More from Books

Saturday

Byron Rogers

Talking Haiti triumphantly

A test for you. Viz, the comic now an improbable quarter of a century old, once ran a strip called ‘Harold and Fred’. It was the sort of thing you will remember from the days of Dandy and Beano, little characters running around and falling over, all with the three expressions of thoughtfulness, joy and shock. Except these faces were already familiar, not from films or television, but from the front pages of the tabloids. The strip had a subtitle, ‘They Make Ladies Dead’, and Harold and Fred, living next door to each other, were Dr Harold Shipman and Fred West. In the first of the four frames reproduced in 25 Years of Viz, Fred, looking thoughtful, sees a woman moving into the empty house across the street.

Alberto Manguel

Lands beyond the sunset

As we were taught in our distant childhood, it little profits that an idle king (doctor, botanist or missionary) mete and dole stuff by a still hearth. We cannot rest from travel, as these close-to-2,000 pages of double-columned small print attempt to prove. In a couple of beautifully produced volumes, each the size of a saddlebag, the former physics teacher and now keen traveller Raymond Howgego has listed the biographies of many of the happy heroes who strove, sought and found unknown lands beyond the sunset.

Matthew Dennison

The melancholy seven

The ordinariness of tragedy, its bread-and-butter nature at odds with Shakespearean grandeur or tabloid-style sensationalism, is the subject of Margaret Forster’s new novel. Is There Anything You Want? examines the lives of seven women in a small town in the north of England. Mrs Hibbert, Edwina, Dot, Chrissie, Ida, Rachel and Sarah are connected through work or illness to the cancer clinic of the local hospital.

Anthony Daniels

Outcasts of the world

The leprosarium of the Pacific islands in which I once worked was situated next to the Mental Wing, as the psychiatric hospital was known. The lepers derived considerable pleasure and hilarity from watching the antics of the lun- atics through the fence that separated them. This taught me an unedifying principle of human psychology, that the existence of people upon whom one can look down is a great solace in misfortune, no matter how grievous. Generally speaking, however, sufferers from leprosy have had no one upon whom to look down. They have been outcasts, cruelly separated from the rest of humanity and cut off even from their own families.

Piers Paul-Read

Decline and ascent

As a rule I decline to review books by old friends: it puts either one’s integrity or the friendship at risk. I make an exception of Father Joe because I first read it six months ago, prior to its publication in New York and, while not as overwhelmed as many American reviewers — Andrew Sullivan in the New York Times Book Review placed it in ‘the first tier of spiritual memoirs ever written’ — I did find it an exceptional book that merits its success in the United States. Tony Hendra is the son of an English stained-glass artist from a working-class background, and a mother of Irish — though she liked to pretend it was Scottish — extraction. He was raised as a Catholic and at the age of 14 was almost seduced by a married woman in the parish.

The Questing-Vole

Life and letters | 15 January 2005

The presentation of this year’s Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize — an annual literary award given, in alternate years, to a volume of poetry and a novel — was an occasion for harmony and reconciliation. The party took place on the penthouse floor of Faber & Faber’s offices in Queen Square, but the winner was not a Faber poet. Rather, it was Glyn Maxwell, whose latest volume of poetry, The Nerve, is published by Picador. It was described by the judges as ‘adventurous, deft, mysterious, and intellect- ually as well as emotionally penetrating, the work of a poet who uses all the octaves on the keyboard’. This must have been a matter of quiet satisfaction for Maxwell.

Saturday

John Martin-Robinson

Not poor or lowly

Which is the finest 18th-century building in England? Not a royal palace, not a library, not a cathedral, but a stable block: that designed by James Paine at Chatsworth. It is a faultless piece of architecture with none of the messiness and compromise of buildings intended for mere human habitation. Perfect in siting, perfect in proportion, perfect in its golden stone execution, it is a masterpiece. Horace Walpole thought the masonry of Chatsworth had the ‘neatness of wrought plate’, but that of Paine’s stables has a poetic, Centaurish magnificence, rippling with five different types of rustication (channelled, striated in two directions, pocked and vermiculated).

