More from Books

Saturday

Caroline Moore

Flattening the literary landscape

Despite the title, this is not one of those gloom-mongering surveys of the state of culture that so regularly (usually at the end of a decade) predict the Death of the Novel, the End of History, the Death of the Individual, and the like. Indeed, on closer inspection, ‘The Last of England’ turns out to mean only ‘the last volume, for the present, in this particular series of the Oxford English Literary History’, bringing us up from 1960 to the millennium. Still, it nevertheless managed to monger a certain mild gloom in me. My chief complaint is that it does not make the period exciting enough. On internal evidence, I must be much the same age as Stevenson, first becoming thrilled by modern poetry and the theatre in the Seventies. And goodness, it was thrilling.

Saturday

Robert Stewart

Butcher in the Rye

In 1743 John Breads, a butcher, stabbed to death Allen Grebell in the declining Cinque port town of Rye on the east Sussex coast. Grebell was the brother-in-law of James Lamb, the mayor who lived in the town’s big house, Lamb House, that was later to be home to Henry James and E. F. Benson. Paul Monod has chosen that murder as a peg on which to hang his history of the town from the Civil War to the mid-18th century. The Grebell-Lamb interest was the cornerstone of the Whig oligarchy that had come to rule Rye. Can Breads’ story tell us something about the progress of Rye from the failure, amid the religious turbulence of 17th-century politics, of Puritan reformers to institute the rule of the godly to the ascendancy of the Whigs?

Digby Durrant

‘My libido’s last hurrah!’

At first sight Gilbert Adair’s new book seems like shameless pornography of a particularly sad and depraved kind, but more charitably and more accurately we discover as we read on that it is the story of an unlikely martyr-hero who risks his life in the cause of militant homosexuality rather than suffer suicidal loneliness. As a youth Gideon occasionally has very mild spasms of lust for boys but is content enough to lie beside a girl, his clumsy fingers inching past the cups of her brassiere to toy with her nipples. Suddenly her record player sings out, ‘Mr Sandman, bring me a dream/ Make him the cutest I’ve ever seen /Give him two lips like rose and clover/Then tell him that his lonesome nights are over.’ The scales fall from Gideon’s eyes.

Jonathan Keates

Early Essex man

Crime is a species of performance art. Acts of murder, theft or fraud assume the collusive presence of an audience formed from that law-abiding majority for whom felony on a grand scale holds an inextinguishable glamour. Even a simple mugging possesses elements of street theatre, as if some sort of scenario had been worked out between the robber and his victim before the offence took place. However much we proclaim our hatred of the sinner, his sinfulness nourishes our less respectable dreams and fantasies. Thus the agents of havoc are easily metamorphosed into folk heroes, loved, envied and applauded even at the foot of the gallows. Highwaymen were archetypal avatars of the criminal as popular entertainer.

Stephen Abell

A serious case of rising damp

In this, her ninth novel, Maggie Gee has determinedly sought — like God in the beginning — to make the watery world she has created ‘teem with countless living creatures’. She did not, however, see to it that it was good. For The Flood teems not only with living things (birds ‘quivering, flashing on the flowering quinces’ or ‘narrow-faced, amber-eyed, rufous, fearless’ foxes, for example), but with torrents of gushingly overwritten prose that only serve to leave the reader bemused, overwhelmed and somewhat flushed.

Charles Mitchell

Sins of the fathers

Dan Fesperman’s first book, Lie in the Dark, was a fine debut: set in Sarajevo during the civil war, it had homicide detective Vlado Petric struggling to investigate a murder case while sniper bullets snapped about his heels. The Small Boat of Great Sorrows (Bantam Press, £12.99) is the follow-up and it is written to the same high standard. Petric is building a new life with his wife and daughter in Berlin when an American working for the International War Crimes Tribunal approaches him with a job offer: go back to Bosnia and help us to flush out a war criminal.

Interconnect

The war and a sprained ankle

The story of the emergence of the poet from the prose writer Edward Thomas — not his emergence as an acknowledged poet, that took another 30 years — is probably well known but is so astonishing it can bear a brief retelling. From his early twenties Thomas had been earning a living, supporting his family (he married when he was 21) by articles and reviews, a staggering number of these, and by prose books of various kinds, more than 40 of them; the thought of the work rate gives one a headache and certainly maddened him. Some were editions of poets, with long introductions, some historical, most were about the countryside, and belonged to what he contemptuously called ‘the Norfolk-jacket school of writing’.

Peter Clark

A breeze with a hint of rain

Diplomat, soldier, diplomat again, humanitarian, environmentalist: you cannot plan a career like that today. But that has been the CV of John Henniker, otherwise Major Henniker-Major MC, now the eighth Lord Henniker, who, in his late eighties, has written a modest and readable account of his life and work. Born in 1916, and following a conventional education, he had an exciting war. He is the last survivor of that sparky band of officers — Evelyn Waugh, Bill Deakin, Randolph Churchill and Fitzroy Maclean — who were parachuted into Yugoslavia to establish contact with Tito. Resuming a Foreign Office career, he opened a post-war embassy in Belgrade before transfer to London, to work in Ernest Bevin’s Private Office.

John De-Falbe

A thoughtful trip to the seaside

Set in Anatolia in 1922, The Maze describes the retreat of a Greek brigade to the sea. Under the questionable guidance of a brigadier addicted to morphine and a hypocritical priest without the slightest understanding of their parlous situation, the detachment is lost in the arid landscape. Thanks to the trail of droppings left by a runaway horse, they reach a town where we are introduced to a venal mayor, a schoolmaster, an Armenian grocer, a French whore and various others. A mysterious spate of thefts is explained, and the man responsible for spreading seditious pamphlets is identified. Accompanied by civilians of the professional classes, the brigade then makes its way to the sea, leaving behind the Turkish underclass. It is not immediately clear why this is such a good novel.

