine one) than a political correspondent, is in a pickle. Having voted Labour his entire adult life, he now finds himself horrified by the New Labour project, and by Blair and Blairism in particular, and wonders whether it isn’t time to swear allegiance to another party. In Harris’s childhood home ‘the Labour Party was like Church’, and that morning in 1985 when, as a 15-year-old, he came down to breakfast to find a Labour party membership form next to his cereal bowl it was the ‘equivalent of Confirmation’. In So Now Who Do We Vote For?

Julia Neuberger

Huddled masses yearning to breathe free

As asylum looks like being a key election issue, Caroline Moore- head reminds us of one simple truth. No one wants to be a refugee. No one wants to leave their home. They do so out of desperation, tortured, raped, witnessing terrifying abuse, or in terrible, straitened circumstances. Of course not all would-be immigrants are in fear of their lives, but a remarkably large percentage turn out to be so, and some 40 per cent are eventually granted refugee status or given exceptional leave to remain. Before all that, they will have paid vast sums to people-traffickers for perilous and terrifying journeys. Then, on arrival, their lives are subject to confusing legal processes, to insufficient money, to dispersal around the country, and to loneliness and abuse.

Lloyd Evans

A guide who opens eyes

Is there a more charming literary companion than Al Alvarez? In this extended series of lectures he examines the writer’s creative method, or ‘voice’, as he metaphorically terms it. His own voice comes through loud and clear, a seasoned, colloquial, authoritative and highly polished channel for his telling insights and throwaway erudition. He flits with ease across the centuries. On one page he is in the 1920s, breathing new life into antique disputes about free verse and quoting Pound’s advice to Modernist poets ‘to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome’.

Tony Gould

Fits and starts

A book with a title like Epileptic does not raise high expectations: will it be an account of suffering nobly borne, or a worthy medical treatise perhaps? Not a bit of it, this memoir is a graphics extravaganza spread over 361 pages, bursting with energy and wild imaginings, a comic tour de force that is as emotionally gut-wrenching as it is visually stunning. For those who associate the word ‘comic’ with Dan Dare and the Eagle, or the firm of D. C. Thomson, this book will be a revelation, an eloquent (probably more so in the original French than in this American English translation), moving and relentlessly honest dissection of a family gradually overwhelmed by the eldest child’s epilepsy. The author/artist, David B.

Stephen Abell

Tunnel of love vision

Tim Madden, the narrator of Norman Mailer’s Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1984), offers a perceptive instance of literary criticism when he recalls that ‘the best description of a pussy I ever came across was in a short piece by John Updike’. However, even that is not enough for him: what he would really like, he concludes presciently, would be ‘to have him guide me through the inside of a cunt’. It is perhaps too simplistic merely to remark that Villages grants Tim Madden’s wish several times over, or to spot that six of the 14 chapters are, accurately, as it turns out, entitled ‘Village Sex’. Certainly, it is easy to become distracted by the genital description that they bemusingly contain: ‘[it] did not feel like Phyllis’s.

Richard Shone

The painter properly portrayed

We are continually told that biography is the dominant literary expression of the age, that Britain, in particular, is a nation of biographers, and that the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is the massive climax of this protracted love affair. Even our fiction suppurates with real-life figures both past and present, from Mrs Thrale and Charles Lamb to Henry James, Alma Cogan and Baroness Thatcher. Biographies of politicians and adventurers, duchesses and spies, consorts and comedians hog the limelight on the publishers’ seasonal lists. But artists receive only sporadic attention. It is true that most of the leading British painters and sculptors have been ‘done’, some more than once, but they are not the easiest of subjects.

The Questing-Vole

Life and letters | 12 February 2005

Russian bandit capitalism — sorry, the joys of the free market — is reaching beyond the grave. Latest victim: Fyodor Dostoevsky. The novelist’s great-grandson Dmitri has called foul on the lottery company Chestnaya Igra (‘Fair Play’), and is suing for £5,000 damages after images of his ancestor started appearing on its lottery tickets. As he points out, it is not in the best of taste to use the image of a notorious problem gambler to promote a lottery. Why not use Turgenev instead, he wonders: ‘The guy gambled more, spent more, lost more and had much more spare money anyway.’ Devils! Idiots! As well have the Russian prison service adopt as its mascot the image of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn ...

Saturday

Interconnect

He didn’t linger

The Australian Robert Dessaix, a Russian scholar, chooses to regard himself, in relation to Western civilisation, as an ancient Greek might have considered a Phrygian or a Scythian — a barbarian outsider. This, he believes, brings him even closer to his beloved and Russian Turgenev, who spent most of his adult life outside Russia, but whom his lifelong love, the French opera singer Pauline Viardot, always regarded as ‘a barbarian’. This famous love leads Dessaix to speculate about the nature of love itself. It was ‘triangular’, in the sense that Viardot was married, and, in the manner of the 12th-century troubadours, it became a ‘courtly love’.