Toby Young

The battle of the breasts

Once upon a time, long, long ago, people used to argue about politics. Now they argue about parenting. Thirty-five years ago, the issue that defined a generation was whether American troops should be in Vietnam. Today, it’s whether to follow the advice set out in The Contented Little Baby Book. Defend the war on Iraq at a dinner party and your neighbour will barely raise an eyebrow, but dare to suggest that Gina Ford is a good thing and the room will immediately divide into two warring camps. As the parent of a one-year-old, I naturally feel quite strongly about some of these issues and I sat down to read Fatherhood, Marcus Berkmann’s new book, with a warm glow of anticipation.

Interconnect

The man who lost control of Ground Zero

‘Unmöglich! Unmöglich!’ or as we would say — impossible. It cannot be built. It won’t stand up. The initial reaction to Daniel Libeskind’s plans for the Jewish Museum, Berlin, completed (adhering faithfully to those plans) in 2001, might have been more apposite in quattrocento Florence given their somewhat hysterical, God-fearing nature. But one soon becomes accustomed to such firebrand emotion. Here is an architect who wears his heart on his sleeve. Everybody has an opinion on his work. For years, I have fought the ennui brought about by reviewing scores of dry architectural tomes and treatises for my ‘Architecture in Brief’ column in the Times Literary Supplement.

Julian Shuckburgh

King’s gambit accepted

Although for more than a century Johann Sebastian Bach has been one of the Western world’s most popular classical composers, it is surprising how little those who love his music know about him as a human being — unlike the others at the top of the list, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms or Schubert. Bach’s most recent definitive biographer is the Harvard professor Christoph Wolff, who apologises to his readers on the grounds that Bach’s life ‘lacks exciting dimensions and does not lend itself to a narrative that focuses on and is woven around a chronological list of dates and events’. There are no diaries, very few letters, and a shortage of personal accounts of his contemporaries’ relationships with him.

Sam Leith

Unsparing, frivolous candour

Charles Greville? you may wonder. ‘Who he? — Ed.’ Ed, decently enough, supplies us with the answer. Greville was an idler, a gambler, a political spectator, a cold fish, and a toff’s toff: a political diarist with Alan Clark’s sharpness if not his ambition, who lived from 1794-1865, and wrote from 1814-1860. Greville had a ringside seat for the Reform Bill, a more than nodding acquaintance with Disraeli, Lord John Russell, Louis Napoleon, and all the English monarchs of his age. He barely noticed the Peterloo massacre, was anxious about Catholic emancipation and the French revolution, was able to see both sides of the slavery issue, and lost, without much apparent regret, a favourite nephew in the Crimean war.

Saturday

Lee Langley

. . . and a Parisian bombe surprise

This is a French novel, a very French novel. The author won the Prix Goncourt for an earlier book and this one carries hints of Voltaire and Sartre. The publishers suggest that Piano can be read as a metaphor of life and death, heaven and hell; Dante is invoked. Daunting stuff, you might think. A thin book, it comes wrapped in heavyweight literary packaging — in France Jean Echenoz is rated alongside Beckett and Nabokov. But what lies inside this intellectual bombe surprise is a sharp, airy sorbet that slips down with great ease: an existential thriller of the sort that might once have been turned into a movie by Jean Cocteau. It’s a deadpan, elegant and wittily observed tragicomedy: posh French fun.

Simon Po

Striving ever upwards

George Frederic Watts (1817-1904), if never exactly popular, was regarded in his day as possibly the greatest artist in the world. He was the first living artist to be accorded a retrospective exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and was esteemed in France as few British artists have been, before or since. He was one of the great portraitists of his age. Sadly, though, to a 21st-century audience he has all too little of the accessibility of his younger contemporaries, the Pre-Raphaelites, and until recently was the point at which even many lovers of Victorian painting drew the line. He deplored the very idea of ‘Art for Art’s sake’ and regarded himself as an ethical teacher like his friends John Ruskin and Lord Tennyson.