Philip Hensher

Roller-coaster of a ride

David Mitchell has fast established himself as a novelist of considerable authority and power. His first novel, Ghostwritten, was published as recently as 1999, and Cloud Atlas is only his third. Anyone who read his remarkable debut, or its successor, number9dream, will instantly recognise the characteristic moves and bold gestures of this amazing extravaganza. His novels have a gleefully kleptomaniac air, moving from the most tawdry thrills to thunderous, visionary spectacle; they are unlike anything else, and you emerge from them dazed, amazed, unsure of the exact nature of the overwhelming experience. Cloud Atlas is a tremendous novel, but I’m not entirely sure why. Ghostwritten had a very original structure, one evidently congenial to Mitchell.

Saturday

Michael Tanner

Fated and enchanted love

Wagner’s masterpiece, Tristan, has now a considerable literature of its own, with books devoted to its harmonic structure, its baleful influence on artists of various kinds, its philosophical significance, its sources in the mediaeval literature of courtly love, its phonographic history, and plenty of other things.

Interconnect

A heist too far

When I first met Terry Smith ten years ago, in the library of Long Lartin top security prison in Worcestershire, he was part of a cockney criminal elite as exclusive and self-perpetuating as the Whig junta that once controlled England. Along the austere corridors in that microcosm of misanthropy and discontent, Smith and his ilk cut quite a dash in their Day-glo designer sportswear, dispensing favours here, meting out summary justice there, employing the less prosperous prisoners amongst us to fetch and carry after regular Lucullan repasts and hooch-fuelled revelries. ‘We were the living embodiment of extroversion,’ Smith suggests in retrospect. ‘A collection of colourful crooks [who] loved to brag and flaunt our natural style, flair and wealth.

Frank Field

A love of God and the ballet

There was a time when the Catholic party of the Church of England was not consumed by the latest ecclesiastical millinery. Its driving force then was a passion for social righteousness. It was also fun in the hands of perhaps the most flamboyant of Christian Socialists, Stuart Headlam. Headlam is still sometimes remembered for standing bail for Oscar Wilde. But there is much more to him than this characteristic act of bravery. Headlam was born into a Liverpool stockbroking family. It was at Eton where his father, an evangelical, noticed what was to him his son’s worrying liking for High Church ritual. But it was in the marrying of F. D. Maurice’s theology to beautiful ceremonial that Headlam made his unique contribution to public life.

Humphrey Stone

Snapshots of the city

Six CDs, 75 minutes eachwww.csaword.co.uk Lying stock-still with a bandage over your eyes for several weeks has its bonuses. In the bookshelves downstairs sit all those spines that for years have been gazing at you reproachfully, pleading ‘when are you going to take me down and read me?’ Help is at hand. You don’t have to exhaust the eyes staring at their type. You can be read to. Ever since my father would read aloud, usually Thomas Hardy or Jane Austen, every evening in winter to anyone who wanted to listen, I have loved being read to. So what better thing to do than to plug into talking-book cassettes (which must be unabridged)? I started with Proust, appropriately, because lying there in bed it was as if I were the author himself, immersed in his world.

Rupert Christiansen

Composing for dear life

Ever since the posthumous publication in 1979 of Testimony, his volume of memoirs, ‘as related to and edited by Solmon Volkov’, Dmitri Shostakovich has ranked not only as a great Russian composer but also as a great figure of Russian literature — sullenly truculent, cynically embittered and permanently disappointed. Some scholars, indeed, have gone so far as to claim that the Shostakovich of Testimony was in effect a fictional creation, based on Volkov’s fraudulent claim to be the composer’s close friend and largely designed to please a Cold War audience who needed to think of him and his music as fervently anti-communist.

Interconnect

High jinks and slaughter

Whatever else may be said of Guy Vanderhaeghe, author of The English Boy, he does at least have one serious fan. The admirer in question is Annie Proulx, who appears on the front cover of this new novel extolling ‘a feast of a book’, and on the back suggesting that ‘here are brilliant writing, picaresque adventure, history and studies of human nature’. Miss Proulx’s work, it may be said, comes from much the same territory as her protégé: that vast, underpopulated expanse of prairie running all the way from Wyoming to mid-western Canada, where a sharp pain in the fleeing horseman’s leg is pretty sure to have come courtesy of the teeth of an opportunistic timberwolf.

Philip Ziegler

An early search for WMD

Any author who subtitles his book ‘The true story of …’ this, that or the other inspires some disquiet in the reviewer. If this is the true story, then the implication is that previous versions have been, if not untrue, then at least seriously misinformed. In his history of the British invasion of Tibet in 1903-4, Charles Allen maintains that earlier writers ‘without exception, have accepted the self-serving line first given out by Sir Francis Younghusband’. In so doing, they have done grave injustice to the military commander of the expedition, General Macdonald, who is usually represented as cowardly and indecisive, while in fact he was merely prudent and responsible. Peter Fleming and Patrick French are the two precursors whom Allen singles out.

Saturday

Piers Paul-Read

A very errant knight

Nicholas Shakespeare is one of the few contemporary British novelists who successfully integrate the political with the personal in the lives of his characters. Like Graham Greene, he has an eye for a dramatic historical backdrop: in The Dancer Upstairs, it was the Shining Path insurgency in Peru; in his new novel, Snowleg, it is the communist regime in East Germany. The story opens when Peter Hithersay, a pupil at an English public school, is summoned home to celebrate his 16th birthday. There his mother tells him that his real father is not her husband, Rodney — an ‘affable and diffident’ commercial artist — but a fugitive East German political prisoner whom she had harboured for one night while competing in a choral competition in Leipzig.