More from Books

Saturday

Antonia Fraser

From Africa back to Scotland

The publishing world is full of romantic stories, not every one with a happy ending. (I was brought up on the tale, possibly apocryphal, that Evelyn Waugh’s brother-in-law, Edward Grant, kept a framed copy of his letter turning down Gone with the Wind in his office.) One truly happy story, however, so far without an end, is that of Alexander McCall Smith. With a day job as Professor of Medical Law at Edinburgh University, he is the author of The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, creator of the immortal Mma Precious Ramotswe, she of the ‘traditional’ Botswana build. Published originally in hardback by the small Edinburgh firm of Polygon, the series has now sold millions worldwide, its fame spread by that surest of all methods, delighted-reader recommendation.

Ian Thomson

A time of zero tolerance

Born in 1956, Ronan Bennett is a Belfast writer of great gifts. His last novel, The Catastrophist, was a tense parable of conscience set in the Belgian Congo at the time of independence in 1960. Havoc, his fourth book, unfolds in 1630s England in the years prior to the Civil War. While Graham Greene is clearly an influence (notably his portrayal of Catholic martyrdom in 1930s Mexico in The Power and the Glory), Bennett is his own man. No one today writes with such sombre clarity of divided loyalties and shifting political allegiances. A small town in northern England is menaced by Irish vagrants and other imagined ‘Romish’ undesirables. In a panic, the town fortifies itself with harsh Puritan laws and sets out to torture and execute presumed subversives.

Julie Burchill

Sob sisters and scolders

Without meaning to come the Big I-Am, I’ve got issues with the whole premise of this book, which probably stem from my very healthy level of self-esteem. I mean, once we’re out of our teens (when admittedly I spent rather too many nights pining after a dreamy 19-year-old Oxbridge undergraduate called Max, of all the naff admissions) is there really any sentient female who genuinely whips herself into a lather when Whatsisname bails out, and before Thingy appears? To paraphrase some smug old sod, a man is only a man — whereas a gram of coke is a kick. Of course, I know that a lot of adult women seem upset when they get the heave-ho, but a big bit of me actually thinks they’re putting it on.

Victoria Glendinning

The fine art of appreciation

A Fine Brush on Ivory: An Appreciation of Jane Austen by Richard Jenkyns OUP, £12.99, pp. 200, ISBN 0199276617 ‘Each of us has a private Austen’ is the first line of Karen Joy Fowler’s readable and ingenious novel. This sentence, and her title, encapsulate her theme. The West Coast book club in question consists of five women, all steeped in the Austen oeuvre, and a single man with long eyelashes called Grigg who has never read any Jane Austen at all. Their ages range from the mid-sixties to the late twenties.

Philip Hensher

Professional to his fingertips

Perhaps not uniquely, I was discouraged from reading V. S. Pritchett by nothing more than the old Penguin cover of his 1982 Collected Stories. It was simply a photograph of the author, wearing a suit, holding a pipe, with an expression of mild elderly benevolence. To callow youth, that was not what genius was supposed to look like, and I didn’t get round to him for years. Big mistake. Pritchett is a writer who delineates a unique world, and the vivid genius of his voice, encompassing so many other voices, seedy, lush, excitable, takes only a line or two to make itself felt. August’s? On the Bath road? Twice-five August — of course a knew August: ivory man. And the woman who lived with him — her name was Price. She’s dead.

Saturday

Sarah Burton

Birds in a gilded cage

George III freely acknowledged he was in no hurry to see his daughters married: ‘I am happy in their company, and do not in the least want a separation.’ As a consequence, three of them (Augusta, Sophia and Amelia) never married; the others did so late: Charlotte at 31, Mary at 40 and Elizabeth at 48. Meticulously detailed and deeply researched, Princesses chronicles their bids to achieve a balance between personal fulfilment and filial duty. The princesses’ early lives were employed almost exclusively in lessons and ‘work’ — an endless round of drawing and sewing imposed upon them by their mother which, then and later, often filled the space where their lives should have been.

Mark Ridley

The pilgrims’ progress

A hundred million years ago, our ancestors were nocturnal mouse-like creatures, living in the shadows of the dinosaurs. Five hundred million years ago, our ancestors were fish, living near (or even in) the sea bottom. Two thousand million years ago, they were single-celled microbes, floating in the sea. Almost 4,000 million years ago, they were replicating molecules, lacking almost every feature that we expect in something that is live — except reproduction. The evolutionary history of life is one of science’s great stories — a story that educated people like to know at least in outline, along with the history of European civilisation and the political history of their own country.