William Brett

Neither fish, flesh nor fowl

According to a Yale professor, Eric Jager has invented a new genre with this book. I can see what he means. It’s not a novel, because the story is based entirely on the historical record; it is, however, told as a continuous narrative, with very occasional invention to fill in the gaps where the sources are silent. I’ve certainly never read anything in this style. But to qualify for so luminous an achievement as generic invention, it has to work, and unfortunately it doesn’t. This is a pity, because Jager has chosen a fascinating subject. In 1386, a French knight challenges his rival to a judicial duel, accusing him of raping his wife. By law, the victor is proved innocent in the eyes of God, and the conquered guilty.

John Shand

Gamesmanship of the mind

Not a manual for omniscience; rather the aim is always to appear right, whether you are or not. Schopenhauer wants to keep the crooked in ‘straight and crooked thinking’, when most books on arguments assume that we should try to eliminate it. This assumption hides a value judgment as to what arguments are for. Is it a matter of winning — getting others to admit that they’re wrong and we’re right — or is it about finding the truth — getting to the right answer? It’s not obvious that the truth is always more important than winning. A good logical argument might convince no one; a bad illogical argument might convince everyone. One could just hope that this isn’t so.

Philip Hensher

Curiouser and curiouser

Haruki Murakami must be one of the most successful novelists in the world, from the point of view of readership; he has a very substantial following in this country, but it is still much smaller than the enormous readership he has in much of Europe. He is not one of those writers who appeals most to foreign readers; his status in Japan, after the publication of Norwegian Wood, rose to such a level that he was forced to leave the country to flee his own celebrity. At first sight, he seems to have attained this global status with a kind of global style. The manner of his writing is simple, clear and direct; the trappings of his novels are strikingly international.

Anita Brookner

General fiction from France . . .

On 30 August 2004 a woman wrote a letter to Le Figaro registering her dismay at the number of novels scheduled for publication in the three months that constitute the rentrée littéraire in France each autumn. She confessed that, although an assiduous reader, she rarely found anything of distinction in what was on offer and deplored the lack of true literary worth, let alone devotion to the task in hand. She perceived that this volume of production is little more than sheer economic activity. This was a worthy and pertinent comment, an alternative reading to the literary pages, in which reviewers are often more complimentary than is entirely justified. It is certain that of the many novels published this season few will merit genuine and serious attention.

The Questing-Vole

QUESTING QUIZ OF THE YEAR

Opening Sentences (name the books) 1) Aaron, Richard Ithamar (1901-1987), philo- sopher, was born on 6 November 1901 at Upper Dulais, Blaendulais, Glamorgan, the son of William Aaron (1864–1937), a draper, and his wife, Margaret Griffith (d. 1940). 2) When the woman found milk in her breasts, and other secret feminine tokens, Scaife, the constable’s man, an archdolt, was dispatched across the windswept moors and icy mountains to fetch Mr John Brigge, coroner in the wapentakes of Agbrigg and Morley. 3) So just how mega is this then? A book on English. 4) Although 1979 may not have the same histor- ical resonance as 1789, 1848 or 1917, it too marks a moment when the world was jolted by a violent reaction to the complacency of the existing order.

Saturday

Jane Rye

Pleasure without angst

David Hockney is a conjuror who likes to explain his tricks, or, as one commentator put it, conducts ‘his education in public with a charming and endearing innocence’. This chunky picture-book brings the story right up to date with watercolours and portrait drawings made only a few months ago. It contains work from throughout Hockney’s career, but is arranged thematically rather than chronologically, according to the themes and subjects that have occupied him for almost five decades.

Michael Beloff

Masters of the majors

The game of golf developed in Scotland in the 15th century. This trio of books chronicles the life, times and competition records (blow by blow and, occasionally, hole by hole) of three golfers who on any reckoning rank among its ten greatest exponents of all time. They cover three distinct periods of the 20th century and open windows on social as well as sporting history. The career of Bobby Jones climaxed in 1929 when he won the then Grand Slam of US and British Open and Amateur Championships in an era when (which would be inconceivable today) an amateur could match strokes with the professionals; and the professionals used the tradesmen’s entrance in club houses.