Bevis Hillier

Losing your heart — or your nose

If a car is travelling behind a tractor for five miles on a narrow road, and at last the tractor turns off down a side street, often you will see that car, from its driver’s pent-up frustration, suddenly shoot forward, trashing the speed limit. Something similar happened to writing about sex after the Lady Chatterley case of the early 1960s and the subsequent relaxation of censorship. Novelists felt that, because they could now cram their books full of eroticism, they must. Eventually things settled down and the writers just brought in sex where, as they say, the plot required it — where poor Thomas Hardy would have liked to deploy it, and nearly did. About ten years later, raging feminism simmered down in much the same way.

Interconnect

It really was a knockout

On 25 June 2003, the day on which Alastair Campbell declar- ed all-out war against the BBC in his evidence to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee (FAC), the BBC’s Director-General, Greg Dyke, was engaged in country dancing in Surrey. He and other top BBC executives were attending one of their regular strategy conferences at which ‘as usual, we had some bonding activity, in which members of the Executive did silly things to make them feel more of a team’. Their very silly thing on this occasion was an It’s a Knockout competition, which was interrupted by a telephone call reporting that Mr Campbell had ‘gone ballistic’ before the FAC. ‘We decided to carry on the game, probably because my team was winning,’ writes Mr Dyke.

Allan Mallinson

The Admiral’s men

It is tempting to conclude that a subject is fished out when strange titles appear, presumably with the intention of suggesting something novel. This is Dot Wordsworth’s territory, but can there really be such a thing as ‘the biography of a battle’? Last year, Macmillan published David Cordingly’s excellent history of HMS Bellerophon — Billy Ruffian: The Biography of a Ship of the Line. This is more easily understood, perhaps, since anyone with a soul would acknowledge that a ship is a living thing. But the biography of a battle? ‘As well write the history of a ball,’ huffed the Duke of Wellington when someone proposed writing an account of Waterloo. Would a ‘biography of a ball’ be admissible?

Interconnect

An ornamental period piece

By the Grand Canal takes place, not wholly unexpectedly, in the Venice of the immediately post-Great War era. To this idyllic if decaying refuge comes dapper Sir Hugh Thurne, a fortysomething career diplomat, bruised by the turmoil of the past four years (in particular the death of his fast friend Philip Mancroft) but keen to resume the even tenor of his Venetian existence from the vantage point of Ca’ Zante, an agreeable rented house beyond the Accademia. Sir Hugh — worldly-wise and faintly world-weary — turns out to have two chief interests.

M R-D-Foot

Far beyond the call of duty

On the 150th anniversary of the first deed for which a Victoria Cross was awarded, this admirable book recounts some of the tales of those who have won it. The earliest, a young naval officer called Charles Lucas, ran forward instead of taking cover when a bomb landed, sizzling, on the deck of HMS Hecla in the Baltic, and tossed it overboard before it burst. Even in that heroic band, now 1,354 strong, some were still more heroic than others. Sir Peter de la Billière has picked out a few of the very bravest, from all three armed services and from several continents. Queen Victoria laid down, when she instituted the award, that it was to be open to every rank and condition; her wish has been faithfully reflected.

Saturday

Sara Maitland

Two halves don’t make a whole

What on earth is a ‘high concept novel’? For the expression to have any meaning you’d have to have a low concept novel, a medium concept novel and even a no concept novel. How high? Compared to? It doesn’t make sense. Nonetheless this is one. (In fairness to Fay Weldon she does not say so; the blurb writer does.) From the evidence I can only deduce that ‘high concept’ means ‘bit of a mish-mash’. Mantrapped is half of a novel and half of an autobiography plus author’s commentary on writing the (half) novel. The idea is that in our celebrity culture there can no longer be a ‘hidden’ author.

Michael Carlson

Reheating the Cold War

In the days when the Cold War provided depth and context to all spy fiction, Charles McCarry was the strongest of the contenders for the title of ‘the American John Le Carré’. Although Robert Littell and Paul Hennisart wrote novels of complex moral ambiguity, McCarry’s CIA was closer in tone to Smiley’s Circus, chosen from society’s elite, products of the best prep (the American equivalent of public) schools and Yale’s secret societies (one of which, Skull and Bones, has produced both candidates in this year’s US presidential election), honourable schoolboys pursuing a business whose currency is dishonour. His protagonist, Paul Christopher, made his debut in McCarry’s first novel, The Miernik Dossier.

Lee Langley

Breaking out of purdah

Reading Maharanis has something of the poignant pleasure of rummaging in the attic of a great house fallen into desuetude: here are reminders of another age. Princesses stroll in their gardens in the Indian moonlight, fireflies flickering like stars, or roller-skate gaily through their marble palaces, saris billowing, with a staff of 400 to keep the place in order. We share the sense of loss Browning discerned in a Venice deprived of splendour ‘when the kissing had to stop’. Think of them dressing for dinner on a tiger hunt in the jungle (white tie and tails, evening gowns and emeralds) while a 35-piece band played in the dining tent. Back at the palace, guests chose their preferred mode of transport for the following day: ‘horse, elephant or Rolls-Royce’.

Douglas Hurd

Ketchup and thunder

I have read somewhere that the friends of this author are worried. Apparently he is an MP, a shadow minister, a performer on chat shows, editor of a weekly magazine, the next prime minister but three — and now out pops a novel. How can he manage it all? They need not worry. On the evidence I would guess that he wrote this in three days, flat out day and night, finishing with the arrival on the fourth morning of what with his Homeric education he would call the rosy-fingered dawn. And none the worse for that. The rollicking pace and continuous outpouring of comic invention make the book. There is no doubt which master he follows. Several times in P. G Wodehouse the Wooster- figure meets in ambiguous circumstances a police constable, who may hold a torch and say, ‘Ho.

Lloyd Evans

Making sheep interesting

He is most like a poet when writing least like one. Skim the titles of P. J. Kavanagh’s new collection and you’ll find the clues. ‘November’, ‘London Bridge’ and ‘Christmas walk’ are admirable instances of a skilled craftsman plying his trade, but they lack the yeasty suddenness of the real thing. Head instead for ‘What I didn’t say to Thomas’, a slice of wry humour about Kavanagh’s evasiveness over his belief in God, or ‘Vox Pop’, which uses a Larkinesque transition to turn a momentary rant into a celebration of civilised values. Kavanagh has all the technical gifts a poet could wish for, but at times his brain has to work overtime because his heart and soul have phoned in sick.

Graham Stewart

Evangelism on the march

When Robert Goizueta, Coca-Cola’s boss, attempted to justify his $80 million annual income to a meeting of shareholders he was interrupted four times — with applause. Attitudes to wealth and opportunity, as to so much else in the United States, are far removed from the prevailing mood in Britain and Europe. During the Cold War, many of these differences were overlooked in the common cause against a yet more alien ideology. The illusion of unity has disappeared with the Warsaw Pact. As John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge argue in The Right Nation: Why America is Different, ‘it is rather like two relative strangers who fight off muggers and then go off for a celebratory meal only to discover that they don’t have as much in common as they thought’.

Francis Kingfrancis-King

Goggling at the box

This far from flimsy novel has been written and published with remarkable speed. Little more than a year ago, on 5 September 2003, the American illusionist David Blaine entered his Perspex box beside the Thames, eventually to emerge after 44 days of starvation. His feat of heroism, madness or self-punishment (interpret it as you will) is the core of radium that provides Nicola Barker’s work with its furious, dangerous and (one hopes) therapeutic energy. The reception of Blaine’s survival in, literally, an unremitting glare of publicity, eerily paralleled that of Princess Diana’s death.

Tom Hiney

Lost white dogs of Africa

There is a fading misconception in Europe that every white person in South Africa lives the life of Reilly, albeit behind a barbed-wire perimeter fence. The fact is that, apart from all the hardworking white postmen and store clerks, genuine white trash abounds, booted out of one too many doors by bosses and wives and daughters’ boyfriends. They walk the streets, live in small townships and paint houses if they don’t drink the paint first. There are quite a lot of them, presumably more now than ever. Emigrating to Canada or Europe is not really an option for these lost white dogs of Africa. The high commissions wouldn’t let them in the door. I picked up such a hitchhiker once, about 40 years old, on the road to Cape Town.